Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) (10 page)

What really hit me over the back of the head, all the way to my heart, was the fact that I knew if they were willing to say the sorts of things they did in my hearing range, they were no doubt willing to make black and Latino jokes.

I was left with an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. A dose of Pepto-Bismol, please. They had to have known I was close enough at the bat rack to be in earshot. It was a problem that stuck inside me.

As a black man who had played all around the country, I had heard every kind of racial epithet from the stands. I had heard some things in clubhouses, too. But I had never heard anything of this duration or this magnitude from my teammates before.

Coming from where I did, the social inequities I had grown up with, I found the anti-Semitism awkward at this juncture. It was ugly. Because I knew, if that’s what they were saying about one ethnic group, then they felt the same thing or worse about black people.

It made me uncomfortable, I wasn’t on the team more than three weeks, and I went upstairs and talked to Gabe Paul, who was Jewish, about it. I said, “I’d like to be traded away from here.”

Gabe gave me a long story: “This is a great place for you, you’ll be fine.” What was he going to do, trade the highest-paid player in the game after three weeks? I didn’t think about how that could happen. I just wanted out.

All that season, it made me feel awkward. Out of place.

I had no idea it would be so blatant. You just didn’t get that in Oakland; you didn’t feel the prejudice. You didn’t get that in Baltimore. Scorn from someone because of your religion, race, beliefs, or looks.

I still hear these sorts of racial jokes and insults. I’m in New Jersey today, and as I speak and breathe, yesterday I had several experiences of people talking of other ethnicities with no regard for who was around. It’s who we are, sadly, as a people and a nation. 2013. I heard comments at breakfast about Latinos. I heard comments at the ballpark, about Italians. And I heard comments about Asians later on in the evening, before I went to bed. And everyone does it! It ain’t cool! And we need to improve.

I liked the multicultural society of New York, lots of different ethnicities and mixed people. I liked the melting pot of New York. I’m from a mixed background, and the mix of people made me comfortable.

Overall, New York had such broad social bandwidth. But it was still a city that was controlled by the corporate world. Still is today, in many ways. And while I have tremendous respect and love for what the city is, there was still a wide separation between its different ethnic communities. There was a social conflict that is still there, in pockets. New York still is the greatest city in the world. But there was and is still a need for change. We are still not all on equal ground. It still needs alteration. And many people in that era weren’t ready to hear that.

I said at the time that I was used to a much more liberal place like Oakland, Berkeley, and the Bay Area. People didn’t know what I was talking about, but it was true. As much as New York maybe thought of itself as liberal, it wasn’t the same thing. Berkeley is liberal—the Left Coast, man!

California’s dress is not nearly like it is here, in the East. It’s more T-shirts and jeans. Whereas New York is still suit and tie. California is more laid-back. New York is hustle-bustle; it’s in your face at all times. “Hurry up, move on.” But even so, as laid-back as California is, African Americans and others forced their way into power in places like Berkeley and Oakland the way they still have not quite done in New York and other places.

Long after I retired from baseball, I saw the first episode of
The Bronx Is Burning
, which I then stopped viewing due to my disgust at how I was portrayed. The look they gave me, the way they had the actor play me, how I supposedly thought of myself—the whole way they portrayed “Reggie Jackson in New York” was a huge disconnect for me. I was coming from a place where racial attitudes were very different than they were in New York.

Oakland, California, and the entire Bay Area were at the epicenter of the social revolution and the civil rights movement that took off in the 1960s and ’70s. The student riots in Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement, and the founding of the Black Panthers had all taken place shortly before I arrived there. I played my very first game in Oakland
less than two weeks after Martin Luther King was assassinated, and not two months after that came the death of Bobby Kennedy. Dissent over civil rights and the Vietnam War continued to grow. People were afraid and society was in turmoil.

This was all strange to me, but I understood the frustrations and anger that were behind it all. It was the first time that I had firsthand experience of what it was to be a black person at a time when people were speaking out about what it meant to be a black person in America—something that was long overdue. The trend that had started with Jackie Robinson and progressed through the civil rights movement had by now evolved into a demand for dignity and respect. These words had long been on the minds of all black people, but unfortunately, that is where it ended for many of us. What we thought and what we said were two different things.

I was never a very political guy, and I was not involved with what was going on around me politically. But I was showing up every day doing my job while people were getting beaten by police within a few miles of the A’s ballpark, going to jail, starting fires in the streets, and being told by Black Power advocates that there was a new day coming and that they should get guns. I could not help being affected by it, no matter how much I tried to look away. At the time, sports in general had always been oblivious to politics and social unrest, but it was hard to avoid these things in Oakland in the late ’60s and during what turned out to be our terrific run in the early to mid ’70s.

I started to grow my hair and was probably one of the first black ballplayers to wear a mustache and an Afro. I thought I was just keeping up with the times. But I was surprised to learn from some of my friends that other people read more into my looks and my actions than I did. They saw me as speaking out as a black athlete when that was not done by black people and, especially, black athletes—the example of Tommie Smith and John Carlos in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics notwithstanding.

Oakland’s racial scene started stirring the pot inside of me, and I think my consciousness about being black in a white man’s world was rising. Apparently, people read into what they were seeing on the field and reading in the press about me and concluded that I was starting to act like I “wasn’t going to take it anymore.” I think that when
I left Oakland, this perception might have come with me—perhaps not consciously, but I think it was there. I was developing the reputation among certain segments of society as someone who was willing to speak out and say what other black athletes were merely thinking. The way I carried myself on the field, the way I looked in my uniform when I was at the plate, the results I got—it felt to them as if I was there to challenge everyone I faced. I think people were so charged up, and, at the same time, confused with what was happening around them, that some folks saw me as a leader in the black community for things I had nothing to do with.

That never really went away. In fact I was, at one point, so influenced by this that when Muhammad Ali retired in 1981, I truly believed that it was an obligation to take my turn and continue the move forward for people of color, African American and Latino American.

Even before that, this perception that I was some kind of racial firebrand or agitator became attached to me. As I look back now, I can’t think of one time when I said anything political in the press, but I think that this misperception of me as some kind of revolutionary was picked up by the press, and that it perpetuated this image of me, which I am sure did not go unnoticed in other parts of the country. I was branded with something I really did not understand, but it was certainly something I felt.

There was at the same time a confluence between all the social revolutions going on in our society at large, and the labor revolution going on in baseball. “Dignity” and “respect” were now also something that black athletes, especially, were demanding be applied to them by management and white players—something that I know shaped some of my attitudes. I think that, as a result of our demands to get rid of the reserve clause and restore our rights, many current players of all ethnicities and backgrounds have an entirely different concept of themselves than players of my time had. We were just meat then, and some of us were lower than that. Now we’re all men. I think it all started in the era that coincided with my coming to New York, and, for me, in my own way, it came to a head there.

I am now starting to realize that part of my experience in New York in 1977 might have been shaped by how New York players and fans perceived me, based, in part, on what they had read about me,
the way I looked, and what I had to say. Take a look at the pictures of me in ’77 before George made me shave. Yeah, sure, I was young and brash. But I did not look like other black ballplayers in New York. Couple that with statements like “bringing my star with me” and POW! I’m someone who
should
be ostracized. Things like the article in
Sport
magazine that would cause so much ill will just confirmed what people were already feeling about me.

I was not the revolutionary these people perceived me to be. But in retrospect, I was clearly a new breed of black player in New York. Everyone else had acted like they were lucky to be there, but I was seen as someone who
expected
to be there, too cocky for my own good. I was seen as a black athlete who felt that he did not need to respect authority, Yankee history, or even his new Yankee teammates. I was seen as making my own rules in a town where that was just not what black people did or what black athletes ever would have thought about. And, most of all, I was seen as someone who did not appreciate the opportunity I was being given to play on the big stage. And here I was coming
with attitude
from the radical Left Coast.

So, now I have to ask myself: Was it
really
all about me coming to New York with my star—or was it about me coming from a place where black people were starting to act differently, like they weren’t going to take it anymore—and that I was bringing some of that
attitude
with my star? I guess I looked the part, and many people felt that I acted the part, even though I did not really feel the part and may have not really understood it. Lots to think about, especially when I look back on my relationships with my white teammates when I arrived in New York—very few of whom saw me as I saw myself. Becoming a Yankee was a childhood dream come true—and, in my mind, I was the furthest thing from an “angry black man” coming to New York to “put it to the man” or show people up.

Others, though, saw me as exactly that. They conflated the idea of a black man who was comfortable in his own skin, who knew his own worth and ability, who was able to shape his own destiny in the game, with their stereotype of the angry black radical. So much of the controversy that surrounded me in New York came from their inability to forget their preconceived notions of what I was, and see the reality.

One of my major disappointments was that in New York they didn’t want to hear about the anti-Semitism or prejudice on the ball team. At least not from me. Nobody in the media ever really stood up for the Jewish player on our team. I was disappointed and hurt that the press wouldn’t defend him, and I believe he was as well. To this day, I don’t know if he has gotten over it. The media were there when Billy and other people said what they said, but they never really asked questions about it. The newspaper guys never put questions to Billy or anyone else about whether he was anti-Semitic. I still can’t get past that. The media are supposed to report. They sure as heck did report on me—but not on this.

Many of our writers were Jewish. They were on the same side that I was—I thought. They were the victims of the same prejudices. I was so disappointed that they wouldn’t talk about it. Not only wouldn’t they stand up for this player, but the writers didn’t defend
themselves
. I lost respect for them, because of the fear that they had. They were more interested in getting their stories than in standing up for their own beliefs.

I know that Henry Hecht said a player called him a “backstabbing Jew c——er,” when he reported that the player went out a window in a hotel once to break curfew in spring training, and he did write about that. But there was so much else they did not report.

Some of those writers were as bright a bunch of people as I’ve met in my baseball life. Bright, sensitive people. But they would not write about so much of what went on.

I understand they didn’t want to interject themselves into the story. But I will always believe that they did not do what they should have done. It’s not whether or not you put yourself in it; you just do what’s right and report what should be reported to the public. You’re supposed to do the right thing. You’re supposed to report what’s happening. They would write about everything else. But they wouldn’t write about the social inequities they themselves felt and experienced.