Branch Rickey (11 page)

When he sat down it was reported that there was tremendous applause. Maybe, but that speech did not succeed with Rachel Robinson. Many years later, she said, “That speech. It was racist. I'd like to forget it.”

 

At the start of spring training, Robinson is still with Montreal, but everybody knows this is a fake. The Dodgers were training at an old military base in Panama for an exhibition game against a team of Carribean all-stars. Most knew that Robinson was only days away. The manager, Leo Durocher, spent a day going around and telling one player after another, “Isn't it great we're going to have Robinson? He can get a pennant for us.” Leo did not like the reactions. He heard a whisper that Dixie Walker was starting a petition against Robinson. Leo went to bed and thought for a long time. If these imbeciles give their petition to Rickey, he figured, they are making the thing official. It'll break this club up. I'm supposed to get World Series money this year. These fucks and their petition are going to take money out of my pocket.

He swung out of bed. “Get everybody up!”

There were two ways of addressing ballplayers at this time.

One was Rickey's indirection, verbal subterfuge, calling for a religious book, a story about Ty Cobb, anything to delay and confuse and soften the path.

Then there was Durocher's way. Right now, he stands in the big military base kitchen, with players seated on steam tables and chopping blocks. No newspaper people were present. They needed their sleep. But everybody who was there, from Durocher down, told of his speech so frequently that it became an official final score.

“I hear some of you fellas don't want to play with Robinson,” he said, “and that you have a petition drawn up that you are going to sign. Well, boys, you know what you can do with that petition. You can wipe your ass with it. Mister Rickey is on his way down here and all you have to do is tell him about it. I'm sure he'll be happy to make other arrangements for you.

“I hear Dixie Walker is going to send Mister Rickey a letter asking to be traded. Just hand him the letter, Dixie, and you'll be gone. Gone! If this fellow is good enough to play on this ball club—and from what I've seen and heard, he is—he is going to play on this ball club and he is going to play for me.

“I'm the manager of this ball club and I'm interested in one thing,” he continued. “Winning. I'll play an elephant if he can do the job, and to make room for him I'll send my own brother home. So make up your mind to it. This fellow is a real great ballplayer. He's going to win pennants for us. He's going to put money in your pocket and money in mine. And here's something else to think about when you put your head back on the pillow. From everything I hear, he's only the first—ONLY THE FIRST, BOYS. There's many more coming right behind him and they have the talent and they gonna come to play. These fellows are hungry. They're good athletes and there's nowhere else they can make this kind of money. They're going to come, boys, and they're going to come scratching and diving. Unless you fellows wake up and look out, they're going to run you right out of the ballpark. So I don't want to see your petition and I don't want to hear any more about it. The meeting is over—go back to bed.”

When Rickey reached Panama he had a morning meeting with Dixie Walker, which angered him plenty, and then another with Bobby Bragan, young and sullen, a reserve catcher from Fort Worth. He stood alongside Rickey with his fists clenched and his face contorted. He came from a contractor's household where he answered black workers at the back door asking for a two- or three-dollar advance on their pay.

“Are you here to tell me you do not want to play with Robinson?” Rickey asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I shall accommodate you. I must have your word on one matter. It might take some time for us to effect a trade for you. Will you promise to try your best for this team until the trade is worked out?”

Flashing eyes answered. Do you think I would lay down on anyone?

Rickey said he would trade him, but he did not. Instead he put his trust in proximity. On twelve-day road trips to three and four cities, Bobby Bragan remembers today, “the most popular players, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Hal Gregg, all were at the table with Robinson in the dining car. We were outsiders. Me, Carl Furillo, Eddie Stanky, and Walker. I watched the table with Robinson. He liked what they said and they liked what he said. They all laughed. We were out of it. It did not last forever, I'll tell you that. We were starting on one trip and I was right at that table with Robinson and so was Stanky. I don't care where you're from, you're on a train trip and he was the best company and I don't want to be off by myself.”

Hearing of this, Rickey said to Harold Parrot of his staff, “When they play cards, if you notice them gambling, act as if you didn't see it.” He went for his cigars. With one word, one small act, proximity, he was sensing a hundred years starting to disappear.

 

Durocher had a temper that made the slightest confrontation suggest Verdun. Yet, no question, he was the manager Rickey believed he needed when they brought in Robinson. Leo was argumentative, unreasonable, a gambler who seemed to adore trouble and a manager loyal to the sky for his players. He didn't seem to notice Robinson's color.

“Be daring,” Rickey kept calling to Robinson all through spring training. When they got closer to the regular season, Robinson was on first base looking for a sign. Durocher was pacing up and down in the dugout, hands at his sides, and he shrugged and his hands came out palms up, and he paced on and Robinson began his dance and then took off and the stands went crazy as he stole second. Durocher's hands clapped in joy.

This was a beautiful partnership. Always, I can see Leo Durocher tying his tie in the manager's dressing room, talking about how he managed the game, talking, talking and then calling to admirer Spencer Tracy, who sat against the wall. “How's that, Spence? How did you like it?”

And Tracy ducked his head and shook it side to side. “Whewf.”

“How's that, Spence?”

Durocher loved that. A soft night with a great friendly star. But nice also is dreadfully boring. Look out below! Durocher could cause turmoil just by remaining still.

This all started where I come from, in Ozone Park in Queens, on the night that Joe Moore chased his own son-inlaw, a boss of the Mafia named Tommy Eboli Ryan, down 86th Street toward the El on Liberty Avenue. Joe sure did have a gun. Tommy Ryan knew that. Even old people on the block with faulty hearing knew the sound.

Joe Moore was an immense man who worked as a special cop, a square badge, at ball games, including Ebbets Field. The next entry on his résumé reads “Does get mad.” He knew Rickey only by sight. Rickey sure recognized Moore. Upon happening to see Joe in full splendor, Rickey remarked, “The man is completely vulnerable to an attack if he doesn't lose weight.” Lumbering down the street on this night, Joe Moore fired a couple shots into the Ozone Park night air. He missed, but nevertheless that is some brave gun. Ryan was the second head of the Mafia to come out of the neighborhood. First there was Vito Genovese, then Ryan, and following all, John Gotti. You do not become head of the Mafia by pushing strollers on Liberty Avenue.

Then Joe Moore went back to his trade, security work at stadiums. All of us in high school knew him because he broke up fights and stopped kids from running onto the field during school football games. When Durocher looked at Moore, however, he saw a great big guy who could beat everybody up; a useful individual. A fan in the upper deck behind third base, one with a voice that could reach New Jersey, was bellowing abuse that infuriated Durocher. “You thief,” he hollered. And, “You're a crook, Durocher.” The man's name was John Christian. He had just been discharged from the military. He lived in the East New York section of Brooklyn and was a known athlete from Thomas Jefferson High. Sitting with him was Dutch Garfinkel, from the same famous high school. Garfinkel was as good a basketball player as anybody ever saw and he became a national name at St. John's University. “He never cursed at Durocher,” Garfinkel said. “With that loud voice he had, I told him that he should cut it out.”

At the sixth inning, Durocher looked across the top of the Dodgers dugout and called Moore over and asked him for a favor. He asked Moore to tell John Christian that the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers would be glad to come down under the stands and sign a lot of autographs and talk about the heckler's opinions. Christian somewhat naively said, sure.

“Don't go,” Garfinkel said.

“No, I'll meet Durocher,” Christian said. He was there under the stands after the sixth inning, right on time, and Joe Moore gave him his autograph. It was some clout, Christian testified in court. Then Durocher took his best shot. The claim was Joe Moore held the guy and Leo hit him. Christian went home in a daze, with a broken jaw, a banged-up face, and a realization that this was a matter for the police. Detectives were at Ebbets Field in time to arrest Moore and Durocher before they left.

Leo always bought trouble wholesale. First, there is the straight news reporting of the assault and arrest. With big pictures taken on the steps of the police station. The following day Christian and his broken jaw were on the front pages and as many pages inside as they could fill. If you sat in a barber shop, your ears were besieged with radio details of Durocher's attack. Rickey was fearful of losing the best manager he ever saw just at this critical moment. He also had great anxiety over the desperate ability of the Devil to take violence and pass it through the air to tempt others. In this matter, he worried most about Robinson's ability to follow the Life of Christ and turn the other cheek. “He is a proud man, powerful man and of great intelligence,” Rickey said. “I am fearful of the amount of abuse we ask him to take. Judas Priest! What if he is inundated with the most scurrilous of remarks and regarding them as threats he is driven to defending himself one day. That is precisely what it would be, self-defense against assault. But he cannot do that. Oh, he knows he cannot. Not a raised eyebrow can be contested. Watch the trouble we have now. Leo is the only one I know of who is familiar with this much trouble to be able to assist Robinson.”

When the Christian assault case was brought into magistrates court, a flotilla of lawyers arrived to defend Durocher. The judge was Samuel Leibowitz, who had been the lawyer for the Scottsboro Boys case in the South and the feared jurist for the Murder, Inc., trials in Brooklyn. The Dodgers lawyers suggested to Joe Moore that he take the weight for the good of the Dodgers. It was not advice well taken.

“You got somebody who doesn't give a fuck about you,” Joe Moore said. “I don't give a fuck for anybody. I'll take everybody with me.”

Rickey got up at a Rotary Club luncheon and looked at some of the players present and announced, “I apologize for the Brooklyn organization's failure to give you proper protection against some errant fan maligning our good athletes by making a false claim. The Dodgers must protect the player from receiving unfair, unconscionable abuse from the fans.

“Look at this case as we have investigated it,” he went on. “The man here slipped on wet cement downstairs, and landed on his face. His jaw was broken, his medical people say. But what preceded this? Constant and complete vilification. No one rose to deflect such humiliating tirades against our defenseless players. And then fashioning a fable, a concocted set of events, yes, Judas Priest! A lie! What must come out of this unfairness is an ordinance, a local law prohibiting the abuse of players.”

The lawyers scurried to have the case postponed repeatedly and it took a full year to get it settled in a cooler atmosphere. With so much time passed, it was somewhat difficult to ask twelve decent citizens to vote against their place of birth and their team. The lawyers paid Christian about $7,000 and he went away. Even Joe Moore went home.

But whenever Durocher walked off the field he headed for trouble as if it was his home address. In one instance it was. He let George Raft and a platoon of thieves use his Manhattan apartment for cards and dice that made you lose. A couple of the gamblers let out the loudest sound in sports: a sucker's holler.

One day, from Los Angeles, there arose a howl from a man who regarded himself as being married to actress Laraine Day:

Leo had been married twice before. The judge in Day's divorce case said Leo had to stop being seen with Laraine or he would rule harshly.

“I am not out in public with her,” Leo told a press conference. “I'm living in her home with her.”

Then he did a Durocher thing. He took Laraine to Mexico and got her a divorce. Now he went to El Paso, Texas, and married her against California law.

If there was one thing that could upset the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, it was sex. Instead of inspiring Brooklyn youth, he is sleeping with another man's wife!

Durocher also was ordered to stay away from Memphis Engelberg, the gambler; Connie Immerman, who ran the Cotton Club for New York mobsters; and Joe Doto, aka Joe Adonis because he looked so good. Adonis was one of the great New York mobsters in a period when they were treasured for the excitement they could cause.

Durocher's sins were so much greater than homicide. His was the mortaller: sex. Leo complained that Larry MacPhail of the Yankees was with more women than he had ever known. And that nobody cared. MacPhail started a squall. The Catholics were the loudest, and in Brooklyn they had numbers. The office of the Bishop announced it was considering having the Catholic Youth Organization withdraw from the Knothole Gang because of Durocher's public immorality.