Rickey and Robinson (16 page)

Red Schoendienst, one of the last great players signed by Rickey to a St. Louis contract, denies to this day any knowledge of a strike threat. “I have been asked that question by a lot of people,” he says. “I was there, but I don’t know anything about it. Nobody said anything. We went out and we played. There was no reason for the Cardinals to go out on strike. The media just looked for a good story and picked the St. Louis Cardinals because we were the furthest south of any team at that time. The facts are that nothing was said with the Cardinals about going on strike.”

The first physical threat came in a Brooklyn-St. Louis game. Harry “the Cat” Brecheen, a fine-fielding hurler, was on the mound for the Cardinals. With one out in the sixth inning, Robinson topped a bounding ball between the mound and first base. Brecheen pounced off the mound and fielded the ball in a direct line with first base. Instead of executing the routine play of flipping the ball to Stan Musial for the putout, Brecheen circled back and over to the baseline. With both fists extended, Brecheen positioned his body in a half-crouch, awaiting Robinson, who was speeding down the line. Robinson slowed and allowed himself to be tagged. “You’d better play your position as you should,” Robinson snapped. “If you ever do that again, I’ll send you right on the seat of your pants.”

A second and potentially more dangerous incident took place a few days later against the Cubs, who were in the process of losing their fourth straight game. Robinson opened the ninth inning with a single and then stole second base. Cub pitcher Bill Lee kept throwing the ball to his shortstop Len Merullo in an attempt to pick off Robinson. The more he threw, the longer Robinson’s lead became. Then, attempting to get back to second base to beat Lee’s throw, Robinson slid between Merullo’s legs. The bodies of the two players became entangled. Merullo was astride Robinson, who lay on the ·ground. Merullo lifted his right leg, and for a moment it looked as if he was going to kick Robinson. The Dodger first baseman jerked his left arm up, as if he was getting ready to throw a punch. Then the two players untangled. There was some glaring, and lots of tension, but no violence.

“It all seems inconceivable now,” says Monte Irvin. “It’s like a bad dream.” Physical challenges; crude epithets; crank phone calls that threatened to rape his wife, to kidnap his child, to assassinate him; aborted strikes; cold, demeaning stares; pitches aimed at his head; meals eaten alone in hotel rooms; a near nervous breakdown that few knew about at the end of the 1947 season, according to Don Newcombeall of these pounded away at the “badge of martyrdom.”

“Robby never spoke about the horror stories,” recalls Joe Bostic. “And he didn’t scare easily.”

“I said to him, six or seven years later at my dining room table in my home in Pittsburgh, ‘It must have been tough, Jackie,’” Mal Goode recalls.

“‘It wasn’t that bad,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“‘Don’t give me that b.s., Jackie, I sat in the stands.’ “‘Well, I guess I had to expect that, Mal.’

“He became philosophical about it. He never growled, never groaned. It was hard to get him to discuss what he went through. He was the right man· at the right time. Willie Mays once said to me, ‘I’m glad it wasn’t me. I don’t think I could have taken it.’ Monte Irvin, Hank Thompson, I think they would have taken a bat and killed somebody. I think Jackie’s coming on the scene was a divinely inspired thing. I think he was hand-picked by God Almighty.”

Duke Snider maintains that he could never have taken the abuse that Robinson took in that :first year and into the second. “Branch Rickey had to select someone who could take it, and Jackie could take it. He dished it out just by ignoring what was hollered at him and done to him. I don’t think that Campy or Newk or Doby could have handled it, or anybody else. It takes a special type of person, a cocky type who can brush off the things done to him. I saw base runners go at him in that :first year when he was playing :first . base. They’d try to step on him, try to cut his leg off.”

Mack Robinson was never a witness to the abuse his brother had to endure, but he was a passionately involved listener to many of the details, later told to him by Jackie. Never for an instant did Mack think his younger brother would not prevail.

“I had gone before Jack, and having gone through some of the trials and tribulations of the athletic world, I knew he could do the job,” notes Mack. “It was made much easier because of Mr. Rickey. It was also made much easier because he was raised in California and went to school with a mixed group. Having played in interracial sports all his life, Jack had no fear of the white man. He was accustomed to just going out and playing. You have heard so many black players, like Satchel Paige and others, who have said they could not have done it. Most of those fellows were southerners. They were used to being bossed by the southern white man. Jack had not been bossed and could not be bossed.”

Part sociological phenomenon, part entertainment spectacle, part revolution, part media event-day after day, the Jackie Robinson story played out its poignant scenes. “Television was a major factor in helping him to succeed,” says Dr. George N. Gordon, a noted communications theorist. “Jack Johnson was edited by photographs and Joe Louis was filtered by radio. But the unblinking eye of TV humanized Robinson. He was not a stereotype; he was an equal with the other players on the field. It was a lesson taught by example, like Ed Sullivan kissing Pearl Bailey. You couldn’t deny his blackness. It was a visible, sustaining show day after day. Television magnified the social event and made it reflective and directed.”

“I’m the grandson of slaves,” observes Mal Goode. ‘’Not just by history—I knew all four of my grandparents. I spent summers with them when I was a little boy in Virginia. . . . And then to see Jackie Robinson. . . . Maybe we overdo it, but you have to understand why.”

Caravans came from Jackson, Mississippi, from Memphis, Tennessee, from Atlanta, Georgia. Charter buses carried thousands of blacks from all over the South to witness “the one.” They would travel, whole families, to Crosley Field in Cincinnati, or Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. They would purchase the souvenir programs and scorecards and eat their home-packed food and marvel at the verve, the skill, the style of the man who broke baseball’s color line. In the late innings of some games, buses would begin loading and an announcement would be made directing the fans to hurry back to their buses. Some would tarry a while longer hoping to see Jackie hit one more time, make one more fielding play, steal one more base.

Mal Goode recalls what it was like in Pittsburgh. “At a quarter to eleven on a Sunday morning people were piling off the buses and streetcars. They were coming to Forbes Field for a day game. At eleven A.M., an announcement was made on the loudspeaker. ‘We are sold out. There are no more seats.’ When Jackie came into Pittsburgh for a night game, traffic started to build at three in the afternoon. At four, it was crowded in the streets. People were parking their cars, getting off the bus. By six-thirty, you could not get into the ballpark. Pittsburgh at that time was a sorry team, but they came to see Jackie Robinson.”

It was the same story all over the National League. When the Dodgers played the Cubs at Wrigley Field on the North Side of Chicago, thousands of blacks spilled off the northbound elevated trains and came out of automobiles, five, six, seven, eight in a car. Not many blacks in those days ever congregated in downtown Chicago: fewer still showed up for Cub games at the ballpark on the white side of town. But to see Jackie, they came. By noon, Wrigley Field was swarming with people. Hundreds clustered outside on the street haggling with scalpers for the few remaining tickets. The crowd was a curious collection of whites in casual clothes and blacks in suits-church suits, funeral suits, dress-up suits. They wore freshly starched white shirts and wide, multicolored ties. Many of the blacks had on straw hats, and their shoes glistened with newly applied polish. They had come to celebrate the man who had broken through.

When the gates to that antique ballpark were closed, more than forty-seven thousand were jammed into a space meant to accommodate ten thousand fewer. They seemed uncomfortable in each other’s presence; it was perhaps the first time many of the whites and blacks had been so close together. There was hardly any eye contact between the races. The whites carried themselves with a casual air. The blacks were dignified, proud, almost as if they were attending a huge church meeting.

Robinson came out of the on-deck circle in the first inning. Walking with mincing steps, he entered the batter’s box. Long, loud, rhythmic applause filled Wrigley Field, like the kind that occasionally celebrates a great musical performance. Some of the blacks cried openly. Others pounded their hands together, clapping out their pride. Robinson took up his erect stance and Wrigley Field became silent. The Cubs, with Phil Cavaretta, Hank Nicholson, and Andy Pafko, were positioned on the field defending against the Dodger rookie.

Flailing with tremendous force at the first pitch, Robinson was able to get his bat or just a small piece of the ball. The white sphere jumped high in the air and then back into the seats-foul ball. For the thousands there, it might just as well have been a bases-loaded home run. Guttural basses mingled with soprano voices. The din could be heard blocks away. When Robinson struck out, the “ohhhhhhh” seemed to make him move more crisply back to his seat on the bench in the Dodger dugout.

“Why doncha go back and pick some cotton, you nigger,” one of the rubes on the Cubs shouted at Robinson. “You’re stinkin’ up Chicaga.” Robinson did not answer. He had heard worse. He was aware of all the blacks in the stands, and he was glad they had not heard the words.

What was said on the field could not be heard in the stands, but what transpired on the diamond was apparent to all. Positioned at first base, Robinson awaited a throw from Reese. The Cub base runner sped down the line. Robinson’s foot took up just a small corner of the bag. As the runner approached the bag he made a stabbing move with his leg. The instant Reese’s throw smacked into his glove, Robinson jumped aside. He had avoided the spiking, but the hostile act set off loud booing in the stands.

Mike Royko, now a journalist, was one of the many youngsters who attended a Cubs-Dodgers game on May 18. He caught a foul ball hit by Robinson, but he didn’t keep it. While examining the major-league ball and looking at the scuff mark, Royko heard a voice behind him say, “Would you consider selling it?”

“I don’t want to. I want to keep it,” Royko told a middleaged black man.

“I’ll give you ten dollars for it,” the man said.

Royko could not believe the amount of money he had been offered. There were men in his neighborhood who earned sixty dollars a week and considered it fine wages.

The amount convinced Royko to make the sale. The black man counted out ten one-dollar bills and handed them one at a time to Royko, who gave him the ball. “Thank you,” the black man said, and he cradled the ball tenderly in his large hands.

“Since then,” Royko says, “I’ve regretted a few times that I didn’t keep the ball. Or that I hadn’t given it to him free. I didn’t know then how hard he probably had to work for that ten dollars. If that man is still around, and has the baseball, I’m sure he thinks it was worth every cent.”

For those who watched Robinson in action, it was worth every cent they paid.

At times, the style with which he played appeared to be a case of trick photography. He was an illusionist in a baseball uniform, a magician on the base paths. The walking leads, the football-like slides, the change-of-pace runs—all were a part of Robinson’s approach to the game.

In Chicago he twice startled even veteran sportswriters with his tactics during his rookie year of 1947· Once, he scored all the way from first base on a sacrifice by Gene Hermanski. Another time, he sent them running to their rule books after executing one of his unpredictable gambits. In the top of the ninth inning against the Cubs, with the score tied 1-1, he worked the count to three and two and then walked. While the Chicago catcher was disputing the base on balls with the umpire, Robinson loped down to first base, touched it, and then dashed to second and slid in safely. A lengthy argument followed, but there was nothing in the rule book against stealing second base on a walk. Robinson moved to third on a sacrifice, and then a sacrifice fly brought him home. His alert steal won the game for the Dodgers.

Even when Robinson was caught off base, he was dangerous. Opposing players used to say that trying to catch him was like trying to bottle mercury. The Philadelphia Phillies got a taste of what it was like in one of Robinson’s most dramatic run-down plays at Ebbets Field. Hottempered Russ Meyer was the Philadelphia pitcher. He glared at Robinson, a darter, a darer, a dancer, at third base. Meyer threw, and Jackie was seemingly caught flat-footed, leaning toward third base but unable to get back.

It was a simple run-down play that the Phillies had practiced over and over again. Two of them covered third base; three of them protected the plate. Back and forth the white ball was thrown as the black man dodged anu wheeled—down toward home plate, back to third. The ball was thrown slowly and deliberately, cutting off the amount of running space. The ball was thrown to the third baseman, Puddinhead Jones, who bobbled it for an instant. An instant was enough. Robinson wheeled and raced for the plate. Jones fired the ball to the catcher, but number 42 had already crossed the plate for another Dodger victory. Meyer swung at Robinson’s face with his gloved hand. There was no racial malice in the gesture; he was just a frustrated pitcher who had had a well-pitched game turned into a loss in the most heartbreaking fashion.

“I said a few bad things to Jackie,” remembers Meyer, “but I was really angry. The papers the next day showed he was definitely out at home. I was so angry I backed Frank Dascoli, the ump, all the way to the screen at Ebbets Field and got thrown out of the game, fined five hundred dollars, and suspended for a week.

“The next year I was traded from the Phillies to the Dodgers. Jackie was the first guy up in the clubhouse in Vero Beach. He held out his hand in front of everyone and said, ‘Russ, we’ve been fighting one another-let’s fight the other teams together now.’”