Rickey & Robinson (16 page)

At the Chicago meeting the Establishment owners elected to impose a lifetime ban on any ballplayer who signed a contract with Jorge Pasqual. This feudal decision led to lawsuits and in time to both cash settlements and reinstatements. The most notable star coming back from a Mexican fiesta was the rugged right-hander Sal
“the Barber” Maglie, later famous for fastballs clipping whiskers from Dodger batters’ chins.

Within a decade the Mexican League ceased to be a problem. Blowing through $50 million, it went bankrupt. Some 30 years would pass before the players’ union became strong enough to overturn the reserve clause. But at the Blackstone Hotel that August, Rickey’s integration was here and now.

“I remember,” Rickey told me, “that Larry MacPhail was very angry. He had just bought the Yankees and he claimed that Pasqual had hired one of your colleagues on the
Herald Tribune
to recruit Yankee ballplayers for the Mexican League. Recruit them right there in the Yankee Stadium clubhouse. He was insisting that the
Tribune
fire the reporter, a man named Rud Rennie, who always seemed to me a decent sort. [Rennie denied the charge and Wilbur Forrest, the executive editor of the
Tribune
, hotly refused MacPhail’s demand.]

“Ford Frick presided at the meeting. Where was Happy Chandler, our new commissioner? I’m not really sure. Frick passed out a report on integration prepared under the direction of MacPhail and Phil Wrigley, the chewing gum manufacturer who owned the Cubs. As I said, MacPhail was angry. He stood up and glared at me. Robinson was then playing for Montreal. Did I realize, MacPhail said, that when Montreal played in Baltimore and Newark more than half the fans in attendance were Negroes? And did I further realize that all those Negroes were going to drive away our white fans?

“He was raging. I made no answer. We read a report that essentially said the time was not right for bringing Negroes into the major leagues. I hoped someone would challenge the report. No one did. Then Frick asked all of us to return our copies to him. After that was done the MacPhail–Wrigley report against Negroes simply vanished from the face of the earth.

“I cannot tell you how dismayed I was. These were my colleagues and, I had thought, my friends. I had only the good sense to hold my
tongue. Then over the next few days I sent letters to the baseball people I considered most important, calling their attention to the Ives-Quinn law.

“Discrimination had always been wrong.

“Now, I pointed out, it was also illegal.”

Rickey believed that the strongest human emotion was sympathy. “The word derives from the classical Greek
sumpatheia
, which suggests mutual understanding which blossoms into affection,” he said. “I believed that when my ballplayers saw what Jackie Robinson was going through, sympathy would make them reach out to him. Eventually most of them did, but it took more time than I had anticipated.

“Ballplayers love money. They love World Series checks. I thought when they saw how good the colored boy was, when they realized that he could get them into the World Series, they’d pretty much force me to promote him from Montreal and make him a Dodger. After that, one problem—Robinson’s acceptance by his fellows—would solve itself.”

During spring training 1947, Rickey arranged for the Dodgers and the Montreal Royals to play a seven-game series, touring the Canal Zone. Robinson, still on the minor-league roster, rose majestically. In the seven games, he stole seven bases. He batted .625. When he won one game for Montreal with a squeeze bunt, Hugh Casey, the Dodgers’ best relief pitcher, picked up the baseball, cursed and threw the ball over the grandstands.

In considering the Holocaust, Jean-Paul Sartre defined bigotry as a passion and passion is, of course, irrational. You cannot talk someone away from avarice; you can’t reason a person away from lust; you could not argue Nazis out of their murderous anti-Semitism. The core of veteran Dodger players was not roused by Jackie Robinson’s success. They felt no sympathy, none at all, for a brave, solitary black man. Instead, the veteran core felt passionate outrage. Bigoted ballplayers would hate Robinson if he batted 1.000, which he damn near did. “How dare a colored fella be that good?”

In Panama the Dodgers were billeted briefly in an Army barracks at Fort Gulick on Gatun Lake. There, one night in March, Clyde Suke-forth, working as a bench coach, told Leo Durocher that some veteran players had drawn up a petition that said simply, brazenly: “We the undersigned will not play on the same team as Jackie Robinson.” Dixie Walker, a literate and intelligent man and a native of Georgia, had done the phrasing. (In 1976 Walker, then 66, told me, “Starting that petition was the dumbest thing I did in all my life.”)

But back in 1947 the petition began to catch on. Bobby Bragan, a backup catcher but a clubhouse leader, signed. So did Hugh Casey. Both men were Southerners. Carl Furillo signed. He grew up in Pennsylvania. Next came Cookie Lavagetto, a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. But a youthful Gil Hodges flatly refused. Pete Reiser, the gifted center fielder, said that when one of his children was gravely ill, the only person who would help out was a Negro doctor. “So I got nothing against the colored people, nothing at all.” Now the petitioners turned to Pee Wee Reese, from whom they expected strong support. Reese was raised amid segregation in Louisville, Kentucky.

“It was a terrible moment,” Reese told me years afterward when we had become close friends. “I knew what these fellers were doing was wrong, just plain wrong, but they were my buddies.” In a quiet, nonevangelical way, Reese was a practicing Christian. “As a Christian,” Reese said, “how could I deny another human being the right to inherit a small portion of the earth? That was what was in my heart. Jackie Robinson had that right.” But at the time Reese was not comfortable speaking so intensely to his teammates. “It could have sounded too churchy or too uppity.” Instead he told them, “This thing might rebound, fellers. If we sign, we all might get the boot. I can’t take that chance. I just got out of the Navy. I got no money and I have a wife and baby to support. So, fellers, just skip me.” The petition lost momentum but did not die.

“Who told you about this fucking petition?” Durocher asked Sukeforth.

“Kirby Higbe, after he had some beers.”

“Must be another Kirby Higbe,” Durocher said. “Our guy comes from South Carolina. They don’t care for colored people down there.”

“It is our Hig,” Sukeforth said. “He told me when his pitching was going badly, the Dodger organization took a chance on his arm and let him restart his career. Hig says he owes the Dodgers. He’s afraid the petition will tear the team apart.”

“This is big, Sukey,” Durocher said. “Let me sleep on it a while.”

But Durocher could not fall asleep on his army cot in the faraway Panama Canal Zone. At one o’clock in the morning Durocher decided that there was no reason why he should sleep. No reason at all.
Get the hell up!

Durocher roused his coaches and told them to bring all the players into a big empty kitchen behind an army mess. The team assembled in night clothing and underwear. “Boys,” Durocher began in a loud bray that rattled spinal disks. “I hear some of you don’t want to play with Robinson. Some of you have drawn up a petition.”

The players sat on chopping blocks and leaned against cold stoves. Durocher, possessed of a phenomenal, if selective, memory, told me he could recall his exact words.

“Well, boys, you know what you can use that petition for?

“Yeah, you know.

“You’re not that fucking dumb.

“Take the petition and, you know, wipe your ass.

“I’m the manager and paid to win and I’d play an elephant if he could win for me and this fellow Robinson is no elephant. You can’t throw him out on the bases and you can’t get him out at the plate. This fellow is a great player. He’s gonna win pennants. He’s gonna put money in your pockets and mine.

“And here’s something else. He’s only the first, boys, only the first.
There’s many more colored ballplayers coming right behind him and they’re hungry, boys. They’re scratching and diving.

“Unless you wake up, these colored ballplayers are gonna run you right out of the park.

“I don’t want to see your petition. I don’t want to hear anything about it.

“The meeting is over. Go back to bed.”

Did any manager ever have a finer moment?

Early the next day Durocher placed a phone call to Rickey, who was briefly back in his Brooklyn office. “I was appalled by what I heard but I entirely endorsed Durocher’s statements, if not his vocabulary,” Rickey told me. “I believe, I have always believed, that a little show of force at the right time is necessary when there is a deliberate violation of the law and the law here was the fair employment act. I knew that a reasonable show of force was now the best way to control this thing. When a man is involved in an overt act of violence or a destruction of someone else’s rights, then that is no time to conduct an experiment in education or persuasion.”

After the Panama tour, Rickey summoned a number of players into his office, one by one. “I talked to them singly,” he told me. “I wanted to rob them of safety in numbers. I read each of them the riot act. Bobby Bragan argued with me hardest. I reminded him that we had other catchers and that he was not indispensable. An intelligent man, but he remained obdurate. I thought that his bigotry might be changed by proximity to Robinson, as given time it was. I did not then cut him from the squad.

“Hugh Casey, our best relief pitcher, was indispensable but curiously insecure for a great competitor. When I told him he might end up relieving in the minor leagues, he simply wilted. I told Cookie Lavagetto, a popular veteran, that frankly I was ashamed of him. Lavagetto hung his head.”

“What did you tell Furillo?” I asked.

“Nothing. I did not bother to speak to him at all. I regarded Furillo as a man in whom talk could arise no moral dilemma because he had no basic moral compass of his own. I would almost have wagered that later Furillo would argue as rabidly in Robinson’s behalf as he was arguing against Robinson in those days.”

During the early 1950s, when I started covering the Dodgers on a daily basis, Furillo warmed up before each game by playing catch with a teammate of his choice, the great receiver from the Negro Leagues, Roy Campanella. And of course he had a moral compass. “I was fucking wrong five years ago,” he told me. “That’s why right now I play catch with Campy every day.”

Whether Bobby Bragan actually did change remains questionable. In 1983, when I bought the Class A Utica Blue Sox, Bragan, then president of the Texas League, telephoned to wish me well. “Most people lose money in the minors,” he said, “but you don’t have to worry about that.” Then, referring to my partially Jewish heritage, he went on, “Your kind always makes money!”

Bragan remained a Dodger into the season of 1948. Neither Rickey’s persuasive power nor playing alongside Jackie Robinson weaned this smart and essentially likeable man away from his entrenched stereotyping of others.

Utica won the 1983 pennant in the New York–Penn League. Keeping the team in business for a single season cost me $17,000. Despite being whatever “kind” I may be, that was a net loss. The local utility, a voracious company called Niagara Mohawk Power, refused to supply electricity for the ballpark lights until I had written a personal check for $7,500 as a deposit. Clubhouse lights? That would be an upfront $1,000 more. “We ought to socialize you bastards,” I said genially to a bloodless clerk, who did not answer.

In retrospect destroying the racist petition was an unalloyed triumph for that decidedly odd couple, Branch Rickey, the eloquent
teetotaler, and Leo Durocher, baseball’s Loud Lip. But as Scott Fitzgerald famously reminded Ring Lardner, life is larger than a diamond. Off the field Durocher, a long-term Rickey reclamation project, was running with a dangerous crowd, on Broadway and in Hollywood. The hallmarks of Leo’s bicoastal friends were a passion for gambling and rampant lust, both of which would have a significant impact on Durocher’s managerial career and Rickey’s noble experiment. Here are some leading characters in
Le Gang Durocher
:

George Raft
, movie tough guy, and offscreen friend of the notorious gangster Owney Madden. Raft was a heavy baseball bettor and a card shark. He sometimes organized crooked dice games. He always brought the dice. Married at the age of 22 in a Roman Catholic ceremony, Raft never was able to obtain a divorce from Grace Mulrooney. Offscreen the movie tough could be warm and attentive and he was a ballroom dancer almost in a class with Fred Astaire. Estranged from Grace for more than 45 years, Raft plunged into affairs with Betty Grable, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and Norma Shearer. “I just don’t like to sleep alone,” he said. During the 1940s, Raft let Durocher share his Hollywood mansion in the winter months and join his crap games and frolics along with his friends, his women and his fellow desperados.

Max “Memphis” Engleberg
, a big-time bookmaker, who set the odds and point spreads that his colleagues used to run their gambling businesses. As detectives later established, the point spreads Engleberg created were a key to prodigious betting on the college basketball doubleheaders that regularly sold out Madison Square Garden. For at least 10 years, games involving City College, St. John’s, NYU, Kentucky and Bradley Tech, among others, routinely were fixed. Hard-eyed gamblers ordered the fixes. Fresh-faced college athletes carried them out.

Conrad “Connie” Immerman
. During Havana’s swinging pre-Castro days he ran the casino at the elegant Hotel Nacional. Gambling was legal then, prostitution flourished and on almost every corner in Havana you found all-night shops selling coffee and condoms.

“Bugsy” Siegel
, born Benjamin Siegelbaum, gently played by Warren Beatty in a popular 1991 movie but in reality a savage hoodlum. Following a mob dispute Siegel was shot to death in June 1947.

Joe Adonis
, born Giuseppe Antonio Doto, a Mafia thug. Adonis was deported to his native Italy in 1956. During an interrogation by Italian police he suffered a fatal heart attack.