Jackie Robinson (43 page)

Opening on May 16 in New York,
The Jackie Robinson Story
was successful both at the box office and, within its limited scope as a low-budget film
biography of a sports hero, with the critics. If its cheap production values disappointed some viewers, its patriotic theme (underscored by its repetitious use of the anthem “America the Beautiful”) charmed many more— although the
Daily Worker,
affronted especially by its ending with Jack’s HUAC testimony, found the movie “
patronizing and offensive.” Almost everyone agreed that Jack’s acting was a pleasant surprise. As the influential columnist Louella Parsons put it: “Surprisingly,
Jackie Robinson is just perfect playing himself. He has dignity and sympathy without ever being maudlin.” The reviewer Bosley Crowther noted the hackneyed nature of the “pluck-and-luck” genre to which the movie belongs, but found elements of distinction: “
Here the simple story of Mr. Robinson’s trail-blazing career is reenacted with manifest fidelity and conspicuous dramatic restraint. And Mr. Robinson, commandeering that rare thing of playing himself in the picture’s leading role, displays a calm assurance and composure that might be envied by many a Hollywood star.”

The Jackie Robinson Story
proved to be one of the more successful sports movies of the era, although the response at the box office was uneven and unpredictable. In Manhattan and even in Brooklyn, as well as in large cities such as Baltimore, Boston, and Washington, ticket sales fell well below expectations. But in Detroit and Chicago, in California and in Canada, and in many smaller midwestern towns, long lines formed to buy tickets. In the often mysterious way of Hollywood accounting, Jack made little additional money from the movie. However, almost fifty years later it had become both a period piece from Hollywood’s darker days and a fascinating memento of a genuine American hero portraying himself on the silver screen.

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, the 1950 Dodgers were supremely confident. Burt Shotton, usually reticent, declared flatly that “
we are going to win the pennant—and the World Series, too. We have more good ball players than anybody in baseball, so why shouldn’t we?” Jack shared this confidence. He also started training with a plan designed to prevent his usual exhaustion near the end of the season. “
I’m not going to steal bases merely to steal,” he confided to a writer. “I will engage only in a minimum of pre-game practice, just enough to keep in shape.” He would “run hard and be aggressive, but only when the game demands hard base running.” This announcement was a mistake. A writer soon suggested that “
Robinson’s recently accumulated wealth has robbed him of his incentive”; he was no longer “the hungry player he used to be.”

The snide reference had something to do with Jack’s new salary. On January 26, after rumors swirled about a trade of Robinson to the Boston
Braves, Rickey made him the highest-paid Dodger ever. His 1950 contract called for $35,000, surpassing that of even the team captain, Pee Wee Reese. “Of course,” Rickey declared, “
in the case of Robinson, drawing power must be considered. I’m sure that other players are intelligent enough to realize that, and not be resentful.”

Diligently Jack worked once again in camp on his hitting with George Sisler, whose spring tutoring had helped make 1949 a memorable season for Robinson. “
Jackie is a better hitter right now than he ever was,” Sisler commented. “He’s just learning to hit.” Then, still a little overweight but in good condition, Jack joined his teammates as they broke camp and headed north on their exhibition tour. Now, unlike in 1949, the presence of black players—Robinson, Newcombe, Campanella, and Bankhead—created little anxiety. The Klan leader, Samuel Green, who had caused trouble in 1949, was dead. Raw resistance to black players was simply fading; in Atlanta, a huge, congenial crowd filled the stands to watch Newcombe pitch against a Crackers team managed by Dixie Walker.

Returning to Ebbets Field, the Dodgers found themselves installed as heavy favorites to win the pennant. Early in the season they looked good; through May and June, they stayed atop the league. Their main strengths were superb defense and hitting; Hodges, Snider, and Campanella excelled in home-run power, and Robinson, Furillo, and Snider each batted over .300. But a shaky, immature pitching staff, despite solid performances by Preacher Roe and Newcombe, kept Brooklyn shackled. Steadily, Philadelphia’s brilliant young team, dubbed the “Whiz Kids,” including Richie Ashburn, Del Ennis, Robin Roberts, Curt Simmons, and Jim Konstanty, took command of the pennant race. In September, the Phillies enjoyed an apparently insurmountable nine-game lead over the Dodgers. But Brooklyn, making a gallant late charge, won twelve of their next fifteen games as the Phillies dropped eight of their next eleven.

The last day of the season found the pennant still undecided, as Brooklyn faced Philadelphia in Ebbets Field, with Newcombe pitching against Roberts. In the bottom of the ninth, with the score tied, the Dodgers’ Cal Abrams was thrown out trying to score from second in a memorable coaching blunder. Robinson then came to the plate with one out and runners on second and third. The Phillies, both unwilling to challenge him and hoping for the double play, decided to walk Jack; he watched helplessly as first Furillo, then Hodges, failed to drive in a run. The Phillies won on a home run off Newcombe by Dick Sisler, George Sisler’s son, to secure their first pennant in thirty-five years.

For Jack, the season was a special disappointment because he had fallen short of the heights of his 1949 MVP season. As a hitter, he had gotten off
to the best start of his career. When he continued to dominate through May, June, and July (with his batting average at one point reaching .380, well ahead of his main rival, Stan Musial), he seemed destined to win the National League batting title for a second consecutive year. (He would then have been the first player to do so since Rogers Hornsby in 1925.) But once again he wilted in August, when his average was a paltry .188 over twenty-eight games to make for his worst hitting slump as a Dodger. Musial, a hero even in Ebbets Field, breezed past Robinson to win his fourth batting crown (with .346).

In the end, despite his disappointment, Jack batted an excellent .328 overall. Nor had his value to Brooklyn lessened. As the Dodger coach Jake Pitler put it in June: “
He’s the indispensable man. When he hits we win. When he doesn’t, we just don’t look the same.” Once again, Jack had the most doubles on the club, and his home-run total was on a par with past years. He drove in far fewer runs (81, compared to 124) than in 1949, but only because he had fewer opportunities to do so. Summarizing Jack’s season at the plate, the team statistician, Allan Roth, noted his “
consistency against all types of pitching and under all conditions, his ability to hit to left and to right depending upon how he is being pitched to, and his proven ability in the clutch”; Roth concluded that Robinson was “the best all-around hitter on the club.” And Jack showed again and again how much winning meant to him. On July 6, when he failed to make the lineup because of injuries, he missed his first game in more than two years, or since June 2, 1948.

In other ways, he had weakened. On the bases, Jack had grown timid. In past seasons he had attempted an average of 41 steals; in 1950 he tried only 18 times (and was safe 12 times). If only to experts, his fielding also seemed in decline. Spectacular on double plays with Pee Wee Reese, and committing only eleven errors over the season, Jack was growing slower. His range moving to his right had shrunk—it was “definitely unsatisfactory,” in Roth’s opinion.

However, Jack had other reasons to be unhappy with the season. Stepping out more assertively as a player, he found himself again and again in controversies he could never win. Only passivity, even obsequiousness, could keep him exempt from criticism when he faced whites; almost any assertiveness was bound to be seen as a step out of line. But for Robinson, the statute of limitations in his 1945 pact with Rickey had certainly run out by this time. He was now on his own, and was a changed man.

On the Dodgers, Jack’s conduct began to be compared unfavorably with Campanella’s. Already seen as the finest catcher in baseball, except perhaps for the Yankees’ Yogi Berra, Campanella played one way and lived another.
Dominant behind the plate, he seldom challenged white men outside this sphere, and in general deferred to Jim Crow. His easygoing manner won him friends; their white teammates respected Jack and Roy, but also loved Campanella. Bubbling with enthusiasm, a quick-witted jokester, and fairly simple in his pleasures, Campanella knew his place and kept it. Harold Parrott would recall an evening in Florida when he took food out to Campanella and a seething Robinson from a roadside restaurant that would not serve them, even as their white teammates ate inside. “
Let’s not have no trouble,
Jackie,” Campy said, according to Parrott. “This is the onliest thing we can do right now, ’lessen we want to go back to them crummy Negro leagues.” More than once, when Robinson complained of ethnic slurs hurled at him, Campanella denied hearing anything. When Jack one day asked Clyde Sukeforth, whom he trusted, if Sukeforth thought he was getting big-headed, Campanella broke in with some advice: “Better go easy, Jackie. Those buses in the minors aren’t like the 20th Century or these big league air-cooled trains.”

Campanella had his run-ins with umpires, but never dreamed of taking these disputes as far as Jack was prepared to go. In 1950, and the years to come, Jack battled with umpires over matters not simply of judgment but of ethics, in his growing belief that the umpires, all white, were abusing their power in order to put him in his place. Perhaps the worst incident of 1950 came during a game on July 2 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. In the second inning, as Robinson walked testily away after taking a called third strike, the umpire, Jocko Conlan, suddenly piped up: “
That strike was right down the middle.” When Jack turned to face him, Conlan repeated the remark. Robinson then said something sharp to Conlan, who threw him out of the game. Jack exploded with a firestorm of abuse. Sure that Conlan and others were baiting him, Robinson wanted Ford Frick, the league president, to crack down on them. “
Frick has given these guys too much power,” he told the press. “Something’s going to have to be done about it.” Sukeforth supported Jack’s position. “
There is no question in my mind that the umpires are picking on Robinson,” he declared. Sure, Jack liked to heckle—but “if Robinson were somebody else, no umpire would pay any attention.”

Almost certainly, Jack’s growing reputation as a troublemaker was behind his omission from the United Press news service’s all-star team that year, when the Giants’ Eddie Stanky was chosen at second base. Jack’s superiority to Stanky in 1950 was clear: in batting average (.328 to Stanky’s .300), hits (170 to 158), home runs (14 to 8), runs batted in (81 to 51), and stolen bases (12 to 9); nor was Stanky the superior fielder. And Stanky, called “the Brat,” was no less aggressive than Robinson; in fact, his rage to win had led Leo Durocher to utter his celebrated dictum “Nice guys finish
last.” But a double standard existed and persisted. What was feisty charm in a white player was often perceived as viciousness in a black, whose presence stirred conscious and subconscious reactions that only the most sensitive white observers recognized.

As his troubles mounted, Jack could take comfort in knowing that Branch Rickey stood solidly behind him; not a scintilla of tension had ever flared in public between the two men. But in July, Rickey’s place in Brooklyn began to crumble. Exactly how it crumbled was to have a severe impact on Robinson’s future with the Dodgers.

The death that month of one of the four Dodger owners, John L. Smith, a friendly pharmaceutical millionaire well liked by the players, set in motion a struggle for control of the club between Rickey and Walter O’Malley, its vice-president and chief counsel. Like Rickey and O’Malley, Smith had owned a quarter-interest in the Dodgers. Whoever gained control of Smith’s block of shares would be in an excellent position to control the club. Increasingly critical of some of Rickey’s decisions over the years, and ambitious to own the entire operation, O’Malley decided to seek control. (The remaining block of shares was owned by Dearie Mulvey, whose father had run the club in the 1930s; but for some years Mrs. Mulvey had taken no interest in its affairs.) Securing John Smith’s shares, O’Malley then moved to acquire those of Rickey, whose days as general manager were now numbered. Aware that Rickey’s capital was stretched thin, O’Malley offered to buy his quarter-share for exactly the amount Rickey had paid for it, about $300,000. Rickey’s only recourse would be to find a better offer elsewhere, which O’Malley would then have to match, according to board rules, in order to acquire the share.

Suddenly, in September, Rickey scored a financial coup. In “
the biggest deal of his career,” as a newspaper put it, he accepted an offer to sell his stock for $1,050,000 to William Zeckendorf, a rich New York real estate speculator who had helped assemble the parcel of land for the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. Of this sum, $50,000 was a premium that Zeckendorf exacted from Rickey—or, in effect, from whoever matched the offer—for tying up his money while the deal unfolded. (Behind Zeckendorf’s serendipitous offer was Rickey’s great friend John W. Galbreath, the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, where Rickey would soon be the new general manager.) O’Malley matched the offer. He also soon discovered that Zeckendorf had turned the premium of $50,000 back to Rickey. In O’Malley’s eyes, Rickey had cheated him out of the sum. “
That was a lot of money in those days,” O’Malley’s son, Peter, would say in 1972.

At a press conference in October, as he toyed with an unlit cigar, Rickey denied that a rift existed between himself and O’Malley; although his
contract as general manager would expire on October 31, he would be delighted to stay on in Brooklyn. But Rickey was finished on Montague Street; O’Malley would soon exact a fine of one dollar from any employee who mentioned Rickey’s name in his presence. At his own press conference, O’Malley let it be known that the club would take a new direction—away from Rickey. Rickey’s old position would be subdivided, to prevent the abuse of power by any one man. Instead of the frequent sale of players to generate revenue (with Rickey taking a commission on each deal), the Dodgers would aim to win games and serve “
the little guy.”