Rickey & Robinson (31 page)

I remember walking the streets of Batista’s Havana at night and being constantly solicited by big-bottomed hookers or by their acned, adolescent pimps. “Seestair,” one boy called to me.
“Cinco pesos.”
He then made a sucking sound. But there was no violence, none at all. American tourists were a significant asset to Cuba, and Batista’s police guarded them as though they were vestal virgins.

It is an interesting irony that Rickey, the moralist, seeking to avoid American racism, put his young ballplayers into the hooker
(and gonorrhea) capital of the Western world. Some, surely not all, of the ballplayers behaved like churchwardens.

Rickey divided his playing personnel into three categories: major league, minor league and black. He booked the Dodgers into the famous Hotel Nacional de Cuba, a glittering eight-story resort towering over the Malecón, Havana’s great roadway overlooking the Gulf Stream and the sea. Winston Churchill had favored the Nacional, as had the movie Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, and the Duke of Windsor. Its elegance confused some of the ballplayers, whose customary off-the-field attire consisted of dungarees and T-shirts. Preoccupied with other matters, Rickey never did impose a dress code.

“Let me tell you about the Nacional,” said Mike Gavin of Hearst’s
New York Journal-American
. “The steaks were so thick you could barely cut them. Rickey picked up the basic tab for most of the writers, but there was another problem. At the Nacional I couldn’t afford the tips. . . . ”

Rickey booked the white Montreal Royals into the barracks at a nearby upscale military academy. The blacks, Robinson and now Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella, were dispatched to a small, drab hotel called the Boston.

“I was enraged,” Robinson told me. “We quit Florida and we get segregated by the dictator of a banana republic. When I calmed down Mr. Rickey told me it was he, not Batista, who did the segregating. He said it was absolutely essential that there be no black–white conflict at this point in time within the Dodger organization. I ended up accepting his approach. I pretty much accepted all of Mr. Rickey’s approaches in those days.”

Ernest Hemingway’s villa, Finca Vigía, was located just outside Havana. Boxing was Hemingway’s favorite sport, but he followed baseball closely, and now he invited a dozen Dodgers to party at the villa. Whiskey flowed freely and after a while Hemingway began
boasting of his skill with his fists. Although he was 20 years older than the ballplayers, and probably out of shape, he offered to take on any of them, one-on-one. Hugh Casey, the hulking relief pitcher from Georgia, stepped forward and within a minute knocked Hemingway clean through a glass cocktail table. Hearing the clatter and the thud, Mary Hemingway ran downstairs, helped her husband to his feet and banished the Dodgers into the tropic night. “We are never inviting ballplayers here ever again,” she said to friends.

“But we were innocent,” Pee Wee Reese told me. “No one lifted a finger until Hemingway started throwing punches at Big Hughie.” (Curiously the lives of Hemingway and Casey ended in similar ways: suicide, a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head. Casey died in 1951 at the age of 37 following a broken romance. Hemingway’s death came a decade later when he was 61, after extended episodes of mental illness.)

Jackie Robinson underwent a difficult spring. As I’ve noted, he neither drank nor smoked, but Robinson was a serious major-league eater. Steak, shrimp cocktail, french fries, apple pie topped with two baseball-sized lumps of vanilla ice cream. Jack loved them all. It was said he never saw a meal he didn’t like. Except in Cuba. “The food at the Boston,” he said, “was so bad it actually made me sick. Everything was fried. Everything was greasy. I suffered a couple of bouts of dysentery. That didn’t help my ball playing.”

Nor did a decision from the Dodger general staff. Eddie Stanky was the established Brooklyn second baseman of whom it was said, “He can’t run, he can’t hit, he can’t throw. All he can do is beat you.” Pee Wee Reese was securely established at shortstop. The Dodgers put a rookie at third, John “Spider” Jorgenson, whose hustling style pleased manager Leo Durocher. But first base? Well, there was Howie Schultz, tall and strikeout prone, and “Big Ed” Stevens, who had some power but essentially was a .250 hitter. “First base,” Durocher told Rickey, “is where we most need help.” Rickey dispatched one of his assistants to
a Cuban sporting goods store where, for $14.50, he bought a new first baseman’s mitt. Rickey presented the glove to Robinson, who had never before played an inning at first base in organized ball.

“I wasn’t pleased,” Robinson told me. “Now, in addition to everything else, I was going to have to learn a new position.” First base is different from the other infield spots in that most of the time you move not toward the ball but to the bag. Catching throws properly involves a stretch toward the ball and deft footwork. Robinson never became really comfortable at first.

For all Rickey’s expertise at scouting, he was unaware that the organization already included an athlete who would become an all-star first baseman. That was 23-year-old Gil Hodges, who came up as a catcher. The Dodgers summarily assigned Hodges to Newport News of the Piedmont League for 1947, where he caught 120 games and hit .276 with good power. It was not until 1948 that Hodges became the Dodger first baseman. Robinson then moved to second (Stanky moved to the Boston Braves, charging, “I’ve been stabbed in the back.”) When Rickey acquired third baseman Billy Cox in a trade with Pittsburgh, the Dodgers fielded one of the great defensive infields of all time: Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and Billy Cox. “Those fellers can really pluck ’em,” Joe Black said in his understating way.

Reviewing this period with Robinson, I thought of Job. Jack was segregated from the white players, stuck in a third-rate hotel, fed brutal cooking and now to crack the major leagues he had to learn a strange position. “At least,” I said, “Rickey neglected to ask you to sweep the clubhouse.” Robinson did not crack a smile.

Attendance at Havana’s Gran Stadium was disappointing, running to only about 3,500 a game. Robinson’s color—and gate appeal—were not distinctive in a Caribbean setting. The Cuban Baseball League traced back to the 1870s and began including black ballplayers
in 1900. All the great Negro League stars, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, played Cuban winter ball without controversy. “Negro League salaries were terrible,” Joe Black said. “We had to play winter ball in Cuba to make a living.”

After Rickey’s athletes rounded into shape, he organized a seven-game trip across the Panama Canal Zone, where the Royals took on the Dodgers every day. Rickey met privately with Robinson and issued marching orders. “Jackie, you can forget about what you did at Montreal last year. That’s ancient history so far as these men [the Dodgers] are concerned. Your minor-league record doesn’t mean a thing. You’ll have to make the grade on the field against major-league pitching and major-league defense, so I want you to be a whirling demon against the Dodgers. I want you to concentrate, to hit that ball, to bunt, to get on base by any and every means, I want you to run wild, to steal the pants off the Dodgers, to be the most conspicuous player on the field—but conspicuous only because of the kind of baseball that you’re displaying. Not only will you impress the Dodger players, but the stories that the newspapermen send back to Brooklyn and New York will create demand on the part of the fans that you be brought up—
now
!” In an uncertain time, Rickey looked everywhere for support.

Robinson thought briefly. “I’ll do my best” was all he said. Robinson then played superlative baseball and the Dodgers responded by circulating a petition to bar him from the team. Glory and infamy were marching side by side.

The story of the anti-Robinson petition has been told and mistold several times, most recently in a 2010 book called
Dixie Walker of the Dodgers: The People’s Choice
, composed by Dixie’s daughter, Susan, and the late, prolific Maurice Allen Rosenberg, who wrote under the name of Maury Allen for a variety of publications. Allen/Rosenberg was energetic at the keyboard but a tireless self-promoter who was often a stranger to truth. He claimed, for example, to have covered
the Dodgers in their late years in Brooklyn, but during that period he was a lowly fact-checker working within the Manhattan offices of
Sports Illustrated
. Allen and Susan Walker insist in their book that Dixie did not originate the petition, which is not the story that Walker told me.

Not only did he originate the petition, he typed a letter to Rickey on March 26, 1947, requesting a trade. I found that memorable letter in one of the many bins in one of the many warehouses of the Library of Congress. Rickey had donated it to the library.

“Recently,” Walker wrote in that long-ago spring, “the thought has occurred to me that a change of ball clubs would benefit both the Brooklyn baseball club and myself. Therefore I would like to be traded as soon as a deal can be arranged. For reasons I don’t care to go into, I feel my decision is best for all concerned.”

In those old reserve-clause days, ballplayers were given no control of their careers—highly paid peons, some called them—and Walker’s letter infuriated Rickey. At a staff meeting Rickey said, “No players on the Dodgers will have anything to say about who plays or who does not play on the club. I will decide who is on it and Durocher will decide who of those who are on it does the playing.”

He did not deal Walker until December. Then he shipped him with two journeymen pitchers, Hal Gregg and Vic Lombardi, to Pittsburgh. In return Rickey acquired the great left-hander Preacher Roe and Billy Cox, at his peak arguably the best defensive third baseman of all time. Trade? This was more like grand larceny.

Dixie Walker was a marvelous ballplayer, a fine defensive right fielder with a strong arm and, when it came time to bat, a picture swing. He thrived on clutch situations and, as Brooklyn fans warmed to him, he won the National League batting championship in 1943, hitting .357.

Dixie and I met in 1976 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, where
he was working as batting coach and had just finished giving tips to Dusty Baker, later a prominent manager, and Steve Yeager, later a convert to Judaism. Baker was black and Yeager was white. Coach Walker did not seem to notice any difference.

Walker approached me and asked if we could drink some wine together after that night’s game. Baseball is a world of beer and the wine suggestion surprised and pleased me. Walker turned out to be an oenophile and we sipped a marvelous Margaux. He told me of a recent trip to England, where he had journeyed to seek out family roots, and he spoke vividly of the Salisbury Cathedral and the flowering gardens of Devonshire. Not, clearly, basic baseball talk. Then Walker got to the point of our meeting. “I organized that petition in 1947 not because I had anything against Robinson personally or against Negroes generally. I had a wholesale hardware business in Birmingham and people told me I’d lose my business if I played ball with a black man. That’s why I started the petition. It was the dumbest thing I did in all my life and if you ever get a chance sometime, write that I am deeply sorry.”

I used Walker’s remarks in my 1993 book,
The Era
, but the
New York Times
(and others) ignored my Walker reporting and didn’t get around to covering this vital story for another 17 years. I am surely not the only soul who misses the
New York Herald Tribune
.

Times
columnist Harvey Araton did a workmanlike job with Maury Allen’s book on Walker, but followed up with a tendentious blog under the headline: “Does Dixie Walker Deserve Scorn or Sympathy?” Of course he deserves both, but the point of his experience is more complex than Araton understood. Ol’ Dixie changed and grew, moving from segregationist outfielder to integrationist batting coach. As he aged, Walker grew in understanding and compassion. During a lifetime a man can indeed be modified. (I recall here Robert Frost’s witty observation: “I never dared be radical when young, for fear it
would make me conservative when old.”) Shakespeare’s commentary was matchless. “One man in his time plays many parts.”

Robinson never grew close to Walker. “I think in 1947,” he told me, “I was on base three times when Walker hit a home run. But I never stopped at home plate and offered a hand. Why not? I thought Walker would not take my hand. Then we would have had the beginnings of an incident.”

Again not getting the point, Araton wrote in the
Times
that Robinson refused to shake Walker’s hand as a protest against bigotry. The
Times
error here misses many things, including the fact that for all his fiery nature, Jack never was a vengeful man.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

RICKEY SCHEDULED EXHIBITION GAMES between the Dodgers and Montreal at Ebbets Field on April 9 and 10. “My plan,” Rickey told me, “was to have Durocher say to the newspapermen that all he needed to win the pennant was a good first baseman and that Jackie Robinson was the best first baseman in sight.”

As pointed out earlier, on April 9, Commissioner Chandler arbitrarily suspended Durocher for the remainder of the year “for conduct detrimental to baseball.” Chandler never explained his decision. Durocher had some friends who were gambling men. He was himself a high-stakes poker player. His adulterous affair with the Mormon actress Laraine Day created a sex scandal that delighted the tabloids. The Brooklyn Catholic Youth Organization threatened to boycott Dodger games if the libidinous Durocher continued to manage. “The Catholic Church,” someone remarked, “never boycotted Mussolini or Hitler. Just Leo Durocher.”

It is impossible to paint Durocher in soft colors, but the sheer arrogance of Chandler’s decision and his czarist refusal to discuss his
reasoning would cost him his job. In 1951, after one term as commissioner, he was dismissed and replaced by Ford Frick. He reacted with rage. “It was really those New York drinking bastards from Toots Shor’s that did me in,” Chandler wrote me. “Like those friends of yours, Red Whiskeyhead Smith and Frank Whiskeyhead Graham.”