Rickey & Robinson (33 page)

The table fell silent. Robinson told me that Casey’s words so shocked him that for a moment he could not see. Quite suddenly his throat went dry. Then, under tremendous control, he said to Casey, “Just deal, man. Just deal.” And the game resumed.

Robinson’s bat had come to life at the Polo Grounds, where
Shotton made his debut, managing in a topcoat and a pearl gray fedora. Starting on April 18, the Dodgers played a short set there against the Giants, and now large crowds began turning out. Many black fans made the relatively short walk down from Harlem into Coogan’s Hollow.

During the 1940s, a number of academics, including William Shockley, who later won a Nobel Prize in physics, were investigating the success of blacks in sport. Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, had been heavyweight champion for 11 years. Jesse Owens’s performance in the 1936 Nazi Olympics established him as the greatest sprinter ever. Other blacks were almost as successful. The academics were working in an uncertain field known as eugenics. At length Shockley and others maintained they discovered that among certain West African tribes the heel bones of males were exceptionally long. This, Shockley said, explained blacks’ speed afoot and general athletic success.

On that April day, his Polo Grounds debut, Jackie Robinson came up in the third inning against a smallish left-hander named Dave Koslo. He lined the third pitch deep into the upper stands in left—his first major-league home run. A number of Dodgers lined up near home plate to shake Robinson’s hand. The crowd, particularly the blacks in an assemblage of 37,000 fans, cheered mightily. In the press box the witty sportswriter Heywood Hale Broun made a home run notation in his score book. Then deadpan Woodie Broun said, “That’s because their heels are longer.”

Afterward Red Smith wrote in his
Herald Tribune
column, View of Sport:

Burt Shotton saw for himself that Jackie Robinson isn’t exactly bad. Robinson hit a fierce line drive for a home run, hit a fiercer one that became a double play through the splendid offices of the Giants rookie Lucky Lohrke, and finally dropped a single in short right. Even before this, alert souvenir hawkers were offering lapel pins, which read, “I’m for Jackie Robinson.”

On April 22 the Dodgers began a three-game series against the Philadelphia Phillies at Ebbets Field. “Ben Chapman, our manager, was one forceful character,” the late Robin Roberts told me over drinks three years ago at the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown. Roberts, one of the best right-handers in the annals, was a 20-game winner in Philadelphia for six consecutive seasons. “Before that first game against Robinson and the Dodgers,” he said, “Chapman ordered all of us, the whole team, to get on Robinson in any damn way we could. Anybody who failed to get on Robinson would be fined $50, serious money back then.”

Robinson later recounted to me some of the slurs that came bellowing out of the Philadelphia dugout.

“They’re waiting for you in the jungles, black boy.”

“Back to the cotton fields, nigger.”

“How did your mother like fucking that ape?”

During the series Robinson went only 3 for 12. He said he was unprepared for the onslaught because he thought the Phillies as a northern team would give him no particular trouble. But here they were defiling him and in his own home ballpark, Ebbets Field. Robinson remembered Eddie Stanky shouting at the Phillies, “Fucking cowards. Why don’t you yell at somebody who can answer back!” He also remembered to the end of his days a trim Phillie infielder, Lee “Jeep” Handley, apologizing to him.

A few newspapermen learned of the Phillies’ behavior. Typically the
New York Times
ignored the issue but Dan Parker, who wrote trenchant columns for the tabloid
Daily Mirror
, cheered Robinson as “the only gentleman in the entire incident.” Walter Winchell, the country’s preeminent gossip columnist, heard about Chapman and in his lair at the Cub Room of the Stork Club Winchell said of Chapman, “I’m gonna make a big
hit
on that bigot.” Alarmed, commissioner Happy Chandler stepped in, offering admonishments. He then
ordered Chapman to pose for a picture with Robinson. The photograph survives. The two are holding the ends of a Louisville Slugger. Neither appears happy. Each man is looking away from the other. A year later the Phillies fired Chapman and he never managed in the major leagues again. (He did resurface as a coach with Cincinnati in 1952. That season the Reds finished sixth.)

Afterward Rickey cited the Philadelphia story as critical to Robinson’s acceptance by the Dodgers. “Chapman did more than anyone else to unite the team,” he said. “When Chapman poured out that string of objectionable abuse, he solidified and united 30 men.” (Not quite. Dixie Walker and Bobby Bragan still demanded to be traded away from Robinson and Carl Furillo continued to grumble about playing with him.)

At the Otesaga Hotel years later Robin Roberts concluded his Philadelphia memories in an interesting way. “After a while,” he said, “Chapman came to realize that Robinson usually played his best when he felt the heat was on. So then Chapman issued a new directive. The $50 fine stuck. But now it went against anyone who
did
get on Robinson.

“‘Don’t stir up the jungle boy,’ Chapman would say.

“I never liked Robinson myself, but I have to give you this. He was one hell of a competitor.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

THE UNCHALLENGEABLE TRIUMPH OF baseball integration was assured soon afterward during a period of roughly seven days in May. One factor was the failure of a massive racist movement. The other was a simple touch of friendship.

I have previously published some details of the great anti-Robinson strike, but the murky tide of revisionist history has since blurred truth
and impels me here to tell the story in full, this time including major facts that I did not earlier have at my command. The strike could well have made the National League, and perhaps all major-league baseball, a disaster area. The piece that saved the game ran on May 9, 1947, as a copyrighted story in the
New York Herald Tribune
.

In an earnestly researched but ultimately plodding book,
Baseball’s Great Experiment
, the late Jules Tygiel wrote, “[Stanley] Woodward often receives credit for averting a player rebellion [against integration]. This was not the case.” Tygiel, a college professor in Northern California, had never covered major-league baseball on a daily basis, nor was he aware of the workings of big-city newspapers. These shortcomings probably led him to a conclusion that was thumpingly incorrect.

In a more recent book, this one claiming to cover Robinson’s first major-league season, a journalist named Jonathan Eig is also dismissive of Woodward, who was the finest sports editor of his time. Eig sometimes writes effectively, but he simply does not understand what went on in 1947, a season that unfolded roughly two decades before he was born.

One man who immediately understood Woodward’s achievement was Jimmy Cannon, Woodward’s intense, complex contemporary on the
New York Post
. All but forgotten now, Cannon was one of the most eloquent and passionate of all the columnists who reported and typed for newspapers in their heyday.

The idea of a player’s strike originated in the busy brain of that exceptional and contradictory character Fred “Dixie” Walker of Brooklyn and the Confederacy. The issue, as Walker rationalized it and later carefully explained it to me, was not about banning blacks from organized baseball. Rather, he said, it was about establishing the right of professional athletes to chose with whom and against whom they would play—and with whom or against whom they would
not
play
. At the time I was too startled by Walker’s sweeping assertion to put up much of an argument. But no such players’ right exists. However lofty their salaries, ballplayers are employees. In a capitalist society the team’s owner and management decide who will play, whether the management is brilliant (Larry MacPhail, Branch Rickey in Brooklyn) or blundering (Peter O’Malley, Frank McCourt in Los Angeles). In a communist society, as I learned while traveling through Canada with the great Central Soviet Army hockey team, the choice of players rests with coaches working under commissars. Nowhere do pro players get to pick their teammates or their opponents. That simply is the way things are.

But Walker recognized that a case for players’ rights, however implausible, would play better with the press and public than a campaign for a continued ban against blacks. After the dramatic days of World War II, America was becoming a more open community. Besides, the Holocaust had given bigotry a bad name.

Walker’s original idea called for a league-wide strike. Working in as much secrecy as possible, he recruited leaders on other National League teams. He found confederates in Ewell Blackwell, a star pitcher with the Reds, and first baseman Phil Cavarretta, who later managed the Chicago Cubs. Neither was a Southerner. Cavarretta was born in Chicago. Blackwell grew up in Fresno, California. But the key people with the St. Louis Cardinals were as Southern as grits. Those included were Enos Slaughter from North Carolina, Marty Marion from South Carolina and the team captain, Terry Moore, a native of Alabama. I have not been able to learn the names of the other Walker allies on other teams. Some surely existed but their secret remains buried in their coffins. (Walker himself died of stomach cancer at the age of 71 on May 17, 1982.)

The story burst forth in the city edition of the
Herald Tribune
dated May 9, 1947. Copies went on sale at about 10:30 the night
before. The Associated Press picked up the story crediting the
Herald Tribune
and a brief version, citing the AP—but not the
Trib
—appeared in late editions of the dormant
New York Times
. Editors at the
Times
made a deliberate decision not to credit the
Herald Tribune
as the source of the story. The legal issue here may be somewhat muddy, but the moral issue is clear. The
Times
pilfered and minimized Woodward’s scoop. Here is all the
Times
, America’s self-proclaimed Paper of Record
, published on a movement that could have shattered the National League.

FRICK SAYS CARDS’ STRIKE PLAN AGAINST NEGRO DROPPED

Ford Frick, National League president, said last night a threatened strike by the St. Louis Cardinals against the presence of Negro First Baseman Jackie Robinson in a Brooklyn Dodger uniform has been averted, The Associated Press reported.

Frick said that Sam Breadon, owner of the Cardinals, came to New York last week and informed him that he understood there was a movement among the Cardinals to strike in protest during their just-concluded series with the Dodgers if Robinson was in the line-up.

“I didn’t have to talk to the players myself. Mr. Breadon did the talking to them. From what Breadon told me afterward the trouble was smoothed over. I don’t know what he said to them, who the ringleader was, or any other details,” Frick said.

Asked if he intended to take any action, Frick said he would have to investigate further before he could make any decision.

The National League president said he had not conferred with Baseball Commissioner A. B. (Happy) Chandler concerning the matter.

The
Tribune
’s headline and subhead went like this:

NATIONAL LEAGUE AVERTS STRIKE OF CARDINALS AGAINST ROBINSON’S PRESENCE IN BASEBALL

General League Walkout Planned by Instigators

The story carried the byline of the sports editor, Stanley Woodward, and a copyright notice that the
New York Times
chose to ignore. Spectacular as this scoop was, the
Tribune
published it not on page 1, where it would have boosted newsstand sales, but back on page 24, where it was invisible, unless of course you had already bought the paper. The managing editor responsible for this misplay, George Anthony Cornish, was, Woodward pointed out, “a native of the Hookworm Belt.” (Actually, a village in Alabama called Demopolis.) Woodward felt that Cornish was so excessively cautious that he nicknamed the editor “Old Double-Rubber.” Woodward added, “In this instance, caution and boyhood bigotry combined. Old Double-Rubber couldn’t kill my story, but he could keep it the hell off the front page, which is what he did. Obviously that night my story should have led the paper.”

Woodward was a large, myopic, powerful man with a strong tenor voice. (I am reminded of other large, powerful tenors, Jack Dempsey and Jackie Robinson.) Woodward’s first name, which he never used, was Rufus. Generally he was called Coach. Woodward ran the
Tribune
sports section when I began working there, first as a nighttime copyboy at $26.50 a week. Woodward sometimes sent me downstairs to the storied saloon the Artist and Writers Restaurant to buy him “a couple of packs of Camels.” Invariably he handed me two dollars. Back then a pack cost a quarter in a machine and when I returned Woodward said, also invariably, “Keep the change, son.” Given the
pay scale of a copyboy, the tip was good enough for a modest meal—salisbury steak, a Mrs. Wagner’s Home-Baked Apple Pie and muddy coffee—in the
Herald Tribune
’s cafeteria. Although many
Tribune
people sent me on many errands during my copyboy years—executives, clerks, Pulitzer Prize winners—Woodward was the only person kind enough and generous enough to tip.

He encouraged my writing and in time, joined by our love of journalism, poetry, lucid prose and well-played sports, we became close friends. Over the years he told me much of how he came to write the great Robinson strike story.

The
Tribune
employed a debonair Canadian, Cecil Rutherford Rennie, called Rud, as one of its senior baseball writers, and Rennie developed friends, both male and female, all around the major-league circuit, which then ran from New England to Missouri. One such was Dr. Robert Hyland, an orthopedist whom the St. Louis Cardinals used as team physician and the St. Louis Browns engaged as a consulting specialist. Hyland, a prominent figure on the St. Louis sports scene, liked to call himself “the surgeon general of baseball.”