The Hustle (8 page)

At the end of World War II, American race relations were primed for change: Thousands of black servicemen had gone overseas, fought for the country, and were in no mood to be treated as inferior when they got back. The war and the jobs it created had pulled another wave of black migrants from the South to cities in the North and the West Coast, and the invention of the mechanical cotton picker meant that many more were soon to make the move. Like the rest of American society, major-league sports were segregated, but it didn't take much to see that there was an amazing talent pool in the Negro Leagues—if a major-league baseball team were to integrate and bring in some of the country's best black players, it would gain a huge competitive advantage. In 1945, Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, took that step and signed Robinson to a minor-league contract. Two years later, on April 15, 1947, Robinson stepped onto the field for his first major-league game.

That season has been recounted in dozens of books and films: how Rickey and Robinson agreed that Robinson would turn the other cheek to provocation; the threats, taunts, and slurs Robinson endured from fans, opposing players, and even his own teammates; Robinson's intensely competitive personality and his excellence on the field, where he helped the Dodgers make it to the World Series; and the overwhelming support of African Americans, who turned out by the thousands to see him play.

Back then, baseball was still the most popular sport in the country and considered the national pastime. Robinson's presence on the field was a step toward visibility for all African Americans. The African-American essayist Gerald Early writes: “Robinson was arguably the person who launched the American era of racial integration after World War II,” preceding
Brown v. Board of Education
, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and everything that followed. “Robinson became a public spectacle in a way that no other African American had quite been before, and he subdued Western culture through his sheer will to win.”

After Robinson's pioneering season, the segregation of other sports quickly ended. In 1950, twenty-two-year-old Earl Lloyd entered a game for the Washington Capitols, becoming the first African American to play in the National Basketball Association. He preceded an explosion of black talent in the sport during the following decades: Bill Russell, a six-foot-ten shot blocker and rebounder, led the University of San Francisco to college championships in 1955 and 1956 before going on to join the Boston Celtics, who won eleven titles during his thirteen-year career; the seven-foot-tall Wilt Chamberlain in 1962 became the only player ever to score a hundred points in an NBA game; and Elgin Baylor, who could seemingly suspend himself in the air, brought unprecedented athletic virtuosity to the court.

Jackie Robinson's ten seasons in the major leagues are by far the most-told part of his story, though not the end. After his retirement in 1956, Robinson became deeply involved in civil rights, pushing for legal remedies such as voting rights as well as economic power through black business ownership. An outspoken advocate for Black Capitalism, he helped to found and then chaired a black-run savings and loan in Harlem. He took a position as a corporate vice president with the restaurant chain Chock full o' Nuts, and instead of just cashing in on his fame, actively worked to improve conditions for black employees. His belief in business as the way forward for African Americans led him to campaign for Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential election—a position he later renounced—and become an aide to Nelson Rockefeller, New York's moderate Republican governor. “I was fighting a last-ditch battle to keep the Republicans from becoming completely white,” Robinson wrote later.

Robinson, in effect, tried to bridge the early philosophies of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois: He wanted black economic empowerment in tandem with legal victories and advancement toward equality. By the 1960s, though, many African-American leaders thought it would be impossible for blacks to ever gain equality under the capitalist system that had once enslaved them. For example, Du Bois joined the Communist Party later in life; he died in exile in Ghana in 1963 at age ninety-five.

Some African-American athletes also began to question the assumption that achievement in sports would lead to full acceptance in American life. The most prominent was heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay, who, with the encouragement of Malcolm X, joined the Nation of Islam in 1964 and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Ali refused to report when he was drafted into the army in 1966 and shunned the idea of the black athlete as an integrationist role model. Robinson, whose son fought in Vietnam, said at the time, “He's hurting, I think, the morale of a lot of young soldiers over in Vietnam.” Ali simply said, “I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”

In essence, Jackie Robinson's integrationist position began to seem passé to many blacks as the 1960s advanced. When he questioned the wisdom of the black separatism of people such as Stokely Carmichael, militants labeled Robinson an “Uncle Tom.” In a much-publicized spat, Malcolm X accused Robinson of simply working for his “white boss,” Branch Rickey. Malcolm noted that in 1949, Robinson had agreed, if reluctantly, to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee to refute Paul Robeson's statement that African Americans, because of their treatment in the United States, would not fight the Soviet Union if a war started. “You let yourself be used by whites,” Malcolm X told Robinson.

Robinson kept up his fight, starting a construction company to build housing for the working class in New York City and continuing to speak out on the discrimination and poverty faced by blacks. But by the late 1960s he was increasingly disenchanted by what he saw as a lack of progress toward equality and the failure of the country to address it. By 1972, at age fifty-three, Robinson was suffering from diabetes, his hair had gone white, and he was nearly blind. He died of a heart attack that October.

In his autobiography, published the year of his death, Robinson remembered the optimism he felt during the singing of the national anthem at the opening of the 1947 World Series, and said it was long gone. “Today as I look back on that opening game of my first World Series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey's drama and that I was only a principal actor,” he wrote. “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world.” Robinson questioned what his achievements on the baseball diamond had translated to in American society at large. While he had integrated the field of play, he was incensed that the positions of power in baseball were still all white. “It is not terribly difficult for the black man as an individual to enter the white man's world and be partially accepted. However, if that individual black man is, in the eyes of the white world, an ‘uppity nigger,' he is in for a very hard time indeed.”

Robinson knew he'd been chosen for the major leagues not only for his talents, but also for his ability to control his temper. He recognized that there were many other black players who could have excelled at the highest levels had they gotten the chance. The playwright August Wilson took up this theme in
Fences
, the story of Troy Maxson, a former Negro Leagues power hitter who was too old to play in the major leagues by the time Robinson had integrated them. The play is set in 1957, and Troy is embittered, working as a garbageman in Pittsburgh. When his wife and a friend suggest that Jackie Robinson had changed things for blacks in baseball, that Troy just came along too early, he explodes: “There ought not never have been no time called too early! … I done seen a hundred niggers play baseball better than Jackie Robinson. Hell, I know some teams Jackie Robinson couldn't even make! … Jackie Robinson wasn't nobody. I'm talking about if you could play ball then they ought to have let you play.”

Always aware of his own good fortune, Robinson found that America feted him for his athletic skills but was much less interested in hearing him talk about lack of opportunity, the hundreds of Troy Maxsons who languished behind one Jackie Robinson. “I can't believe that I have it made while so many of my black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity, live in slums or barely exist on welfare,” he wrote. “There was a time when I deeply believed in America. I have become bitterly disillusioned.”

Randy Finley, born in 1942, was a decade older than Willie McClain and had in almost every way grown up on the opposite side of the racial and cultural divide. As a kid in the late 1940s, he had moved with his family to Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, into a house that was only a few blocks from the East Madison neighborhood of the Central Area, which at the time was swelling with new black migrants from the South. Just as Willie McClain's mom warned him never to cross the railroad tracks in Gulfport, Mississippi, Randy's parents told him to stay away from the Central Area, which, of course, just made it more alluring. “I can remember it being one hundred percent black down there on Twenty-third and Madison,” he says. “Riding my bicycle, I was scared to death, but I was always very curious.”

Finley, like McClain, had roots in the South. His father had grown up in Asheville, North Carolina, where a black woman had wet-nursed him. When Finley's father enrolled in college at Duke, she went along to wash his clothes and take care of him. After the family moved from Washington, D.C., to Seattle—Finley's mother had grown up in Washington State—Finley's father hired black laborers to work around their house. “We had some contact,” Finley says. “There was a very comfortable relationship.”

In 1951, his father, a lawyer, was elected to the Washington State Supreme Court, and the family moved to Olympia, sixty miles southwest of Seattle. Finley soon discovered a love of sports and joined the basketball, football, and swim teams in high school. “I loved competition,” he says. “I really was a basketball player trapped in a football player's body. I never could jump very much, but I loved the sport of basketball.” Finley struggled in his classes, though, especially with writing. Outside of school, he tooled around in his '48 hot rod and generally raised hell. “I was drunk probably five nights a week,” he says. “We'd take hypodermics and squirt vodka into oranges and then eat them at lunch at school.”

He started college in the 1960s, taking eight years to earn a degree from the University of Washington. In the meantime, he served in the army reserve, worked as a night guard at the King County Juvenile Detention Center, spent months at a time in Mexico City learning Spanish, and sold trinkets at rock shows. While Willie McClain was taking to the streets, Finley was actually living in a house in the Central Area that he'd rented with a white roommate. “We knew there were dangers, but we were also very sympathetic,” Finley says. “I wanted to contribute to what we thought was happening. We thought our generation was changing the world”—Finley laughs at the statement—“and we were just trying to be a small part of it in Seattle. It sounds kind of dreamy, but it was a couple young men interested in being better citizens and helping other people be better citizens.”

In 1969, Finley was thinking about going to graduate school when he saw a double feature of François Truffaut's
Jules et Jim
and Ingmar Bergman's
The Seventh Seal
. Afterward, while smoking a joint with his wife and some friends, he had an epiphany—instead of grad school, he was going to get into the film business, deciding, “I'm going to open a theater just like one of those porno, skin-flick theaters on First Avenue. I'm going to build a little small theater and play nothing but films based on literature.”

His first place, near the University of Washington, was a cramped room with only ninety-three seats. Finley discovered that the idea of showing only films based on books wasn't realistic, but he soon became known around Seattle for his oversize personality: He wore an army jacket with his name sewn on, had a beard down to his chest, a wild head of hair topped with a Russian Cossack hat, and greeted customers by serving them tea and coffee. He expanded throughout the 1970s and eventually owned sixteen theaters, located in quirky places such as old American Legion halls. In the early 1980s, though, he found he was having a hard time getting the rights to show popular first-run movies. He filed an antitrust suit against several big theater chains, charging them with colluding to block him out. Finley was far from the type to shy away from a fight, but as the lawyers stacked up billable hours, the battle began to burn him out. In 1986 he decided to sell his theaters. He'd already begun to rustle around for somewhere else to invest his considerable energy.

Finley had mixed feelings about sending Maitland to Lakeside. He appreciated the education but found the other students to be “too rich and too spoiled,” and worried that Maitland would become a “snob.” (“It's amazing they let a few plebeians like us in with their young captains of industry,” he says of our families the first time I interview him.) When he spied Willie McClain's team, he saw a chance to open the minds of the Lakeside kids a bit. He wanted us to learn something about black people and perhaps form some friendships. “That was the hope—that as a unit we could all begin to think of each other as just people,” he says. “Basketball was a vehicle to do a lot more than just play basketball.”

Willie McClain was cautious when Finley approached him—taking his players out of the Central Area to play basketball with a bunch of rich white kids would open him to the charge that he was letting them be exploited. But McClain quickly grasped the possibility in Finley's offer: “What was so attractive when Randy talked about bringing the teams together—and we talked about it a lot—was the idea of these kids going on to private schools, and that really kind of blew up in my head. I said ‘Really, do they have an opportunity to do this?' ”