Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  “Yeah, pretty soon you’ll want to eat and sleep with white ballplayers!”

  And those were just the two he deemed suitable for print. His accounts in later years, and accounts by others who were there, say the Phillies mentioned Robinson’s thick lips, thick skull, and sores and diseases his teammates and their wives would likely contract by associating with him. They were powerful words delivered at high volume by a surprisingly large number of players. Bench jockeying had always been a part of the game, and the taunting often centered on ethnicity. Babe Ruth had been called “Nigger Lips” by players who speculated that at least one of his ancestors must have been black. Hank Greenberg, the game’s greatest Jewish star, had been referred to as a kike and a Christ killer. But even veterans of the game had never heard anything like the insults hurled at Robinson. Ben Chapman, the Alabama-born manager of the Phillies, was leading the cry and had reportedly ordered his players to join him. They would incur fines if they didn’t obey, some players later recalled. “Figuratively, he was still fighting the Civil War,” recalled Howie Schultz, who was in the Dodger dugout that day and later played for Chapman in Philadelphia. “He was just embittered when Robinson joined the league.”

  White people said such things and worse all the time. Even white people with no particular animosity toward black people spouted off among friends from time to time. Occasionally, on a factory floor, in a bar, or aboard a bus, a white person might launch a verbal assault in the face of a black person. Relations were tense, conflicts inevitable. But seldom did such raw attacks occur on a public stage, with real emotions flashing, and with thousands of people watching and listening. Fortunately, it was a weekday afternoon, and few children were in the crowd. But for everyone who heard Chapman and the Phillies that day, the outburst served as a sort of Rorschach test. Instantly, instinctively, they may have been repulsed, shocked, embarrassed, horrified, humiliated, discomfited, ambivalent, mildly pleased, or perhaps even genuinely delighted. Gil Jonas, who was at the game, was startled and confused. Robinson wanted to put his fist through someone’s face.

  “For one wild and rage-crazed minute I thought, ‘To hell with Mr. Rickey’s noble experiment,’ ” he recalled years later. “I thought what a glorious, cleansing thing it would be to let go. To hell with the image of the patient black freak I was supposed to create. I would throw down my bat, stride over to the Phillies dugout, grab one of those white sons of bitches and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist. Then I could walk away from it all.”

  He didn’t. The first two pitches to Robinson were curveballs, high and inside, perhaps intended to send a message. The second one was close enough to the strike zone for Robinson to hack at it, which he did, raising a routine fly ball to left field. The Dodgers and Phillies played tense, scoreless baseball through seven-and-a-half innings. By the end of the seventh, some of the cold, damp crowd had gone home. In the top half of the eighth, Robinson made a great, spearing catch to snuff a Philadelphia rally. Then, in the bottom half, he took a curveball on the outer half of the plate for a strike and then swung at a fastball, poking it softly but in just the right spot, a few feet past second base. The grandstand murmured with excitement; no one wanted to see extra innings on such a frigid afternoon. With Pete Reiser at the plate, Robinson took a long lead from first, his right foot scratching at the infield’s soggy clay, and then took off. Reiser swung and missed, strike three. Andy Seminick, the Phillies’ catcher, tried to throw Robinson out but never had a chance; his throw sailed into center field. Robinson hopped up from his slide and started running again, speeding safely to third. After a walk to Walker, Hermanski smacked a single to center, scoring Robinson.

  In the top of the ninth, with the Dodgers clinging to a 1–0 lead, the Phillies had the tying run on first when Robinson committed his first error of the season, letting a sharp grounder shoot under his glove. Now the Phillies had runners on first and third with two outs. Chapman sent the slugger Nick Etten in to pinch hit. Etten smashed a hard grounder past the pitcher. It looked like a certain hit, which would have tied the game. But Pee Wee Reese, the slick shortstop, gloved the ball just before it touched down in the center-field grass and flipped to Stanky at second for the game-ending out. “Greatest play I ever saw,” said the pitcher Hal Gregg. Robinson, his error erased, was even happier than Gregg. He sprinted across the field to slap Reese on the back.

  The victory helped Robinson feel better about what had been one of the most trying afternoons of his life. But the next day, Chapman and his men continued their taunting. This time, at least, some of Robinson’s teammates stood up for him. They knew that Robinson had promised Branch Rickey he would not respond to any such attacks. “Listen, you yellow-bellied cowards,” Stanky was said to have shouted across the field, “why don’t you yell at someone who can answer back.” Even Dixie Walker supposedly told his fellow Alabaman Chapman that he had gone too far.

  In the third game of the series, Chapman called in sick, letting one of his coaches take over for him in the dugout. But the storm over his behavior didn’t end. In the days and weeks ahead, fans and sportswriters weighed in on whether Chapman had a right to harass Robinson. The Sporting News noted that all ballplayers faced insults, and cited the case of the great pitcher Lynwood “Schoolboy” Rowe, saying “few players had ever had to take in more copious doses” of punishment than Rowe. But Rowe was teased about a dumb remark he’d once made on the radio, not the color of his skin, and the attackers never once suggested that they wished to see him permanently expelled from the game of baseball. If the literate men at The Sporting News couldn’t see the difference between Rowe and Robinson, it was little surprise that ballplayers were no better. And they weren’t. “We will treat Robinson the same as we do Hank Greenberg of the Pirates, Clint Hartung of the Giants, Joe Garagiola of the Cardinals, Connie Ryan of the Braves, or any other man who is likely to step to the plate and beat us,” Chapman said, naming some of the game’s prominent ethnic ballplayers, and suggesting that the taunting was more a strategy than an expression of his personal feelings. “There is not a man who has come to the big leagues since baseball has been played who has not been ridden.” Chapman may have been right. Maybe he did mean to give Robinson the same treatment any rookie might expect. But his claim wasn’t helped by his reputation. As an outfielder for the Yankees in the 1930s, Chapman had made a specialty of baiting Jewish ballplayers, and he’d been in a huge brawl with one of them, Buddy Myer of the Senators. There were several Jewish stars in the 1930s, including Myer, Harry Danning, and of course, Hank Greenberg, and more Jews of marginal talent, but their presence was still small enough that they stood out. Now, with the arrival of Robinson, Chapman found an easier target.

  Robinson didn’t know whether Chapman would be the worst or merely the first of many. But, as it happened, Philadelphia’s manager might have done him a favor. Some fans seated near the Phillies dugout wrote to Commissioner Chandler to complain about what they’d heard, and Chandler in turn warned the owner of the Phillies to control his manager or face punishment. Walter Winchell, the most popular journalist in the country—and the most spiteful—used his Sunday night radio broadcast to attack Chapman’s behavior. “Ballplayers who don’t want to be in the same ball park with Robinson don’t belong in the same country with him!” Winchell trumpeted. Robinson had his own column in 1947, as did many popular sports figures at the time. Robinson’s was ghostwritten by Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, and thanks to Smith’s accommodating nature and long-range view of the integration effort, the column tended to deflect most insults. Thus Robinson announced in his column that Chapman’s assault “didn’t really bother me.”

  Gil Jonas was neither convinced nor calmed. As the days and weeks went by, the teenager returned to those taunts again and again, replaying them in his mind, puzzling over what could have inspired them and wondering what the black people sitting in the grandstand around him must have thought as they listened.

  “I didn’
t know people could be that cruel,” he said.

  Only at that moment did the teenager begin to realize that Robinson was not like the other ballplayers he’d followed through the years. Only then did he begin to realize that life in America was different for black people, harder, more complicated, more painful. Only then did it occur to him that he had failed to ask Robinson some important questions in his interview. From that point on in the season, he began attending games not only to see whether the Dodgers would win but to see how Robinson was holding up, to see how black fans maintained their decorum, and to see if the race-baiting would let up. It was as if a new set of senses had become available to him. Week by week, he would notice a change. Some of the white fans who might have let slip a few snide remarks on race seemed to stop. Some of those who had sat in silence, unsure what to make of baseball’s lone black man, broke down and began to cheer him. “I watched people who were hard-hearted or antagonistic . . . ,” he recalled. “. . . and they changed. It was palpable. It changed so completely, and it changed me over the course of the season. Just watching the pain this guy felt, hearing the shouting across the field, it became very personal.”

  When Gil graduated from high school in 1948, he fulfilled his wish to go far from Brooklyn, enrolling as a freshman at Stanford University, where he was surprised to discover that the campus had not been integrated. Had it not been for Jackie Robinson, he said, he never would have noticed. But he did, and he wrote a letter to Roy Wilkins, the second in command at the NAACP, an organization he had never heard of previously, asking if anything could be done. Wilkins advised him to form a campus chapter of the NAACP, which he did, and within a year, he and some of his classmates succeeded in getting the school integrated. A year later, when the second black student came to campus, Gil summoned the nerve to ask her out on a date.

  He started to become interested in politics and world affairs and gave up on becoming a sportswriter. When he graduated from Stanford, he went to work for the NAACP and spent most of his career with the organization, eventually becoming its leading fundraiser and helping to bring in about $110 million in donations. Jackie Robinson became a member of the board of directors.

  In 1960, Jonas and Robinson met for the second time, at a fundraiser. They shook hands. Jonas, a little nervous, asked his hero if he remembered their interview in 1947, when they had sat together on the stoop on MacDonough Street and talked about nothing but baseball. He tried to explain to Robinson how that meeting had changed the course of his life.

  Robinson smiled politely. He said he didn’t remember it.

  SIX

  PRAYING FOR BASE HITS

  The camelhair hat looked too big, like a garbage can lid perched atop his head. The coat, also camelhair, billowed in the wind. His face was tanned, but he did not look like a man who’d been spending time outdoors. If anything, he looked like a man who’d just been in the hospital and soon would wind up back there.

  “Hiya, Babe,” said an umpire to the most popular player in baseball history, now fifty-two years old, as he walked under the stands at Yankee Stadium, headed toward the home team’s dugout. Two other umpires stuck their heads out a door to catch a glimpse of the great George Herman Ruth. “Get back in there, you three blind mice,” the Babe said, smiling at the umps. The rasping voice hinted at the source of his illness: throat cancer. As he walked on, peanut vendors stepped aside and shook their heads in silence.

  More than fifty-eight thousand people packed the stadium to say good-bye to the player who had meant more to the game than any other. Baseball’s history could be divided into two eras, before Ruth and after. Before Ruth, the game had been played by quick little men who scratched out hits and stole bases in low-scoring games. After Ruth, it became a fireworks show, a dazzling display of power, an American spectacular, with homers soaring like rockets and slow, thick-necked soldiers making glorious marches around the bags. Ruth hit so many home runs and hit them so far that he became more myth than man, and the game, in turn, became something more fabulous than ordinary life.

  Of course, Ruth never had to hit against a black pitcher. It was somewhat easier to clobber the competition when Jim Crow played on your side.

  When Ruth retired in 1935, he had 714 home runs, nearly twice as many as his closest competitor. In the twelve years since then, the country had been through Pearl Harbor, World War II, the dawn of the atomic era, and the onset of the Cold War. But it was remarkable how little had changed in baseball. Had Ruth been plopped into the Yankee dugout in 1947, he would have fit in fine. He would have been the most popular man in the clubhouse, same as ever, the best and highest-paid player in the league, the greatest home run hitter, and the favorite attraction of every typewriter-pecking gent in the press box. The sources of revenue that would later come to dominate the game’s economy—radio, television, and advertising—were still insignificant in 1947. The big leagues consisted of sixteen teams and extended only as far west as St. Louis. Air travel was becoming more common, but teams still traveled almost exclusively by train. The men who played were more or less the same in character and world view as those who had played in the twenties and thirties. They were the sons of fishermen, farmhands, and barkeeps. Baseball delivered them from lives of manual labor, but it did not make them so rich—not most of them, anyway—that they could afford to quit working winters. Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, and Ty Cobb had been replaced by Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Bob Feller. These ballplayers may have been a bit slicker and more subtle, in much the same way that Casablanca was slicker and more subtle than Gone With the Wind, but there was nothing remotely revolutionary about them.

  Then along came Robinson.

  At Ebbets Field, where Ruth’s farewell speech was heard on the public address system, the Dodgers and Giants were getting ready to meet for the fourth time in the young season. The stands were stuffed to capacity, mostly with Dodger fans, of course, but also with a strong contingent of Giants rooters, and once again with a larger-than-usual number of black Jackie Robinson followers. The crowd was giddy and tense, but the tension had little to do with race relations. Today it was about baseball. There was no matchup in Gotham more enthralling than Dodgers v. Giants.

  Bobby Thomson, a rookie center-fielder for the Giants, felt some jealousy at all the attention given to Robinson. Thomson was a promising newcomer, too, and a New York City kid, to boot. But at game time he wasn’t worried about which rookie got more attention. Nor was he interested in Robinson’s color and its effect on baseball as a whole. He was focused on helping the Giants beat their rivals, and he was eager to see how Robinson’s unique set of skills would affect the course of the game. “We knew he was pretty good,” Thomson recalled. “He was fast and shifty, as good a base-runner as you’ll ever find. But I still never gave him any credit. I never gave any of the Dodgers any credit.”

  A swirling wind turned the game into a bumbling series of collisions and dropped balls, classic Brooklyn baseball, in a sense. The hometown fans were having a good time. In the fourth inning, spectators got a special treat when Joe Louis, the heavyweight champ, walked down the aisle of the grandstand near the Dodger dugout. Celebrity sightings were not unusual at Yankee Stadium, but at Ebbets Field they were almost as rare as a triple play. Louis waved to Robinson at first base as he took his seat.

  If there was any man in America capable of understanding the pressures facing Robinson, it was Louis, a sharecropper’s son turned full-blown hero. Louis was not the first black boxing champion, but he and Jesse Owens were among the first black men to be widely admired by white Americans. By 1947, Louis had already been champ for a decade, giving him a run of celebrity far greater than that enjoyed by Owens, who began slipping from view shortly after his Olympic triumph in 1936. Louis was respected for his talent. No one had ever dominated the sport so completely and for so long. But the Brown Bomber was also widely admired for the way he comported himself. He never used his position as a pulpit. He showed little interest in politics. He
never gloated after beating opponents. And, unlike the great Jack Johnson, Louis never made race an issue, in or out of the ring. He made it a point never to appear in public with white women, conveying an image of a soft-spoken, God-fearing man. For all of his ferocious power, Louis somehow made whites feel safe. He was not “too black,” as some whites put it—by which they meant that he wasn’t too threatening to their own notions of superiority.

  By 1947, the champ was thirty-two years old, only four years older than Robinson, but, like Ruth, seemingly of another time. Before the war, he had been indomitable, a machine designed and created to administer punishment. After the war, he was merely human, a dangerous condition given his line of work. Louis had defended his title in 1946 by beating Billy Conn, but he’d looked sluggish in doing so, and while he won a purse of $625,000, he owed so much money to the IRS, his managers, and his ex-wife that he ended the night still in debt by about $200,000. He would go on fighting for a few years, but never convincingly. He would try his hand at business, but almost always with disastrous results. For the rest of his life, the IRS, drug addiction, and mental illness would dog him. But in 1947, for yet a few more moments, he remained the champ, and the crowd at Ebbets Field, black and white, greeted him lovingly.

  Louis and Robinson had met before, in 1942 at Fort Riley, Kansas, when Robinson was in basic training. They had played golf, ridden horses, and exercised together. Louis was poorly educated, but Robinson, no doubt flattered by the attention from such a famous figure, was impressed by the sharpness of his mind. Now, as Louis found his seat, Robinson leaned over the railing to say hello, presenting him with an autographed baseball. Photographers sprang from the dugout and surrounded the men. It turned out to be Robinson’s best play of the day. Back on the field, he walked once and scored a run, but otherwise didn’t do much else. The Dodgers pulled out a 9–8 win, improving their record to seven wins and two losses. Despite his unremarkable performance and a three-game stretch in which he’d gone hitless, Robinson had reason to be pleased. The Giants had treated him much more kindly than the Phillies. His team was in first place. And the sight of two strong, proud black men shaking hands had elicited nothing but cheers. Put that one in the win column.