Although skeptical, the players went along once Smith told them that the Courier would pay for their trip. On the second week of April 1945, they set off by train for Boston. When they arrived, they discovered that the Braves had already departed for spring training and had canceled their tryout. Then, as the four men were waiting for a call from the Red Sox, they learned that President Roosevelt had died. As the nation went into mourning, Smith and the three Negro League players waited in a Boston hotel with nothing to do. The delay gave Wendell a chance to get to know Jackie better, and to witness his short temper for the first time. “Listen, Smith, it really burns me up to come fifteen hundred miles for them to give me the runaround,” Robinson fumed.
Finally the men were summoned to Fenway Park, only to find themselves in the company of high school players and prospects from the lowest rungs of the minor leagues. Joe Cronin, the Red Sox manager, and Eddie Collins, the general manager, sat high in the stands and observed without saying anything. None of Boston’s white baseball writers bothered to show up. The tryout lasted only an hour, and Smith left feeling that it had been nothing more than a cynical political sop. When a promised follow-up call never materialized, he wrote to Collins, who claimed that the Red Sox couldn’t make any decisions because Cronin had broken his leg.
Disappointed but not wanting to waste a trip to the East Coast, Smith decided to look into an intriguing development in the world of black baseball. The previous year, Gus Greenlee, the former owner of the Pittsburgh Crawfords and czar of the Negro Leagues, had announced a comeback. His coffers replenished by the wartime numbers racket, Greenlee planned to launch a new baseball circuit called “the United States League” to compete with the two existing black leagues of the day. Now there was word that Branch Rickey was huddling with Greenlee to discuss sponsoring a team for the new league, one that would play in Ebbets Field while the Dodgers were on the road.
Smith called Rickey to check out the story, and Rickey invited him to New York the next day. When they met at the Dodgers’ headquarters on Montague Street in Brooklyn, Rickey asked if Wendell could recommend any players for his new team, to be called the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers. Smith mentioned the three players he had just brought to Boston. When he uttered the name “Jackie Robinson,” Smith recalled, Rickey’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “Jackie Robinson!” Rickey said. “I knew he was an All-American football player and an All-American basketball player. But I didn’t know he played baseball.” Smith told Rickey that Robinson had been the star of the Red Sox tryout, bashing homers over Fenway Park’s famous left field wall and speeding around the bases. Rickey listened raptly. “You will hear from me,” he said as the men parted.
A week later, Rickey phoned Smith in Pittsburgh. In a secretive tone, he said that he was sending his top scout, Clyde Sukeforth, to observe “the young man from the West.” Wendell assumed Rickey was talking about Robinson, and that he had a reason for speaking in such veiled terms. “Mr. Rickey,” he asked, playing along, “is there any chance of this ball player ever becoming part of the Brooklyn ball club?” Rickey dodged the question. “This may be more extensive than you visualize,” was all he would say. “I don’t know exactly how this is going to turn out.” Still, the call was enough to confirm that the Dodgers were eyeing Robinson for something. A week later, Wendell saw Jackie and gave him a heads-up. “The Dodgers are trailing you,” he said.
Soon afterward, Rickey called Smith again with worry in his voice. While scouting Robinson, Clyde Sukeforth had heard from a fellow scout that the Monarchs shortstop had gotten into a fight with a white umpire. Was the prospect “a belligerent individual”? Rickey asked. Wendell knew the answer was complicated, but he didn’t want to discuss it at this delicate stage. “I didn’t want to tell Mr. Rickey, ‘Yes, he’s tough to get along with,’ ” he recalled. “A lot of us knew that. Jackie had a sizeable temper.” Smith assured Rickey that the incident was probably just a routine dust-up—but then he contacted Jackie again and warned him to be on his best behavior. “I told Jackie to watch himself, to watch his conduct,” Wendell recalled. “Everything he did, on and off the field, would get back to Mr. Rickey.”
Finally, in August 1945, Rickey was ready to meet “the man from the West.” Robinson was playing for the Monarchs at Comiskey Park in Chicago when a pale man with a long, thin face waved at him from the stands. It was Clyde Sukeforth, come to take Robinson to Brooklyn. That night, the two men rode on a sleeper train to New York, and the next morning Jackie was in Rickey’s office on Montague Street, receiving an offer to play in the Dodgers’ farm system.
“Mr. Rickey told me I would have to stand a lot of gaff without losing my temper or making a scene,” Robinson recalled in an autobiography written with Wendell Smith two years later. “He even acted out several situations I’d be likely to face, and then asked how I would meet each one of them. I wasn’t too happy with the prospect he foresaw, but I knew, too, that I was pretty sure to run into some name-calling, some insults, some Jim Crow. I told him I felt pretty sure I would stay out of rhubarbs on the field and trouble of any sort away from it, but that I couldn’t become an obsequious, cringing fellow. Among other things I couldn’t play hard, aggressive ball if I were that sort of man.”
The response satisfied Rickey, and by the end of the meeting he offered Robinson $600 a week and a $3,500 bonus to play for the Montreal Royals of the International League the following season. Fearing leaks, Rickey demanded that Jackie keep the deal a secret from everyone but his mother and his fiancée. Rickey also continued to play coy with Wendell Smith. Although Wendell had yet to write about Rickey’s pursuit of Robinson for the Courier—“it would have killed it,” he explained later—he couldn’t be expected to sit on such a huge scoop. “I had the definite impression there was more behind [Rickey’s interest] than the Brown Dodgers,” he recalled, “but he never came out and said so until he signed Jackie for the Montreal Royals.”
When that day arrived two months later, it caught the rest of the sports world by complete surprise. Reporters didn’t know what to expect when Hector Racine, the Royals president, invited them to a hastily arranged press conference in Montreal. When Racine introduced Robinson as the team’s latest recruit, sportswriters in the room rushed to find phones and telegraph machines to report the news. Once America’s leading sports columnists started to weigh in, however, many didn’t give Robinson much of a chance. “With every major league ball club having a backlog of young talent, proven stars, returning from the war, Robinson is a 1,000–1 shot to make the grade,” wrote Jimmy Powers in the New York Daily News.
Shortly afterward, Smith was rewarded for his behind-the-scenes role in Robinson’s scouting with two splashy exclusives for the Courier. One was a first-person account dictated to him by Jackie himself—the first of dozens of “diary” stories that Wendell would ghostwrite for Robinson over the next two years. The other was a two-hour interview in which Rickey explained his decision. In characteristic fashion, he portrayed it as a brave act of Christian faith rather than a calculated business bet. “When my scouts told me Robinson was good enough to play with Montreal . . . I could not turn him down because he was a Negro—my conscience wouldn’t let me,” Rickey insisted. “I anticipated the adverse reaction that has been expressed by certain people, but I had the shield of right and I was not afraid.”
Rickey was far less charitable, however, when it came to the organization he had stepped over to sign Robinson. When Smith brought up the Kansas City Monarchs, Rickey appeared “irked” and started to rock side to side in his swivel chair. “Kansas City claims that Robinson was signed to a contract,” Rickey sputtered. “Well, Robinson says he cannot remember ever having signed one. I’d like to see the contract they claimed he signed!” Then Rickey heaped contempt on the corrupt ways of black baseball. “I don’t care what they say about contracts, suspensions and fines; they don’t have a league,” he scoffed. “They’re simply a booking agent’s paradise. Another thing, they have owners
of ball clubs in each league serving as presidents. They are not leagues and have no right to expect organized baseball to respect them!”
In his early crusading columns, Smith had imagined that the Negro Leagues might benefit from big league integration, by selling player contracts for top dollar and serving as an unofficial farm system. Cum Posey, the owner of the champion Homestead Grays and secretary of the Negro National League, had written that black teams would not “stand in the way” of their players getting a shot at the major leagues but would demand a fair return. “We’re not here to give anything away,” Posey insisted. But now Rickey was sending a very different signal to the rest of white baseball: it had no obligation to compensate black teams for giving up their best players.
For a brief time after the Royals announcement, J. L. Wilkinson and Tom Baird, the owners of the Kansas City Monarchs, cried foul. Clark Griffiths of the Washington Senators also came to the defense of the Negro Leagues, hoping to protect the hefty fees he received for renting his ballpark to the Homestead Grays. But the white owners soon backed off once they realized how bad it looked for them to stand in Robinson’s way. And by the time Jackie began his season with the Montreal Royals, the one leader in black baseball tough enough to stand up for its interests was dead.
In the days after Cum Posey succumbed to lung cancer at the age of fifty-five, thousands of admirers filed by his casket as he lay in state in Homestead. David Lawrence, the ambitious FDR foot soldier who had just been elected mayor of Pittsburgh, hailed the passing as a “severe blow to the community.” Gus Greenlee tipped his cap to his longtime adversary. “Although at times we opposed each other bitterly,” Greenlee told the Courier, “I always held the greatest respect for Cum as friend, associate and rival.” Ira Lewis captured the unapologetic drive that had led Posey to win more championships than any owner in the history of black baseball. “Cum Posey was a man who never forgot an enemy or a friend,” Lewis said in his eulogy at Homestead’s Clark Memorial Baptist Church. “He asked very few favors but was rather inclined to seek results on the merits of operation and competition. He prided himself on never being a good loser because, as he said, ‘Good losers are seldom winners.’ ”
Now Cum Posey was gone, and with him the chance that anyone would prevent the Negro Leagues from becoming the biggest losers in the baseball revolution to come.
• • •
IT WAS THE MOST important social night of the year for major league baseball. For more than two decades, the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America had hosted an annual dinner to toast—and roast—the national pastime. The guest list included not only sports reporters and team owners but hundreds of influential politicians and businessmen. Every year, they looked forward to the dinner’s main event: a burlesque show in which the writers dressed up in humorous costumes to spoof news in the baseball world. As more than a thousand attendees gathered in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria on an early February night in 1946, they were eager to see how the mischievous scribes would make sport of Albert Benjamin Chandler, the gregarious Kentucky politician known as “Happy,” who had just given up a seat in the United States Senate to become the new commissioner of baseball.
After cocktails and dinner, an orchestra struck up Happy Chandler’s favorite song, “My Old Kentucky Home.” The ballroom curtain rose to reveal a Southern mansion set. A butler in knee britches stood with his back to the audience, dusting furniture. As the butler slowly turned, the crowd could see that his face was painted black, and that he was wearing a Montreal Royals jersey. The sportswriter playing the part waited for a wave of laughter to subside before he uttered a line in “darky” dialect. “Looks like the massa will be late this evenin’!” he said before exiting the stage.
Five more sportswriters entered, all dressed as Kentucky colonels and hailing their leader: “Colonel Chandler.” After singing several verses in praise of baseball, Chandler clapped his hands. “Robb-eee!” he called out. “Robb-eee!”
“Yassuh, Massa,” said the butler, returning to the stage. “Here I is.”
“Ah, there you are, Jackie,” Chandler said. “Jackie, you old wooly-headed rascal. How long you been in the family?”
“Long time, Colonel, mighty long time,” the butler said. “Ever since Massa Rickey done bought me from the Kansas City Monarchs.”
“To be sure, Jackie, to be sure,” the colonel said. “How could I forget that Colonel Rickey brought you to our house?” Then in a loud stage whisper, Chandler hissed to the audience: “Rickey—that no good carpetbagger! What could he be thinking?”
More laughter rippled through the Waldorf ballroom. At the end of the evening, the master of ceremonies, columnist Dan Daniel of the New York World Telegram, proclaimed the burlesque “the best one yet.” Arthur Daley of The New York Times devoted his next column to describing the show, complete with long passages of the mock dialogue between “Colonel Chandler” and “Robbie” the butler. “It was one of the best and most merciless ribbings the boys ever dealt out to anyone,” Daley wrote. “The burlesque was so broad that the scribes were able to risk bringing into the cast of characters as delicate a subject as Jackie Robinson, the Negro shortstop whom Branch Rickey signed to a Montreal contract. But it all was such lampoonery that no one’s feelings really were hurt.”
To the contrary, one sportswriter was enraged. After reading the account of the burlesque in The New York Times, Wendell Smith denounced the white baseball writers in his next Courier column. While most of them paid lip service to giving Robinson a shot at the majors, he wrote, their “Nazi Opera” showed what they really thought. “They weren’t courageous or brave enough to express their feelings in their respective newspapers, (that might affect circulation), so they put on this dastardly act behind closed doors,” Smith fumed. After a decade of crusading for integration, Smith had finally seen a major league organization sign a black player. But the Waldorf dinner showed him that the struggle to get the men who ran and covered baseball, and the fans who filled the stands, to take Branch Rickey’s “experiment” seriously had only begun.
Unbeknownst to his Courier readers, Smith now had a personal role in that experiment’s next phase. Ever since the Royals press conference the previous fall, he had been in regular contact with both Robinson and Rickey. When Wendell wrote a column defending Jackie against skepticism from some white ballplayers and reporters, Jackie sent him a grateful letter. “I want to thank you and the paper for all you have done and are doing on my behalf,” he wrote. “As you know I am not worried about what the white press or people think as long as I continue to get the best wishes of my people.” In November, Jackie wrote again from Venezuela, where he was playing exhibition games with Negro League veterans. Wendell wrote back to say that he had informed Rickey of the example of “good conduct” Jackie was setting for South American fans.
Meanwhile, Smith was corresponding with Rickey about plans for Robinson’s first spring training. Searching for a warm-weather location that would be hospitable to blacks, Rickey had decided to bring both the Dodgers and the Royals to Daytona Beach, on the northeast coast of Florida. Daytona had a small working-class black community and a practice ball field in the Negro section of town. It was also home to a black college, Bethune-Cookman, founded by Mary McLeod Bethune, the friend and adviser to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Anticipating problems with Daytona hotels, Rickey summoned Smith to Brooklyn and asked him to search for lodging for Robinson and another player he planned to offer a tryout, Grays pitcher Johnny Wright. Later Rickey wrote to ask Wendell to do the same in Sanford, Florida, a nearby town where he wanted to locate an “early camp” for first-time prospects.
Rickey proposed that Smith serve as Robinson’s chaperone as well, to keep him company and keep him out of trouble. “This whole program was more or less your suggestion, as you will recall,” Rickey wrote, “and I think I had a point that much harm could come if either of these boys were to do or say something out of turn.” S
mith wrote back to accept the offer, and to suggest that he take on chauffeur duties as well, since Robinson and Wright would often not be able to travel by bus with their teammates. At some point, Smith arranged to include Billy Rowe and his red Pontiac in the arrangement, and Rickey agreed to pay each man $50 a week—matching their Courier salaries. But Wendell’s letters made it clear that he saw himself as having far loftier motivations than money. “I am most happy to feel that you are relying on my newspaper and me, personally,” he wrote Rickey, “in cooperation in trying to accomplish this great move for practical Democracy in the most amiable and diplomatic manner possible.”
As luck would have it, Wendell had a college classmate who lived in Sanford, Florida. Viola Brock was a schoolteacher whose husband, David Brock, ran the local bolita, the numbers-in-a-bag lottery racket. They owned one of the finest houses in the Negro section of town, a two-story white manse with a wide screened-in porch shaded by a large tree in the front yard. When the Brocks agreed to act as hosts, Rickey showed his gratitude by visiting them several days before Robinson and Wright were due to arrive. Sitting in a wicker chair on the porch, Rickey praised the property, unaware of the gambling operation that funded it. “This is the type of place they should be quartered in,” Rickey proclaimed. “If we can’t put them in hotels, then they should stay some place that represents something. This is the type of home.”
The day after Jackie and Rachel Robinson’s arrival in Daytona Beach, Smith and Rowe drove them to Sanford’s Memorial Athletic Field, where hopefuls trying to make the Royals squad had been working out for two days. If Rickey had hoped to minimize the hoopla surrounding Robinson by starting his tryout in Sanford, it didn’t work. Along with hundreds of walk-on prospects—many of them returning World War II veterans—the park was full of reporters. For the rest of the day, they peppered Robinson with questions as he did jumping jacks, fielded grounders, and took batting practice with a newfangled pitching machine called the “Iron Mike.”
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