Robinson had taken a swat at his vanquished foes, the Braves, telling one captive audience that the Braves lost the pennant because “one or two of the key Braves players were out ‘nightclubbing’ with the pennant on the line.” It was bad enough that the Braves had lost the pennant on the second-to-last day of the season, and now on his way out, Jackie was pouring a fifth of bourbon into the open wound. That sent Johnny Logan into a lather. Logan chafed at Jackie Robinson for publicly flogging the Braves. If Robinson was going to suggest the Braves partied their way out of the money, Robinson, Logan believed, should at least name the players he knew to be carousing. Otherwise, Logan thought, Robinson was being a coward for covering the entire team under one blanket accusation, for there were players like the catcher Del Crandall—whom Grimm used to call without admiration “the milk shake drinker”—who almost certainly were not burning the midnight oil.
Spahn said Robinson had developed a real hate for Milwaukee, ever since a couple from that city sued him for forty thousand dollars when he accidentally flipped his bat into the stands. Still, Robinson’s greatest crime was his candor. Days after being traded to the Giants, he received a letter from his favorite manager, Charlie Dressen, who by that time had begun what would be a short managing stay in Washington. Dressen wrote the letter in his squat, loopy longhand on Washington Senators stationery (“Office of the Manager”) and thanked Robinson sweetly for never failing to mention Dressen’s considerable influence on him (“Players rarely give their managers any credit,” he wrote). The letter was written with a sense of warmth, which underscored the fact that the relationship between the two men went beyond the professional, proof that during the tumultuous period of integration, a legitimate friendship had formed. Dressen had always believed that Robinson was the best baseball player he’d ever managed, and it was clear that Robinson was never more comfortable than when he played under Charlie Dressen. Dressen invited Robinson to Yankee Stadium when the Senators traveled to New York, and said he understood if it was too early yet for Robinson to step into a big-league ballpark, having quit the game so recently. Dressen then asked Robinson to remember, even in retirement, a key portion of the ballplayer code:
Had something in mind,89 of course it would not help you now. Just want to give you a tip but I think you are well aware of the same. Anyhow, Jack, don’t let anyone trick you into nameing [sic] players in regards to night life. You will have to be careful because you will be asked many times about the Milwaukee club. Off the record, or on, don’t name anyone.
Then, there was the small matter of Jackie Robinson versus Florence and Peter Wolinsky, the Milwaukee couple who had sued Robinson for forty thousand dollars two and a half years earlier on the grounds of “severe nervous shock” when Robinson conked the couple on the head with a bat he inadvertently tossed into the stands after being ejected by home plate umpire Lee Ballanfant. On February 5, Henry Aaron’s twenty-third birthday, Robinson paid each of them three hundred dollars.
On January 31, Robinson’s thirty-eighth birthday, Maglie came out swinging. “Jackie Robinson is a pop-off who hurts people and ‘then writes them a letter of apology,’ Brooklyn’s clutch pitcher Sal Maglie said today,” a United Press wire story reported. Robinson may have been retired, and it may have been January, but the Barber was still trying to dust Robinson. Robinson was out of shape, Maglie said. He played when he wanted to. His reflexes were shot.
“I admire his playing, but it’s a shame that a great ballplayer like he was does that,” Maglie was quoted as saying.
Maybe Robinson was cracking under the burden of responsibilities and symbolisms that had weighed him down for too long. His physical appearance would always be the best giveaway—gray hair at thirty-eight would turn porcelain white by forty-five. Only sitting presidents would age on the job as severely as Robinson. His physical appearance was proof of the anecdotal rhetoric: His journey was killing him.
The thing of it was that Robinson understood his special place, his burden, his mission more clearly than anyone else. Though Robinson was always described, quite clumsily, in fact, as “breaking the color barrier,” the mission itself was by no means the removal of a singular obstacle. First there was the goal of getting onto the field, of making being the first a reality. Then it was necessary to make sure that when he finally did play, he did not do so only as a novelty, but as someone who would be remembered as one of the very few transformative figures equal to the moment. That was the only way integration could gain its proper weight, provide the appropriate momentum for the larger movement that was to follow. Robinson’s 1947 roommate, Dan Bankhead, for example, was the first black pitcher in the major leagues, but no one remembered him, because he couldn’t play. Baseball’s first dominant black pitcher would come a few years later, when Don Newcombe arrived, but it would be nearly twenty years after Robinson before a black pitcher—in this case, Bob Gibson of St. Louis—began a Hall of Fame path and in fact wound up in Cooperstown.
The third stage was full membership in the club, at a level of every white person born in the United States of America—not only for Robinson but for the twelve million Negroes in the country at the time. Well, that one would be a bit more complicated. That was why his contemporaries understood and applauded the early Robinson, the one who took the spikes to exposed shins, the mitts to the face, and the knockdowns, and yet would be so offended and threatened by the assertive, bolder Robinson of later years, the one who realized full equality did not mean staying in your place, but not having a place at all. The early Robinson accepted his road by facing down his adversaries with that dangerously double-sided word—dignity—which could be at once reverential and patronizing (as Henry would one day discover), and that fit the narrative the kingmakers with the typewriters wanted to tell.
The Robinson who turned the other cheek fit the rules, the perception of how blacks were expected to deal with white aggression, as well as the perception of what the noble experiment was supposed to be all about, the nonviolent protest of being above aggression and thus better than his oppressors. The writers could bask in his forbearance, as long as they had control over and approved the narrative. In truth, Robinson waited for the day to drop a knuckle sandwich on some clown who put him in the dirt one time too many, and when he did—just ask Davey Williams, the Giant second baseman Robinson buried back in the old days, when Maglie (the real target) ducked the responsibility of covering first base after throwing at Robinson—the results were messy and merciless. He once told Roger Kahn that he had no intention of being turned into “some pacifist black freak.”90
The hard truth was that even as the mid-1950s were producing an unprecedented generation of Hall of Fame black ballplayers who surpassed him in statistics, if not overall raw baseball talent—Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, Elston Howard, Roy Campanella, Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson, Larry Doby, and Henry Aaron all made their debuts between 1951 and 1955—Robinson was still alone in front.
The 1950s were not a time when Negro ballplayers voiced confrontation in the press, except for Robinson. Happy to be there wasn’t full membership; neither was stay in your place. It was also true that it did not matter what was being said to the umpire or to the press, but, rather, that it was Robinson doing the talking. During Robinson’s first five seasons in the big leagues, from 1947 to 1951, he was ejected a total of sixteen times. A loudmouth like Eddie Stanky, the hard-charging adopted southerner, got tossed seventeen times, but it was Robinson who earned the nickname “Pop-off.” On August 3, in a death grip for the pennant with Milwaukee, Robinson would go four for six with three RBIs in a twelve-inning loss at St. Louis. That same morning, an item appeared in the Los Angeles Times:
SOUTHERN SCRIBE BLAMES91
JACKIE FOR RACE LAW
NEW ORLEANS, AUG. 2 (AP)—Bill Keefe, sports editor of the Times-Picayune, said the new law received a push from the “insolence” of Robinson….
“He has been the most harmful influence the Negro race has suffered �
�� and the surprising part of it is that he wasn’t muzzled long ago.”
Unbowed, Robinson responded, “You call me ‘insolent.’ I’ll admit I haven’t been subservient, but would you use the same adjective to describe a white ballplayer—say Ted Williams, who is, more often than I, involved in controversial matters?”
It would take another generation of players, the Jim Brown, Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali generation, to embrace Robinson’s role of the political figure as athlete, confident in his standing, willing to take a sledgehammer to the old order. And perhaps more importantly, the writers who most passionately championed Robinson’s right to exist as a player in 1947 did not appear to appreciate this final leg of the Robinson quest.
Men like Arthur Daley of the New York Times and Shirley Povich of the Washington Post were not of the appropriate generation to recognize this next challenge as a first assault on a paternalistic order. Instead, they saw Robinson as oversensitive, hot-tempered, irrational, and in many ways betraying the nobility of the experiment. In a sense, their attitudes were no different from the attitude expressed one day in Bradenton, when Spahn would shake his head after reading the latest headline about the Montgomery Bus boycott and ask Henry uncomprehendingly, “Henry, just what is it you people want?”
The writers did not understand their own inherent paternalism. When Robinson formally petitioned for his retirement, Daley recalled in print an early exchange with Robinson.
“If you’ll forgive a personal experience,92 it will be offered as an illustration of Robinson’s shrewdness,” Daley wrote. “Midway in Jackie’s second season … this reporter suddenly realized that Robbie had never once addressed him by name…. He did not want to set himself apart … by using the clumsy ‘mister’ and he wasn’t certain … whether the first-name approach would be too familiar.
“… in his second season, I asked him an inconsequential question. ‘You know the answer as well as I do, Arthur.’ … He’d smuggled in the first name…. He was never troubled thereafter.”
Daley was so sure of his position, convinced of his birthright to be addressed in a certain formal fashion by a black person, for the reinforcement of his class superiority to Robinson’s surely occurred daily. Yet Daley seemed so secure within that order that in his report he did not offer to break the caste system himself by simply inviting Robinson to call him by his first name.
And it made sense that so many began to hate Robinson, because the shift toward a new society did not just come suddenly and without warning; Robinson did not ask for permission to change these unspoken rules. He did not ask to speak in turn. He did not issue a press release announcing he was upgrading his membership, appointing himself one of the first leaders of the movement, years before it was given a proper name.
And the ones who remembered the noble Robinson turned on him because he saw faster than they that his audacity in showing he was unsatisfied was part of that movement. What the Art Daleys and Shirley Poviches of the world did not understand was the difference between perceived and actual equality. Robinson knew the critical difference lay in who sat at the controls. Through Robinson, a meteoric shift was taking place right in front of their eyes, and men like Dick Young and Daley and Povich were of the wrong generation to see it.
He would not play for the Giants, and inside the game he did not have many friends in that insular, exclusive club called baseball. DiMaggio eventually went back to the game, to coach in Oakland after a long disillusionment. Robinson never would. There would be no offers to coach, work in the front office, or manage, few reconciliations, and plenty of calamity, but that was the thing about Jackie: No matter how unsure he looked in his endeavors off the field (sparring with Malcolm X and JFK, supporting Nixon before recognizing the enormity of his error), compared to his grace and fire on it, baseball in a sense would always seem too limiting for him.
That is also the tricky thing about history: You never know which way it will turn. Induction into the Hall of Fame requires one’s name appear on 75 percent of the ballots. When Robinson was elected in 1962, the first year he was eligible, he was safe, by a hair, receiving a mere 77.5 percent of the vote. His Hall of Fame plaque served as proof that baseball at the time did not comprehend its own larger significance: Nowhere did his inscription note that he was the first black player in the major leagues.*
THEY CAME AND went in baseball, but face it, how many actually changed the rules of the game, how it was played, who was allowed to play, and how they were allowed to act? There were really just five—Ruth, Landis, Rickey, Robinson, and Marvin Miller—while the rest served at the pleasure of the ruling class, some doing their part but most maintaining the status quo. And of that five, only one could say he was just as influential on the political front, in protests and events outside of the ballpark, as he was dancing off third base. Following the second game of the 1956 World Series, Robinson received letters on White House stationery from both Vice President Nixon and Frederic Morrow, the first black White House aide, congratulating him and the Dodgers. Nobody else in baseball was getting letters from the Oval Office, and they hated him for that, too. “What? Is he running for president, too?” asked a bitter Allie Reynolds when Robinson once criticized the Yankees for not signing black players. It went back to what the writer Leonard Koppett used to say about Robinson, that before him, black people did not really exist in the eyes of white America. Certainly they were there, in the streets, on the sidewalks, in the kitchen, as the objects of jokes but invisible to the touch, never anything more than stage props.
Robinson was the first black American to play his piano in the foreground, with no intention of ever being anything else but the leader. Joe Louis came first, but boxers didn’t fight every day, and while the fights were big, the racket itself lacked the social legitimacy of baseball. While Maglie was throwing heat his way, Robinson soared beyond, his legacy secured by progress, redrawing the canvas of society, giving the discussion an entirely different starting point. His enemies chafed at the unfairness of it all, but virtually all would stand on the wrong side of history. It was history that would vindicate him, and the men who sparred with Jackie, the ones who were sick of him, who could least see those transformative qualities, stood alone, sounding little more than bitter. As Robinson’s influence as the single most important political figure in baseball history grew all the more obvious as the lifetimes piled up, his enemies began looking horribly small, insignificant signposts disappearing in the rearview mirror.
AT THE TIME, there would be no publicity marking the moment, and it would take years before he articulated his position publicly, but Henry Aaron had carefully watched Robinson, and he did not admire him as much as revere him. Where others saw audacity, Henry saw a road map. For years, Henry would be paired with many players. For if no other reasons than their outsized production and contrasting playing personalities, Henry would always be connected to Willie Mays. For their annual rivalry for the Gold Glove and the starting spot in the All-Star Game, Henry would face comparisons to Roberto Clemente. Naturally, as he reached the pinnacle of his baseball achievements, Henry would always live with Babe Ruth.
For the rest of his playing career, Henry Aaron would be paired with Willie Mays instead of the one player who truly mattered, the one who provided the template not for him as a player but for the man he sought to become. When Robinson retired, to the business world and the somewhat foreign but important arenas of politics and philanthropy, Henry saw the value, the necessity of not being limited by baseball. Only in following in the footsteps of Robinson could Henry realize his true path: to use whatever influences his baseball life afforded him to have some effect on society at large.
* In 2008, the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, took the unprecedented step of replacing Robinson’s original plaque with an updated version, one that notes his batting average and awards, but also his place as the first African-American to play in the Major Leagues in the twentieth century.
&n
bsp; CHAPTER SEVEN
SCRIPTURE
IT WOULD TAKE one of those years when it all came together—when he could not only hear the notes in his head but play each and every one of them beautifully—before the legend could officially commence. It needed to be the kind of season where all you had to do was say the year and the heart of every fan would spontaneously flutter, carrying that person easily back into the warm currents of memory, and when, even decades later, the faces of his peers would firm with professional respect. Sometimes, the faces would betray envy, other times admiration, but in all of them would be the recognition that he was one of the very special ones, that millionth percentile, someone who may have stood on the same field with them but, because of his enormous talent, was playing a game completely different from all the rest.
HENRY RANG IN the year 1957 with the same ritual he would begin every year of his first decade in the big leagues—by sending his contract back to the Braves unsigned. He’d earned $17,500 in 1956 and had no illusions about his value to the team. First for Charlie Grimm and then for Fred Haney, Henry had chopped the wood. Adcock had his best year in home runs, drove in more than a hundred runs, and most importantly, it seemed as if all of those home runs were against the Dodgers late in games. But as the season reached its devastating conclusion, with every at bat critical, Adcock’s batting average dropped nearly twenty points in September, highlighted by a disastrous zero for seventeen in four games against bottom-feeders Philadelphia, New York, and Pittsburgh. Mathews was second in the league in home runs, but he was stuck in low gear for the whole season, hitting .229 at the all-star break before grinding his way to a .272 average.
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