by Roger Kahn
“By the time I did, I’d lost a lot. There went the farm. But Buzzy’s taken care of me. I broadcast for his San Diego club and do some coaching.”
“Back on the damn road.”
“It’s not that bad,” Snider said, “but you know what bothers me. This house there”—he pointed at his lost manor—“is set so high we could get TV stations from L.A. and San Diego both. Now where we are, down Green Canyon, we only get San Diego.” A breeze stirred through the avocado fields. “Come on,” Duke said. “Let’s get a brew.”
We drove into Fallbrook, a low, sprawling town, and as we walked into the bar, men called greetings. Snider introduced me and one of the men said, “Keep your money in your pocket. You come all the way from New York, we won’t let you buy.”
“Thanks.”
“But if you come all the way from New York, how can you speak English? I didn’t know they spoke English in New York.” Others nodded. “How do you like it out here?” the man asked.
“It’s great,” I said, quoting Fred Allen, 1938, “if you’re an orange.”
“Hey,” said the man, “that’s all right.” He was wearing work pants and a khaki jacket. “You know we let Duke in our softball game once.”
Snider nodded. “They told me it was fast pitch, but everything I hit went foul. Fast pitch to these guys, but I pulled everything inside first base.”
They took softball seriously, said the man in khaki, as someone bought a second round. They played through the summer in informal leagues, building to “a kind of world series.” A year before, the Fallbrook team had reached the series against a team from an Indian reservation. The Indians went ahead, three games to nothing. The Fallbrook team sent for the Duke.
“Right,” Snider said, “and I said I’d help if I could use a hardball bat.”
“I don’t remember what he used, but we put him at shortstop, and from losing three games to nothing, we won the series four games to three.”
“He still hits good,” someone said.
“Different league,” the Duke said. “My round.” And he bought the beers with a flourish.
As we drove home, he reminisced. “My dad, Ward, come out west from Ohio. He used to see Cincinnati play. He kept putting the bat on my left shoulder when I was little because he knew the right-field fences were closer. Pete Rozelle and I were forwards on the same basketball team in Compton and he wrote for the newspaper, the Tartar Shield. My wife was with him the day he went ice skating and fell and lost his two front teeth. I could throw a football seventy yards. Pete says I coulda been a T quarterback. But I liked baseball. The Dodgers give me seven hundred and fifty dollars to sign and I took a train acrost the country to Bear Mountain, where they were training. I was seventeen and I never owned a topcoat.”
“Did you buy one?”
“No. I stayed indoors a lot.” Snider smiled at his own joke. “That was ‘44 and I got in an exhibition game at West Point and Glenn Davis was in the outfield for Army. I was the professional, but I got a thrill being on the same field with the amateur.
“I made it to Brooklyn in ‘47. In the first game Jackie Robinson played, I pinched hit for Dixie Walker. Base hit to right. I sent the clippings to my mother and I wrote that it wasn’t only a colored person’s first game in the big league, it was also her son’s.
“I really made it after 1951. You know I struck out eight times in five games during the 1949 Series. I don’t remember it bothering me much in ‘50, but in the last month of 1951 I kept thinking I was gonna face those Yankee pitchers again. I went in a terrible slump. I’m no psychologist, but I know that was in the back of my mind. I didn’t hit and then we lost the play-off. The next year, you were there, I got straightened away and that Series I hit four home runs.
“I could always go back good in the outfield, and when I went to my left, Furillo and I had this trick. If we thought we might collide, I’d take a step in and try to catch the ball high and Furillo would take a step back and try to backhand it low. Not much got through us all those years and we never did run into each other.”
When we reached his house, I said maybe we ought to go out for dinner again. “If we can find where Eartha Kitt’s playing.”
“You remember,” Beverly said. “Well, there isn’t any of that kind of thing in Fallbrook, but there is a fine restaurant called Valley Forge.”
“An old Marine sergeant is behind the bar,” Duke said, “and if you wear a tie, he clips it. I’ll call ahead and fix it so he won’t cut yours.”
The sergeant, a massive man with a great waxed mustache, waved as we entered, winked to indicate that my tie was safe and made drinks. “Did you see The Graduate?” Beverly said.
I nodded.
“You work hard for your money. Why give it to a dirty movie like that?”
“It wasn’t much good, but I wouldn’t call it dirty.”
“Well, I sing in the Methodist choir,” Beverly said, “and a lot of us don’t see any reason for putting sex on a movie screen.”
“Sex exists, Bev.”
“I know it does, and it’s very beautiful and very private.”
Duke seemed to be considering the oak floor. “I’ve always meant to tell you two that I was sorry about the reaction to the Collier’s story,” I said.
“Fergit it,” Duke said. “Like Rickey put it, don’t worry what they say about you, as long as they say something. Boy, I sure got my ink.
“And most of that story still goes. Except after I got done playing, I come to realize that baseball was what I knew, all I knew. When we had losses, and I had to get back, it wasn’t like before. I’m older. I don’t mind things so damn much.”
“He misses the old team,” Beverly said. “Everyone was so close.”
“Heck, once in Pittsburgh,” Duke said, “after a day game we went to watch the Kentucky Derby at the men’s bar of the Schenley Hotel. There was nineteen of the twenty-five ball players in that bar. Lots of time after a game, there might be fifteen of us go to the same place. I credit Rickey, from the way he was working to bring us together. Hey, who you seen?”
I told him and mentioned Pafko’s remark that Duke was so fine a ball player he deserved a steak. Snider nodded. That seemed fair. We went to eat. Brooklyn or Fallbrook, his swagger endured. Over the sirloins I told Beverly Pee Wee Reese’s favorite Snider story. Four players rode a car pool from Bay Ridge to the Polo Grounds in 1951, and on Reese’s night to drive a motorcycle patrolman stopped them. Approaching, the policeman burst out, “Pee Wee. It’s you. Why you driving so fast?”
“Big series with the Giants, officer. Kind of nervous.”
“Don’t listen to that, officer,” Snider said. “He deserves a ticket.”
“Hiya, Duke,” the cop said. “Gee, fellers. What a thrill for me. Good luck, and take it easy, will ya, Pee Wee?”
Snider drove the next night and within a mile of the same spot another policeman sounded a short siren burst from Die Walküre. Then he took Snider’s license and started writing.
“Say, officer. That Edwin Donald Snider is Duke Snider. I’m the Dodger center fielder.”
Without looking up the policeman said, “I hate baseball.” He handed Snider a ticket for speeding.
Beverly smiled faintly. Duke nodded. “That’s about right, and I woulda had to pay it, too, if John Cashmore, the Borough President of Brooklyn, hadn’t fixed it for me.” And buoyant and boyish though fifty was approaching and the farm was gone, Duke resumed his attack on the steak.
14
THE LION AT DUSK
A free man counts tomorrow and yesterday and both of them are his; hunger and there’s no master to feed you, but walk with long steps and no master says go slowly.
HOWARD FAST, Freedom Road
Of all the Dodgers, none seemed as able as Jackie Robinson to trample down the thorns of life. Indeed, the thornbush became his natural environment. But here, on the night of March 6, 1968, not a dozen years after his last World Series, Robinson stood am
ong television reporters, a bent, gray man, answering questions in a whisper, and drawing shallow breaths, because a longer breath might feed a sob.
Jackie Robinson, Jr., no more the large-eyed imp, had been arrested in a one-night-cheap hotel. The police of Stamford, Connecticut, charged him with possessing a tobacco pouch filled with marijuana, a .22 caliber revolver and several packets of heroin which he may have wished to sell. Outside a suburban courthouse, television reporters, who had never seen the father play baseball, called hard questions with extravagant courtesy.
“Sir, are you going to stick by your son?”
“We will, but we’ll have to take the consequences.”
“Were you aware that he had certain problems, Mr. Robinson?”
“He quit high school. He joined the Army. He fought in Vietnam and he was wounded. We lost him somewhere. I’ve had more effect on other people’s kids than on my own.”
“How do you feel about that, sir?”
The gray-haired black man, Jackie Robinson, shook his head. “I couldn’t have had an important effect on anybody’s child if this happened to my own.”
I turned away and Jack answered another question at length, as if in relief, as if in penance. He had not faded from public sight like most of the others. Even Robinson’s declining baseball years crackled with controversy. During Walter Alston’s first spring as manager, he said in Vero Beach, “Every man on this ball club will have to fight for his job.” Some veterans laughed. Duke Snider did not expect to spend the season of 1954 on the bench. Pee Wee Reese was offended. Jackie Robinson spoke out. “I don’t know what the hell that man is trying to do. Upset us all?” That year a strong, mismanaged, discontented Dodger team finished second.
In succeeding seasons the Dodgers won two pennants, but for Robinson the old spirit was vanished. He felt out of things, he said. This manager was hostile. This front office did not provide support. Then, after the 1956 season, Walter O’Malley traded him to the Giants. “We hate to lose Jackie,” O’Malley said, “but it is necessary for the good of the team.”
To find similar cynicism, you had to go clear back to 1935 when the Yankees dumped Babe Ruth on the old Boston Braves. But then the star was being sent to another league. Robinson, the embodiment of the loud, brave, contentious Dodgers, was being assigned to his team’s great adversary. Sports pages flapped with excitement. Robinson deserved it. O’Malley was outrageous. The Polo Grounds was no Valhalla.
Ed Fitzgerald, the editor of Sport magazine, commissioned an artist to paint a cover portrait in which Sal Maglie, who had come to Brooklyn early in 1956, stood at the mound, glowering at Giant base runner Jackie Robinson. “Maglie of the Dodgers against Robinson of the Giants,” Fitzgerald said. “Un-believable. But would you first find out if Jackie’s gonna play?”
Robinson was vague when I telephoned. The money was good, he said. The Giants were offering $40,000 for one year; then they’d pay him $20,000 for each of the next two seasons as a part-time scout.
“So you’re going to accept?”
“You know me.”
“Well, do you expect to play?”
“Whatever I do, I’ll give it all I got.”
What Robinson was trying to say (and has never known how to say) was “No comment.” A month later on a chilly Sunday afternoon in January, Look magazine called “a press conference of major importance involving Dodger great Jackie Robinson.”
At four o’clock in a wood-paneled conference room off Madison Avenue, Look’s promotion men distributed press releases and tearsheets of an article “copyright 1957, Cowles Magazines, Inc.” Above Robinson’s by-line, the story was headed: “Why I’m Quitting Baseball.” Robinson explained that he was thirty-eight and had a family to support. He had been offered a job as vice president for personnel at Chock Full O’Nuts, a chain of lunch counters staffed almost entirely by Negroes. He was “to keep turnover at a minimum.” “So,” he wrote, “I’m through with baseball. From now on I’ll be just another fan—a Brooklyn fan.”
Reporters sat in overstuffed black-leather chairs and sipped Scotch. Their first questions were gentle. Help? Yes, Robinson conceded, he’d had help with the article. Had the Giant trade made him quit? No, he’d already begun working on the story when Buzzy Bavasi called him.
“Didn’t you lie to your friends?” someone said suddenly.
“I did not lie.”
“Mislead?”
Dan Mich, a large, square-faced man, stepped forward. “I run Look,” Mich said, in a presidential tone. “Any statement Jack made that may have been misleading was out of respect for us. I’ve never met anyone more honest.” The conference descended to chatter and morning newspapermen left to make their deadlines.
Back home in Stamford that night, Robinson faced doubts that would not down. He had said that he was quitting and he had meant that he was quitting, but a Giant executive called to propose a still better contract. If the offer improved further, Jack simply would have to change his mind. Look, Robinson reasoned, would be getting $50,000 worth of publicity. He was square there, he felt. Now it might be fun making Walter O’Malley look like a clown of a trader. Then two days later Buzzy Bavasi told reporters, “Robinson will play. I know the guy and he likes money. Now that Look’s paid him, he’ll play so he can collect from the Giants, too.”
Reading these sentences, Robinson knew: the retirement would have to be permanent. Already Red Smith was attacking him “for peddling a news story, the rights to his retirement.” If he did play again, critics would denounce him as a phony. His baseball years, begun with heroic pioneering, could end amid cries of fraud. “Goddamn, I can’t play,” Robinson told himself, cheerlessly, but the doubts endured until the first day of the 1957 season. That morning his right knee, crippled by a thousand slides, was so swollen he could not get out of bed.
“I’ll miss the excitement of baseball,” Robinson wrote in Look,
but now I’ll be able to spend more time with my family. My kids and I will get to know each other better. Jackie, Sharon and David will have a real father they can play with and talk to in the evening and every weekend. They won’t have to look for him on TV.
Maybe my sons will want to play ball, as I have, when they grow up. I’d love it if they do. But I’ll see to it they get a college education first, and meet the kind of people who can help them later.
Just now Jackie still feels badly about my quitting. It’s tough for a ten-year-old to have his dad suddenly turn from a ball player into a commuter. I guess it will be quite a change for me, too. But someday Jackie will realize that the old man quit baseball just in time.
He telephoned two seasons after his retirement and asked if I’d talk to him about a biography he was preparing, helped by Carl Rowan, the black journalist. We lunched in Janssen’s, a restaurant on Lexington Avenue, and Robinson immediately told me how difficult it was to be a writer. “First I picked the wrong collaborators,” he said, and mentioned two white newspapermen. “I tell one of them something for the book. He tapes me and two days later uses it for a column. Now I’m squared away on that, but I’ve got other problems. Campy. I told you there was a little Tom in him. Suppose I go into that. I’m hitting a cripple.”
“Write the damn thing the way you feel it,” I said.
“And then there’s a point about women. When I was at UCLA, more white women wanted to go to bed with me than I wanted to go to bed with white women.”
“Congratulations.”
“Everybody thinks it’s all the other way. All the black guys are panting to get into bed with white women. Well, a lot of white guys are just dying to get hold of black women. I’m not kidding. I’ve seen it. And, for me, with white girls, like I said, I didn’t have to make much of a move.”
“You’ve got to write that. A chapter. Write it goddamn tough.”
“I don’t know,” Robinson said.
“Pliss,” said a short, elderly man, bending so that his bald head dropped between us. “Be a good boy
and give your autograph.”
“What?” Robinson’s tenor clanged through the restaurant.
The man started. “I said, could I have your autograph?”
“That isn’t what you said.” Robinson’s voice drew eyes toward our table. The man was frightened. “Who’s this for?” Robinson shouted.
“My grandson.”
“All right. I’ll give you the autograph to your grandson, but not because I’m a boy.” Robinson scribbled on the menu. The man took it and hurried away.
“You’re a fierce bastard,” I said.
“He won’t call a black man ‘boy’ again,” said Robinson.
The biography, called Wait Till Next Year, told several plain, hard stories. Robinson was born near Cairo, in southwestern Georgia, during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919, the fifth and last child of Mallie McGriff Robinson. The father, Jerry, deserted Mallie six months later and she bundled her children onto a train for California. There she found work as a domestic. Mallie Robinson taught her children to look after one another. She tried to fill them with a sense of pride. At eight, Jack was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the house, a small frame building in Pasadena, when a white Southern girl shouted from across the street, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.”
“You’re nothing but a cracker,” Robinson answered.
The girl had played this scene before. She chanted:
Soda cracker’s good to eat.
Nigger’s only good to beat.
At fourteen, Robinson went wading in the Pasadena City Reservoir. The municipal pool was closed to blacks. Someone saw him splashing, and a few minutes later a sheriff arrived and drew his gun. “Looka here,” he roared, behind the .38. “Niggers in my drinking water.”
Robinson grew up tough, running with street gangs, but the 1930s were not revolutionary years. Street boys believed aspects of the American Dream, and Robinson rode his athletic skill to junior college and then to UCLA. Although in Wait Till Next Year he cannot say it, Robinson was a superathlete, probably the best in the United States. He was a star forward in basketball, an extraordinary running back in football, a record-breaking broad jumper. And he played baseball.