Branch Rickey

by Jimmy Breslin

  Rickey leaned on Oliver French, the general manager of the St. Joseph team, to take Dean into his home over the fall and winter. The Frenches found Dean charming but raucous: they had trouble sleeping when he went down in the cellar and threw pieces of coal into the open furnace.

  Dean left the house one day and made his way to Rickey’s office in St. Louis. He needed $150.

  “He didn’t give me any money,” Dean reported of the conversation that followed. “All I got was a lecture on sex.”

  Dean once rented a car and drove it until it ran out of gas in the countryside. He left the vehicle there and hitchhiked back home. The rental agency had to send out a scout to find the car and they billed Dean $300. He not only couldn’t pay, he wouldn’t.

  Dean was a four-time All-Star and led Rickey’s Cardinals to a World Series win in 1934. A few years after that, Rickey sold him to Wrigley for $185,000, of which Rickey took his usual 10 percent.

  By the time Rickey unloaded Dean, the pitcher’s arm was largely shot, but four years later he made a move that wasn’t nearly as shrewd. Rickey didn’t need to travel far to find Yogi Berra and bring him to a workout at Sportsman Park. The catcher was a short, stocky, earnest guy who came out of the Hill District in St. Louis and could reach over his head and swat a pitch into next week. Casey Stengel said of him, “He acts like he’s not very smart. But he’s got a very good sports mind, which is good for a player to have.”

  Yogi became Rickey’s biggest mistake. Berra remembered this one day at an affair in his hometown, Montclair, New Jersey: “Jack Maguire, who was scouting for St. Louis, took me to a tryout Rickey ran with the Cardinals. He offered Joe Garagiola five hundred and then he watched me and said he would give me two hundred fifty. I wouldn’t sign with him. He was going to the Dodgers the next year. He told the Cardinals that I wasn’t so good. He wanted me with Brooklyn. At the end of the year he sent me a telegram saying I had to report to the Dodgers camp at Bear Mountain. I never did. I wasn’t signed. I guess he still didn’t believe I wouldn’t sign with him. He figured he had talked me out of every place but his. So many people saw me playing that the Yankees heard I was good. That’s where I went.”

  We are now at the end of the 1942 season. Three years before this Rickey and the Cardinals owner, Sam Breadon, had a disagreement that became a bitter dispute that turned into anger that required an awareness of the perpetual need for lawful behavior. It was over money, don’t worry about that. Breadon had cut every salary, including the cleaning woman’s. Rickey made a Prussian surprise attack and announced that he would leave when his contract ended. The team had just won the World Series, but Breadon did nothing to make Rickey stay. So he left landlocked St. Louis, whose Southern customs blocked his true ambitions, and moved to Brooklyn, which had both feet in the Atlantic Ocean, whose tides slapped the shore and sent foam into the air, the spray and the waves carrying from all corners of the earth.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Branch Rickey loved to plan. He walked around with pockets filled with notes, and he would rush to board the train from New York to Philadelphia for a Dodgers road game and sit going through his notes without a dollar on him. Conductors rode him on credit. Once, his wife went shopping at a department store in Dayton, Ohio, while he attended a business meeting nearby. When he was finished, he told the driver to start for home. They were well gone when he suddenly remembered his wife. They rushed back to find her standing wearily on the sidewalk. He went through life carrying notes to himself on slips of paper, coffee shop menus, napkins. He could see months and even years ahead, devising tactics to fit future situations.

  In these early years in Brooklyn, he worked on his six-point plan to integrate baseball. By 1945 he had already handled the first point during his meeting with George V.: secure the backing of the team ownership. The remaining five points were: (2) find the right Negro player and (3) find the right Negro person; (4) employ public relations; (5) gain support of the Negro community; and (6) gain acceptance by his teammates.

  He started working on these points a full two years before the player arrived, before he even knew who that player would be. At lunch on one particular day, he walked down the street hoping to make some headway on point four, public relations.

  Walter “Red” Barber, the radio announcer for Dodger games, met Rickey in Joe’s Restaurant on Fulton Street, a few blocks from the Dodgers office. Barber was out of Mississippi and Florida and had a voice to prove it, soft and Southern yet understandable, and calling to mind magnolia blossoms. The voice captured Brooklyn. Red Barber might have been the most literate, the most thrilling, of announcers, calling plays with unforgettable understatement and humor. “We’re in the catbird seat,” he told listeners. Rickey loved it, but he also knew that all his planning could be useless without Barber’s voice on his side. He could hear Barber from every car radio, barbershop, kitchen window. This became his dearest tactic. Proximity! Rickey would hypnotize everyone with Barber’s familiar voice carrying the exploits of the new player through the streets of Brooklyn, into Manhattan, and out through Long Island, his Southern voice reassuring all.

  The two men sat across from each other at Joe’s Restaurant. Breaking salt rolls into crumbs, Rickey immediately told Barber, “Mrs. Rickey and my family say I’m too old at sixty-four, and my health is not up to it. They say I’ve gone through enough baseball and [taken enough] from the newspapers. That every hand in baseball will be against me. But I’m going to do it.”

  “He looked straight into my eyes,” remembered Barber, “fixing my attention.”

  Rickey said, “I’m going to bring a Negro to the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

  Barber remembered Branch Rickey speaking slowly as he said it: “I’m going to bring a Negro to the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

  Barber sat straight and silent.

  “I don’t know who he is,” continued Rickey, “or where he is, but he is coming.”

  From somewhere, small sounds rose through Barber’s memory and became loud and formed a crowd in Sanford, Florida. A harsh, bare, hot sun burned down from above. Red Barber, age ten, was on the edge of a crowd of jeering, nasty men in Ku Klux Klan robes. They shoved a black man, crying, tarred and feathered, along the streets. Barber was told that he was witnessing a great event.

  In remembering this, Barber always quoted the one line that might be the best written in English in our time: “I had been carefully taught.”

  Now Barber was witness to a truly great event, Branch Rickey’s assault on ignorance. “All the men in baseball understood the code,” Barber recalled later. “A code is harder to break than an actual law. A law is impersonal. Often a man breaks a law, is clever enough to get away with it, and people think he is a smart fellow. But when you break an unwritten law, a code of conduct, you are damned, castigated, banished from the club so to speak. You are a renegade, a scoundrel, an ingrate, a pariah.”

  Leaving Joe’s that day, Barber felt that lesson becoming heavier and harder. He walked across to the subway, took it to Grand Central Station, and there in the vast splendor, with so many people walking quickly by him at the end of a day’s business, he told himself that he couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t announce a game with a black in it. He reasoned to himself that he always hung out with players before the game, after it, at dinner. This habit gave him anecdotes for his broadcasts. He never could do this with a black player. Nope. He took the train home to Scarsdale.

  He walked into the house calling out to his wife, Lylah, that he was quitting. Had to quit. He thought he should call Rickey right now and end it. Lylah Barber thought about that. She was from as far south as her husband was. She also knew that she had a nice, expensive house in southern Westchester County. She was an adult.

  She said, brightly, “You don’t have to quit tonight. You can do that tomorrow. . . . Let’s have a martini.” Lylah mixed her husband a big glass of gin and some ice. When he drank it, and allowed that he might have another, she relaxed and had one herself. Barber wasn�
��t going anywhere.

  It was somewhere around this time that Jackie Robinson, with all his strength and intelligence, was going around on tryouts. They were destined to break his heart. He went to Fenway Park in Boston accompanied by the baseball writer Wendell Smith, who was trying to help. There was a clubhouse attendant who let them into the park and a batboy or a groundskeeper operating the pitching machine. You had Jackie Robinson ready to show what he could do and nobody wanted to watch. Robinson hit a few and decided to leave. Somebody called good-bye as they left. The Red Sox owner, Tom Yawkey, would spend the next twenty years keeping blacks off his teams and he got what he deserved, which was nothing. He made it in life thanks to his family’s huge lumber business, never having to lift a board himself. This was a background similar to those of other baseball owners. Only a few of them, including Rickey and George McLaughlin, appear to ever have done a day’s work. This type of experience seemed to mean something. Dan Topping of the Yankees knew what it was like to be shot at in a war, and Chicago’s Bill Veeck, who lost a foot in battle in the Pacific, not only wanted to play a black, but was ready to play an all-black team.

  “He has to be playing somewhere,” Rickey told every scout who came through his office. “Where can we find him?” He went to everybody he knew in baseball at every level, old ballplayers, ministers with athletic fields behind their churches, teachers, old friends who knew a ballplayer when they saw one. He asked all his people to look for blacks. It was that simple. Out on some sandlot, a scout said, “Mister Rickey needs Negroes. I guess we go over the other side of town. That’s where they all play.”

  Branch Rickey read dispatches that came to him from the hundreds of sandlots and fields in the unknown neighborhoods where blacks played. Soon his desk had a stack of reports. One came under the name Robinson. But there were others, too—Campanella, Newcombe, Doby.

  He asked his secretary to call Clyde Sukeforth. Now we are getting into it. Sukeforth was a scout who could go out for coffee and come back with a second baseman. Like Rickey, he was an old major league catcher, with Cincinnati and Brooklyn, which to Rickey meant Clyde could see the whole field. His playing days all but ended when he was out hunting in Ohio and birdshot from a misbehaving shotgun ruined his eyes. Yet in the end he could see through a stack of hay and look at a ballplayer on the field and make the decisive judgment on him. He could go beyond running and hitting and measure the character of the player. On a matter of supreme importance, Sukeforth would have the last look and all would hold their breath until he reported to Rickey. Sukeforth called him “Mister Rickey,” and the two never relied on each other as heavily as they did during this time.

  Sukeforth was born in Washington, Maine. In his later years, he moved to Waldoboro, which was just over the town line. People in Waldoboro said, “He’s from away.” He attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., a powerful institution the mention of which caused Rickey to grunt in approval. Georgetown! Jesuits! Sukeforth had the capacity to go off the baseball field and negotiate delicate matters.

  Rickey said years later, of Robinson, “I think we know about his playing ability. I want to begin to know what he is like as a person. He is out of UCLA, an excellent, excellent institution of higher learning and a commissioned army officer. Sukeforth had the capacity to talk to such a man and report to us.”

  As soon as Rickey read the report on Robinson, he told Sukeforth to find out about the court-martial. Word came back that it was about Robinson refusing to sit in the back of a bus in Fort Hood, Texas.

  “He has spirit!” Rickey said with great enthusiasm when he learned the details. “I want you to see Jackie Robinson play shortstop,” he told Sukeforth. “He is with the Kansas City team in the Negro league. They are playing at Comiskey Park on the weekend. I want to know about his arm. He certainly is a prospect.”

  Rickey, obsessed, made many phone calls about Robinson. Each time, some old guy on the other end of the line told him that, yes, Robinson could play in the major leagues. Rickey told Sukeforth, “George Sisler says he never saw anybody protect the plate with two strikes as well as Robinson can. Andy High thought he is the best bunter he ever saw. I want you to talk to him and see if he can come to Brooklyn with you. If he can’t, tell him I would be glad to come out and see him.”

  Clyde Sukeforth’s business trip by train to Chicago was so much more than a search for a baseball player. He was not traveling merely to see a baseball player, even a great player, for even these are merely bodies that one day run fast and then run slow before fading into memory. Sukeforth took the train to Chicago and arrived at Comiskey Park on the night of August 24, 1945. He bought a box seat and a program for the Negro League game between the Lincoln Giants and the Kansas City Monarchs. The Kansas City team was coming out of the dugout, and Sukeforth tried to pick Robinson out by his uniform number but decided that the program was usually wrong because the players kept changing. He heard somebody say Robinson’s name, and Sukeforth leaned over the rail of the box seat and called to the player.

  Sukeforth said right away that he represented Branch Rickey, who was starting a black team. Robinson had soured on Kansas City and listened attentively, although not with great expectations. Then Sukeforth asked Robinson to show him his throwing arm. Robinson hesitated. He had tumbled onto his shoulder a few days before and the arm was still tender. Besides, why did Rickey really want to know about it?

  Sukeforth said that Rickey wanted Robinson to come to Brooklyn, but if he couldn’t, then Rickey would be pleased to come out to see him.

  And with that, everything was different. Standing in the lights of a major league field, rented for the night by blacks, wearing the uniform of a team only blacks knew, Robinson felt a bolt of excitement. Whatever this was about, this fellow Sukeforth made it pleasant. Here was a white man who didn’t seem to notice skin color. Robinson observed that Sukeforth spoke quietly when he said that Rickey would travel to see him. He could feel he was being told the truth.

  Robinson said he would meet Sukeforth at his hotel, the Stevens, after the game. Sukeforth got to the hotel first and told the desk he was having a guest and then he tipped the elevator operator $2 so he wouldn’t balk when a black man rode up. This was only one of the reasons Rickey trusted Sukeforth to handle this job.

  Immediately, Sukeforth always said, he knew what he had on his hands. He had read a pound of paper on Robinson. It told of a man born in Cairo, Georgia, which at that time, the late 1910s, was just about the bottom of the country. His mother, Mallie, cleaned houses for white women. When her fifth child, Jackie, was born, she pushed her sharecropper husband to earn more than his $12 a month pay. He sure did. He also ran away.

  The mother took her five children on a Jim Crow train to Pasadena, California. Nine days and nights with a baby in your lap and four others writhing about you. She was able to fit her family into a house on Pepper Street, where they were the only black family. The Northern big-city racism came down on them in rocks and screams.

  Jackie Robinson came up moody and combative on the streets of Pasadena. The cops actively disliked him. He had a mouth.

  An older brother, Mack Robinson, Jackie’s hero, had a heart murmur, but he begged to be allowed to run in the 1936 Olympics. He finished second to Jesse Owens and came back from Berlin bitter about not winning. It did nothing to improve Jackie’s disposition. Only a person of Branch Rickey’s overwhelming personality could calm him.

  When he got to schools his athletic ability made him golden. One day he won a broad jump in a meet and then he hitched a ride to the baseball field where he got two hits to win the game. In 1939 and 1940 he was at UCLA, running as a crack halfback who was on All-America lists, performing in front of crowds and being surrounded by admirers and reporters. Sukeforth knew that Robinson had played basketball and run track and was a name in both sports. His legend was already all over the papers on Clyde Sukeforth’s lap.

  Sukeforth’s written report to the Dodgers office noted:


  “I asked him why he was discharged from the army and a number of other questions for information we may need. It seemed an old football ankle injury had brought about his discharge but, as it proved, it did not bother him. I reasoned that, if he wasn’t going to play for a week, this would be an ideal time to bring up coming to Brooklyn. I had him make a few stretches into the hole in his right and come up throwing. His moves looked good.”

  Sukeforth had to see a player named Bobby Rhawn in Toledo on Sunday; no matter how important the first player is, you can’t make an expensive trip just for one. He asked Robinson if they could meet there and ride the train together to New York. Robinson said yes. Because of his arm, he was taking a few days off from the Monarchs. Suddenly it was real. A magnet was drawing Robinson through the doors and toward a field of mowed grass whose sweetness could be smelled even here. On Sunday, Robinson was at the Toledo ballpark with a bag. Sukeforth bought two spaces in the same Pullman car. The ticket clerk saw a black with him and seemed ready to ask about it. Sukeforth spoke first in words that slapped—yes, they were traveling together.

  One of the porters was an organizer for A. Philip Randolph’s union of Sleeping Car Porters, which was threatening a major national demonstration over black jobs. He knew Robinson was a college football star. Would he come back in the morning to discuss the march? Robinson agreed, leaving Sukeforth to eat breakfast with the whites, and exciting the workers by telling them he was interested in big-league baseball.

  In New York on Monday, Sukeforth went to the Bossert Hotel in Brooklyn and Robinson to the Hotel Theresa, the famous building on the corner of 125th and Seventh Avenue, the cornerstone of Harlem.

  They met again at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, August 28, 1945, in front of 215 Montague Street in Brooklyn. It is a downtown business street that becomes a place of history. On Montague Street the clothes were seersucker and short sleeves, and bare arms in the August heat. This morning was to become one of the most vividly recalled of these years. All remembering starts with Clyde Sukeforth.