In the Cincinnati Reds’ old Crosley Field, two big, wonderful German women had a counter near the press box from which they served the largest sandwiches in all of baseball, and maybe sports. Surely, members of the Baseball Writers Association deserved such service, even though, because of them, there was not a black mouth to feed.
The Baseball Writers Association of America organization was a fake and a fraud, a shill as white as the Klan. The teams paid the way for the writers traveling with them, starting with spring training. They also gave the writers $8 a day meal money. Only one or two newspapers declined to be part of such a corrupt arrangement. The others were delighted to save the money.
The association was in charge of all press boxes at baseball games, and only reporters working for daily newspapers, and thus only whites, were permitted to enter. Association rules kept out reporters from the weekly papers, almost all of whom were black. There was the New York Amsterdam News and similar papers in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Baltimore, and elsewhere, all shut out.
In Brooklyn, the only reporter from a weekly paper admitted to the Baseball Writers Association was Jack Butler of the Brooklyn Tablet, the official publication of the borough’s Roman Catholic Diocese. As there were perhaps fifteen black Catholics in the entire diocese, this made their weekly newspaper safe and white.
The association rules were so sinful and scandalous that even a faint voice in protest could have shattered the arrangement. But it continued to exist because the team owners allowed it. The newsmen opposed not. Everybody was silently satisfied at working in the atmosphere of a restricted country club. Comfort would be ruined by the opening of the door for even one black sports reporter. Who would sit next to him?
When the rumor of Jackie Robinson first turned real, the association polled members in each city. Someone had the notion that a strong negative reaction to Robinson by baseball writers would keep him out. It did not. In Cincinnati, there was a single vote against Robinson. Everybody assumed it had been cast by Tom Swope of the Cincinnati Post, an old-timer, gruff as a watchman. Swope said nothing. Of course he was far better than voting to keep some infielder from earning a living just because he has dark skin.
In New York, Jimmy Powers, the sports editor of the Daily News, then with a circulation of nearly three million, wrote not even one column during this time that called for making room for black players. The thought of Powers, with that immense circulation behind him, losing the clear chance to become a new and commanding figure in America causes you to wince. Oh, he lost that chance, don’t worry about that. He was the most persistent and vicious of Rickey’s enemies. He delighted whites who saw blacks as not just playing baseball but also taking white men’s jobs in the iron workers’ union.
In 1946, from June until September, Powers wrote eighty columns against Rickey.
Rickey had neither met nor even seen Powers. At an exhibition game at Yankee Stadium, Rickey told his press agent, Harold Parrott, “Tell me what he’s wearing. So when I look around I’ll know him.” Powers wasn’t there. He never went anywhere except to Madison Square Garden, where he announced the Friday-night fights on television for Gillette razors, and the mobsters who promoted the fights under the name of the International Boxing Club. Otherwise, he wrote his column and went to the golf course in Westchester.
Faced with this barrage from Powers, Rickey plunged into temporary madness himself. He and his people at 215 Montague Street put together a thirty-seven-page rebuttal. “His charges are poisonous smokescreens, personal vilification, innuendoes, colored exaggerations, half truths, untruths, flat lies,” they wrote.
Rickey showed it to John Smith, who as president of Pfizer understood that you survive on remaining cool and patient and not stumbling. He told Rickey, “Your mode of refuting Powers’s assertions dignifies them and adds weight to them.” Smith knew that someone practicing prolonged lousiness usually winds up falling into your lap. And in this he was correct.
One day in 1949, Rickey received a copy of a letter Powers had written to somebody in his business:I talked to the captain last night [the publisher of the Daily News] and he told me not to worry about latrine gossip picked up by the FBI. That if Winchell and the rest of the Jews had their way, America would be a vast concentration camp from Maine to California. There wouldn’t be enough barbed wire to hold back all the decent Christians maligned by the Jews and those who run with them. In short, I was in pretty good company with him, with Col. McCormick, Joe Kennedy and several other decent family men . . . How in hell can I be termed ‘pro-Nazi’ simply because I don’t happen to like certain crackpot politicians and Jews?
The letter brought jubilation to the Dodgers’ office mail room. A guy called out, “This does it!”
“And you are doing what?” Rickey asked.
“Sending it to every newspaper in the city,” the mail room guy said.
“No, you’re not. You’re throwing it away,” Rickey said. “Nobody is to know this exists. I’ve never sunk low enough to do a thing like this. I never should have taken him seriously. Now we can forget him.”
Rickey called John Smith at Pfizer and thanked him profusely for being right. Of course only the owner of heaven could walk completely away from a wonderful opportunity to inflict some discomfort on a rat that had been gnawing on his feet for some time. Somebody in the Brooklyn office called Powers and told him that Rickey had the letter and was holding it and would do nothing with it. Immediately, Powers looked out the Daily News sports department window at 42nd Street and took many deep breaths to keep his heart from stopping dead. After which he never wrote another bad word about Branch Rickey.
Rickey then—just for nothing, for he never would think of getting even—sent free passes to Dodgers games to Powers and his family. Powers promptly answered: “I appreciate your thoughtfulness very much. I too wish you a lot of luck, and if there is anything I can do for you during the season, I will be glad to do all I can do to help you.”
Of the other white sports reporters in New York, none matched the bitterness of columnist Joe Williams of the World Telegram, a Scripps-Howard paper. He was out of Memphis, and it showed. By printing Williams’s tobacco road views, the publishers showed support for them. He never quit. In 1946 Williams wrote that Rickey deliberately lost the pennant race for the Dodgers by trading second baseman Billy Herman to the Boston Braves and postponing a championship until the next year, when Robinson’s arrival would make it “a Negro Triumph.” Then, a few years later, when Robinson was a fixture with the Dodgers, Williams wrote, “It might help Jackie Robinson if he remembered that he came into the majors as a ballplayer, not a symbol.”
Robinson caused the gravest of all fears: what if this black man makes it and then there is another one after him and soon a third and fourth and more, then what will happen to our way of life, this national pastime, if these players take everything and the whites we applauded turned out not to be so great and wound up working in Southern gas stations? And what if our fans can’t stand sitting next to blacks and leave the ballparks and the game? Civilized society had to rely on outsiders who came out of alleys to call for beliefs and behaviors that were supposed to be American.
The man Rickey needed so badly was just out of his reach. His name was Dave Egan and he wrote for the Boston Record, a Hearst tabloid. As early as the 1930s, he wrote things like, “The kings of baseball can bay to the moon and howl to the stars but there is no way for them to shuck off the fact that theirs is a sport that is no more national than the trolley to Brookline. How can you claim to represent the nation while you exclude anybody not of white caucasian extraction?”
CHAPTER NINE
This is February of 1947, just weeks before the start of baseball season. Branch Rickey is walking into the Carlton Branch of the YMCA in Brooklyn to talk to thirty civic leaders, all men of color, about Robinson. Of the six points he had written down at the start of this grand experiment, he had achieved all but one: “the backing and thorough understanding
from the Negro race, to avoid misrepresentation and abuse of the project.” Now he was setting to finish the job.
He got up right away. “I’m not going to tell you what you hope to hear. Someone close to me said I didn’t have the guts to tell you what I wanted to do; that I didn’t have the courage to give it and that you people wouldn’t be able to take it. I believe all of us here tonight have the courage. I have a ballplayer named Jackie Robinson . . . on the Montreal team . . . He may stay there . . . He may be brought to Brooklyn. But if Jackie Robinson does come up to the Dodgers the biggest threat to his success—the one enemy most likely to ruin that success—is the Negro people themselves!
“I say it as cruelly as I can to make you all realize and appreciate the weight of responsibility that is not only on me and my associates but on Negroes everywhere. For on the day Robinson enters the big league—if he does—every one of you will go out and form parades and welcoming committees. You’ll strut. You’ll wear badges. You’ll have Jackie Robinson Days and Jackie Robinson Nights. You’ll get drunk. You’ll fight. You’ll get arrested. You’ll wine and dine the player until he is fat and futile. You’ll symbolize his importance into a national comedy . . . and an ultimate tragedy—yes, tragedy!
“For let me tell you this. If any individual, group, or segment of Negro society uses the advancement of Jackie Robinson in baseball as a triumph of race over race, I will regret the day I ever signed him to a contract, and I will personally see that baseball is never so abused and misrepresented again!”
When he sat down it was reported that there was tremendous applause. Maybe, but that speech did not succeed with Rachel Robinson. Many years later, she said, “That speech. It was racist. I’d like to forget it.”
At the start of spring training, Robinson is still with Montreal, but everybody knows this is a fake. The Dodgers were training at an old military base in Panama for an exhibition game against a team of Carribean all-stars. Most knew that Robinson was only days away. The manager, Leo Durocher, spent a day going around and telling one player after another, “Isn’t it great we’re going to have Robinson? He can get a pennant for us.” Leo did not like the reactions. He heard a whisper that Dixie Walker was starting a petition against Robinson. Leo went to bed and thought for a long time. If these imbeciles give their petition to Rickey, he figured, they are making the thing official. It’ll break this club up. I’m supposed to get World Series money this year. These fucks and their petition are going to take money out of my pocket.
He swung out of bed. “Get everybody up!”
There were two ways of addressing ballplayers at this time.
One was Rickey’s indirection, verbal subterfuge, calling for a religious book, a story about Ty Cobb, anything to delay and confuse and soften the path.
Then there was Durocher’s way. Right now, he stands in the big military base kitchen, with players seated on steam tables and chopping blocks. No newspaper people were present. They needed their sleep. But everybody who was there, from Durocher down, told of his speech so frequently that it became an official final score.
“I hear some of you fellas don’t want to play with Robinson,” he said, “and that you have a petition drawn up that you are going to sign. Well, boys, you know what you can do with that petition. You can wipe your ass with it. Mister Rickey is on his way down here and all you have to do is tell him about it. I’m sure he’ll be happy to make other arrangements for you.
“I hear Dixie Walker is going to send Mister Rickey a letter asking to be traded. Just hand him the letter, Dixie, and you’ll be gone. Gone! If this fellow is good enough to play on this ball club—and from what I’ve seen and heard, he is—he is going to play on this ball club and he is going to play for me.
“I’m the manager of this ball club and I’m interested in one thing,” he continued. “Winning. I’ll play an elephant if he can do the job, and to make room for him I’ll send my own brother home. So make up your mind to it. This fellow is a real great ballplayer. He’s going to win pennants for us. He’s going to put money in your pocket and money in mine. And here’s something else to think about when you put your head back on the pillow. From everything I hear, he’s only the first—ONLY THE FIRST, BOYS. There’s many more coming right behind him and they have the talent and they gonna come to play. These fellows are hungry. They’re good athletes and there’s nowhere else they can make this kind of money. They’re going to come, boys, and they’re going to come scratching and diving. Unless you fellows wake up and look out, they’re going to run you right out of the ballpark. So I don’t want to see your petition and I don’t want to hear any more about it. The meeting is over—go back to bed.”
When Rickey reached Panama he had a morning meeting with Dixie Walker, which angered him plenty, and then another with Bobby Bragan, young and sullen, a reserve catcher from Fort Worth. He stood alongside Rickey with his fists clenched and his face contorted. He came from a contractor’s household where he answered black workers at the back door asking for a two- or three-dollar advance on their pay.
“Are you here to tell me you do not want to play with Robinson?” Rickey asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I shall accommodate you. I must have your word on one matter. It might take some time for us to effect a trade for you. Will you promise to try your best for this team until the trade is worked out?”
Flashing eyes answered. Do you think I would lay down on anyone?
Rickey said he would trade him, but he did not. Instead he put his trust in proximity. On twelve-day road trips to three and four cities, Bobby Bragan remembers today, “the most popular players, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Hal Gregg, all were at the table with Robinson in the dining car. We were outsiders. Me, Carl Furillo, Eddie Stanky, and Walker. I watched the table with Robinson. He liked what they said and they liked what he said. They all laughed. We were out of it. It did not last forever, I’ll tell you that. We were starting on one trip and I was right at that table with Robinson and so was Stanky. I don’t care where you’re from, you’re on a train trip and he was the best company and I don’t want to be off by myself.”
Hearing of this, Rickey said to Harold Parrot of his staff, “When they play cards, if you notice them gambling, act as if you didn’t see it.” He went for his cigars. With one word, one small act, proximity, he was sensing a hundred years starting to disappear.
Durocher had a temper that made the slightest confrontation suggest Verdun. Yet, no question, he was the manager Rickey believed he needed when they brought in Robinson. Leo was argumentative, unreasonable, a gambler who seemed to adore trouble and a manager loyal to the sky for his players. He didn’t seem to notice Robinson’s color.
“Be daring,” Rickey kept calling to Robinson all through spring training. When they got closer to the regular season, Robinson was on first base looking for a sign. Durocher was pacing up and down in the dugout, hands at his sides, and he shrugged and his hands came out palms up, and he paced on and Robinson began his dance and then took off and the stands went crazy as he stole second. Durocher’s hands clapped in joy.
This was a beautiful partnership. Always, I can see Leo Durocher tying his tie in the manager’s dressing room, talking about how he managed the game, talking, talking and then calling to admirer Spencer Tracy, who sat against the wall. “How’s that, Spence? How did you like it?”
And Tracy ducked his head and shook it side to side. “Whewf.”
“How’s that, Spence?”
Durocher loved that. A soft night with a great friendly star. But nice also is dreadfully boring. Look out below! Durocher could cause turmoil just by remaining still.
This all started where I come from, in Ozone Park in Queens, on the night that Joe Moore chased his own son-inlaw, a boss of the Mafia named Tommy Eboli Ryan, down 86th Street toward the El on Liberty Avenue. Joe sure did have a gun. Tommy Ryan knew that. Even old people on the block with faulty hearing knew the sound.
Joe Moore was an immense man who worked as a special cop, a square badge, at ball games, including Ebbets Field. The next entry on his résumé reads “Does get mad.” He knew Rickey only by sight. Rickey sure recognized Moore. Upon happening to see Joe in full splendor, Rickey remarked, “The man is completely vulnerable to an attack if he doesn’t lose weight.” Lumbering down the street on this night, Joe Moore fired a couple shots into the Ozone Park night air. He missed, but nevertheless that is some brave gun. Ryan was the second head of the Mafia to come out of the neighborhood. First there was Vito Genovese, then Ryan, and following all, John Gotti. You do not become head of the Mafia by pushing strollers on Liberty Avenue.
Then Joe Moore went back to his trade, security work at stadiums. All of us in high school knew him because he broke up fights and stopped kids from running onto the field during school football games. When Durocher looked at Moore, however, he saw a great big guy who could beat everybody up; a useful individual. A fan in the upper deck behind third base, one with a voice that could reach New Jersey, was bellowing abuse that infuriated Durocher. “You thief,” he hollered. And, “You’re a crook, Durocher.” The man’s name was John Christian. He had just been discharged from the military. He lived in the East New York section of Brooklyn and was a known athlete from Thomas Jefferson High. Sitting with him was Dutch Garfinkel, from the same famous high school. Garfinkel was as good a basketball player as anybody ever saw and he became a national name at St. John’s University. “He never cursed at Durocher,” Garfinkel said. “With that loud voice he had, I told him that he should cut it out.”
At the sixth inning, Durocher looked across the top of the Dodgers dugout and called Moore over and asked him for a favor. He asked Moore to tell John Christian that the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers would be glad to come down under the stands and sign a lot of autographs and talk about the heckler’s opinions. Christian somewhat naively said, sure.
Branch Rickey Page 8