“What do you weigh, Campy?”
“Two fifteen to two twenty.”
“Judas Priest!” Rickey shouted. “You can’t weigh that much and play ball!”
“All I know is that I’ve been doing it every day for years and it’s worked out fine.”
Rickey knew how well it had worked out. A couple of months before he had sent Clyde Sukeforth to scout Newark Eagles pitcher Don Newcombe. Sukeforth was impressed by Newcombe but also impressed with the catcher on the opposing team, Roy Campanella of the Baltimore Elite Giants. A week after Sukeforth’s scouting expedition, Rickey and his wife went to Jersey City. They watched Campanella catch both ends of a doubleheader. Rickey agreed with Sukeforth’s high opinion of Campanella.
“Everything is fine,” Rickey continued. “The one thing that puzzles me is your age. I have your age noted in this book,” Rickey gestured down to the black book. “You sure this is your right age?”
“Sure, it’s my right age. I’m twenty-three. Iwas born November nineteenth, 1921. I’ll be twenty-four next month.” Campanella was a bit annoyed.
“You look older.”
“Mr. Rickey, I’ve been playing ball for a long time.”
Rickey removed the cigar from between his fingers and placed it in a large ashtray on his desk. “I was a catcher, Campy, you know. You’re a catcher. I think that’s why we’ll always be able to get along. I have had to ask you some of these questions. They were important. Now Iam going to ask you the most important one: Vlould you like to play for me?”
Campanella knew about Rickey’s sponsorship of the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers and thought that he was being offered a position with that team.
“I’m doing all right where Iam, Mr. Rickey. I’ve been working for the same man for nine years. I like the man. I am one of the highest-paid players in the colored leagues. I make three thousand dollars a year and another two thousand from winter ball. I’m not interested, Mr. Rickey, in changing what I’m doing.”
“All right,” Rickey said calmly. “I understand, Roy. I want you to make me a promise. You promise me that you won’t sign a contract with anyone else unless you talk to me.”
Campanella had no trouble agreeing to the suggestion. “I don’t sign contracts, Mr. Rickey. I just play ball.”
Rickey stood up from behind the leather swivel chair and came out from behind the desk. He extended his hand. Campanella could feel the gnarled fingers and Rickey felt Campanella’s rough and bruised catcher’s hand. “111 be in touch with you,” were Rickey’s final words. Campanella was anxious to leave to get something to eat and to be out in the fresh air to clear his head of all the words.
Campanella returned to the Woodside Hotel in Harlem, where he was staying along with other Negro ballplayers who were enjoying a brief vacation in New York City before going to Venezuela for the winter baseball season. He settled down to a game of poker. One of the players was Jackie Robinson, the shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs whom Campy had played against twice during the summer of 1945.
“We got to playing cards and talking,” Campy remembers. “And Jackie told me, ‘Roy, Mr. Rickey is signing up colored boys.’ I had heard that kind of talk all the time from one player or another. They all had those kinds of pipe dreams. I told him, ‘Jackie, I don’t believe that kind of talk anymore.’
“Then Jackie told me that he had been signed up to play for Montreal and that the announcement was going to be made very soon. He told me not to tell anyone. ‘They’ll hear about it themselves,’ he said, and he had a big smile, a real big smile on his face when he said those words.”
On October 23, 1945, the announcement was made that Jackie Robinson had signed a contract to play for the Montreal Royals in the International League. The signing was the most dramatic and controversial sports story of he
When the news came over the radio at the Woodside Hotel in Harlem, there was loud cheering.
“I hope he makes it,” said Sam Jethroe, who had been with Robinson at the Fenway Park tryout, “because if he does, I know I can.”
“I’m afraid Jackie’s in for a whole lot of trouble,” warned fabled Buck Leonard, a longtime Negro Leagues star.
Roy Campanella was distressed. “I felt bad. Not that Jackie had signed, it didn’t matter to me who was number one. I felt bad that I had said no to Mr. Rickey. But he had said he would get in touch with me, so I decided to go to Venezuela and play ball and wait to hear from him.”
Rickey heard from a lot of the owners. “When he finally decided to sign Jackie,” Mal Goode reports, “men like Connie Mack in Philadelphia, Griffith in Washington, McKinney, who owned the Pirates, and Breadon in St. Louis were calling him. ‘Branch, you’re gonna kill baseball bringing that nigger into baseball now,’ they said.
“’You run your ball club, and I1l run mine,’ Rickey told them.”
The October signing was carefully plan ed. desegregation that I passed on to Mr. Rickey,” explained Professor Dodson, “was that it succeeds best when management at the top takes a firm stand. I suggested that the contract with Robinson be signed before other players negotiated contracts for the spring, so that it would be clear that if they signed with the Dodgers for the coming year, they in all likelihood would be playing with black players in the future. I suggested to Mr. Rickey that he stand firm on this and not equivocate.”
There had also been a question about where Robinson should play. Rickey personally decided on Montreal. “It is the best place,” Rickey told Dodson, who recalls the twinkle in Rickey’s eyes as he spoke of the city. “It has a heavy French influence, and their attitudes toward colored people are not what they are in the States, It also has the advantage that he would be playing in the eastern part of the United States most of the time, and the International League cities for the most part are urban places without the southern rural influence. Finally, the best press coverage would come out of Montreal.”
Rickey told reporters, “My job is to build a baseball team. I have spent three years and twenty-five thousand dollars searching for Robinson. When I go after baseball players, sitting on the bench they all look as alike to me as doorbells. I never notice the color of their skins. I never meant to be a crusader, and I hope I won’t be regarded as one. My purpose is to be fair to all people. My one selfish objective is to win ballgames.”
A veteran player of many years in the Negro Leagues took a more cynical view: “That Branch Rickey was not just doing a little black boy a favor. He had more to offer to those sixteen prejudiced owners than just one black boy: He had those hundreds of thousands of Negro fans.”
Minor-league baseball commissioner William Bramham also questioned the purity of Rickey’s motives. “Father Divine [the flamboyant black evangelical minister] will have to look to his laurels,” said Bramham, “for we can expect a Rickey Temple to be in the course of construction in Harlem soon. . . . Whenever I hear a white man, whether he be from the North, South, East, or West, protesting what a friend he is to the Negro race, right then I know the Negro needs a bodyguard. It is those of the carpetbagger stripe of the white race, under the guise of helping but in truth using the Negro for their own selfish interests, who retard the race.”
Hall of Farner Monte Irvin was a star for the Newark Black Eagles then. His New Jersey scholastic sports feats had mirrored Robinson’s accomplishments in California. “I was delighted,” the soft-spoken Irvin notes, “but there was a certain amount of jealousy. I knew it would give us all a chance to possibly make it, but there was a certain amount of envy that he had been picked. There were real stars in the Negro Leagues—Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Roy Campanella. Those guys were proven stars. But they said Branch wanted a guy with talent and a college education, able to express himself with the press and in other situations. Jackie was perfect for all this. And we knew that if he made it there was a chance for the door to swing really open for all the black athletes not only in baseball, but for all the other professional sports. And it happened just that way
. We were truly for him one hundred percent, but there was also a certain amount of jealousy.”
Pee Wee Reese was aboard a ship returning to the United States from Guam. “I was told that a black had signed to play for Brooklyn,” recalls Reese, “although I’d have to say that the word that was used was not ‘black.’ Like most Americans who were white, I didn’t know what a black athlete was like. I just assumed they weren’t good enough for the big leagues. I had heard the talk, you know, that if you threw at them, they backed down.”
Reese then learned that the new man played shortstop. “Dammit, I thought,” Reese recalled. “There are nine positions on the field and this guy has got to be a shortstop like me. I began to wonder what the people in Louisville would think about me playing with a colored boy. Then I thought, the hell with anyone who didn’t like it—he deserved a chance just like anybody else.”
Willa Mae Walker, three years and eight months older than her brother Jackie, remembers the reaction of the family. “We were all very happy,” she says, “but we were frightened, too, because we knew there had never been any blacks in organized baseball.”
Satchel Paige, the longtime pitching star who had toiled all those many years in the Negro Leagues for the Kansas City Monarchs, thought the Dodgers had signed the right man. “Jack’s the number-one professional player. They couldn’t have picked a better man,” said the man who was now too old to be number one.
Paige was a prime example of how a black star made his living before the possibility of a major-league career. Estimated to have pitched thirty-three years, winning more than two thousand games, Paige traveled all over the world to play baseball. By car, by bus—some say even by horse—wherever there was a game, there was Satch. His nickname came from the fact that most of those years he lived out of a suitcase, or satchel. Breaking into the majors at an age when most players have since retired, Paige had a long career there. “Even though I got old, my arm stayed nineteen,” claimed the Hall of Fame pitcher.
Many disagreed with Paige that Robinson was a good choice. Bob Feller, who had played against Robinson when a white All-Star team competed against the Monarchs, said, “He won’t make it. That guy’s got football shoulders. He’s all tied up in the neck.”
A week after Robinson’s signing, The Sporting News attacked those who opposed him on racial grounds, calling them “un-American.” Then the most powerful baseball newspaper in the United States proceeded to evaluate the black pioneer’s chances: “Robinson, at twenty-six, is reported to possess baseball abilities, which, were he white, would make him eligible for a trial with, let us say, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Class B farm at Newport News, if he were six years younger. . . . The war is over. Hundreds of fine players are rushing out of the service and back into the roster of organized baseball. Robinson conceivably will discover that as a twenty-sixyear-old shortstop just off the sandlots, the waters of competition in the International League will flow far over his head.”
Walter O’Malley explained why Robinson’s age was so important. “We wanted a fellow who was a little older than the average athlete, because we knew that what he would face would require maturity. It got down to two men, Jackie and Roy Campanella. Branch wanted Jackie because he knew Jackie had absolutely fierce pride and determination.”
Rickey’s motivations for signing Robinson have always been questioned. How much came from a moral conviction that the color bar must go, and how much came from a desire to make money and field a winning team? Monte Irvin suggests that what Rickey did is far more important than why he did it. “Regardless of the motives,” Irvin observes, “Rickey had the conviction to pursue it and to follow through.”
As Irvin points out, other owners had the chance to sign black players but didn’t. “The Homestead Grays of the Negro Leagues used the ballpark of the Senators when Washington was on the road,” Irvin recalls. “Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard were on the Grays. Today they are both in the Hall of Fame. They also had Roy Partlow, a fine left-bander, and Raymond Brown, a right-handed pitcher who hurled just like Red Ruffing. The Senators were at the bottom of the league, and those four players on the Homestead Grays were all at their peak. Josh was the equal of the Babe [Ruth]. Buck was just like Lou Gehrig. They used to draw big crowds—thirty-five thousand, forty-five thousand.”
His scouts suggested to Clark Griffith, the owner of the Senators, that he sign those four players. “They would have played for nothing,” says Irvin.
“But Griffith was a southerner. When faced with the idea of signing the four black players, all he could think was ‘Where would they stay? How would they travel? Where would they eat? How would the other players feel about it?’ That was the way of life back then and the way people thought,” Irvin concludes. “It took Branch Rickey to come up with the answers, to do it.”
Out of the limelight and away from the swirl of controversy from November 1945 to January 1946, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella played winter ball in Venezuela. Robinson was the shortstop; Campanella was the catcher-outfielder as their black All-Star team won eighteen of the twenty games it played. “Jackie and I roomed together,” Campanella recalls. “We were able to get real close and have a lot of discussions about the situation. And Jackie would say, ‘I just want a chance to play, and I think I can handle the worst of it.’ “
Robinson told reporters that he was ready for what he knew would be a difficult ordeal. “I know I am heading for trouble in Florida next March when I must train with Montreal. I don’t look for anything physical. I really believe we’ve gotten beyond that in this country. I know I’ll take a tongue beating, though. But I think I can take it. I’m due for a terrible riding from the bench jockeys all around the International League circuit if I am good enough to play with Montreal all summer. I know about the riding white players give one another, and I’m sure it will be much worse for me because I am a Negro. They’ll try to upset me and they’ll have plenty of material, but we got that also in our league and I am prepared for it. These days keep reminding me of something my mother told me when I was a little kid. She told me that the words they say about you can’t hurt you. And when they see that, they’ll quit saying them. I’ve had plenty of nasty things said about me from the stands, especially in basketball, where you can hear everything they shout. I never let it get to me. I think it made me play better. I’ll always remember what my mother taught me, and I think I’ll come through.
“Joe Louis has done a great thing for our race. Without being conceited, I think I can say that I am going in with a much greater advantage than Joe had. . . . Therefore, I have a much greater responsibility.
“I think I am the right man to pick for this test. There is no possible chance that I will flunk it or quit before the end for any other reason than that I am not a good enough ballplayer. . . . That is the only thing I can be mistaken about now.”
Robinson was the first black player signed to a contract to play in organized baseball. Rickey also signed the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth, as America eagerly anticipated its first springtime peace in four years. John Wright, a twenty-seven-year-old pitcher, was signed in February 1946, following his discharge from the navy. On March I, Campanella received a telegram advising him to report to the Brooklyn Dodger main office by March 10—“very important,” the telegram said. It was signed “Branch Rickey.”
“I got right back,” Campanella recalls, even though the message came in the middle of the winter ball season. “I just got right out of there and lit out for New York. I signed up. The papers said I got a bonus. I got nothing except a salary of a hundred and eighty-five dollars a month to play with the Brooklyn Dodger farm team at Nashua, Class B.”
Roy Partlow, pitcher, age thirty-seven, and Don Newcombe, pitcher, age nineteen, were also signed. The monthly salary for the five black pioneers was a grand total of $r ,Boo. Robinson received the most, $6oo a month. Campy was making the least.
The main man, though, was Jackie Robinson. Married to Rac
hel on February ro, 1946, the young man with his bride headed for spring training in Florida and the “trouble ahead” that Rickey had warned about. When they boarded the plane in California for Daytona Beach, Mallie Robinson presented them with a shoebox filled with fried chicken and hard-boiled eggs. At first they protested, explaining that they were just going to Florida, not to a wilderness. Then, not wanting to hurt Mallie’s feelings, they took the shoebox with the home-cooked food along with them.
The American South, with its signs reading “For whites only” and “For colored women,” its segregated drinking fountains, its layer upon layer of Jim Crow laws, was a shock to the Robinsons. When they arrived in New Orleans to get a connecting flight to Daytona Beach, they were bumped onto a later flight by the airlines. Informed that the law banned their eating at the New Orleans airport—they could only take food out-the man on the first steps of his mission to break baseball’s color line became enraged. It accomplished nothing. The contents of the shoebox—succor provided by Mallie, who might have anticipated such a scene when she prevailed on them to take the food—eased their hunger if not their rage.
When they resumed their journey, they were bumped off a plane at Pensacola, Florida, “for military priorities, so they said,” Robinson noted. Determined not to waste any more time, the Robinsons boarded a bus to Daytona Beach. Although there were empty seats up front, they were forced to stay at the back of the bus—the Negro section. Jackie breathed the Florida air that mixed with the carbon monoxide fumes of the bus and thought about the adventure that loomed ahead and the price he knew he would have to pay.
On April 18, 1946, a new world quality enveloped the early spring day at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, New Jersey. It was opening day of the International League season. It was opening day for Rickey and Robinson. After all the months of picketing and letter writing, of debate and dissent, Jack Roosevelt Robinson—a black man—would be playing second base for the Montreal Royals, the first of his race ever to play organized baseball.
Rickey and Robinson Page 12