The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  In another telling, for Ken Burns’s documentary Baseball, O’Neill added, “They stopped the game and waited, he and Satchel talking, until the kid went out, got the ball, brought it back, and Satchel had Babe Ruth autograph that ball for him.”

  Like others in the black community, Negro Leaguers wondered, gossiped, and made happy assumptions about his racial background. Ruth’s granddaughter Linda Ruth Tosetti was introduced to Theodore Roosevelt “Double Duty” Radcliffe at the annual Hall of Fame induction weekend one year in the late 1990s. Double Duty was then the oldest living Negro Leaguer, perhaps the oldest living professional baseball player. “He said, ‘Sit down, I’m gonna tell you about your granddaddy. He was a good man. People used him. He knew it, and he helped them anyway. That’s a fine tribute to a man. And he used to be a friend to the Negro Leagues. He used to speak up about us. They tried to shut him up, but he wouldn’t be shut up. And he used to come to my games when he could. And he used to bring a blond one for him.”

  Double Duty treated the rumors about Ruth as fact. “Babe Ruth was mulatto,” he told Sports Illustrated in 2002. “He had the nose of a colored man. He grew up in that orphanage, so nobody knows what all is in him for sure, but there’s black and white blood in him. We all thought it was great that he could pass for white and hit all those home runs and make all that money playing white baseball.”

  It was still a subject of conversation among Negro Leaguers when young Monte Irvin joined the Newark Eagles in 1938. “Some of the knowledgeable players would mention it just in passing,” Irvin said before his death in 2016. “They’d say, ‘Babe’s got the big lips and the wide nose. Maybe that’s why he was so well thought of by the Negro community and the players.’ They used to say, ‘I think Mrs. Ruth was dating other guys.’”

  Irvin, later a member of the major league’s first all-black outfield with the 1951 New York Giants, a Hall of Famer, and president of the National League, also heard stories about the size of Ruth’s personal assets from former Yankee Waite Hoyt, by then a broadcaster for the Cincinnati Reds. This, too, was purported evidence of his blackness for those who trucked in stereotype. “When he went to Japan, the women in Japan couldn’t handle him, so they had to send up to Northern Japan where the Russian women were to import them for him to have somebody to play with,” Irvin quoted Hoyt as saying. “He was known to be heavily endowed. He complained about the little women in Japan who were too skinny. He needed some real women. So he told the Japanese authorities about it; and they sent up to Sapporo, which may be 100 miles or so more or less, to import a bevy of women to make him happy.

  “Hoyt said when he would finish with one of those women, he would light up a cigar. And when he came in the room in the morning, there were four cigars in the tray; so that meant he had sex with these girls. Then Waite said that’s the way he knew how much fun he was having by counting the cigars in the ashtray.”

  IV

  One story that did not appear in the African American press—probably because black sportswriters did not have access to white clubhouses—marks the only time on record that Ruth publicly responded to the insults and epithets. The occasion was Game 3 of the 1922 World Series against the Giants, the last time the Yankees called the Polo Grounds home. Ruth had a sore elbow, a bad Series, and unaccustomed bad press.

  The Giants, under the direction of manager John McGraw, employed benchwarmer Johnny Rawlings, a boyhood schoolmate of Walsh’s in Los Angeles, to hector Ruth at the plate. Rawlings was the type of ballplayer for whom the word scrappy was invented, a guy who would do anything to help his win team, even if it included shouting racial slurs from the home dugout in a voice loud enough to be heard on the other side of the Harlem River, where construction on Yankee Stadium was under way.

  “I’ll get them,” Ruth told his teammate Bob Meusel after going hitless in Game 3. “In fact, I think I will right now.”

  With Meusel in tow, Ruth charged into the Giants’ locker room to confront the slanderer. The sanctity of the clubhouse is a foundational principle of baseball etiquette, a threshold not to be crossed—as opposed, for example, to calling a man a nigger within earshot of fifty thousand people.

  Frank Graham, then writing for the New York Sun, gave the fullest account of the episode in his 1943 book, The New York Yankees: An Informal History.

  Rawlings, one of the heroes of the 1921 series, but now a utility infielder, was sitting in front of his locker putting on his socks. He was a little fellow. The Babe strode over to him.

  “If you ever say again what you said to me out there today I’ll beat your brains out. I don’t care how small you are.”

  Rawlings grinned up at him. “What’s the matter,” he asked quietly, “can’t you take it?”

  “I can’t take that.”

  Earl Smith, hard-boiled Giant catcher, walked over while the other players looked on in silence.

  “What did he say to you, Babe?” he asked.

  The Babe told him. Repeated here, it would burn a hole in the paper.

  Smith shook his head. “That’s nothing,” he said, and walked away.

  The conversation escalated, with other Giant players joining in and everybody calling everyone else a liar. Ruth almost came to blows with Frankie Frisch when he accused him of staging the act to get his name in the newspaper. It was only then that Ruth noticed a cohort of baseball writers looking on.

  “Gee, fellows, I didn’t know you were here. Please don’t write anything about this. Please! I’m sorry I came in.”

  As he turned to go, he looked at Rawlings and said, “But lay off that stuff. I don’t mind being called a —— or a —— but none of that personal stuff.”

  The Giants howled.

  The story stayed secret until Graham told it in 1943 but gained no traction until Robert Creamer repeated it in his 1974 biography, Babe, filling in the blanks: a prick or a cocksucker.

  That was the year Hank Aaron broke Ruth’s lifetime home-run record—a milestone that subjected Aaron to racist invective and prompted a literary reconsideration of Ruth. Four major biographies would be published between 1973 and 1975, not to mention No Cheering in the Pressbox, with all its first-person recollections of the Babe.

  “I’ve been somewhat amused this past summer reading about the trouble Hank Aaron was running into when he was chasing Ruth’s record,” Fred Lieb told Holtzman. “Aaron said—and it came out in the papers—that the fans were writing him abusive letters, calling him, ‘nigger,’ and he said that Babe Ruth was never confronted with anything like that.

  “What Aaron doesn’t know, and I supposed what most people don’t know, is that some of Babe’s teammates on the Red Sox were convinced he had Negro blood. Many of the players, when they wanted to badger him, called him ‘nigger.’ Ruth had Negroid features, Negroid nose, mouth, lips. But when you saw him naked, from the neck down, he was white, a good deal whiter than most men.”

  Lieb had been covering sports for over fifty years; his words carried a lot of weight and were widely repeated and recycled by sportswriters and biographers. Especially the stories about Ty Cobb, the son of the South, baiting Ruth about his body odor and hurling the N-word from the Detroit dugout. By 1924, the Tigers had acquired the acerbic personality of their player-manager, which was much in evidence during a testy series in Detroit that June. With the Yankees leading 10–6 in the top of the ninth inning on June 13—and New York and Boston a game ahead of Detroit in the standings—Ruth had “to duck to escape a pitch near his head,” the Times reported. Having failed to hit him, the Tigers’ aggrieved pitcher Bert Cole promptly nailed “Languid” Bob Meusel in the ribs, whose response was anything but languid. The ensuing altercation, no mere baseball rhubarb, involved two major-league rosters, all the police on duty at Navin Field, and 18,000 spectators. According to Fred Lieb, Ruth and Cobb went after each other “like two football linemen, each trying to put the other out on the play.” Ruth had to be restrained by “two umpires and three or four players,” T
igers’ owner Frank Navin reported to league president Ban Johnson, “like an enraged tiger held at bay.”

  In his letter to Johnson, protesting his innocence, Ruth said only that “several sharp things were said to me, and I replied with remarks of the same sort.”

  Umpire Billy Evans made no mention of Ruth’s role in the riot in his official report to the league, except to note that Cole had almost hit him, too. Much to the Tigers’ dismay, Ruth was not punished. Cole and Meusel were suspended indefinitely.

  Lieb told Jerome Holtzman a story he had heard about Cobb refusing to share a cabin at a Georgia hunting lodge with Ruth, saying, “I won’t sleep with a Nigger,” which gained wide circulation after the publication of No Cheering in the Press Box. He also told Holtzman, from the neck down, Ruth was “as white and a good deal whiter than most men.”

  (Though Ruth and Cobb collaborated in a series of charity golf matches to raise money for the USO during World War II, Cobb’s resentment was still in full flower in letters addressed to Christy Walsh years after Ruth’s death.)

  Every ten years or so, the stories would resurface, sometimes in most unexpected fashion. In 1984, during previews for the very brief run of the off-Broadway play The Babe, Max Gail, the star of the one-man show, appeared on a radio call-in show hosted by an African American sportscaster. “On the show, a guy said there was a story that Babe Ruth was actually a black brother,” Gail recalled. “I said a lot of black people knew people who were passing.”

  A day or two later, he received a telephone call from a woman who said, “Mr. Gail, my name is Dorothy Ruth Pirone and I have a bone to pick with you. I hear you’re out there telling people my father’s a black man.”

  Then she said, “I just wondered how you’d feel—I have children and grandchildren—how you’d feel if someone said your parent was black?”

  Gail replied, “They probably will, because my wife is black.”

  In fact, Dorothy’s youngest daughter, Linda, had questioned her mother about her grandfather’s skin color and been told his swarthy complexion was the result of how much time he spent outside at St. Mary’s. So one day when an African American couple greeted her by saying, “You can’t be Babe Ruth’s granddaughter—you’re not black,” she had a ready reply. “He was German and suntanned.”

  In May 2001, Spike Lee dedicated his inaugural sports column in Gotham magazine to the subject of Ruth’s race. After rehashing Ty Cobb’s slurs, he suggested that perhaps it was time to dig up the Babe and test his DNA. As quickly as he made the suggestion, Lee assured his readers that would never happen, allowing Hank Aaron to explain why: “They are not going to dig up the Babe. They don’t want that revealed, that there could be an ounce of black blood in him.”

  Lee’s column set off a flurry of renewed speculation and opinion. Clarence Page, columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and a prominent voice in the African American community, brought new perspective to the old tale, pointing out Ruth’s quandary: “Even if there were no hard evidence that he was black, how was Ruth to come up with hard evidence that he wasn’t? You can’t prove a negative, as the old saying goes. Gee, imagine how the Babe must have felt,” Page wrote. “Whether he was a black man or not, he was getting abused like one.”

  His daughter Julia came to believe, as she said her father did, that racial bias was the decisive factor in his banishment from baseball and the unwillingness to hire him as a manager. “Judge Landis was absolutely against blacks,” she said. “He knew that if Daddy was a manager, Daddy would have had blacks on the team. He felt they were discriminating against him, Judge Landis in particular, because he had absolutely no objection to blacks in baseball.”

  It isn’t necessary to elevate him to the rank of a civil rights pioneer in order to imagine how it must have felt to be the object of racial invective. Nor is it necessary to dig up his corpse, as Spike Lee proposed, to appreciate why the answer to the question would have special significance in the African American community.

  In the interest of history, Jan McNamee, Mamie Ruth’s granddaughter, his closest proven biological relative, agreed to have her DNA tested. A saliva sample analyzed by CeCe Moore, of the DNA Detectives, a consultant for the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Genealogy Roadshow, and ABC News, concluded that her test sample showed no evidence of African “admixture” in her DNA.

  It follows, Moore said, that if Ruth’s biological parents were who they were believed to be, Ruth had no “significant amount of African admixture” in his DNA.

  No test is required—or sufficient—to measure the quotient of delight in the faces of the African American fans photographed leaning out of a rickety spring training ballpark in the South, hands reaching for the sweaty Babe, taking his ease by the right field fence, just out of their reach. Or the concern in the eyes of the well-heeled Washington, D.C., fans in their white straw boaters consigned to the black section of Griffith Stadium on July 5, 1924, when the Babe knocked himself unconscious running into the concrete parapet. A fat white cop raised his arm toward the men peering over the wall to see, an officious and peremptory reminder that blacks were not permitted on the field. The Babe was out cold for a whole five minutes but stayed in the game.

  There is no photographic evidence of his visit to a crippled black man in Chicago one Friday afternoon in November 1927, just an address scribbled on a pad in the hotel suite he was sharing with Lou Gehrig. They were expected at the Palmer House that evening for the annual All America Football dinner hosted by Christy Walsh to promote the new rivalry between Notre Dame and USC and the big game that weekend at Soldier Field. They had promised to show up in team colors. When, late in the afternoon, Ruth was still AWOL, Gehrig went in search of him.

  “He rode out to the address—in the black belt on the mid-South Side,” John B. Kennedy wrote. “He located Ruth in a dingy bedroom of a Negro tenement telling a beaming little colored cripple just how the Yankees won the World Series.”

  V

  Because of the added visit to Wheatley-Provident Hospital and a promotional appearance the Babe had tacked on to his already overscheduled day, he was running late for the game at Muehlebach Field. Because it was one of the first tour dates announced, it was also one of the best publicized and best attended. Zack Wheat, the future Hall of Famer who had just concluded the last of his nineteen years in the major leagues, was there, as was Pat Collins, the Yankee catcher, with whom Ruth and Gehrig would sneak out of the ballpark after the game—“Just try and find us,” Ruth teased. (One place they weren’t found was Lawrence, Kansas, at the annual Dad’s Day banquet at Kansas University, which they had promised to attend. They sent their regrets.)

  Tickets were sold at fifty-four stores. A local railroad advertised a special excursion fare from Chillicothe for the game—$2.50 round-trip. Fifteen patrolmen were required to direct traffic and find parking spaces for two thousand cars arriving at the ballpark.

  The Buddies Friend club transported fifty residents of a veterans’ hospital, guests of the Post, who were admitted free, along with fifty children from the Gillis Home and the Kansas City Orphan Boys’ Home. Ruth donated another fifty tickets to children from the St. Vincent’s Home and the Guardian Angel Home for Negroes, who arrived early in a caravan of Army trucks from Fort Leavenworth. They had busied themselves at the concession stands while waiting for Ruth and Gehrig. By the time they appeared for batting practice, the Post reported, “the youthful worshippers were so full of peanuts, soda pop and hot dogs about all they had for the two sluggers was a glassy stare.”

  The paper estimated the crowd as “9,900 conscious spectators, weakly backed by 100 peanuts and pop foundered orphans.”

  Newsreel cameras from Pathé and Paramount filmed highlights of the game, which would be screened the next night at local movie theaters for those who’d been unable to attend.

  It was an Indian summer day, with a glorious, golden sun, lasting longer than the season normally allowed. The paper’s unidentified scribe wondered whether
Ruth’s power extended to turning back the clock. “Babe Ruth, the fair fans idol, envy of fallen arches—the answer to Boyville’s prayer—loveable boyish Babe” autographed two hundred baseballs before the game and convinced “the kind, generous old sun” to hang around until the game was over.

  Gehrig was admired for his dimples and his physique. “Men looked at him and wondered where their waist line had gone; wished the old muscles hadn’t gotten so tight and that they had been a little fairer with Mother Nature in her efforts to keep them human. For Gehrig, clear eyed, fair of face and clean limbed, showed himself to be a worthy model for any male.”

  His inside-the-park home run on a ball that stuck in the sod at the base of the right-field wall and popped straight up was a challenge to the Babe. Of course, he was up to it. Gauntlets were his specialty.

  He hit a towering shot that sailed over a hundred stomachaches and the right field wall, bounding off the pavement on one bounce into the hands of an African American boy balanced on a billboard “heavily laden with spectators at the corner of Twenty-First Street and Brooklyn Avenue.”

  The boy maintained his equilibrium on his perch and clung to the ball.

  Chapter 8

  October 16 / Omaha

  BABE RUTH HEN WINS EGG RECORD

  LAID ONE A DAY TILL SCORE OF 173 MADE HER WORLD CHAMPION

  —NEW YORK TIMES

  AN OMAHA SCHOOL GIRL IS MISSING

  POLICE FIRST HEAR OF IT WHEN MOTHER’S AD SEEN IN PAPER—TWO BABE RUTHS MEET SUNDAY

  —LINCOLN EVENING JOURNAL

  I

  The summit between the Babes was hastily arranged on October 11, the day the aviary champion laid her world-record-breaking 166th consecutive egg. Lady Norfolk, a single-comb white Leghorn chicken weighing in at 43/4 pounds at the beginning of the National Egg Layers’ Association contest in November 1926, had laid an egg a day every day since April 29, two weeks after Ruth hit the first of his sixty home runs. She was a 307 chicken, meaning her mother had produced 307 eggs in a lifetime of laying them. Her paternal grandmother was a 275 hen.