Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Gordon and Robinson were not strangers. Playing football for McKinley Junior High against Marshall one day, Gordon had run back a punt some eighty or ninety yards for a touchdown. The next day, aglow with his success, he was holding court near a water fountain, chatting with some girls after choir practice, when Robinson walked up. He barely glanced at Gordon. “I hear you got lucky yesterday,” he said suddenly. “You won’t do that against us.” Stunned, Gordon opened his mouth to answer, but Robinson was gone. Robinson was right; his team beat Gordon’s, 6–0. The next time they met, Gordon was taking part in a track meet for which he was ineligible. No one noticed but Robinson, who walked up and got right to the point: “What are you doing participating in this meet? You’re still at McKinley.” Gordon started to explain, but Robinson was gone. “He was the greatest person in the world for just walking away,” Gordon recalled, “just the greatest person at walking away. The guy had such confidence. I don’t think he knew how much confidence he had in himself. And it was confidence.”

  For Robinson, however, it was Gordon who had true confidence. “I remember he used to be a spokesman for me,” he recalled. “He would go with me every place. Through him I met my first girlfriend.… I don’t think I had enough courage at that time to go out on a date with a girl alone.” Actually, Jack and the young lady had already met; she was Elizabeth Renfro, the girl Jack had told to go jump in a lake. Bessie and her sister Mabel were close friends of Bernice Burke, Jack Gordon’s girlfriend (and later his wife). Soon Robinson was dating Bessie and enjoying it, especially when they went on double dates with Gordon and Bernice, whose nickname was Rudy. A date usually meant a movie, with popcorn, at the Park Theater or Farrell’s, which cost ten or fifteen cents, or sometimes they splurged at the posh United Artists cinema, where a ticket cost as much as thirty-five cents.

  Gordon saw Robinson’s mischievous side, which some people at times mistook because in those days it had a slightly manic edge. “Say we are at the movies,” he recalled, “and Jack saw one of our friends eating a snack. He might go up and knock it out of his hand and not say a thing about it. He was just devilish that way. Or he might toss a firecracker and scare some people, and laugh. He was just a devilish guy. But he wasn’t belligerent or anything like that. He was definitely not a bully. He wasn’t picking a fight, and he never looked for trouble. He didn’t avoid trouble, but he didn’t look for it, either. Everything was a lot of fun to Jack.”

  Some people, Gordon knew, disliked Robinson: “Someone told my mom, You’d better stop your son from running around with that Jack Robinson, he’s going to get into trouble. My father told me so. But I paid them no mind. Jack just didn’t appear that way to me.” Their friendship deepened. In 1946, when Robinson married, Gordon would be his best man; a few years later, he would move to New York with his wife and their son to work with Robinson and continue a friendship that obviously meant a great deal to both men. Eventually, Jack would see PJC as the place where he shed some old, rough skin and healed some wounds, including, no doubt, a few that were self-inflicted. “It was there,” he said, “that I lost most of my shyness that had always made my early life miserable.” Undoubtedly, Jack Gordon was an essential part of this process of healing.

  OVER THE SUMMER OF 1937, Jack enrolled again in John Thurman’s baseball school in Brookside Park. At night, he also played shortstop for Floracube, a commercially sponsored team in the popular city-run Owl League (softball played with baseball rules) in Brookside Park. Floracube was made up of members of the black North Pasadena Athletic Club. Against this opposition, Jack ran wild. His base running was so astonishing that the Post sports columnist Rube Samuelsen reported in July that “in almost every game” Robinson had stolen second, third, and home at least once. “It’s practically a habit,” Samuelsen marveled. “That isn’t stealing. It’s grand larceny.” Before thirty-five hundred fans in the all-star game that closed the season, Robinson singled twice in two at-bats, then thrilled the crowd further by stealing third base after each hit. He was also thrown out twice at home.

  In September, he returned to a transformed PJC. The “tent era” was over; set among what one school official touted as “the most beautiful of college grounds in Southern California,” with freshly planted lawns and flowering plants and a serene reflecting pool, the three new buildings gleamed white as the “reconstructed” PJC opened its doors at last. The college, blessed with nothing less than the “last word in modern facilities for both academic and technical training,” would now begin a “new era in higher education.”

  But Jack’s mind was mainly on football. Football defined athletic excellence at PJC and almost everywhere else on the American college scene. The Bulldogs had a new, young head coach, Tom Mallory. A former football star at Pasadena High School and at USC (class of ’32), Mallory had just arrived from Oklahoma City, where he had been coaching high school football. Several Oklahoma players, all white and with no experience playing with or against blacks, had followed him to PJC; about ten of them enrolled near the start of the season. Mallory’s black players were few and homegrown. At least three were expected to start: at quarterback, Jack Robinson; his boyhood friend Ray Bartlett, a sensational pass receiver; and Larry Pickens, also a talented end. Other blacks hoped to make the team as substitutes.

  On September 13, at the first scrimmage, Robinson was clearly the most brilliant player on the field. “Jack Robinson, the dashing quarterback from Muir, stole the show,” according to the PJC Chronicle. “Time and again Robinson broke loose from the defense with his spectacular style of running.” But the next day, disaster struck. In the middle of the scrimmage, Jack limped off the field with a wrenched ankle and what was diagnosed as a chipped bone in his right leg. The leg required a cast; he would be out for at least a month.

  On October 9, after PJC sustained four consecutive losses, Jack’s cast was cut off and he returned to the practice field. The next week, in Phoenix, Arizona, against Phoenix Junior College, he entered the game as a substitute and scored the third touchdown in what proved to be an easy victory. In the next game, at home before fifteen thousand fans against PJC’s archenemy, Compton Junior College, he again did not start. When he was inserted, however, his first rush was a thing of beauty that gained twenty yards. Then, stung by the interception of one of his passes, he raised the crowd to its feet with the longest Bulldog run of the day, a dazzling trip of thirty-four yards. With his rushing and passing, and aided by brilliant catches by Bartlett and Pickens, Robinson starred in two long drives against the Compton squad. The game ended in a scoreless tie, but he was now poised to assert himself as a football Bulldog.

  Jack shone again in the next game, against the Loyola University freshmen; intercepting a pass, he ran it back ninety-two yards for a touchdown in an easy win. Against Chaffey Junior College, Jack added a new page to his already storied season. Playing at safety on defense, he caught a punt on his own 22-yard line, “fumbled the ball, picked it up on the 20, and behind some of the finest downfield blocking by Pasadena all year, ran 80 yards to a touchdown, standing up.” In the final game of the season, against a weak Caltech team, and before a crowd of eighteen thousand in the Rose Bowl, Jack was masterful again. A young white sportswriter noted of the “dark-hued phantom of the gridiron” and his “brilliant running and passing” that “it would have been a far different story if the Negro quarterback had not been in the game last night.” Scoring one touchdown, Jack also passed for another. The writer, Shav Glick, caught something of Robinson’s astonishing body control, his uncanny ability to run at a blazing pace, shudder suddenly to a stop, change direction, then swiftly accelerate past befuddled opponents. On one defensive play against a pass, “Robinson reared up, took the ball out of the air in midfield, cut toward the west sidelines, and just as he was about to be forced out of bounds, he sidestepped a Caltech man and raced on to a touchdown. A twisting change of pace which Robinson used baffled the Caltech defense into several errors.”

  With suc
h inspired playing, Jack ended the season a hero to the student body and to much of Pasadena. Almost by himself he had helped to rescue the Bulldog season from ignominy, and he had done so with amazing flair. Nevertheless, on December 7, before a festive crowd of about four hundred citizens at the annual banquet of the Pasadena Elks at the Altadena Golf Club, his teammate Bill Busik won the Most Valuable Player award. Robinson had hoped for the prize; Busik had carried the team in his absence, but not to victory. “I had found out earlier that Busik was going to win,” Jack Gordon recalled, “and I told Jack about it. Jack got very quiet. I thought he was upset. I told him, Well, Busik played well, he carried the team for a long time. Jack didn’t say anything. Then he sort of shrugged and that was the end of it.” He was present at the Altadena Golf Club when Busik was handed a “gold” football and lauded in a ceremony that apparently made scant reference to the other Bulldog quarterback. Jack probably laughed as loudly as everyone else when, according to a newspaper report, “the three colored players, Jack Robinson, Ray Bartlett, and Larry Pickens, came in for their share of kidding about incidents of the past season.”

  On December 17, 1937, Hank Shatford, a student journalist who had praised Jack all season, reported tersely in the Chronicle that “Pasadena will lose Jackie Robinson’s football talents next year. He intends to enroll at Oregon State in September.” Whether this plan had anything to do with the award or the ceremony is unclear. With Mack Robinson’s two years of junior college eligibility gone, he had decided to accept a scholarship to the University of Oregon, in Eugene. Perhaps Jack had decided to leave with him. Finally, however, Jack decided to stay in Pasadena, where he was now out from under the shadow of his celebrated brother.

  AT PJC, JACK’S STOCK ROSE with his amazing feats on the football field. On the whole, he moved easily if quietly among the students, black and white, but stayed mainly within the small group of blacks. The junior college had no student union or other convenient gathering place, but black students had their favorite spot, which was near the swimming pool and a short-order food shop. Often Jack could be found there. Openly associating with the other black students, he nevertheless had misgivings about their tendency to cling together and hang back in the company of whites. Neither Jack nor Ray Bartlett had much use for the Armulites, the all-black society. “I wouldn’t join it,” Bartlett said. “I wouldn’t think of doing that.” And Jack Gordon remembered Robinson urging other black students to give up their habit of sitting in the back of the balcony at school assemblies; he wanted them to spread out more. But Jack and Bartlett responded differently to the ways of most of their fellow blacks. “They used to call me all sorts of names because I wouldn’t loaf with them all day,” Bartlett recalled, “but Jack would spend time there, hanging out with them. I would be at the library. I don’t think I ever saw Jack at the library.”

  At some point, however, Robinson, Gordon, and another black student became the first blacks elected to the Lancers, a service organization with policelike duties at assemblies, tournaments, and other gatherings of students. “We wore our official black sweaters,” Gordon recalled, “and were your big men on campus, giving orders. Jack liked that.” Certainly Jack managed to maintain some links with whites, especially his old friends. When Warren Dorn, a sweet-natured boyhood friend and self-professed admirer of the Pepper Street Gang, stood for a school election, Jack jumped in to help. “I remember we had a lunchtime rally at PJC,” according to Dorn, “and Jack just got up before everyone and made a fine, rousing speech about why it was important that Warren Dorn should be elected. Everybody listened, too; it definitely helped me.” (Also speaking up for Dorn at that noon rally was another friend and fellow student, and a future movie star, William Holden.) As for trying to date white women, Jack drew the line there; deliberately he squelched any overtures that may have come his way with his sporting success. Again Bartlett was different: “Sure, I socialized with Caucasian girls, especially the ones that hung around the athletes. I sat with them in class, talked with them. Not Jack, though. He kept his distance. Jack was always kind of slow with the girls. He was always bashful.”

  Jack was popular, but racial hostility was real. Shig Kawai, an outstanding athlete who had joined him on an all-star southern California high school baseball team in 1935, also played basketball and football at one time or another with Jack for the Bulldogs. “A lot of the time you would hear ‘Get that Jap’ and ‘Get that nigger,’ ” he recalled. “We had to hear these other teams making racial remarks all the time. Of course, that only made us fight a little harder. And we usually won!” For all Bartlett’s sports success and his striving, he too felt the sting of exclusion. “I felt left out,” he conceded. “I felt that because I was a Negro I was being passed over, not considered, for many things. All the clubs were white. You can look through all the old yearbooks and see that so clearly.”

  On a trip north to Sacramento, Robinson and Gordon were flatly refused service in a restaurant. “You can’t eat in here,” a woman told them. “Why not?” Gordon asked. “ ‘Because you’re colored.’ That was the whole conversation.” He also remembered that the entire track team, except for one Oklahoma “jackass,” then walked out in a show of solidarity. The Bulldog football trip to Arizona was marred for Robinson and the other blacks when the team hotel in Phoenix refused to accept them. Such episodes enraged him, but Jack tried to curb his anger. At a junior college picnic once, he would recall, a white student made “a slurring remark to me about my race.” When Jack angrily challenged him to a fight, the fellow “sort of snapped out of it.” He hadn’t meant the insult, the student explained; “he said it was just a bad habit.… I accepted his apology and we shook hands in a very friendly way.”

  He was starting to discover the truth of his mother’s lesson that doing good often brought good in return, that the dangers of idealism were outweighed by its benefits. Nowhere was this more evident than in generosity to teammates; in his intense desire to win, Jack was both a nonpareil star, burning with individual brightness, and the unselfish team player. Perhaps his major test at PJC came with Coach Mallory’s Oklahoma players, who tried to freeze out the black players, or some of them. Gordon remembered one day finding Robinson, Bartlett, and some other black players sulking on the sidelines. “The Oklahoma boys don’t want to play with us,” they explained. “So we just walked off the field.” Robinson himself offered two versions of the episode. In one, the Oklahomans had treated him, Bartlett, and Pickens fine but slighted the other blacks: “I called a little harmony session, urging that we either get together or go elsewhere and play football.… After that, we had real teamwork.” In another version, Jack recalled going to Tom Mallory and threatening to transfer to a rival school. In any event, Mallory put down the rebellion decisively—and Jack learned a lesson both about the value of protesting injustice and about using his market value as an athlete to fight against it. “Coach Mallory laid down the law and the Oklahoma fellows became more than decent. We saw that here was a case where a bit of firmness prevented what could have grown into an ugly situation.”

  He also learned another lesson, apparently. He recalled: “I decided that Bartlett and I had a responsibility to do something to make the Oklahoma fellows feel that they had nothing to fear from Negroes—that they were just as valuable to the team as we were.” As quarterback, Jack said, he went out of his way to spread the scoring around to include the Oklahoma players who blocked for him and the other backs but were never expected to score. In gratitude, they returned the favor by blocking for Jack with a vengeance. “That convinced me that it was smart to share the glory,” Jack said, “that in the final analysis white people were no worse than Negroes, for we are all afflicted by the same pride, jealousy, envy and ambition.”

  Consciously or not, Jack was acting as his mother Mallie had done in winning over Pepper Street, when she saw that some whites were mainly prisoners of their ignorance and had to be treated accordingly, with a measure of understanding. Drawing
both on religion and on her practical sense of the world, Mallie had responded calmly to them, as one might treat children, and she had won out, in her own way, over racial prejudice. Now Jack, younger and impetuous, and in a milieu about which she knew nothing, and which seemed to breed rage and violence, was striving to do the same.

  The football season had barely ended before Jack showed up for practice with the Bulldog basketball team under Coach Carl Metten. Like Mallory, Metten was an alumnus of Pasadena High School; at Oregon State he had lettered in football and basketball. The PJC basketball team labored under two handicaps. The first had to do with its arena, which was little more than a shed, with one side exposed to the elements, so that fans shivered on chilly nights, or fled the rain. The other handicap was the team itself; its average height was only about six feet.

  With Robinson and Bill Busik at forward and Ray Bartlett (also about six feet) at center, the Bulldogs started the season with two victories, but soon fell to earth. In a virtually all-white league, with all white officials, the Bulldogs believed they were being mistreated. At an early tournament, Jack’s spirited play and team-high scoring were offset by questionable calls, as PJC saw them, including a technical foul against Jack. A string of losses followed, including one in Sacramento when Jack left the court with bruised ribs; Busik, too, was hurt. These injuries were no accident. By this point, the league-leading scorer Jack Robinson was a prime target of blows. In turn, Jack was hardly bashful about hitting back, if he could do so surreptitiously. Gordon remembered a game in which an opponent hacked at Jack repeatedly without a foul being called. Robinson waited patiently for his chance. “Jack had the ball,” according to Gordon, “and he had his head sort of down. All of a sudden he comes up with the ball. He just ripped the guy, right up the front. Blood went everywhere. But no foul. After that, he had no problems in that game.”