Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Robinson’s rare pugnaciousness helped to inspire his teammates, but won him few friends outside the Dodgers. In Philadelphia, he found himself heckled with an intensity he had not expected to find again. More seriously, he soon knew that he could not expect a fair shake from league officials. Complaining to a reporter that he was “tired” of Robinson’s “popping off, and all that business,” the National League president, Ford Frick, threatened to curb Robinson if the Dodgers would not. But the Dodgers management stood behind their controversial star. O’Malley declared: “I have no reason to be dissatisfied with Jackie Robinson, his conduct on the field, or his spirit.… He has the full support of this organization.” Buzzie Bavasi, for whom Jack had developed an affection, insisted that Durocher and other Giants be called “on the carpet, too, to straighten out the whole deal.”

  Always loyal to Jack, Branch Rickey pointed out a fact: “Robinson always has been willing to take more than he has given.” But in the Pittsburgh Courier, the black columnist W. Rollo Wilson reported the opinion of “many fans of both races” that Robinson “is becoming increasingly obsessed with his own importance. With them his name is a synonym for swelled-head.” He recalled someone joking, apropos of President Truman’s recent dismissal of his most famous general: “Who does General MacArthur think he is—Jackie Robinson?” Vincent X. Flaherty, a top columnist for the Hearst newspapers, chastised Jack both for his behavior and his hypersensitivity: “Robinson will read this and when he does, instead of smoldering into a rage, I hope he digests a little of it and looks to the future. I hope, in days to come, people won’t point and say: ‘There goes Jackie Robinson … what a guy he might have been!’ ”

  This new level of hostility took an ominous turn on May 20, when Jack arrived at his hotel in Cincinnati to find two FBI men awaiting him. The Cincinnati Reds, the police, and the Cincinnati Enquirer had each received a letter containing a death threat against him: while he was out in the open at Crosley Field, someone with a rifle in a building across the street would shoot him. Each letter was signed “Three Travelers.” Calmly, Jack brushed aside the idea that he should not play. He also joined his teammates in their grim joking. “I think we will all wear 42,” Reese deadpanned, “and then they will have a shooting gallery.” “That would be too much trouble for you fellows,” Jack warned, “because you would have to darken up, too.” But the death threat seemed to spur the Dodgers. Playing before a crowd aware of the letter, Brooklyn pounded out twenty-four runs to sweep a doubleheader. In the seventh inning of the first game, when Ewell Blackwell deliberately walked Duke Snider and pitched to Robinson, Jack hit a long homer over the center-field fence, in what seemed a magnificent riposte to the “Three Travelers.” The Cincinnati team president, Warren Giles, no fan of Robinson’s, called the fan response the most prolonged round of applause he had ever heard at Crosley Field.

  Robinson gained more admirers the following week with his handling of another controversy. At Ebbets Field, in a game against the Phillies, he found himself stranded between third and home. Deftly eluding one trap after another, he then broke for home. Covering home plate, the pitcher Russ Meyer seemed to have an easy out. But Meyer dropped the ball when Robinson crashed into him and scored (the Dodgers won by one run). Enraged, Meyer had to be restrained from attacking Robinson, then loudly challenged him to a fight under the stands. Jack started out of the dugout, before his teammates stopped him. Later, Meyer visited the Dodger clubhouse to apologize to Robinson, who not only accepted the apology but also tried to share the blame: “If I hadn’t started down to meet him, there would have been no trouble.” (Meyer was fined $50 by the league.) Jack’s gesture did not go unnoticed. The Sporting News, which praised him for facing the death threat “in a way that Americans like—lightly, and with wit”—also found his attempt to share the blame “American.” Robinson “is a player to stir the spirit and admiration of all Americans, who, almost to a man, will respect quality and integrity of performance, allied with seemly deportment.” Then the journal revealed its deep hostility to him: “However, they will resent and repel with all their force the agitator, the sharper with an angle, the fellow who is less than an American because he chooses to be a rabble rouser.”

  Despite the controversies, the Dodgers began to pull away from the rest of the league. Dressen lauded the team as better than the pennant-winning Dodgers of 1941; a Giants official called it the finest National League team since the 1929 Cubs. In August, the New York World-Telegram and Sun saw the Dodgers waltzing into the World Series; Philadelphia, the defending league champions, promised their fans a better effort in 1952. Near the end of the month, at home, Brooklyn steamrolled over the Cardinals with two tenth-inning victories. In the middle of September, responding to the public clamor for World Series tickets, Walter O’Malley announced that his team was willing to play the series in commodious Yankee Stadium.

  Now, improbably, the Giants began to win. On August 11, they were thirteen games behind the Dodgers, with sixteen more losses than Brooklyn. Then, starting the next day, in a streak reminiscent of the 1935 Cubs, when Chicago won twenty-one games toward the end of the season to beat out the Cardinals, the Giants strung together sixteen straight victories. Steadily the gap closed between the two teams, even as the Dodgers assumed victory and Durocher seemed to concede defeat. When the Giants clinched at least second place—the best Giants finish in fourteen years—he said in contempt: “What good is that? You either win the pennant or you lose.” Individual Giants players looked to their laurels in a lost season. On September 16, for example, Bobby Thomson tied his season mark for most home runs by hitting his twenty-ninth of the year.

  The gap narrowed, although with ten games to play Brooklyn led the Giants by four and a half games, an apparently insurmountable gap. But at home, Brooklyn dropped two out of three to the Phillies, who were then swept by the Giants at the Polo Grounds. On September 25, in Boston, after dropping an afternoon game, the Dodgers committed three errors in one inning in a nighttime loss to the Braves. The lead was now one game. The next day, Robinson stole home for the first time in the season as Brooklyn won, to preserve the slim lead. (The run, coming in the eighth inning of what was already a rout, infuriated many Braves.) But the following day, September 27, a decision in the eighth inning by umpire Frank Dascoli (the same umpire who had accused Robinson of using ethnic slurs against him) gave Boston the game, 4–3. Fielding a sharp grounder, Robinson threw quickly to Campanella as a runner broke from third to home. Dascoli called him safe. When Campanella protested, Dascoli immediately ejected him from the game. “I’m not saying anything about the decision,” an enraged Robinson told a newsman. “That was simply a matter of judgment. But I do say he had no right to throw Camp out. In a race like this, the umpires should expect tempers to be a little frayed.”

  After the umpires retired to their dressing room, a policeman reported seeing Robinson viciously kicking its door, splitting two panels as he cursed at the umpires. Backed by his teammate Preacher Roe, Robinson denied kicking the door. But despite his denials, the league fined him $100. (Roe had kicked in the door.)

  At Shibe Park for the last three games of the regular season, Brooklyn was ahead 3–1 in the eighth inning of the opening game when Andy Seminick blasted a two-run home run off Carl Erskine to tie the score; in the ninth, the Phillies won. Brooklyn and New York were now tied for first place. The Giants then defeated Boston to move ahead, but the Dodgers, behind Don Newcombe’s pitching, also won in Philadelphia. On the last scheduled day of the regular season, September 30, in Boston, the Giants edged the Braves in an afternoon game to move ahead once more. At 3:55 p.m., with the Dodgers trailing the Phillies 8–5, after trailing 6–1 (the one run driven in by a Robinson triple), the scoreboard at Shibe Park posted the Giants victory. But Brooklyn fought back to tie the game, 8–8, in the eighth inning. Three more innings went scoreless. Then, in the twelfth inning, near six o’clock, with the sunlight fading from the green, Newcombe pitching, and the bas
es loaded with two men out, Eddie Waitkus smashed a low drive to the right of second base. “The ball is a blur passing second base,” Red Smith would write, “difficult to follow in the half-light, impossible to catch. Jackie Robinson catches it. He flings himself headlong at right angles to the flight of the ball, for an instant his body is suspended in midair, then somehow the outstretched glove intercepts the ball inches off the ground.” The fall jammed his left elbow into his solar plexus so hard that he was knocked out. In the stands, word spread that a heart attack had felled him. To Roscoe McGowen of the New York Times, Jack’s catch was “one of the greatest, if not the greatest, clutch plays I have seen in almost a lifetime of watching major league games.” Red Smith would write of Robinson “stretched at full length in the insubstantial twilight, the unconquerable doing the impossible.”

  Two innings later, recovered, Jack drove a towering home run into the left-field stands off Robin Roberts to put the Dodgers ahead to stay, and preserve the tie with the Giants to end the regular season. “There’s no stopping us now,” Jack exulted later in the dressing room. “The breaks haven’t been going our way during the past month, but now that we’ve gotten this far we aren’t going to look back.” In the three-game playoff series, the Giants took the first, at Ebbets Field, with home runs off Ralph Branca by Bobby Thomson and Monte Irvin; but the next day, at the Polo Grounds, the Dodger rookie Clem Labine shut out the Giants as the Dodgers scored ten runs. Robinson was a force: in the first inning, he hit a home run with Reese on base; he also drove in the third run.

  Finally, in the deciding game on October 3, again at the Polo Grounds, Maglie faced Newcombe. In the first inning, Jack singled home a run off Maglie. After that, the pitchers dueled about evenly, but the Giants tied the game with a run in the seventh. In the eighth inning, when the Dodgers scored three times, a Brooklyn victory seemed certain. But in the bottom of the ninth, the Giants’ Alvin Dark and Don Mueller singled off Newcombe. Monte Irvin, leading the Giants in runs batted in, then popped out; but Whitey Lockman doubled off Newcombe to drive in a run. The score was now 4–2. Then, in one of the most debated decisions in baseball history, Dressen decided to replace the tiring Newcombe with Ralph Branca. Branca’s first pitch was a strike past Thomson. His next became the most famous home run in major league history, as Thomson drove it into the left-field stands to give the Giants their first pennant since 1937.

  The Dodgers had endured one of the most bitter defeats in the annals of organized sports, but Robinson was calm. As Thomson circled the bases, Jack watched him closely, making sure he touched every base. Robinson was also one of the few Dodgers who made the trip to the delirious Giants clubhouse to congratulate the victors; he alone, according to Branca later, consoled the heartbroken pitcher. Bob Campbell, Jack’s friend and former employer in his UCLA days, was with Rachel when Robinson emerged from the dressing room. They exchanged wan smiles. “Well,” Jack said, “we let the Brooklyn fans down.” Campbell told Jack that Rachel was sorry for the Dodgers, because they had been counting on the money. “Yeah, that’s true,” Jack replied, “but they have no business counting on it until the season is over and the pennant is clinched.”

  However, some observers saw Dodger arrogance, with Robinson a leading offender, behind the disaster. On August 9, according to the Giants’ captain, Alvin Dark, he and his teammates had listened grimly after a defeat to a stream of taunts coming from the Brooklyn dressing room. The Dodger team sang: “Roll out the barrels!… We’ve got the Giants on the run!” According to Dark, the “arrogant aria” was sung by four men in particular: Reese, Newcombe, Furillo, and Robinson. However, throughout Brooklyn, the brunt of criticism for the defeat fell on Charlie Dressen for his fateful decision to remove Newcombe. Robinson stoutly defended Dressen. During the game, Jack told a radio audience, Newcombe had twice warned the manager that his arm was dead. Robinson was sure his teammates did not blame Dressen: “We think he’s a wonderful manager and just as great a fellow.”

  Disappointed, Robinson still saw the 1951 season as his best yet in the majors. His batting average was .338 (up ten points from 1950), with 19 home runs and 88 runs batted in. But the MVP award went to Roy Campanella. Despite injuries, Campanella hit .325 with 33 homers and 108 runs batted in. “He deserves every honor he can get,” Jack said of Campy. “He kept us in the pennant race.… I’m convinced Campanella is the best catcher in baseball today.” Jack himself came in sixth in the voting, behind Campanella, Musial, Monte Irvin, Sal Maglie, and Preacher Roe. The Baseball Writers Association also named him to their 1951 all-star team, as the best player at second base in either league. His .992 fielding percentage was the best in the league, and his seven errors set a record for fewest by a second baseman.

  In the National League, the Rookie of the Year award, previously won by Robinson and Newcombe, went to a young black player, Willie Mays of the New York Giants. (Early in the next season, Robinson would marvel at a catch by Mays. “It was not only the best catch I’ve seen,” he said, “but probably the best catch anyone has ever seen, because they just can’t come any better.”) In 1951, the project started in 1947 by Rickey and Robinson continued to grow, as fourteen black men played in the majors. No one could doubt the quality of their play; five were in the All-Star Game at mid-season. Only five teams fielded a black at any time that year, but those five teams finished in the first division of their league. In the World Series, in another landmark event, the Giants’ Mays, Monte Irvin, and Henry Thompson formed the first all-black outfield in major-league history, when they faced the Yankees.

  But Negro-league baseball, which had nurtured almost all of these players, was now virtually dead. Something else had happened. “Fans used to travel hundreds of miles to see Robinson and Doby,” Walter O’Malley said in explaining a decline in Dodger attendance. “But they don’t have to do that anymore. Negro players are all over the country.” In the wake of Robinson’s success, doors previously shut to black Americans were opening, however slowly. Althea Gibson became the first black woman to be invited to play at Forest Hills, New York, in the United States lawn tennis championships. The American Bowling Congress dropped its whites-only policy. And all but three teams in major-league baseball now had a black player under contract somewhere in their farm systems.

  IN OCTOBER, in Wilmington, Delaware, Robinson started what he hoped would be his last barnstorming tour ever, a month-long ramble through some thirty towns and cities of the South, the Southwest, and California. “These trips are really tough,” he complained. “The accommodations in the South are not good. You live on short-order food, have irregular hours and dress out of a suitcase.” But a flood of letters “from my people in the South” (as well as the promise of good money) had made him play. Also encouraging was “the amazing overall change in attitude” of Southern whites to black players. “The reaction now,” he said, “compared to when I first played down there in 1947 is unbelievable.”

  This time, Campanella led a rival team. He and Robinson jostled each other to claim the leading black stars—Larry Doby and the young first baseman Luke Easter of the Cleveland Indians and the veteran Sam Jethroe, sold by the Dodgers to the Boston Braves. With all three men joining Robinson, his team outdrew all other barnstorming outfits. “It’s Robinson they come to see,” the promoter Ted Worner knew; “I don’t have any doubts about that.” This was certainly so in California, where Oakland, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, and San Diego all honored him. November 4 was “Jackie Robinson Welcome Day” in Los Angeles, when fifteen thousand fans saw his team beat a group of West Coast all-stars led by Bob Lemon of the Cleveland Indians. The next day, before a UCLA homecoming crowd of fifty-five thousand in the Los Angeles Coliseum, Jack was honored before a football game against UC-Berkeley; a tumultuous reception greeted him when he rode with Rachel in an open, banner-draped car through the streets of Westwood as grand marshal of the Homecoming Day parade.

  Back home in St. Albans, Jack faced so many engagements and tasks the New
York Journal-American called him “the league’s busiest non-working ball player.” He continued to spend a great deal of his time at the YMCA facility on 135th Street in Harlem, and he accepted several invitations to speak at school assemblies. On December 4, for example, he addressed the history club at the elite Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut. Gracefully he fielded questions about baseball but also tried to steer his remarks toward social problems. The next day, he played a leading role at a YMCA dinner at which Campanella and Sugar Ray Robinson won awards; Jack presented a plaque to Morris Morgenstern, a generous supporter of the Harlem branch. On December 28, at a function of the black Philadelphia Cotillion Society, he presented the Gold Cross of Malta to Branch Rickey—and received the Toussaint L’Ouverture Medal of Honor from the contralto Marian Anderson. On February 12, at its annual dinner, Robinson and Rickey were honored again, by the black Loendi Club of Pittsburgh. Accepting a plaque as the outstanding athlete of 1951, Jack emphasized the extent to which he had matured from his early days in the major leagues, when “I had a chip on my shoulder.”

  In the month before leaving for training camp, he took two more impressive steps beyond baseball. One solidified his place in television. On February 4, in Manhattan, the flagship stations of the NBC network, WNBC and WNBT, announced that they had signed Robinson to a two-year contract “unique in the field of broadcasting” as director of community activities, with the rank of vice-president. As such, he would not only perform on air but also supervise the development of youth programs, especially those involving sports, as well as work with organizations such as the Police Athletic League, the Catholic Youth Organization, the Boy Scouts, and the YMCA and YMHA. Jack’s color was a major factor in the appointment. The general manager of the stations, Ted Cott, spoke of the appointment as “another trail blazing experience” by Robinson, one that would link the network to “the more than one million negroes” in the city area. Robinson would be concerned with combating juvenile delinquency and other “social service activities.” To Jack, the new job pointed directly toward his retirement from baseball. “I have had to realize,” he said, “that my baseball days will one day be over and, therefore, I’ve been thinking about a new turning point. This is it.”