Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Moreover, Alston knew that Jack had lost the support of some of his teammates, and had antagonized O’Malley and Bavasi no matter how politely they treated him. The low point of Jack’s relationship with O’Malley, until Robinson’s departure from the Dodgers, came when the owner not only summoned Robinson to his office in Miami for a dressing-down but also asked him to bring his wife along. Insisting on Rachel’s presence was a blunder. If O’Malley expected her to take his side against Jack, to help in disciplining her husband the prima donna—as O’Malley called Jack during the meeting—he was mistaken. Rachel respected O’Malley and admired his wife, Kay; but calling Jack a prima donna lit a fuse in her. “I was pretty angry,” she said, “and I told him in no uncertain terms that the charge was ridiculous, that Jack had always put the club above his own interests, that he had always played hurt if he could play at all. I told him that the finest thing about Branch Rickey was not that he brought Jack into baseball but that once he brought him in, Rickey stuck by him. He didn’t snipe and carp at him, or allow others to attack him unfairly behind his back. Rickey backed Jack all the way.”

  Jack’s eulogizing of Rickey in the July 1953 number of Our Sports widened the breach between himself and O’Malley. In particular, the article included an invidious, and inaccurate, comparison of the two men on the subject of money. Defending Rickey against an ancient libel that he was a cheapskate, Jack insisted that he was more generous than the new leaders in Brooklyn. They were “a fine group of men,” but were paying him not “a cent more” than his last salary under Rickey. This charge angered O’Malley and Bavasi, who assured reporters that Jack’s current salary exceeded his last under Rickey by as much as a typical reporter’s annual pay. Feebly, Jack conceded that he now earned more than in 1950—but denied that the difference was equal to a reporter’s salary, which one source pegged at $6,500. In fact, the difference was probably $6,000; Bavasi’s point was valid.

  If this error was the fault of a ghostwriter, as Jack claimed, he should have corrected it. If he was underpaid, as perhaps he was (along with most of the other Dodgers under both Rickey and O’Malley), not once had he complained publicly, much less held out for a higher salary, as Doby, Furillo, Branca, and Newcombe, for example, all had done at one time or another with their respective teams. There is also evidence that O’Malley sought to preserve a balanced view of Robinson. When in November Jack played three games in Mexico at the end of a barnstorming tour, and someone wrote O’Malley to praise Jack’s “actions, his attitude, and his willingness of cooperation,” O’Malley replied scrupulously that “over the years Jackie Robinson has been big league in every respect.” Only Robinson’s ghostwriters, agents, and promoters had caused concern “on occasion.”

  Jack’s unhappiness with the Dodger management was not softened by conditions in Florida, where the black players continued to stay at the “colored” Lord Calvert Hotel while the white Dodgers enjoyed air-conditioned, beachfront accommodations. In addition, Harold Parrott, the genial traveling secretary for years under Rickey, was gone; Lee Scott, his replacement, seemed less concerned with the griping of Negro players—as did O’Malley and Bavasi, compared with Rickey. On the road, the black players often had to search for a decent place to eat; once, they were reduced to buying a loaf of bread and slices of cold meat at a shop and eating in the streets. This was after white taxi drivers refused to pick them up and they were forced to lug their bags through the streets to a local black “hotel.” “It was a dump,” a player recalled. “I wouldn’t have kept a dog there.”

  Martin Stone, Jack’s manager, recalled trying to have an impromptu dinner with him at a Miami Beach hotel in the early 1950s. “I remember Jack sighing when I suggested it, meaning that we should not try,” Stone said; “but I thought, Hey, I’m Jewish, this is Miami Beach, no problem! I called one hotel, very fashionable; I spoke to the manager, told him I wanted to bring Jackie Robinson. Silence. ‘Anything wrong?’ ‘I’m sorry, Marty, but we have a problem.’ I asked him if Sugar Ray Robinson hadn’t been there with Walter Winchell. ‘On the terrace,’ he tells me. I hang up on him. I called Grossinger’s, spoke to Paul, Jennie’s son. ‘Bring a black man here, Martin? I don’t know what the help would do.’ Now he hangs up on me! I tried several hotels and got nowhere. Finally I called a man named Walter Jacobs, who ran a hotel that the vaudeville people—Milton Berle, Sophie Tucker—liked. ‘Walt,’ I said, ‘I have a problem. I want to take Jackie Robinson to dinner, but nobody will have us!’ ‘Give me an hour, Marty,’ he says, ‘and then come over. I’ll see what I can do.’ We get there, and the crowd is huge! Photographers everywhere! Walt Jacobs took advantage of the situation, but we got our dinner.”

  Rachel recalled her own first visit to a “white” Miami Beach nightclub: “Walter Winchell had arranged it. He literally led the way, parted the waters, as Jack and I, Sugar Ray Robinson and his wife, followed him like sheep to his table. It was more tense than fun, but it was another barrier broken.”

  When Rachel came down, usually with the children, Jack was happy. At the Lord Calvert, a haven for black notables visiting Miami, he proudly showed off his family, or slipped away with Rachel for long walks on the beach; on one stroll that year, he helped her dig up a huge piece of driftwood, which he later shipped north for conversion into a coffee table that she still owned forty years later. In March, he also traveled to Daytona Beach, the scene of their 1946 ordeal. This time, the local Evening News hailed the changes Robinson had wrought, “his tremendous contribution to this Nation by widening the racial basis of the sport which we call our national pastime.” Jack revisited Bethune-Cookman College for “one of the biggest thrills I have ever had”: accepting an honorary degree along with Dr. Ralph Bunche, the winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his heroic work of mediation in Palestine for the United Nations. Like Robinson, Bunche had been a star basketball player at UCLA; a brilliant student, he had then gone on to earn a doctorate in history at Harvard. Like most black Americans, Robinson was proud of Bunche, whose triumphs on the world stage would have been impossible with his own government. “Perhaps the most thrilling event of the entire evening for me,” Jack wrote to Bunche, “was listening to your wonderful experiences.”

  The South was still Jim Crow, but there and elsewhere Jack found some signs of change. In St. Louis, the Chase Hotel finally agreed to permit the black Dodgers to register, if they did not loiter in the lobby, or use the dining room, or swim in the pool. Jack resented these rules, but on April 27, alone among the blacks on the club, he signed the register at the Chase. (“I’m not going to stay there,” Campanella declared. “If they didn’t want us before, they won’t get my business now.”) On the next trip to St. Louis, Jack approached Lee Scott and demanded to see the hotel manager. “I want it understood that I’m coming in here just like all the other players,” Robinson told Scott. “If I want to have a visitor I’ll have one. If I want to eat in the dining room, that’s where I’ll go.” Scott then informed him that all barriers at the hotel were now down. Some time later, the other black players joined him at the Chase.

  This breakthrough coincided almost precisely with the single most important event affecting racial segregation in the United States in this century: the decision of May 17 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that “separate but equal” schools were a violation of the Constitution. That the Chase Hotel gave in before the Supreme Court ruled, and desegregated itself for a baseball team, suggests something about the deep significance of baseball, Rickey, and Robinson in the unfolding national drama about the passing of Jim Crow.

  THE 1954 SEASON WAS both the worst by a Dodger team since 1947 and, for Jack, the most fractious and painful of his major-league career. That year, he admitted, “I lost my head more than I ever had in my eight years as a major leaguer.” In April, he had announced some lofty goals—to win the National League batting title and MVP award again. Another goal was to get closer to Ty Cobb’s record for ste
aling home (thirty-five times); Jack now had sixteen. For a while, he seemed on target with both objectives. After he hit two singles, a double, and a home run in a game against Philadelphia, the New York Post saluted him: “He ain’t what he used to be, that’s for sure, but Jackie Robinson can still make the wheels go ’round on occasion.” On April 23, Jack stole home on a triple steal, with Amoros and Hodges, in a game against the Pirates that Brooklyn won by one run. In April, he hit .368; in May, .345; in June, .351. Then his season changed. In July, he hit only .211, and struggled as almost never before. In August he recovered, to bat .342. Then he slumped again, even as an assortment of injuries to his legs, ankles, and heels limited his at-bats. Ending the season above .300, he nevertheless drove in far fewer runs and stole far fewer bases than ever before in his career.

  But for Jack, his growing notoriety was the main disappointment. Early in June, one of the most serious incidents of his career, at least as it affected his image in the white press and among fans, left him upset. With the Dodgers in Milwaukee to play the Braves, a bitter rivalry enveloped the two teams, not least of all because of a succession of Brooklyn wins in County Stadium. In the current series, one maniacal fan had been caught with a mirror trying to blind Russ Meyer, now a Brooklyn pitcher. Fans drenched Dodger fielders with paper cups full of beer, which was cheap in Milwaukee; the rival pitchers, especially Lew Burdette of the Braves, seemed on the brink of a beaning war.

  On June 2, in the bottom of the fourth inning, an apparent counting error by umpire Lee Ballanfant gave a Brave hitter, Johnny Logan, first base on three balls. Jeered mercilessly from the Dodger dugout, an irritated Ballanfant ordered the bench cleared. In the top of the fifth, with Milwaukee ahead 6–2 and rain apparently about to end the game, Robinson, up to bat, felt free to taunt Ballanfant. “Can I get a walk on three balls the way Logan did?” he inquired sweetly. “Get in there and hit,” Ballanfant said, “or get out of the game.” When Robinson continued his needling, Ballanfant ejected him. Disgusted, Jack turned away and headed for the bench. Near the dugout, he flipped his bat forward, aiming for the dugout; but the bat, slippery and wet from the rain, carried into the stands, where it fell among Milwaukee fans.

  Widely reported, the incident triggered a bitter reaction by white fans across the country, although Ballanfant himself assured the league office that Robinson had not acted deliberately or even in anger. According to initial reports, the bat injured no one. (However, almost a year later, on May 11, 1955, an enterprising couple filed a $40,000 damage suit in Federal Court against Jack and the Dodgers claiming that they each had suffered a brain concussion, nasty headaches, abrasions, and cuts after being struck by the bat.) Thereafter, throughout the summer, Jack was booed and jeered at every ballpark he visited; he became what Sport magazine later that year called “the most savagely booed, intensively criticized, ruthlessly libeled player in the game.” According to Sport, “his every appearance on the field was greeted by a storm of boos, by cat-calls, by name-calling. No matter how hard others might applaud in order to balance the scales, Jackie’s ears were filled with the roar of the crowd getting ‘on’ him, giving it to him, needling him, insulting him.”

  Eventually, Jack would try to give his side of the story in a three-part article called “Now I Know Why They Boo Me,” in Look magazine early in 1955. This was his own provocative attempt to match Milton Gross’s sympathetic essay “Why They Boo Jackie Robinson,” published the previous February in Sport.

  Early in August, Jack found himself in another fracas. This one came after his teammate Clem Labine knocked down the Braves’ Joe Adcock with a ball to the head. In retaliation, the Braves’ Gene Conley floored Robinson with a pitch that hit him; Jack then got into a confrontation with the Braves’ third baseman Eddie Mathews. Again, while several players were involved, the harshest glare fell on Robinson, with the Milwaukee radio announcer Earle Gillespie hotly denouncing him as “an agitator.” This was a damaging remark, with overtones of Communist influence, for which Gillespie later apologized to Robinson privately; according to Jack, he “told me he was ‘emotionally upset,’ didn’t know what he was talking about.” (The blow from Conley marked the sixty-sixth time Jack had been hit by a pitch in the major leagues. “If that’s a record,” he said later, “I’m not proud of it.”)

  In Jack’s battles, he could expect little support from Walter Alston. Their regard for one another, deteriorating through the season, hit bottom with an incident at Wrigley Field in Chicago. In a game against the Cubs, Duke Snider hit a ball that carried to the left-field bleachers, into the hands of fans there, before falling onto the turf. When the umpire ruled the hit a double, Jack stormed from the dugout, screaming that Snider had hit a home run. He was on the field, protesting vigorously, when it dawned on him slowly that no other Dodger was backing him—neither his teammates in the dugout nor Alston, who stood impassively in the third-base coaching box. “Out there alone, with the fans riding me more every second,” Jack wrote, “I felt foolish. I wanted to find a hole and crawl into it. The Chicago players in the dugout were enjoying my predicament. One held up his hands to show that the ball had cleared the wall by two feet. If the umpire saw the signal, they gave no sign. I was ignored and they waved the game on.” The next day, a photograph showed that Robinson was right; Snider had indeed hit a home run. When a contemptuous crack by Robinson about Alston “standing out there at third base like a wooden Indian” reached the Dodgers manager, the rift between the two men widened.

  To many people, Robinson had no tender side worth noting. And yet the same Milwaukee stadium that witnessed the bat-throwing incident also saw the start that year of a warm relationship, entirely unpublicized, between Jack and an eight-year-old boy who brought little to their exchange beyond his hero worship of the ballplayer. The boy was Ronnie Rabinovitz, the adopted son of David Rabinovitz, an attorney and Democratic Party supporter from Sheboygan, Wisconsin. On his father’s office stationery, he had written a fan letter to Robinson, who agreed to meet him if he should ever come to see the Dodgers play in Milwaukee, about fifty miles away. Outside the dugout after a game in the spring of 1954, as his father watched, the boy effusively greeted Robinson: “Hey Jackie, I’m Ronnie Rabinovitz. Remember me?” “Sure,” Jack replied quickly. “I got your letter.” Startled, David Rabinovitz gently objected. “You must get thousands of letters,” he said. “You don’t have to pretend you remember the one from my son.” “I do,” Jack responded. “It was the one that was on lawyer’s stationery.”

  Thereafter, Ronnie and his father regularly attended Dodger games in County Stadium, with seats near the visitors’ dugout and visits with Jack; less frequently, they met at public dinners, and once, as a grown man, Ron lunched with Robinson in Manhattan. Starting in 1954, also, Jack and Ronnie corresponded with one another, with Jack sending the youngster around twenty letters. Sometimes these letters touched on civil rights and politics, usually with light jabs at the Democrats (David Rabinovitz, an ardent supporter of John and Bobby Kennedy, was rewarded with a federal judgeship in Wisconsin). Mainly Jack wrote about what seemed important to his young friend—from Ronnie’s struggle to lose weight to the happy occasions of his bar mitzvah and his graduation from high school. Underneath was a serious aspect; Jack knew that having accepted the boy’s trust, he was now morally obliged to him. Once, Jack summed up for Ronnie, as simply and eloquently as he ever did, his own fundamental view of life. “I learned a long time ago that a person must be true to himself if he is to succeed,” Jack wrote. “He must be willing to stand by his principles even at the possible loss of prestige. He must first learn to live with himself before he can hope to live with others. I have been fortunate. God has been good to me and I intend to work as hard as I can to repay all the things people have done for me.”

  This relationship, conducted away from the public eye, boosted Rabinovitz’s confidence but also helped, if in a modest way, to sustain and reinforce Jack’s own sense of self, his idealism and capaci
ty for human sympathy, which many people did not want to see or would not acknowledge, or was obscured in the heat and dust of competition. To Rabinovitz, the core of their friendship was not its improbability but its solid, concrete nature. “The main thing,” he said about Robinson, “is that he was a real man. He was an important big hero in my life and yet he had time to talk to a kid. He had time to visit. I don’t know what it was. But right away he liked me and I liked him.” In 1972, he would write to Rachel, who knew nothing of the correspondence, about the impact of Jack’s courtesy: “I learned from Jackie the true meaning of being a man. I learned how cruel and full of hate some people are to others. I learned never to back down on a cause you truly believe in.… I will always cherish those memories and recall the friendship between a man and a boy.”

  This friendship was part of Jack’s lifelong attraction to young people; but his kindness was not limited to youngsters. The writer Roger Kahn would tell of Robinson’s immediate show of concern for a young journalist—probably Kahn himself—out of a job when his newspaper suddenly folded, and Jack’s care in arranging for the man to be offered some work. Robinson was sensitive again in telephoning Kahn’s wife immediately after he found out that she had suffered a miscarriage. “I hope my bringing this up doesn’t upset you,” he told her, “but I just want you to know that I’m sorry.” “That was a particularly sensitive thing to say,” she told her husband. “It was a lovely way to say something that I know must have been very hard for him to say at all.”