Branch Rickey (7 page)

 

“He has to be playing somewhere,” Rickey told every scout who came through his office. “Where can we find him?” He went to everybody he knew in baseball at every level, old ballplayers, ministers with athletic fields behind their churches, teachers, old friends who knew a ballplayer when they saw one. He asked all his people to look for blacks. It was that simple. Out on some sandlot, a scout said, “Mister Rickey needs Negroes. I guess we go over the other side of town. That's where they all play.”

Branch Rickey read dispatches that came to him from the hundreds of sandlots and fields in the unknown neighborhoods where blacks played. Soon his desk had a stack of reports. One came under the name Robinson. But there were others, too—Campanella, Newcombe, Doby.

He asked his secretary to call Clyde Sukeforth. Now we are getting into it. Sukeforth was a scout who could go out for coffee and come back with a second baseman. Like Rickey, he was an old major league catcher, with Cincinnati and Brooklyn, which to Rickey meant Clyde could see the whole field. His playing days all but ended when he was out hunting in Ohio and birdshot from a misbehaving shotgun ruined his eyes. Yet in the end he could see through a stack of hay and look at a ballplayer on the field and make the decisive judgment on him. He could go beyond running and hitting and measure the character of the player. On a matter of supreme importance, Sukeforth would have the last look and all would hold their breath until he reported to Rickey. Sukeforth called him “Mister Rickey,” and the two never relied on each other as heavily as they did during this time.

Sukeforth was born in Washington, Maine. In his later years, he moved to Waldoboro, which was just over the town line. People in Waldoboro said, “He's from away.” He attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., a powerful institution the mention of which caused Rickey to grunt in approval. Georgetown! Jesuits! Sukeforth had the capacity to go off the baseball field and negotiate delicate matters.

Rickey said years later, of Robinson, “I think we know about his playing ability. I want to begin to know what he is like as a person. He is out of UCLA, an excellent, excellent institution of higher learning and a commissioned army officer. Sukeforth had the capacity to talk to such a man and report to us.”

As soon as Rickey read the report on Robinson, he told Sukeforth to find out about the court-martial. Word came back that it was about Robinson refusing to sit in the back of a bus in Fort Hood, Texas.

“He has spirit!” Rickey said with great enthusiasm when he learned the details. “I want you to see Jackie Robinson play shortstop,” he told Sukeforth. “He is with the Kansas City team in the Negro league. They are playing at Comiskey Park on the weekend. I want to know about his arm. He certainly is a prospect.”

Rickey, obsessed, made many phone calls about Robinson. Each time, some old guy on the other end of the line told him that, yes, Robinson could play in the major leagues. Rickey told Sukeforth, “George Sisler says he never saw anybody protect the plate with two strikes as well as Robinson can. Andy High thought he is the best bunter he ever saw. I want you to talk to him and see if he can come to Brooklyn with you. If he can't, tell him I would be glad to come out and see him.”

Clyde Sukeforth's business trip by train to Chicago was so much more than a search for a baseball player. He was not traveling merely to see a baseball player, even a great player, for even these are merely bodies that one day run fast and then run slow before fading into memory. Sukeforth took the train to Chicago and arrived at Comiskey Park on the night of August 24, 1945. He bought a box seat and a program for the Negro League game between the Lincoln Giants and the Kansas City Monarchs. The Kansas City team was coming out of the dugout, and Sukeforth tried to pick Robinson out by his uniform number but decided that the program was usually wrong because the players kept changing. He heard somebody say Robinson's name, and Sukeforth leaned over the rail of the box seat and called to the player.

Sukeforth said right away that he represented Branch Rickey, who was starting a black team. Robinson had soured on Kansas City and listened attentively, although not with great expectations. Then Sukeforth asked Robinson to show him his throwing arm. Robinson hesitated. He had tumbled onto his shoulder a few days before and the arm was still tender. Besides, why did Rickey really want to know about it?

Sukeforth said that Rickey wanted Robinson to come to Brooklyn, but if he couldn't, then Rickey would be pleased to come out to see him.

And with that, everything was different. Standing in the lights of a major league field, rented for the night by blacks, wearing the uniform of a team only blacks knew, Robinson felt a bolt of excitement. Whatever this was about, this fellow Sukeforth made it pleasant. Here was a white man who didn't seem to notice skin color. Robinson observed that Sukeforth spoke quietly when he said that Rickey would travel to see him. He could feel he was being told the truth.

Robinson said he would meet Sukeforth at his hotel, the Stevens, after the game. Sukeforth got to the hotel first and told the desk he was having a guest and then he tipped the elevator operator $2 so he wouldn't balk when a black man rode up. This was only one of the reasons Rickey trusted Sukeforth to handle this job.

Immediately, Sukeforth always said, he knew what he had on his hands. He had read a pound of paper on Robinson. It told of a man born in Cairo, Georgia, which at that time, the late 1910s, was just about the bottom of the country. His mother, Mallie, cleaned houses for white women. When her fifth child, Jackie, was born, she pushed her sharecropper husband to earn more than his $12 a month pay. He sure did. He also ran away.

The mother took her five children on a Jim Crow train to Pasadena, California. Nine days and nights with a baby in your lap and four others writhing about you. She was able to fit her family into a house on Pepper Street, where they were the only black family. The Northern big-city racism came down on them in rocks and screams.

Jackie Robinson came up moody and combative on the streets of Pasadena. The cops actively disliked him. He had a mouth.

An older brother, Mack Robinson, Jackie's hero, had a heart murmur, but he begged to be allowed to run in the 1936 Olympics. He finished second to Jesse Owens and came back from Berlin bitter about not winning. It did nothing to improve Jackie's disposition. Only a person of Branch Rickey's overwhelming personality could calm him.

When he got to schools his athletic ability made him golden. One day he won a broad jump in a meet and then he hitched a ride to the baseball field where he got two hits to win the game. In 1939 and 1940 he was at UCLA, running as a crack halfback who was on All-America lists, performing in front of crowds and being surrounded by admirers and reporters. Sukeforth knew that Robinson had played basketball and run track and was a name in both sports. His legend was already all over the papers on Clyde Sukeforth's lap.

Sukeforth's written report to the Dodgers office noted:

“I asked him why he was discharged from the army and a number of other questions for information we may need. It seemed an old football ankle injury had brought about his discharge but, as it proved, it did not bother him. I reasoned that, if he wasn't going to play for a week, this would be an ideal time to bring up coming to Brooklyn. I had him make a few stretches into the hole in his right and come up throwing. His moves looked good.”

Sukeforth had to see a player named Bobby Rhawn in Toledo on Sunday; no matter how important the first player is, you can't make an expensive trip just for one. He asked Robinson if they could meet there and ride the train together to New York. Robinson said yes. Because of his arm, he was taking a few days off from the Monarchs. Suddenly it was real. A magnet was drawing Robinson through the doors and toward a field of mowed grass whose sweetness could be smelled even here. On Sunday, Robinson was at the Toledo ballpark with a bag. Sukeforth bought two spaces in the same Pullman car. The ticket clerk saw a black with him and seemed ready to ask about it. Sukeforth spoke first in words that slapped—yes, they were traveling together.

One of the porters was an organizer for A. Philip Randolph's union of Sleeping Car Porters, which was threatening a major national demonstration over black jobs. He knew Robinson was a college football star. Would he come back in the morning to discuss the march? Robinson agreed, leaving Sukeforth to eat breakfast with the whites, and exciting the workers by telling them he was interested in big-league baseball.

In New York on Monday, Sukeforth went to the Bossert Hotel in Brooklyn and Robinson to the Hotel Theresa, the famous building on the corner of 125th and Seventh Avenue, the cornerstone of Harlem.

They met again at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, August 28, 1945, in front of 215 Montague Street in Brooklyn. It is a downtown business street that becomes a place of history. On Montague Street the clothes were seersucker and short sleeves, and bare arms in the August heat. This morning was to become one of the most vividly recalled of these years. All remembering starts with Clyde Sukeforth.

The Brooklyn Dodgers offices were on the corner of Court Street, wide and busy with cars, with the state and federal courts on the far side across from ten- and twelve-story buildings that hold every title guaranty, lawyer, mortgage broker, and insurance broker in the borough. Montague Street starts at Court Street and runs up a street of business offices in low buildings with restaurants on the ground floor. The street goes into a few blocks of the graceful two- and three-story brownstones of Brooklyn Heights. At the end, there is a walk looking over a harbor of glittering water, in the center of which is the Statue of Liberty, which still, today, no matter how many times you have looked at it, takes your breath away.

Sukeforth and Robinson went up to the fourth-floor offices of the Dodgers. The scout was there as third-base coach to history.

They entered Rickey's large office, which had a fish tank and a blackboard with the names in chalk of every member of the Dodgers organization, down to infielders in Olean, New York, Class D.

Rickey sat behind a large desk. Sukeforth said, “Mister Rickey, this is Jack Roosevelt Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs. I think he is the Brooklyn kind of player.”

Rickey put down his cigar and stood up and shook hands. He then sat, and Robinson sat facing him. Off to the side was Sukeforth.

Rickey stared at Robinson.

And stared.

Robinson stared back.

Their eyes cast across a moat of deep silence.

The lawyer in Rickey took over.

“Do you have a contract?”

“No, players only work game by game in the Negro League.”

“Do you have anything written or in conversation that ties you to Kansas City?”

“None.”

“Do you have a girl?” Rickey asked.

“I think so.”

“What do you mean, ‘I think so'?”

“Baseball keeps me away so much that I don't know if she's still waiting for me.”

“Do you love her?”

“I love her very much.”

“Marry her.”

He told Robinson that baseball was a hard life and a player had best have a strong home life. Rickey now had the cigar waving, the eyebrows coming together, the eyes piercing even more than before.

“Do you know why we brought you here?”

Robinson said he understood it was for some new Negro baseball team or league.

“No,” Rickey told him. “That is not why we went to Chicago for you. You were brought here, Jack Robinson, to play for the Brooklyn organization. We see you starting in Montreal.”

Robinson became numb. “Montreal?”

“If you can make it, which everybody says you can. If you make good there, then we'll try you with the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

There was more silence. Good, Sukeforth remembered thinking. This puts it where it should be. Everybody knows Robinson's color. We want them talking only about his ability. Sukeforth could think and figure in the silence. Robinson was in clean shock.

Rickey was waving his cigar. With a wave of a cigar he could cure the wound of a lifetime. He was sure of Robinson's baseball ability. He had a pile of reports on Robinson by the most famous scouts, men who could look through a sandlot's dust and see a World Series player. Now Rickey had to learn about the rest. Robinson could control a bat and hit behind a runner. But could he control himself under insults and even assaults and put the attackers to shame? That Sukeforth brought him here said much about his character. But Rickey needed to know even more. It would be easier not to attempt this, he thought.

Robinson couldn't open his mouth. Suddenly, Rickey thumped the desk. “I want to win. I want ballplayers who can win for us. Are you one of them? Do you think you can win for us?”