Everything They Had (18 page)

It was as if Weiss was trying to withhold not merely Raschi's money but his dignity as well. Weiss had the real leverage, and that made their struggles all the more unfair. Weiss never looked him in the eye but, instead, he looked down on the floor or out the window or off to the side, and he would say after an exceptionally successful season, “Prove to me why you deserve a raise.”

Raschi, more than almost anyone else on those teams, stood his ground. After all, he was a winning, starting dependable pitcher for a great team, and starting pitchers were always hard to come by. His only alternative would be a decision to retire, and in this case it was a real possibility. He was just proud enough to do that.

At the end of the negotiations, when Weiss magnanimously agreed to grant a $5,000 raise as a reward for a 19- or 20-game season, he would close the meeting by turning to Raschi and saying his last words of the afternoon: “Don't have a losing season.” Those words would hang in the air for weeks and months for what they were: a threat.

Weiss seemed to Raschi and his teammates like a man with a very long memory for slights, and Raschi had a feeling that the moment he showed any sign of slipping as a player, Weiss would turn the screws on him, and he would be gone. The top salary he made after all those great seasons and those five pennants was $40,000, and it had been a war to get even that much.

In 1953, still bothered by injuries, he slipped slightly, winning 13 and losing 6 and starting only 26 games instead of his usual 33 or 34. Raschi, who was 34, had a sense that the end was near.

When he received his contract from Weiss, it called for a 25 percent pay cut. He sent it back, unsigned, with a note to Weiss, saying he had made a cripple of himself in the Yankees' cause. That winter, the Yankees sold him to the Cardinals. They did not notify him personally, and he learned of the deal only though newsmen. One called Raschi at his home. Raschi, proud to the end, said in what was a virtual epitaph for baseball management of that entire era, “Mr. George Weiss has a very short memory.”

My appointment with Mr. Theodore Williams of the Islamorada, Fla., Williams family had been agreed on well in advance, though we had not yet talked to each other. That is normal in matters of this gravity, and our earlier arrangements had been conducted through intermediaries.

My representative had been Mr. Robert M. Knight of Bloomington, Ind., who, in addition to being my occasional appointments secretary, is coach to the Indiana University basketball team. Mr. Knight, on occasion, has had troubles with members of the press himself, and was almost as celebrated as Mr. Williams in this regard.

It had taken no small amount of time to win over Mr. Knight's good opinion, for somewhat early in our relationship I had failed him on a serious literary point. Mr. Knight, unbeknown to many, is a literary man and I would not be amiss if I referred to him as a kind of literary executor for Mr. Williams. On that earlier occasion, he had quizzed me on my qualifications to write about Mr. Williams.

I had done reasonably well until the final question. Mr. Knight had asked me to quote the best-known sentence of John Updike's famous
New Yorker
piece on Mr. Williams. I had not known, and Mr. Knight had, with no small measure of disdain, pointed out that it said, “Gods do not answer letters.”

Still, I had gradually managed to win my way back into Mr. Knight's good favor, and the fact that someone such as Mr. Knight recommended me as a worthy reporter-historian to Mr. Williams had weighed heavily in my favor.

Mr. Williams was reported to have said that if Mr. Knight gave his goddamn approval, why that was goddamn good enough for Mr. Williams.

I arrived well in advance at the motel where Mr. Williams would call on me, and I was told he would come by at eight the next morning to summon me to our meeting. The motel itself was not exactly memorable. Simpler America, vintage 1950s southern Florida, I would say, if architecture were my specialty, which it is not. But I do remember that the cost of it for the night was roughly what the cost of orange juice is at a hotel in the city in which I live, New York.

At exactly 8 o'clock in the morning there was an extremely loud knock on my door. I answered it, and there was Mr. Williams, and he looked me over critically and then announced, “You look just like your goddamn pictures.” So, I might add, does Mr. Williams. He has reached his 70s, admirably tanned and handsome and boyish. He seems not to have aged, though he no longer, as he did in his playing days, looks undernourished.

Mr. Williams took me to his house and granted me that agreed-upon interview. The interview with Mr. Williams, who is enthusiastic about whatever he undertakes, was exceptional. Not only did he answer my questions with great candor, but he also managed to give me several demonstrations of correct batting procedures.

He emphasized that I should goddamn well swing slightly up since the mound was higher than the plate. Referring to his close friend Mr. Robert Doerr, of the Junction City, Ore., Doerrs, with whom he has been negotiating on this point for 50 years, he said, “I still can't get that goddamn Bobby Doerr to understand it.”

His advice was helpful, particularly since I, like him, bat left-handed, and for a moment I wondered whether with coaching like this, I might make a belated attempt at a career as a designated hitter. I was a mere 54 at the time.

I found Mr. Williams on the whole to be joyous and warmhearted. He had opinions on almost everything, and it was clear that he had loved playing professional baseball and had stayed in touch with a large number of his teammates, which is unusual for a professional player, 30 or 40 years after his career is over.

Mr. Williams also sought to advise me about political developments in Salvador and Nicaragua. There seemed to be a considerable difference in our opinions on how best to bring a measure of happiness to those two countries, but Mr. Williams did not hold against me my lack of enthusiasm for greater military involvement.

Late in our meeting, Mr. Williams found out that I was a fisherman. It was not information I had volunteered readily since I was afraid that if he found me inadequately skilled with a fly rod, his judgment of me as a writer and interviewer would decline accordingly and he might even report back unfavorably to Mr. Knight.

The interview took up most of the day, and that night Mr. Williams and his lady friend Lou took me to dinner. It was a wonderful dinner, and Mr. Williams paid for us. We had been together 12 hours and he was everything I had always hoped he would be. I considered it to be one of the happiest days in my life.

He was history's man. Nothing less. Though he came to the nation disguised as a mere baseball player, he was, arguably, the single most important American of that first post-war decade. It was not just that he was the first black to play our one showcased national sport, nor that he did it with so dazzling a combination of fire and ice, that he was in truth the black Cobb. What made him so important was the particular moment when he arrived and the fact that he stood at the exact intersection of two powerful and completely contradictory American impulses, one the impulse of darkness and prejudice, the other the impulse of idealism and optimism, the belief in the possibility of true advancement for all Americans in this democratic and meritocratic society.

It is easy now, a half century after Jackie Robinson first played for the Dodgers, when we live in an age of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, and Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith and Frank Thomas and Bobby Bonds and countless other brilliant black athletes to forget the ethos which existed in America of the 1940s, just before Robinson broke in with the Dodgers. There was a special cruelty to it: for this society not only blocked black athletes from competing on a level playing field, and it did not merely prevent them from gaining their rightful and just rewards from their God-given athletic talents. We as a country were worse than that: we discriminated against blacks, prevented them from playing, and having done that, we denigrated them and said that the reason that they could not play in our great arenas with our best whites athletes, was because they were not good enough.

We defined elemental fairness. We denied them entry to our greatest and most revered arenas, and having done that, we said that the fault was theirs, that they, the they being Negroes (though that was not the word which was used, of course), did not deserve to play with our great whites because they were not good enough. They were, we said, too lazy. We also said of them that they were gutless, and would not in critical situations show the requisite grittiness and toughness demanded of big league ball players. And having said both those things, and having denied almost all blacks in the country any kind of parity of education in those years, we also said that they were not smart enough to play our big-time sports. The only thing they could do—this was self-evident from track meets—was run fast. The issue of courage was particularly pernicious: even if they seemed to have enough natural talent, we said, they would fold under the pressure of big games. Having said this, and it was, I assure you, passed on as a kind of folk gospel at the bar of a thousand saloons, and on the sandlots of a thousand small towns and cities, we denied them any chance to give the lie to words so uniquely ugly, and indeed un-American. Their athletic bell curve was, so to speak, not as good as ours. This, by the way, was not just said in the South, where the reasons for blocking any progress by black people was obvious; rather it was said all over the country. That was one part of the ethos of the time.

The other completely contradictory impulse was that of elemental American fairness. It is critical to our national sense of self-identity that we believe that we are above all, a fair and just society where every child has as much right to prosper as any other child. The greatest and most obvious arena where this could be proved was, of course, sports. We had as a nation always thought of sports as a place where American democracy proved its own validity and where generation after generation of new immigrants showed their worthiness as Americans by prospering first here before they went on to excel in other fields. We as a nation had, for example, on the eve of World War II, taken special pride in the success of the DiMaggio family of San Francisco, that the three children of the immigrant fishermen had made it to the big leagues, and that one of them, Joseph, was the greatest player of his era. That proved that American democracy worked. There was, sadly, only one ethnic group excluded from that exclusionary vision right up until 1947.

Therefore Jackie Robinson's timing in 1947 was impeccable. It was the perfect moment to create a broader, more inclusive definition of American democracy. For it took place right after the victory over Nazi Germany and authoritarian Japan in a great war which was viewed in this country because of the intensity of our domestic propaganda, as nothing less than a victory of democracies over totalitarian states, of good over evil. It had been a war about elemental justice. A generation of young Americans who had gone off to fight in that war returned more determined than ever to make this country whole in terms of justice and fairness. The kind of discrimination which had been practiced against native-born black Americans up until then was no longer feasible. At stake was the most elementary American concept of fairness, in this most democratic of venues, sports. In American folk mythology, a rich kid who had a fancy uniform and an expensive glove still had to prove, when he tried out for a team, that he was a better player than some poor kid from the wrong side of town who did not even own a glove. Now that basic concept of fairness was about to be applied along a racial divide as it never had been before.

It was the conflict between these two conflicting concepts of which Jackie Robinson became the sole arbiter. To most citizens of the country, particularly younger Americans, anxious that their country be as fair and just as it claimed it was, Robinson's debut was more than an athletic performance; rather it was like a political work in progress, an ongoing exercise in the possibilities of American democracy. When he finally arrived in this most open and public of arenas, not only was the whole country watching, but Robinson was performing in an area where success was stunningly easy to calibrate—every school boy could if he wanted, measure the ability of this man. Nothing could be hidden. We are not talking about some great medical school accepting one black student covertly and the rest of the country thereupon not being able to chart that student's progress. Rather we are talking about the perfect arena for so great an experiment. Rarely therefore has one good man given the lie to so much historic ugliness. Branch Rickey had picked well: Robinson was not just a gifted athlete, he was a gifted human being, proud, strong, disciplined, courageous. Robinson did not merely integrate baseball, he did not merely show that blacks could play baseball, and football and basketball, as well as whites could, he helped put the end to arguments in other fields. When the Supreme Court ruled on Brown seven years later, and when Martin Luther King came along in Montgomery eight years later (and when Lt. Colin Luther Powell entered the United States Army eleven years later), the deed was essentially already done. Most of the country was ready in no small part to give blacks a chance in other venues, because Robinson and those who had come immediately after him, like Mays and Aaron, had shown in the most final and compelling way, that if blacks were given an equal opportunity, they were more than worthy of it. The argument was over. One vision of America, a cruel and self evidently crippling one, had mercifully come to an end in 1947, and another, infinitely more optimistic, had been greatly strengthened.