Everything They Had (8 page)

In the postwar era America had to face the domestic consequences of its own wartime rhetoric. For the war had generated its own powerful propaganda, that of the democracies taking on two totalitarian powers, Germany and Japan, and in the case of Germany a racist, genocidal nation. But there were important domestic consequences to that. If America was the driving force of a new, more democratic world, then it was still a nation divided racially, not just in the South, where feudal laws imposed state-sanctioned legal and political racism, but in the North as well, its major professional sports events still lily white. In the courts a large number of cases trying to end the doctrine of separate but equal were working their way to the Supreme Court. But it would be the world of sports that became the most important postwar laboratory of racial change and where black Americans finally got their first true chance at showing their real talents. That their sports were segregated was singularly unjust, and no one knew this better than the professional baseball players themselves. For they often barnstormed with black players from the Negro League after the season, and they knew exactly how good the black ballplayers were, that only racial prejudice prevented them from playing.

Jackie Robinson, whose terrible responsibility it was to be the first, the man in the test tube, his abilities and conduct to be scrutinized by an entire nation—was nothing less than history's man. He was a superb athlete, strong, quick, and wildly competitive. He had been a four-sport star at UCLA before he played professional baseball, and he could probably have played professionally in three major sports. Before he entered the service in World War II, though professional basketball and football were still quite embryonic in the West, he played with semi-pro teams in both.

He brought with him a rare on-field and off-field intelligence, and exceptional mental discipline and toughness of mind, an ability to restrain himself despite extreme provocation (and control his hair-trigger temper). He resisted, as he promised he would, the temptation to lash back for a long time despite the constant taunts of fans and opposing players. “Mr. Rickey, what do you want?” he had asked the Brooklyn Dodger boss at their fateful first meeting. “Do you want a player with guts enough to fight back?” “I want a player,” Rickey had answered memorably, “with guts enough not to fight back.” He might rage inside, but he remained true to the challenge offered him by Rickey. Throughout his career, Robinson remained aware that the spotlight was always on him, and that the challenge to excel on field and behave with dignity off it was singular in his case. Few Americans were ever subjected to such relentless scrutiny in so public a manner; it is doubtful if any of his fellow citizens ever endured such relentless pressure with such sustained excellence.

If American society, in the oddly pious-but-shrewd incarnation of Branch Rickey, was looking for the perfect candidate to undergo so withering a test as being the first black to play in the major leagues, then it could not have done better than Jackie Robinson. He was intelligent, purposeful, resourceful, modern; he played at a brilliant level, and he did not back down when taunted racially. He was fast and strong: clothed in his loose-fitting baseball uniform, he did not look particularly powerful, but there is one photo from those days of him alongside Joe Louis, both men stripped to the waist, where Robinson looks every bit as muscled and powerful as the heavyweight champion. Above all, Robinson was nothing if not a man. Everything about him demanded respect. He had played in endless integrated games as a collegian, and he had no illusion, as many blacks less privileged might have, that white athletes were either smarter or had more natural talent than blacks. White people to him were not people you were supposed to shuffle around who had superior abilities; they were just people, people who because of their skin had gotten a better deal than blacks.

It was a great experiment, and it took place in 1947, seven years before
Brown v. Board of Education
. In a way, what Jackie Robinson did, performing in the most public arena in America, was every bit as important as that Supreme Court decision in 1954. His arrival in the big leagues had been the ultimate test of something that most Americans prided themselves on—the fairness of their country, that in this country the playing field was somehow supposed to be fair. In a way it was an experiment which put America itself at a crossroads between two powerful competing national impulses, one impulse reflecting the special darkness of racial prejudice and historic meanness of spirit which had begun with slavery, the other the impulse of idealism and optimism, that a true democracy offered the children of all American citizens a chance to exhibit their full talents and rise to their rightful place. What he was contesting was the worst myths of the past, for in the particular cruelty of the time, America had not merely barred blacks from its professional leagues, it had said it was barring them because they were unworthy. Yes, the rationale went in those days, they could run fast, but they lacked guts and heart, and they would fold in the late innings in big games, and, of course, by the way, they were lazy—everybody knew that.

By midseason the argument was over. Robinson was a great player—clearly on his way to becoming rookie of the year. He had brought life and speed and intensity to an otherwise more passive Dodger team. He was an American samurai, the baseball player as warrior, and the other Dodgers became more like him—they were with his arrival much more a warrior team that fought you all the time than they had ever been in the past, and they would remain that way for the duration of his career. As a player no one was more explosive. Pitchers in particular feared him once he was on the base paths because of his explosive initial burst of speed. Years later, the Yankees pitcher Vic Raschi, talking about how he had lost a 1–0 game in the 1949 World Series by giving up a hit to Gil Hodges, said that it was Robinson, bluffing a dash from third toward home, who had beaten him. “I had just never seen anything like him before, a human being who could go from a standing stop to full speed in one step. He did something to me that almost never happened. He broke my concentration, and I paid more attention to him than to Hodges. He beat me more than Hodges.”

If Robinson's stunning success against the myths of the past marked the first great breakthrough of the postwar era, then the second one was driven by technological change. It was the coming of network television and it started as a true national phenomenon roughly a decade after the end of the war. It inaugurated nothing less than another golden age in sports. For in truth the world of sports as the postwar era started actually had two golden ages ahead, both of them driven by technological breakthroughs, the first one wrought by the coming of network television which dramatically boosted football as a sport, especially the professional game, and the second some 25 years later with the coming of satellite transmission, which created the world of cable television and aided all sports, most particularly basketball.

It was the power of an instrument—the power of the camera—which now revolutionized American society. Nothing changed the culture and the habits of Americans more than the coming of television. Television had a kind of greenhouse effect on the society around it: What the camera liked grew and prospered beyond anyone's expectations (often growing too quickly and too large for its own good, of course); what the camera did not like just as quickly withered.

In particular, the camera liked professional football. What the camera caught and savored about football, which radio had always missed, was the speed of the sport, and, above all, the violence. For the camera more than anything else loved action. Football—fast, balletic, often brutal, with its bone-crushing hits—was made to order for the camera. Baseball, with its slow, leisurely pace, a sport which had its roots in an agrarian America where the pace of life was slower, had been perfect for radio, where an announcer could paint a gentle portrait and measure his cadence to the casual pace of the game.

Before the coming of television, professional football was, in comparison to baseball, virtually a minor league; it was a very good game, indeed a connoisseur's game, played by immensely talented athletes before passionate, diehard fans, but it had somehow never quite broken out of its rather narrow place in the sports spectrum. Radio revealed neither the talent nor the fury with which it was played. To the degree that ordinary sports fans committed their time to football on fall weekends—it was on Saturday when they could pick up a Notre Dame or Michigan game on the radio, not Sunday.

Sunday became in the new televised age the day which was set aside in the fall for American males. It introduced the pro game to a vast new audience, and the pro game began to enter the consciousness of average sports fans as never before. Very quickly in the mid- to late Fifties, as the country was wired nationally for television, pro football went on a dizzying rise to a point where it began to rival professional baseball as the national sport. In those days not that many people owned sets, and many young American males would agree to meet at a neighborhood bar to watch and eat and drink. The sense of a sport on the rise was obvious—and nowhere was that more obvious than in New York, where the football Giants began to become something new in pro football ranks, media celebrities. Football stars like Frank Gifford, movie-star handsome, were doing commercials (for very little money, mind you), and being welcomed as never before in bars like Toots Shor's, where baseball players, fighters and jockeys had held forth. The game was coming of age.

With the coming of network television professional football became a truly national game, with a national constituency. A fan did not have to live in Baltimore to be a Unitas or a Colts fan, or for that matter to live in New York to root for the Giants defense led by middle linebacker Sam Huff. Millions of sports fans who cared nothing about Pittsburgh, had never been to the University of Louisville, and had no intention of ever visiting Baltimore turned on their sets on Sunday to watch the daring exploits of a young quarterback from Pittsburgh who had gone to the University of Louisville and now played for the Baltimore Colts. The camera, it turned out, was quite dazzled by Johnny Unitas, the least likely, it would seem, of American media heroes.

In a way his career marked America in a cultural and economic transition. He grew up under the worst hardships inflicted on blue-collar America in the Depression and post-Depression years, living in a home which received almost no protections from the government, and yet he became one of the early celebrities under the gaze of a new and powerful medium which was going to change the nature of the economy and make part of the society infinitely more glitzy. He knew all too well an America which was tough and poor, and he was largely unmoved by his place in this new America which was more affluent and more celebrity oriented. Unlike Namath (and Ali), who came after him and understood intuitively that in the new sports world created by television, it was always both sport and show, he always thought it was merely sport. His values had been set in that earlier age. Yet Unitas became the first superstar of the new age, the signature player of an old sport amplified by a new and loving medium, the perfect working-class hero for a sport just beginning to leave its working-class roots behind.

To the degree that radio liked football, it loved offensive stars—quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers. But television was different, it had eyes for the defensive stars as well. Fans loved not only the long passes and the brilliant broken-field runs; they loved the savagery of clean hits. In this new era, living in the media capital of the world, Huff had become the first great national celebrity on defense. CBS did a documentary on him, “The Violent World of Sam Huff,” and
Time
magazine put him on the cover. Giants fans cheered more loudly when their defense came on the field than when the offense took over. “Our offensive unit was not highly regarded,” Kyle Rote remembered, years later. “When the offensive unit went out on the field, the defense shouted, ‘Get in there and hold them.'” Because of that new rivalries developed and flourished: If New York against Baltimore was not necessarily a historic rivalry, then that collision of the Colt offense against the Giant defense, a matchup perhaps without historic roots, was one the knowing fan could readily anticipate.

In 1958, in what was later called the greatest game ever played, Unitas led the Colts to victory in overtime in the championship game against the Giants. He did it with two spectacular long drives, one at the end of regulation, the other in the sudden-death overtime. It was a signature game. Ewbank, not known for his pregame inspirational speeches, really pushed his players before the game. “In 14 years,” defensive end Gino Marchetti said about pregame pep talks, “I heard 'em all. ‘Win for Mother,' ‘Win for Father,' … ‘Don't disappoint all those people watching on television.'” Sometimes, Marchetti said, “they even tried to tell you how to act: ‘Don't piss in the air with forty million people watching.' But that day Weeb really put it to us. He went up and down the roster, name by name: ‘Donovan, they got rid of you—too fat and slow … Ameche, Green Bay didn't want you.' Yeah, he named me, Unitas … he didn't miss anybody.”

On that December day the Colts, because of Unitas, were the favorites, and they took a 14–3 lead. At one point in the third quarter the Colts had a first down on the Giant three, and a chance to put the game away 21–3. But the Giants held and began to turn it around. They came back to take a 17–14 lead in the fourth quarter. With 1:56 on the clock, it was Unitas time. The Colts got the ball back on their 14. Unitas missed on his first two passes, and then he simply took over. He connected on four passes, three of them to Raymond Berry. When the drive was over, the Colts were comfortably poised for the tying field goal on the Giant 13. That drive and a comparable one in the overtime, when the Colts marched for the winning touchdown, were like works of art. “The man was a genius,” Huff said later. “I never saw a quarterback that good on those two drives.” The Colts were the winners, but when the game was over, the real winner was the game of football itself.