I Never Had It Made (9 page)

 

Ben Chapman, who during his career with the Yankees was frequently involved in unpleasant incidents with fans who charged him with shouting anti-Semitic remarks at them from the ball field, seems to be up to his old trick of stirring up racial trouble. During the recent series between the Phils and the Dodgers, Chapman and three of his players poured a stream of abuse at Jackie Robinson. Jackie, with admirable restraint, ignored the guttersnipe language coming from the Phils dugout, thus stamping himself as the only gentleman among those involved in the incident.

The black press did a real job of letting its readers know about the race baiting which had taken place. The publicity in the press built so much anti-Chapman public feeling that the Philadelphia club decided steps must be taken to counteract it. Chapman met with representatives of the black press to try to explain his behavior. The Phillies public relations people insisted, as Ben Chapman did, that he was not anti-Negro. Chapman himself used an interesting line of defense in speaking with black reporters. Didn't they want me to become a big-time big leaguer? Well, so did he and his players. When they played exhibitions with the Yanks, they razzed DiMaggio as “the Wop,” Chapman explained. When they came up against the Cards, Whitey Kurowski was called “the Polack.” Riding opposition players was the Phils' style of baseball. The Phils could give it out and they could take it. Was I a weakling who couldn't take it? Well, if I wasn't a weakling, then I shouldn't expect special treatment. After all, Chapman said, all is forgotten after a ball game ends.

The press, black and white, didn't buy that argument. They said so. Commissioner Happy Chandler wasn't having any either. His office warned the Phils to keep racial baiting out of the dugout bench jockeying.

A fascinating development of the nastiness with the Phils was the attitude of Mr. Rickey and the reaction of my Brooklyn teammates. Mr. Rickey knew, better than most people, that Chapman's racial prejudice was deeper than he admitted. Bob Carpenter, the Phils' president, had phoned Rickey before game time to try to persuade him not to include me in the lineup. If I played, Carpenter threatened, his team would refuse to play. Mr. Rickey's response was that this would be fine with him. The Dodgers would then take all three games by default. The Dodgers' president wasn't angry with Chapman or his players. As a matter of fact, in later years, Mr. Rickey commented, “Chapman did more than anybody to unite the Dodgers. When he poured out that string of unconscionable abuse, he solidified and unified thirty men, not one of whom was willing to sit by and see someone kick around a man who had his hands tied behind his back—Chapman made Jackie a real member of the Dodgers.”

Privately, at the time, I thought Mr. Rickey was carrying his “gratitude” to Chapman a little too far when he asked me to appear in public with Chapman. The Phillies manager was genuinely in trouble as a result of all the publicity on the racial razzing. Mr. Rickey thought it would be gracious and generous if I posed for a picture shaking hands with Chapman. The idea was also promoted by the baseball commissioner. I was somewhat sold—but not altogether—on the concept that a display of such harmony would be “good for the game.” I have to admit, though, that having my picture taken with this man was one of the most difficult things I had to make myself do.

There were times, after I had bowed to humiliations like shaking hands with Chapman, when deep depression and speculation as to whether it was all worthwhile would seize me. Often, when I was in this kind of mood, something positive would happen to give me new strength. Sometimes the positive development would come in response to a negative one. This was exactly what happened when a clever sports editor exposed a plot that was brewing among the St. Louis Cardinals. The plan was set to be executed on May 9, 1947, when Brooklyn was to visit St. Louis for the first game of the season between the two clubs. The Cards were planning to pull a last-minute protest strike against my playing in the game. If successful, the plan could have had a chain reaction throughout the baseball world—with other players agreeing to unite in a strong bid to keep baseball white. Stanley Woodward, sports editor of the New York
Herald Tribune,
had learned of the plot and printed an exclusive scoop exposing it. Ford Frick reacted immediately and notified the Cardinal players in no uncertain terms that they would not be permitted to get away with a strike.

“If you do this you will be suspended from the league,” Frick warned. “You will find that the friends you think you have in the press box will not support you, that you will be outcasts. I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do it will encounter quick retribution. They will be suspended and I don't care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America, and one citizen has as much right to play as another.

“The National League,” Frick continued, “will go down the line with Robinson whatever the consequence. You will find if you go through with your intention that you have been guilty of complete madness.”

The hot light of publicity about the plot and the forthright hard line that Frick laid down to the plotters helped to avert what could have been a disaster for integration of baseball. Many writers and baseball personalities credited Woodward with significant service to baseball and to sportsmanship.

While some positive things were happening, there were others that were negative. Hate mail arrived daily, but it didn't bother me nearly as much as the threat mail. The threat mail included orders to me to get out of the game or be killed, threats to assault Rachel, to kidnap Jackie, Jr. Although none of the threats materialized, I was quite alarmed. Mr. Rickey, early in May, decided to turn some of the letters over to the police.

That same spring the Benjamin Franklin Hotel in Philadel-phia, where my teammates were quartered, refused to accommodate me. The Phillies heckled me a second time, mixing up race baiting with childish remarks and gestures that coincided with the threats that had been made. Some of those grown men sat in the dugout and pointed bats at me and made machine-gunlike noises. It was an incredibly childish display of bad will.

I was helped over these crises by the courage and decency of a teammate who could easily have been my enemy rather than my friend. Pee Wee Reese, the successful Dodger shortstop, was one of the most highly respected players in the major leagues. When I first joined the club, I was aware that there might well be a real reluctance on Reese's part to accept me as a teammate. He was from Ekron, Kentucky. Furthermore, it had been rumored that I might take over Reese's position on the team. Mischief-makers seeking to create trouble between us had tried to agitate Reese into regarding me as a threat—a black one at that. But Reese, from the time I joined Brooklyn, had demonstrated a totally fair attitude.

Reese told a sportswriter, some months after I became a Dodger, “When I first met Robinson in spring training, I figured, well, let me give this guy a chance. It may be he's just as good as I am. Frankly, I don't think I'd stand up under the kind of thing he's been subjected to as well as he has.”

Reese's tolerant attitude of withholding judgment to see if I would make it was translated into positive support soon after we became teammates. In Boston during a period when the heckling pressure seemed unbearable, some of the Boston players began to heckle Reese. They were riding him about being a Southerner and playing ball with a black man. Pee Wee didn't answer them. Without a glance in their direction, he left his position and walked over to me. He put his hand on my shoulder and began talking to me. His words weren't important. I don't even remember what he said. It was the gesture of comradeship and support that counted. As he stood talking with me with a friendly arm around my shoulder, he was saying loud and clear, “Yell. Heckle. Do anything you want. We came here to play baseball.”

The jeering stopped, and a close and lasting friendship began between Reese and me. We were able, not only to help each other and our team in private as well as public situations, but to talk about racial prejudices and misunderstanding.

At the same time Mr. Rickey told me that when my teammates began to rally to my cause, we could consider the battle half won; he had also said that one of my roughest burdens would be the experience of being lonely in the midst of a group—my teammates. They would be my teammates on the field. But back in the locker rooms, I would know the strain and pressure of being a stranger in a crowd of guys who were friendly among themselves but uncertain about how to treat me. Some of them would resent me but would cover the resentment with aloofness or just a minimum amount of courtesy. Others genuinely wouldn't know how to be friendly with me. Some would even feel I preferred to be off in a corner and left out. After the games were over, my teammates had normal social lives with their wives, their girls, and each other. When I traveled, during those early days, unless Wendell Smith or some other black sportswriter happened to be going along, I sat by myself while the other guys chatted and laughed and played cards. I remember vividly a rare occasion when I was invited to join a poker game. One of the participants was a Georgia guy, Hugh Casey, the relief pitcher. Casey's luck wasn't too good during the game, and at one point he addressed a remark directly to me that caused a horrified silence.

“You know what I used to do down in Georgia when I ran into bad luck?” he said. “I used to go out and find me the biggest, blackest nigger woman I could find and rub her teats to change my luck.”

I don't believe there was a man in that game, including me, who thought that I could take that. I had to force back my anger. I had the memory of Mr. Rickey's words about looking for a man “with guts enough not to fight back.” Finally, I made myself turn to the dealer and told him to deal the cards.

Traveling had its problems but being at home with Rachel and little Jackie was great even if our living conditions left something to be desired. If we had been living away from our home base, the club would have found some type of separate living arrangement for us. But in the excitement of converting me into a Dodger, no one seemed to have given a thought to our accommodations. We were living—three of us—in one room in the McAlpin Hotel in midtown Manhattan. It was miserable for Rae. In that one room that seemed constantly overrun with newsmen, she had to fix the baby's formula, change his diapers, bathe him, and do all the things mothers do for small babies. We had no relatives in New York and no one to turn to for babysitting. Rae brought our son out to the ball park for the first game I played with the Dodgers. She was determined not to miss that game. Never having lived in the East, she brought little Jackie dressed in a coat which, in California, would have been a winter coat. He would not have been able to stand the cold, dressed as he was, if Roy Campanella's mother-in-law hadn't kept him with her under her fur coat. Rae warmed bottles at a hot dog stand. At four and a half months, Jackie began what was to be the story of his young life—growing up in the ball park. He came to many games with his mother, and when he was old enough, he became very popular with some of the Dodger players who would keep him on their laps and play with him.

Before the season ended, we did manage to escape from the hotel. We found a place in Brooklyn where there was a small sleeping room for little Jackie, a bedroom, and use of a kitchen for us. We had no place to entertain the few friends we were making, but it certainly beat living in the hotel and we were grateful.

We were glad, too, that we could see some tangible results from our sacrifices. Not only were the other black players on the Dodger team winning acceptance, but other teams started to follow Mr. Rickey's example. Larry Doby became the first black player in the American League, signing on with the Cleveland Indians, and Willard Brown and Henry Thompson had been hired by the St. Louis Browns.

The Dodgers won the pennant that year, and when our club came home in September from a swing across the West, we were joyfully received by our fans. Their enthusiasm for me was so great that I once went into a phone booth to call Rae and was trapped in that phone booth by admirers who let up only when policemen arrived on the scene to liberate me.

Getting a hero's welcome in September made me remember how bad the beginning of my first season with the Dodgers had been. At that time I still wasn't looking like any kind of winner, even though the increasing acceptance of my teammates had begun to help me out of a terrible slump. I seriously wondered if I could ever make the Rickey experiment a success. Both Manager Burt Shotton and Mr. Rickey believed I would eventually come through. Clyde Sukeforth with his quiet confidence helped as much as anybody else.

During the season I was under even greater pressure than in my Montreal days. It was there that I had earned a reputation for stealing bases, and the pressure eased when I began stealing them again. Late in June, in a night game at Pittsburgh, with the score tied 2-2 I kept a careful eye on pitcher Fitz Ostermueller. I noticed he had become a little careless and relaxed. I began dancing off third base. Ostermueller paid me the insult of winding up, ignoring my movements as antics. The pitch was a ball. Easing open my lead off third, I made a bold dash for home plate and slid in safe. That put us in the lead 3-2. It was the winning run of the game. As I ran I heard the exhilarating noise that is the best reward a player can get. The roar of the crowd.

After I made that comeback, I think Mr. Rickey was as happy as I was. He said to some friends at the time, “Wait! You haven't seen Robinson in action yet—not really. You may not have seen him at his best this year at all, or even next year. He's still in his shell. When he comes out for good, he'll be compared to Ty Cobb.”