The Boys of Summer (14 page)

“Wrong. You’re forgetting fucking spring training and play-offs and World Series. The number changes. It’s always, like I said, a lot. Now you’re gonna write the games most of the time.
Nothing you can do about that and it ain’t bad. But anytime, you hear me,
anytime
you can get your story off the game you got to do it. Because that’s unusual and people read unusual things. Fights. Bean balls. Whatever. Write them, not the game.”

“But most of the time you do write the games.”

“That’s right, and when you do, you forget the
Times.
They tell you the score, but your real fan knows the score already. When you got to write the game, the way you do it is: ‘In yesterday’s 3–2 Dodger victory, the most interesting thing that happened was …’ Get that? Someone stole two bases. Someone made a horseshit pitch. Dressen made a mistake. Whatever the hell. Not just the score. Tell ‘em fucking why or make them laugh. Hey. Gimme another bourbon.”

Into the heavy silence, I sent forth: “Young’s two rules of sportswriting.” What he had articulated among curses and assaults was his credo, and a man like Dick Young, who has been hurt by life and who lives behind rings of fortification, is pained on yielding up a credo. It is like a birth. As a laboring woman, he had cried out. Now to his splendid, terse analysis of his job and mine, I had said, in condescension, “Young’s two rules.”

“There’s a third rule, kid.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t be so fucking sure.”

“Hey, Dick. That’s goddamn good.”

“It isn’t mine.”

“What do you mean?”

“That rule was made by a
New York Times
sportswriter whose favorite lead—you know, about the blood—you were just making fun of.”

After Miami, the Dodgers rode chartered buses to Tampa, where the team played five exhibition games, then joined the Boston Braves, their foils for an agonizing, lucrative journey through the South. In 1952 apartheid flowered in what Stanley
Woodward called the American hookworm belt. Blacks attended separate schools, patronized separate restaurants, drank at separate water fountains, relieved themselves at separate urinals, watched baseball from separate sections of the grandstand, bought Cokes at separate soft-drink concessions and, at the end of the wearying way, were eulogized in black churches and interred in cemeteries for colored only. “We like our nigras,” said white people who described themselves as moderates. “They like us. We all like the way things are. Say, y’all oughta heah ‘em sing.”

That time seems simpler than today, but mostly because the past always seems simpler when its wars are done. Jackie Robinson was a focus. At big, dark Number 42, forces converged: white hatred for his black pride, for his prophetic defiance and simply for his color, contested with black hope, the same black hope which Southern whites said did not exist.
Man, a little music and some coins is all them pickaninnies want.

Before anything else, however, Robinson was used commercially. His visit to a Southern city stirred scuffles for reserved seats among whites. Black crowds lined up early on the morning of each game, struggling for places in the narrow colored section (reserved seats not available). When you barnstormed the South with the Robinson Dodgers, you always covered sold-out games. And if you were inclined toward economics, you realized that Jack was doing something other than reordering baseball. He was earning his annual salary, which never exceeded $40,000, before the season began.

We boarded Pullmans in St. Petersburg. The Dodgers and the Braves leased private cars and a roomette became one’s movable home. We all dozed on the Pullman sleepers, ate in the Pullman diners and drank in Pullman club cars. The players would shower in ball park clubhouses. Reporters shared the toilet next to a hotel press room, which the Dodgers rented in each town at a day rate of $6 or $8.

After winning an exhibition from Cincinnati in Tampa, the team thundered into the dining car at St. Petersburg. “Players first,” cried Lee Scott, the traveling secretary. He was a slight, fastidious man with a pencil-line mustache. “They worked hard. Let the workers eat first.”

Ignoring Scott, Young, who had worked hard, joined Carl Furillo. The two talked intensely over shrimp cocktail. At another table Robinson sat with Erskine. At a third Campanella ate beside Labine. Although I did not know it then, Robinson had ordered the blacks “spread out. Don’t sit together at one table. Mix it up. Eat with the white guys. You all sit at one table, you look like a spot.”

I obeyed Lee Scott and drank and read, and ate with a man from the New York
Post,
and went to bed, but not to sleep. Our train was a world (I thought) free and independent in the racist South. If you chose to draw the shades, you could pretend that there was no racist South. Certain older reporters did just that. Hell, a ball game was a ball game anywhere, wasn’t it? And afterward the club bought beer. Then there were cards. On a barnstorming trip you could play poker very late every night for two straight weeks. Other reporters, including Young, had seen the South before. They accepted apartheid with a brief, angry grunt, the way they accepted a cramped press box, or a sinewy steak. Hurtling due west, our train transversed the Florida panhandle. It was odd, I thought. We wrote about the games, the players and the prospects. But, here in a wounding land, no one would report or could report the horror all about—racism. It was legal, even controlled, to be sure, but outside my roomette window stirred nameless, unreasoning racial hate threatening then as it threatens now to shatter the country. I wish I could figure a way, I thought, punching at a tiny Pullman pillow, to get beyond the ball games and to get the real story into the paper.

There was a glue factory in Mobile, someone said. Whatever, the clear morning smelled. We rode taxis out of the railyards to the Admiral Semmes Hotel and breakfasts and showers. Fairly clean, at one o’clock I hailed a taxi along with Bill Roeder, a reserved, round-faced man of thirty, who composed airy pieces for the New York
World-Telegram.

“Ball park,” Roeder said.

“Hartwell Field?” the driver asked. He turned, showing a square face and spectacles.

“How many ball parks do you have?” Roeder said.

“Oh, we got plenty,” said the driver, starting the cab. “Say, you guys goin’ out to see the coal?” Roeder and I sat in separate silences. “We comin’ to where I grew up,” the driver said. He turned into a street of gnarled trees and clapboard homes. “Coal now. The coal is taking over. How do you like that? Where I grew up there’s all these fucking cannibals.”

“All right,” Roeder said.

“We got to stop these cannibals ‘fore they eat us. Gonna be a lotta cannibals out today, see that nigger Robinson.”

“Just drive, will you?” Roeder said.

“Does this happen all the time?” I said.

Roeder stared sullen out the window. After a while, a green wooden grandstand rose in front of us. “You get out,” Roeder said. “I’ll pay him.”

“Fucking niggers want to take over baseball, too,” said the driver.

“Go on ahead,” Roeder said. In a minute I heard the driver shout. Roeder had paid the meter but withheld a tip. That was our social protest, emancipation through nontipping. We’ll straighten out this country yet, I thought. And if we meet a kleagle, you know what? I’m not going to buy him a drink. Surely I
wanted
to protest, but I rejoiced in the luxury of sportswriting and, instead of ripping the meter out of the cab, or citing John Stuart Mill or doing something wise, I hurried
away from the taxi to see how Hartwell Field looked, and where the press box was, and whether Western Union facilities would be satisfactory.

Most of the old grandstand was reserved for whites. It was crowded, but not yet full. Two strips, at the end of each foul line, were open to blacks. The black humanity of Mobile stood and squatted and bent and sat wedged two to a seat.

Twenty minutes before game time workmen rigged ropes from the black sections to the outfield. Armed Mobile police and Alabama troopers took patrol positions. Then the cattle car of a stand was opened and the black mass spilled onto the field. The people ran. There was no reason to run. There was ample space for everyone behind the ropes. But they ran in jubilation and relief, and as they hurried, the black mass diffused and ceased to be a mass and became individual men and women who were running, and who wore bright red and yellow and green. Someone in a yellow shirt was limping. A woman was carrying a baby and leading a small boy. These were people and that was a hard thing to face, and rather than face it I asked Young what the ruling would be on balls hit into the black crowd.

“Double.”

“Getting a two-base hit in every inning.” In a needling little game we composed parodies of the hoary lead, “scoring in every inning.”

“Wordy,” Young said.

“Doubling in every inning.”

“Better.”

Jackie Robinson was the third man to bat. Vern Bickford’s first pitch to him broke wide, and when the scoreboard showed “ball one,” the blacks, who ringed the entire outfield, cheered in triumph. Robinson fouled the next pitch, hopping in an awkward follow-through. A roar went up from the whites. In the end, to a
tutti
of enthusiasm and disappointment, Robinson hit
a short fly to left. He played an unimportant role in this exhibition. Botn teams used other blacks. But to the crowd, Sam Jethroe and Roy Campanella were ball players who happened to be colored. Then there was Robinson, the threatening, glorious black.

“Does that bother you?” I asked at dusk, as our sealed train moved slowly on a single track among low pine trees.

“What?” Robinson said.

“That noise about everything you do and the way the fans get pushed around.”

“If I let
that
shit bother me,” he said without emotion, “I wouldn’t be here.”

“I mean—”

“Gotta play cards,” Robinson said.

But one way or another, Robinson always answered a question. At Pelican Field in New Orleans we began to chat while he threw with Pee Wee Reese along the third-base line. “Writers think I should thank them when they do a good story about me,” Robinson said, “but aren’t they just doing their job?”

“You get on a writer when he knocks you.”

“That’s right.” Robinson moved about as he caught. “If I think he’s wrong, I blast him. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Well …”

A cry rose from the stands and at once defined the scene. Robinson whirled. “Goddamnit no,” he shrieked. “Don’t cheer those goddamn bastards. Don’t cheer. Keep your fucking mouths shut.” A barrier was coming down at Pelican Field. One small section of unoccupied seats in the white section was being opened to blacks. White policemen had opened the gates and the blacks were cheering in joy.

“Stupid bastards,” Robinson screamed. “You got it coming. You’re only getting what’s coming. Don’t cheer those bastards, you stupid bastards. Take what you got coming. Don’t cheer.”

He threw down his glove and walked in a little circle.

“You come to catch, Jack?” Reese shouted.

“Shit,” Robinson said, and picked up his glove and resumed warming up.

In a minute he walked into the dugout and slumped down by himself. “I’m sure it doesn’t mean a damn, Jack,” I said, “but I just want you to know I think that racist shit is a disgrace.”

“Then write it.”

“I will.”

“You’ll be the first.”

“This must be hell,” I said to Jackie Robinson.

“Never been there.”

“I mean knowing that you can’t get off the train, that if we had to stop overnight in any one of these towns, you wouldn’t have a place to stay.”

“Are you kidding?” Robinson’s high voice grew shrill. “Any town down here, any one, I could be a guest of the most successful Negro family—the lawyer, the banker, the doctor. I could be their house guest. I’m not stuck like you. I don’t need any fucking salesmen’s hotel.”

Sportswriters reigned at the salesmen’s hotels. The Jeff Davis with its Urban Room in Montgomery. The Biltmore (“Lions Meet Here”) in hilly Nashville. And the Read House, where Broad and Chestnut intersect in Chattanooga (package store, meeting rooms, pets limited).

I found Chuck Dressen in a suite at the Read, sitting on a flowered sofa, sipping a Scotch and black cherry soda. It was almost noon. “I want to talk about pitching,” I said.

“Was you in an incubator?”

“No. Not that I know of.”

“Well, if a pitcher is a incubator baby, he can’t go nine. The incubator weakens ‘em. Ya didn’t know that, did you? College ain’t nothing in this business, kid. Ya wanna drink, kid, ya drink, doncha?”

“I’ve got to write.”

“It’s good to take one, ‘fore you write, ain’t it, Jake?”

A coach had been sitting at the rainy window. “Yep,” Jake Pitler said. He was fifty-eight, Jewish and retained, some said, primarily to absent himself on Yom Kippur, publicizing Dodger Semitism without hurting the starting line-up. Now Pitler moved quickly and made a Scotch and soda. “Ya oughta try it with black cherry, kid.”

“I’d better stick to just plain soda.”

“There’s tricks to this game,” Dressen said. “Ya can’t just worry about the next play. Ya gotta worry about two plays, or three.” Dressen was a short and thick-bodied man full of hypotheses and advice. He had been born in Decatur, Illinois, in 1898, the son of a railroad man, and played for the Staleys, the professional football team that evolved into the Chicago Bears, and after that major league baseball. By reputation he was a man of shrewdness, a master stealer of signs and a grand tactician. “You get blowed, kid?” he said.

“No. No. I don’t know anybody here.”

“Well, don’t do it. Don’t get yourself blowed. Getting blowed makes you sweat in hot weather. You can’t do the job, pitching or writin’ good stories, when it’s hot if you let them go down on you.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“And watch out for pickpockets, right, Jake?”

“Right, Chuck.”

“At the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, a pickpocket damn near got my dough. Now me, I got small nuts, but even so I felt his hand. I got small nuts but sensitive. Right, Jake? Whoop. Yep. Good-bye, Dolly Gray.” Dressen whistled and winked.