A Hard Out

Branch Rickey, the beefy, bushy-browed boss of the old Brooklyn Dodgers, was at his histrionic best. Scowling at the young black ballplayer seated in his office, he portrayed in turn a bigoted umpire deliberately making bad calls, a haughty railroad conductor pointing to the Jim Crow car, and a hostile waiter snarling, "Nigger, you can't eat here." "Suppose they throw at your head," Rickey demanded. "Suppose you're fielding a ground ball, and a white player charges into you and sneers, 'Next time get out of my way, you dirty black bastard.' What do you do then? Can you walk away from him?" Jack Roosevelt Robinson was puzzled. "Mr. Rickey," he said, "are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?" "On the contrary," said Rickey, "I'm looking for a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back. They'll taunt you, goad you. Anything to make you fight. Anything to bring about a race riot in the ballpark. If they succeed, they'll be able to prove that having a Negro in baseball doesn't work."

When Jackie Robinson died of a heart attack last week at 53, there were black baseball players, many of them top stars, on every team in the majors. Their very presence was a memorial to the man who 27 years ago agreed to take part in Rickey's "noble experiment" to break the color barrier in major league baseball.

Carpetbagger. It was no small task for Robinson to don what Rickey described as an "armor of humility." As a track, basketball, football and baseball star at U C.L.A., he was a belligerent competitor who always prided himself on "reacting spiritedly when insulted or scorned." As a lieutenant in the Army, he had, in fact, been threatened with a court-martial for refusing to sit in the back of a bus. The toughest task of his career, he once recalled, was learning "to conquer and control myself."

When Rickey startled the sports world in 1945 by announcing that Robinson would join the Dodgers farm team in Montreal, Minor League Commissioner W.G. Bramham called Rickey a "carpetbagger" and scoffed: "Father Divine will have to look to his laurels, for we can expect Rickey Temple to be in the course of construction in Harlem soon." From retirement, Slugger Rogers Hornsby warned, "Ballplayers on the road live close together. It won't work." Bob Feller, the fireballing Cleveland Indians pitcher, thought he had a more reasonable reservation: "I can't foresee any future for Robinson in big league baseball. He is tied up in the shoulders and couldn't hit an inside pitch to save his neck. If he were a white man, I doubt if they would even consider him as big league material."

At spring training, the slurs continued. Once, after watching Robinson pull off a dazzling play in the field, Rickey exclaimed to Montreal Manager Clay Hopper, "That was a superhuman play!" Hopper, a Mississippian, drawled, "Mr. Rickey, do you really think a nigger's a human being?" Hopper was also doubtful about how well Robinson would fare against big-league pitching. Before one exhibition game, former Cincinnati Reds Pitcher Paul Derringer volunteered to help Hopper, an old friend, find out. "Tell you what I'm going to do, Clay," Derringer said. "I'm going to knock him down a couple of times and see what makes him tick." The first time up, Robinson had to fall down to avoid a Derringer fast ball. Then Robinson got up and hit a single. Next time up Robinson again had to hit the dirt. Then he leaped up and hit a Derringer curve into left center for a triple. Turning toward the Montreal bench, Derringer hollered: "He'll do, Clay."

Hopper's bias toward Robinson soon turned to open admiration. In the season's first game, Robinson collected four hits, including a three-run homer, stole two bases and scored four runs. But the taunting cries of "Go home spook!" and "Kill the jungle bunny!" still echoed from the bleachers, both north and south of the Mason-Dixon line. During one game in Syracuse, the opposing team turned a black cat loose on the field, shouting that it was the "black boy's cousin." Robinson responded by drilling a double to left. In 1946, after leading the International League in hitting, with a .349 average, Robinson moved up to the big leagues--and bigger troubles.

First Rickey had to chew out some Southern members of the Dodgers, most notably Georgia-born Dixie Walker, for organizing a ban-the-black petition. Then National League President Ford Frick was forced to intercede with a tough play-or-else edict to put down a proposed boycott of the Dodgers by a group of St. Louis Cardinals. On the field, though, race-baiting continued unabated, most stridently and offensively by the Philadelphia Phillies and their manager Ben Chapman. Once, when Robinson seemed ready to storm the Philadelphia bench, Dodger Shortstop Pee Wee Reese, Jackie's closest friend on the team, silenced Chapman by challenging him to "take on somebody who can fight back."

The bigotry that was characteristic of so many big league ballplayers was expressed in other, more painful ways. In the field, Robinson was frequently spiked; at bat, he had the dubious distinction of being hit by beanballing pitchers more times than any other player in the league. Through it all, though, he kept his temper and helped lead the Dodgers to the 1947 pennant with a team-high batting average of .297. He quieted his critics with a display of clutch hitting, bunting, slick fielding and flashy base running that won him Rookie-of-the-Year honors. In one poll at season's end, he was runner-up to Bing Crosby as the most popular man in America. Though his batting average* through ten seasons with the Dodgers was a formidable .311, Robinson is perhaps best remembered for his daring, pigeon-toed base running. The consummate artful Dodger, his long, dancing leads and false breaks on the base paths worried more than one pitcher into committing a balk or a wild pitch. He also made a specialty of the game's most thrilling play; before he retired from baseball in 1956, Jackie had stolen home eleven times, a feat that has not been equaled since.

Robinson, who lived with his wife Rae on an estate in Stamford, Conn., spent his last years as a well-to-do businessman (banking, insurance, construction, food franchising), a conspicuous Republican-turned-Democrat and a tireless, outspoken champion of civil rights and rehabilitation programs for drug addicts. (The eldest of his three children, Jack Jr., a reformed heroin addict, was killed in an auto accident last year.)

Though slowed in recent years by a heart condition, arthritis and a case of diabetes that left him blind in one eye, Robinson was never without a cause. When the World Series opened in Cincinnati this month, he was presented with a plaque commemorating the 25th anniversary of his arrival in the big leagues. "I am extremely proud and pleased," he said, "but I will be more pleased the day I can look over at third base and see a black man as manager." Among the hundreds of eulogies for Robbie last week, the simplest and perhaps most telling was delivered by Yogi Berra, the former Yankee catcher who played against Robinson in six World Series. "He was," said Yogi, "a hard out."

* Which reached a career high of .342 in 1949, the year he was named the National League's Most Valuable Player.

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