It is easy to forget, in the debate over the stadium, the men who play in these stadiums, and what they represent to us. Jackie Robinson played in Brooklyn, but represented all New Yorkers. This profile is by Thomas Evers McMorrow, from his upcoming book, Newsreel.
I Remember Jackie Robinson
In 1949 the Dodgers' offices were reached via an antique elevator in a musty old office building at 215 Montague Street in downtown Brooklyn . The camera crew and I rode up in that elevator that January day to record Jackie Robinson's signing of his contract for the coming season. Present to perform the ritual for our newsreel were the two most important men in baseball history, in their special way, Jackie and that figure of myth and legend, Branch Rickey.
Rickey was the game's preeminent sage, a coiner of phrases – “Luck is the residue of design” – with the requisite beetle brows and a courtly manner that would have made him eminently castable as a preacher, a homey country doctor or a distinguished politician, had the acting game rather than hardball had been his choice of a calling.
Back in the 1920's his far-sightedness had created baseball's first farm system for the St. Louis Cardinals, setting up minor league teams where young players could be developed over years in organizations ranging all the way from Class D to AAA. After he had made perennial winners of the Cardinals, he moved to Brooklyn and did the same thing for the Dodgers.
A further tribute to his genius was his choosing of Jackie Robinson to be the first black man to play in Organized Baseball. This was not your ordinary athlete by any means. For one thing, as a graduate of UCLA he was better educated than most of the white players who had reviled him when he first took the field with the Dodgers. During that season he had had the character to take the most vicious abuse they had to offer, to prove that it was not going to drive him out.
That first day I met him, in the Dodger offices, we filmed his contract- signing twice, once in the head-on wide-angle shot of him and Rickey sitting at the desk, then they gave him another blank contract, and we shot with the camera looking over his shoulder so you could read his name as he signed it. This was not of course the real contract, just a reenactment for the newsreel, using blank standard major league contract forms they provided for us.
After the over-the shoulder shot, we were wrapped up, and a Dodger official crumpled up the dummy contract and threw it away. But I still had the first one. I had slipped it into an inside pocket and took it home as a souvenir to show off to my friends.
Years later, writing about the episode, I went looking for it – couldn't find it. Questioned my wife, was indignantly rebuffed: a devoted Brooklyn Dodger fan, would she have thrown Jackie Robinson's autograph away? I am still looking for it, and if I find it I will frame that historically significant signature and display it proudly.
It's shameful that some black players today don't even know who Jackie Robinson was. What he faced for them was terrifying. As a teenager in Washington , D.C. , I had seen a graphic demonstration of what a wise man has called “the snake in our brains,” race hatred. The Washington Senators had a stockily built Cuban outfielder, Roberto Estalella, whom the rednecks among the players branded as a “Nigger” trying to sneak into the majors under false pretenses.
One day at Griffith Stadium I saw a pitcher hit him in the head with a fastball. The ball struck Roberto squarely on the skull, above his left temple, where it might have killed him, with a crack you could hear in the upper stand, and rebounded about ten feet up into the air in a lazy arc before plopping to the ground.
Roberto lay there for a long time without moving as the trainer, Bucky Harris the manager and the team doctor bent over him, and he was finally taken off on a stretcher.
Nobody rushed the mound to attack the pitcher, there was no raucous demonstration from the stands and no beanball war ensued. What I recall is everybody being somber and quiet, and applauding the senseless body as it was carried off. I believe he was gone from the majors shortly thereafter. That was the world in the 1930's, and it seemed it could never be different.
Of course there was a reason why Jackie wasn't beaned that way the first week he was in the league: he was not a humble little guy from Cuba . He was a famous American athlete, and the whole nation was watching. Terrorists don't like sunlight.
Years later when I was assembling film for a documentary on college football, I was looking at an old College All-Star game when suddenly there was Jackie Robinson of UCLA, with that unmistakable loose-jointed run of his, bursting into the clear and running for a touchdown. He had the body of a halfback, the quickness and grace of a basketball star and the speed of a track team dash man, all of which of course he was.
And when he spoke, in his somewhat high-pitched tones, it was with the voice of an All-American California kid. Had you not seen his handsome dark face, the speaker could have been a blond, blue-eyed Santa Monica surfer.
When I introduced myself to him, my hand was engulfed in his large handshake, and I'm a tall guy. They all have that big hand, as I found over my years in the business, shaking hands with perhaps a hundred great athletes
I got to know Jackie better than the other ballplayers, because besides being a superstar he was the most socially significant player of them all, and I saw him not just at the ballpark. We did stories on him at his home in Stamford , Connecticut , with him, his wife Rachel and their little son, and they were a gracious couple I'm proud to have known.
It was a great loss to America when Jackie Robinson died young. You might say he was our greatest standard-bearer for fair play.
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