Branch Rickey by Jimmy Breslin Page A

for you during the season, I will be glad to do all I can do to help you.”
    Of the other white sports reporters in New York, none matched the bitterness of columnist Joe Williams of the World Telegram , a Scripps-Howard paper. He was out of Memphis, and it showed. By printing Williams’s tobacco road views, the publishers showed support for them. He never quit. In 1946 Williams wrote that Rickey deliberately lost the pennant race for the Dodgers by trading second baseman Billy Herman to the Boston Braves and postponing a championship until the next year, when Robinson’s arrival would make it “a Negro Triumph.” Then, a few years later, when Robinson was a fixture with the Dodgers, Williams wrote, “It might help Jackie Robinson if he remembered that he came into the majors as a ballplayer, not a symbol.”
    Robinson caused the gravest of all fears: what if this black man makes it and then there is another one after him and soon a third and fourth and more, then what will happen to our way of life, this national pastime, if these players take everything and the whites we applauded turned out not to be so great and wound up working in Southern gas stations? And what if our fans can’t stand sitting next to blacks and leave the ballparks and the game? Civilized society had to rely on outsiders who came out of alleys to call for beliefs and behaviors that were supposed to be American.
    The man Rickey needed so badly was just out of his reach. His name was Dave Egan and he wrote for the Boston Record , a Hearst tabloid. As early as the 1930s, he wrote things like, “The kings of baseball can bay to the moon and howl to the stars but there is no way for them to shuck off the fact that theirs is a sport that is no more national than the trolley to Brookline. How can you claim to represent the nation while you exclude anybody not of white caucasian extraction?”

CHAPTER NINE
    This is February of 1947, just weeks before the start of baseball season. Branch Rickey is walking into the Carlton Branch of the YMCA in Brooklyn to talk to thirty civic leaders, all men of color, about Robinson. Of the six points he had written down at the start of this grand experiment, he had achieved all but one: “the backing and thorough understanding from the Negro race, to avoid misrepresentation and abuse of the project.” Now he was setting to finish the job.
    He got up right away. “I’m not going to tell you what you hope to hear. Someone close to me said I didn’t have the guts to tell you what I wanted to do; that I didn’t have the courage to give it and that you people wouldn’t be able to take it. I believe all of us here tonight have the courage. I have a ballplayer named Jackie Robinson . . . on the Montreal team . . . He may stay there . . . He may be brought to Brooklyn. But if Jackie Robinson does come up to the Dodgers the biggest threat to his success—the one enemy most likely to ruin that success—is the Negro people themselves!
    â€œI say it as cruelly as I can to make you all realize and appreciate the weight of responsibility that is not only on me and my associates but on Negroes everywhere. For on the day Robinson enters the big league— if he does—every one of you will go out and form parades and welcoming committees. You’ll strut. You’ll wear badges. You’ll have Jackie Robinson Days and Jackie Robinson Nights. You’ll get drunk. You’ll fight. You’ll get arrested. You’ll wine and dine the player until he is fat and futile. You’ll symbolize his importance into a national comedy . . . and an ultimate tragedy—yes, tragedy!
    â€œFor let me tell you this. If any individual, group, or segment of Negro society uses the advancement of Jackie Robinson in baseball as a triumph of race over race, I will regret the day I ever signed him to a contract, and I will personally see that baseball is never so abused