Word: branch
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Jackie has never tried boxing, but Branch Rickey is convinced that Jackie would be sensational at it-or at any other sport he tried. In basketball, Jackie was the leading scorer of the Pacific Coast Conference for two years. He did not play tennis much, but the first time he played in the Negro National Tournament, he got to the semifinals. Baseball was the game he had played longest and liked least...
...long enough to play a game. The smart ones got aboard the bus early, rolled up their uniforms for a pillow, and slept in the aisle. "After two months of it, I was for quitting," says Jackie. "No future." He didn't know it, but all the time Branch Rickey was getting reports of Jackie's playing, and of his .340 batting average...
...Montreal had been won over, but that cut no ice in Flatbush. Branch Rickey, who knows his fellow citizens, set out to soften them up. He organized a group of Brooklyn's leading Negro citizens, including one judge, into a formal "how-to-handle-Robinson committee." In every other city in the National League, Rickey set up similar committees. The Brooklyn committee drew up a list of do's and don'ts a yard long; Jackie's deportment in public & private was to be supervised as thoroughly as Princess Elizabeth...
...Help at First. Branch Rickey's do's & don'ts strangely enough, did not include any instructions on how to play baseball. Although Jackie had played second base or shortstop all his life, he was handed a first-baseman's mitt and sent out to sink or swim at a new position -first base. Being right-handed was no help: first base is a left-hander's position. It is easier for a left-hander to throw from first to any other base, and easier to pick a man off the bag. Only...
Actually, Jackie at bat is most dangerous when the odds are against him. When the count gets to two strikes, as he explains it: "Then I begin to crowd the plate a little." Says Branch Rickey: "He is the best batter in the game with two strikes on him." Pitchers capitalize on his hasty swing by feeding him slow stuff. "I just can't hit those nuthin' pitches," Jackie complains. Because he is the best bunter in the game, the Dodgers "cut him loose" at the plate (i.e., let him decide for himself whether to take...