Word: rickey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, in 1954. Jackie Robinson boarded a plane with an umpire who had known him since 1946 when Robinson was a rookie in the International League, playing for the Brooklyn Dodger's Montreal Royals farm club. The previous year, 1945, Robinson had met with Branch Rickey, then the Dodgers' general manager, who had told him of his intention to vault a black man across major league baseball's color bar and into a Brooklyn Dodger uniform and of his selection of Robinson as the man to do it. In that meeting, Rickey had also told Robinson that baseballs...
...knew every taunt, dig, threat and underhand device of the bigots." Robinson once said of Rickey. "He shouted their damnable curses at me, then pulled up sharply. 'Can you take it?"' Rickey asked him. "'Can you take it without fighting back...
...told Rickey he would, and for three years, he did. Sublimating all of the anger the taunts and threats and accumulating indignities fired within him into his performance on the field, Jackie Robinson walked quietly but carried a very big stick...
...runs scored. The following year, brought up to Brooklyn, he led the Dodgers to the National League pennant, despite the fact that many of his teammates had been so opposed to the idea of playing with a black that at the beginning of the season they had jointly petitioned Rickey to trade them if he was going to play Robinson. However, by the end of the season, the attitude of these players towards Robinson had changed substantially. As one of them, Bobby Bragan, recalls: "Sure, there were five or six of us who resented Robinson's joining the team...
FAVORITE DRINK: Big Green Rickey (a jigger of Creme de menthe spinach juice a time an olive and an immature grasshopper...