Word: rickey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lightskinned, straight-haired Negro. A few Mexicans, Cubans and strongly suntanned whites who have played for other big-league clubs have been widely believed (but never proved) to be Negroes. Last week, after three years and $25,000 worth of scouting the Negro leagues, Branch ("The Brain") Rickey called in reporters-not to make a confession but to tell the world that Brooklyn had signed Jack Roosevelt Robinson, a Negro shortstop...
Minor League Commissioner Bill Bramham exploded: "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." Ex-Star Rogers Hornsby put his finger on a sore spot: "Ball players on the road live [close] together. It won't work." Most baseball men, after an initial blush, realized that it could and perhaps would work (it had worked pretty well in college sports...
...outlines of the Robinson story are, of course, familiar even to many a non-baseball fan, given the event's enormous symbolic importance. The exhaustive search by Branch Rickey, the Dodger president, for the "right" player to be the first to break baseball's color barrier; the extreme secrecy in which he shrouded his plans; the abuse Robinson had to suffer during his first years in the league--these themes have become cultural common knowledge in the wake of the wild publicity that accompanied him throughout his spectacular 1950s career. But Tygiel, a San Francisco State history professor, is able...
Tygiel has interviewed dozens of participants in the drama and read voluminous newspaper accounts, and the effort shows. The relations between Rickey and Robinson, for example, so often portrayed as a paternalistic one, is showed to be for more complicated with Robinson more assertive than commonly believed. Tygiel depicts the complex web of loyalty and apprehension that bound Robinson to his white teammates, and how subsequence the slow crumbling of resistance to integration, as Rickey's experiment gained momentum. And he goes beyond the main themes of his story--noting, for example, the devastating effect that integration...
...those who can recall it from personal experience and those less fortunate who remember it only from the worn pages of the record books, is brought back to life. The roll-call of greats that parade through Tygiel's pages pay ample testament to the glory of those days: Rickey, Robinson, Reese, Durocher, Sukeforth, Campanella, Veeck, Mays, Aaron, Newcombe...At the very least, we are grateful to Tygiel for culling these names and others from scrapbooks and long-destroyed card collections. And at the most, Tygiel transforms a dramatic but simple tale into a complex metaphor for some...