Word: rickeys
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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...
...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...
...counterman goes to a sink by the pay phone to wash his hands, and the man with the crossbite drinks down the rest of his cup. It is now 4:15--time to leave the Tasty--so the other customer finishes off his lime rickey, pays his bill, and walks out the door...