Word: rickeys
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...promote baseball's racial integration; of cancer; in Chicago. Early in 1945, Smith took Jackie Robinson and two other black players to open tryouts with the Boston Red Sox. When the Red Sox demurred, Smith stopped off in Brooklyn to report the incident to the Dodgers' Branch Rickey, who sent his own scouts out for a look and hired Robinson. Later, at the Chicago American as the first full-time black sportswriter on a major daily, Smith led a successful fight to desegregate baseball housing facilities in the South...
Carpetbagger. It was no small task for Robinson to don what Rickey described as an "armor of humility." As a track, basketball, football and baseball star at U C.L.A., he was a belligerent competitor who always prided himself on "reacting spiritedly when insulted or scorned." As a lieutenant in the Army, he had, in fact, been threatened with a court-martial for refusing to sit in the back of a bus. The toughest task of his career, he once recalled, was learning "to conquer and control myself...
...When Rickey startled the sports world in 1945 by announcing that Robinson would join the Dodgers farm team in Montreal, Minor League Commissioner W.G. Bramham called Rickey a "carpetbagger" and scoffed: "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." From retirement, Slugger Rogers Hornsby warned, "Ballplayers on the road live close together. It won't work." Bob Feller, the fireballing Cleveland Indians pitcher, thought he had a more reasonable reservation: "I can't foresee any future for Robinson in big league...
...spring training, the slurs continued. Once, after watching Robinson pull off a dazzling play in the field, Rickey exclaimed to Montreal Manager Clay Hopper, "That was a superhuman play!" Hopper, a Mississippian, drawled, "Mr. Rickey, do you really think a nigger's a human being?" Hopper was also doubtful about how well Robinson would fare against big-league pitching. Before one exhibition game, former Cincinnati Reds Pitcher Paul Derringer volunteered to help Hopper, an old friend, find out. "Tell you what I'm going to do, Clay," Derringer said. "I'm going to knock him down...
...First Rickey had to chew out some Southern members of the Dodgers, most notably Georgia-born Dixie Walker, for organizing a ban-the-black petition. Then National League President Ford Frick was forced to intercede with a tough play-or-else edict to put down a proposed boycott of the Dodgers by a group of St. Louis Cardinals. On the field, though, race-baiting continued unabated, most stridently and offensively by the Philadelphia Phillies and their manager Ben Chapman. Once, when Robinson seemed ready to storm the Philadelphia bench, Dodger Shortstop Pee Wee Reese, Jackie's closest friend...