Free Branch Rickey by Jimmy Breslin

long trip with the team. He doesn’t even look at him. Finally, he says. “ ‘Whatchu want, boy?’ ”
    â€œA seat.”
    â€œ ‘Didn’t you see a sign at the door says no animals allowed in here?’ He turns his back on you. What do you do now, Jack Robinson?”
    â€œGo someplace else to eat, I guess.”
    Rickey said, “They’ll throw at your head.”
    â€œThey’ve been throwing at my head for a long time.”
    Rickey growled. “I’m a player who runs right into you and gets knocked down. I’m getting up and I only see your black face. You knocked me down, you dirty black sonofabitch.” Rickey stepped up and threw a fist, a broken baseball catcher’s right hand. It just missed grazing Robinson’s cheek.
    â€œWhat do you do now?”
    â€œMister Rickey, do you want a ballplayer who is afraid to fight back?”
    â€œI said I want a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back. You’ve got to win this thing with hitting and throwing and fielding ground balls. Nothing else!”
    Sukeforth remembered Rickey shivering with tension as he shouted, “We’re in the World Series. I’m at first. It’s a key part of the game. You are going to throw to first for a double play. And I come into you. You don’t give ground. Here are my spikes. You still don’t move. You jab that ball into me. I hear the umpire shout, ‘Out!’ And I see your black face. You dirty black son of a bitch!”
    The right hand came at Robinson’s face again. He did not move. “His eyes had a lot of sparks in them, I can tell you that,” Sukeforth recalled later.
    â€œWhat do you do?” Rickey asked again.
    â€œMister Rickey, I’ve got two cheeks.”
    It was after lunch, and the afternoon crowd of businessmen was walking by 215 Montague without hearing a murmur of the thunderous American history unfolding nearby. Upstairs, a black man was being signed to a Brooklyn baseball contract that assigned him to the Montreal team of the International League. He would get a signing bonus of $3,500 and a salary of $600 a month. Done.
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    â€œFirst meeting,” Branch Rickey began one afternoon when asked what he remembered about this, “lasted about four hours. When he came to me, he came secretly. He came with the idea that he was going to join the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers, a colored entry in the so-called professional colored league . . . And he didn’t understand and it was hard for him to believe that day that I had meant for him to become ultimately a member of the Brooklyn club, the Dodgers.”
    Rickey’s plan was to ease Robinson into the league through the Dodgers’ farm team in Montreal, “which was a very handsomely acceptable place for the trial of a Negro,” he said later. “There is no prejudice in that country. And I knew that. And Brooklyn owned Montreal, and we placed him there on this optional agreement basis.
    â€œNow we had a manager who came from the South, Greenwood, Mississippi. Clay Hopper. Charming fella. Graduated Mississippi A&M. Really, a scholarly type. And fine . . . he was a cotton buyer or sorter working with a dozen other white men and a great number of Negro employees in Greenwood, Mississippi. He was a manager. He was a major league manager in my book . . . If I had a major league club, I wouldn’t hesitate to employ him. But this fella felt that his job and his standing and his self-respect was at stake. And I remember that day . . . this fella Robinson made a couple of great plays and I remarked about them and I turned to Hopper on the second one which was a test play, a slide on his belly to the left toward first playing second base he was. He stabbed the ball, kaleidoscopically changed it to the right, retired a front runner at second, and completed a double play from the shortstop to the pitcher. A tremendous play. A test play. A man can