Rickey & Robinson by Roger Kahn

Dodgers, mostly pitchers. Jack held the paddle facing downward, as some Chinese world-class players did, and no matter how hard or where I hit the little white ball, it came back harder and with a devilish spin. Robinson was totally concentrated, his face without expression. My ping-pong winning streak abruptly came to an end. “Now,” Robinson said, finally smiling and meeting my gaze, “would you like to take me on in gin rummy? For dough?” I declined.)
    On Durocher Field, Bostic approached peppery, toothy Harold Parrott, a former
Brooklyn Eagle
sports columnist, who was the Dodgers’ traveling secretary and publicist. Bostic said he intended to see Branch Rickey. “I want him to give these fellows here a tryout.”
    Spring training tends to be informal, but asking to see the president of a ball club without first having made an appointment was and is a stretch. (Seeing some executives, such as George Steinbrenner in his later years, was a stretch—even
with
an appointment. Baseball organizations generally are about as transparent as carbon.) Parrott told Bostic that Rickey was watching an intrasquad game on another diamond and said, “I’ll see if he’ll talk to you later.”
    After 15 minutes Parrott returned with one of Rickey’s assistants, an elderly front office aide named Bob Finch. “Mr. Rickey says to tell you that there is no bias in his organization,” Finch said, “but we won’t look at the players until we’ve set up workouts for them. That will take a little time. Now Mr. Rickey would like you and the ballplayers to be his guests for lunch.”
    In the dining room at the Bear Mountain Inn, Rickey told Bostic that personally he detested prejudice. Then, with great intensity, he repeated the story of Charles Thomas and the hotel in South Bend. Carried away by the memory, or by his own words, Rickey suddenly burst into tears. Embarrassed, Bostic focused on his roast beef. When Rickey recovered, he was not congenial.
    “Look,” he said. “You’re pretty cute.”
    “No, I’m not cute,” Bostic said. “I’m not concerned with being cute. I brought you two ballplayers.”
    “Yes,” Rickey said, “but if I give these men a tryout, you’ve got the greatest sports story of the century. And if I don’t give them a tryout, you’ve got the greatest sports story because it’s an absolute showdown. I don’t appreciate being backed into this kind of corner.”
    Rickey then agreed to look over McDuffie and Thomas a day later. He was true to his word, but apparently never forgave Bosticfor publicly pressuring him. According to Bostic, subsequently he found himself cut off from Dodger press releases, not invited to Dodger press conferences and unable to reach Dodger people by telephone. In an angry outburst Bostic said, “Rickey treated me as though I was a ‘fresh nigger.’”
    The tryout took place early on a Saturday afternoon, April 7. McDuffie and Thomas reported to the Dodger dressing room in the West Point Field House, where uniforms had been laid out for them. Jackie Robinson was
not
the first black to wear a Brooklyn Dodger uniform. That man was either Terris McDuffie or Showboat Thomas. (I have been unable to determine which one first finished lacing up his spikes.)
    It was a cold day and the tryout took place entirely in the field house. As he observed, Rickey was accompanied by two baseball men who had no racial prejudice: Dodgers manager Leo Durocher, later a surrogate father to Willie Mays, and Clyde Sukeforth, a onetime catcher from the village of Washington, Maine, who would later do extensive scouting work on Robinson.
    At Rickey’s direction the two athletes ran laps and then threw to one another. Sukeforth put on catching gear—the tools of ignorance, in the baseball phrase—and McDuffie began pitching. After a bit Rickey began calling pitches: curve, fastball, change. According to Bostic, Rickey “marveled at Mac’s control.”
    Thomas got three turns at bat, 30 swings,