Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) (2 page)

Winkles had already heard from the major-league scouts who watched me in high school that I had really good tools, and he said in his southern drawl, “Well, come over here and take some batting practice.” I still had my football gear on at the time. I was wearing a pair of Riddell football shoes, had my football pants on still, my shoulder pads and shirt. I was still wearing my helmet. But he said, “Take some batting practice,” so I just took off my shoulder pads, set my football helmet down, put on a baseball helmet, and started swinging. After a couple pop-ups and grounders, I started hitting line drives and fly balls over the fence.

Bobby Winkles said, “Would you like to try out for the team?” And I said, “I would love to”—and thought of course of my $5 payday. It also meant I got to miss Frank Kush’s spring football practice, which was a big plus!

I played on the freshman team, and everything went fine. We had ten games, all of them at home or within a day-trip away. The next year, in the spring of 1966, I was on the varsity. We played a fifty-game schedule and traveled around the Western Athletic Conference to the states in that region. The team had decided to have a vote, to see who would room with me when they traveled. I had to wait outside. When I look back on that, it just made me feel so small, so insignificant.
I don’t know how many people actually objected to me, but it was a different thing for the team, having a black player, even in 1966—nineteen years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major-league baseball.

It never went to a vote, because the captain of the team, Jan Kleinman, said, “I’ll room with Reggie, no worries.”

Jan and I are friends to this day, and we got along very well. Later, after he went to play in the Phillies’ organization, I roomed with a country kid from Kansas named Glenn Smith, and we had a blast together. Glenn was just a real salt-of-the-earth person with a great midwestern twang who went on to play in the Minnesota Twins’ system for a few years. He used to call me a “yearling”—said I ran fast like a yearling deer—and we had some great times together.

We ended up having eight players from that squad who were drafted by major-league teams, and four of them made it to the show: Al Schmelz and Duffy Dyer, who played with the Mets, and Rick Monday, who was the top prospect in the country, and Sal Bando—both guys I would play a lot of games with as a professional with the Oakland Athletics.

I did well, I led the team in everything. I got along great with Bobby Winkles. He really treated me like a son. He helped break me of some bad habits, helped kick some of that chip off my shoulder I had then. He ran me to death, taught me to play up to my potential. He taught me discipline and sacrifice—on and off the field.

It was Bobby Winkles who taught me to hustle
all
the time. He taught me to control my emotions, learn the right way to play the game. Don’t throw your bat and helmet when you strike out. Keep learning and getting the best of your ability. Be more responsible. He helped start me on the road to becoming an adult.

It also helped that I was in great shape. They still used to tell baseball players in those days, don’t lift weights too much, you’ll get muscle-bound, you’ll get too tight. But I was already a football player, so I knew about working out, I went to weight-lifting classes, and I was pretty muscular and thick. I believe weight training in football helped me in baseball.

At Arizona State, because it was a great baseball school, the major-league scouts were all over the place. I was considered the number
one draft pick in the country. Danny Murtaugh, who would manage the Pittsburgh Pirates to two world championships, was taking some time off for his health, scouting amateur players for the Pirates, and he came to see me play. He was asked, “What do you think about this year’s draft?” and he said, “It’s a pretty good crop of players. But there’s this kid at Arizona State who’s built like a blacksmith. And his name is Reggie Jackson. He’s head and shoulders above everyone else.”

You can imagine how excited I was when I read that in the
Arizona Republic
. Danny Murtaugh! At the time the Pirates had an amazing lineup: Willie Stargell, Donn Clendenon, Matty Alou, the great Roberto Clemente. “
The Lumber Company
.” I would’ve loved to have played with those guys, but Murtaugh didn’t think there was any way the Pirates would ever get to me in the draft, that I’d be taken first by some team with a higher draft pick.

The team that had the first pick in the draft that year? The New York Mets. They had never finished out of last place, so they had the first pick, and everyone figured they would pick me.

I think about that sometimes. If I had gone to the Mets then, my career would’ve been in New York from the very start. I would’ve been coming up just as that team was finally improving. They had all those great arms: Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Jon Matlack, Nolan Ryan, Tug McGraw. Oh, boy! They had Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee in the outfield, Jerry Grote behind the plate. A little later they acquired Rusty Staub and Felix Millan, brought up John Milner. They brought back Willie Mays—I could’ve learned so much if I’d got to play with him, my boyhood idol.

As it was, they would win two pennants and a World Series. Add me, and who knows what the Mets would have done? I played against them with the A’s in the 1973 World Series, and I was the MVP. We won in seven, and I drove in half the runs in the last two games. Maybe they could’ve won that Series if they’d had a guy who could hit thirty home runs and drive in a hundred. Maybe they would’ve pushed across a couple more pennants if I were there with all those other great players. Oh, well … and, oh, that pitching.

It would’ve meant that I would have been in New York about a decade earlier than I was. But with the Mets, that would’ve meant
playing with very different personalities. It would’ve meant playing for Gil Hodges, who nobody ever said a bad word about and who played with all those great black players on the old Brooklyn Dodgers. It would’ve meant playing for Yogi Berra, who got along well with everyone. Unlike Billy Martin, Yogi didn’t need to be the star all the time. He already was the star; he didn’t need to prove it to anybody. Tom Seaver and I were always friendly; he introduced me to my agent Matt Merola in 1969.

It’s intriguing to think about. I think it would’ve gone very well.

But then, a day or two before the draft, Bobby Winkles sat me down and told me, “You’re probably not gonna be the number one pick.” He said, “You’re dating a Mexican girl, and the Mets think you will be a problem. They think you’ll be a social problem because you are dating out of your race.”

“
Wow, really?
” I said.

I didn’t know what he was talking about. I said, “Well, she’s Mexican, and I’m part Latino, so what’s that?” My father’s mother was from a little town outside San Juan, Puerto Rico. I mean, my
middle name
is Martinez. And he said, “No, you’re colored, and they don’t want that. It may hurt your draft.” I told him, “Everyone says that I’m the best.” And he said, “Yes, but the Mets think you’re gonna maybe cause a problem, socially.” I said, “But I think we’re gonna get married.” Her name was Juanita Campos.

But that didn’t matter. It turned out Bobby Winkles was right. I heard it was Bob Scheffing, who was the Mets’ director of player development then—the same guy who traded Nolan Ryan a few years later, after Scheffing became general manager. He saw to it they drafted a guy named Steve Chilcott, a high school catcher who would become one of only two first picks in history to retire without ever playing a single game in the majors.

Scheffing denied it later, said there was nothing racial about it. Then he tried to blame it on Casey Stengel, who was about seventy-five years old at the time and doing some scouting for the team. Can you believe that? I couldn’t. I know I never saw Casey Stengel when I was being scouted—and how could you be in a ballpark and not know if Casey Stengel was there?

Ten years later, when I was a free agent, the Mets
still
didn’t even try to sign me. After the free-agent draft, Bob Scheffing told a reporter from the St. Petersburg
Evening Independent
, “Jackson wasn’t the best ballplayer available, Joe Rudi was. Jackson was the best press-agent around.” He said I was “a pleasure to talk to” but that I was “not an outstanding offensive ballplayer.”

This was the sort of thing that put that chip on my shoulder, when I was a young man. It had a lot to do with what went on with the Yankees, when I finally did get to New York.

It’s hard for many people to understand what a different place the world was when I was young. And it’s hard for them to understand the ways in which it still hasn’t changed.

I wasn’t raised in the Deep South. I grew up in Pennsylvania, in a nice town outside Philadelphia called Wyncote. I was in a nice neighborhood; the people were nice. The neighbors were wonderful. But it was 95 percent white. Not far away, across the Mason-Dixon Line, there were regular Ku Klux Klan meetings that went on in Maryland, maybe sixty to eighty miles from my home. There were certain towns down there where you didn’t go.

Pennsylvania was considered the North. But there were often reminders that color was a social issue, and I was colored. I went to a white school, and being black, you were a second-class citizen. The
n
-word was overheard from time to time. Socially, in those days, the world was different. You weren’t allowed to (or, it was
preferred
you didn’t) swim in the community pool in Glenside if you were colored. You weren’t allowed to go to the country club in Elkins Park and play golf, because you were colored!

The parents of a lot of kids I knew didn’t want me to play with them. I was in Glenside one day and was riding a buddy of mine’s bicycle back to my house. I had been hanging out with him all day, and rather than make me walk the two or three miles back home, he lent me his bike. On the way home, I got maybe a mile, and his step-dad saw me. I can still remember he was driving a ’57 yellow Chevy,
with a Continental kit. And when he saw me, he stopped that beautiful car, and then he stopped me. He made me get off his stepson’s bike and walk it back to his house
—walk it back!

How’s that for a memory? I don’t know if I felt embarrassed, small, humiliated … I don’t know how I felt, except bad. I knew exactly what was going on. He did not want a colored kid riding his son’s bicycle, and we were best friends. I know the guy—my friend—to this day. Still a great guy, and one of my longtime elementary school, junior high, high school buddies. I’m sure it broke his heart, just as it broke mine. We were thirteen, fourteen, and we didn’t know what to say. I just felt like the sole of a shoe.

Call it a petty humiliation, but there was nothing “petty” about it. “Mountainous” would be a better word. Those humiliations become scars. They become wounds—and then they get opened up again, on another day. And then before the scab heals, someone else opens it up. You wind up getting in a fight with someone because of something else you’ve had on your mind for two years.

And dating—there was a girl in our neighborhood, her name was Helen S. She was cute, and we wanted to be friends. We were, you know, thirteen, fourteen, but her parents wouldn’t allow it. Because I was colored. There was another girl in high school, a few years later, named Sandy H. I had a friend, George Beck, a white guy. He had a ’55 Chevy and I had a ’55 Chevy, so he would pick her up at her house when it was light out. Then, when I drove her home, I’d have to hold the interior light button down with my hand when I dropped her off, so the inside of the car would stay dark and her parents couldn’t see who it was. Then she could get out in the dark and run in the door.

Meanwhile, things were going on all around us. You know, I was thirteen years old when they held the first sit-in at the Woolworth’s counter in 1960. Negroes weren’t allowed to vote in much of the United States until 1965—we were still physically kept from voting when I was already in college! All that stuff that went on, all the murders in the South, the burning of the churches, the murder of Martin Luther King—that all went on when I was a teenager or in my early twenties.

It’s hard to get across to some people—what that does to you. Many think of it as ancient history: “Oh, my gosh, that was so terrible.
Forty years ago, I can’t believe it! That’s the way it was? My, my, what a terrible thing. That’s really too bad!” is what people would say.

But my brothers and sisters, the six of us? We were raised in that era. Our youngest is sixty-two, my older sister is seventy-five, my brother is seventy-three. We were
raised
in that America. So it’s not something that you easily forget.
It’s part of who we are
. Part of who I am. You don’t just forget! You work at forgiving.

As a kid, you tend to just accept that that’s how things are. But it still hurts. Growing up, all through my teens, I was raised as a second-class citizen. You’d have to be a psychologist to know all the different ways that impacts someone. I’m just a human being who felt the hurt in mind and heart.

People ask you, “How did you feel about that?” and you almost want to say to them, “How do you
think
I felt?” I’d want to start swearing or something, because it’s hard to find the words, it’s not comfortable even to think about that again. You just want to get away from it emotionally. Invariably, though, something happens to remind you of the ugliness.

My father used to tell us, “If you ever get in a race, if you ever get in a contest, make sure that you’re clearly the winner. Make sure that there’s no photo finish. Because if there’s a photo finish, you won’t win the race.”

So now it’s 1966, and here I was, I had won going away. Danny Murtaugh said it. A white guy, been around baseball all his life, a great judge of talent. He said I was head and shoulders above the rest. And then the Mets drafted Steve Chilcott. I don’t want to disrespect Steve Chilcott, he got hurt. I’m sure he was a good ballplayer and a good guy.

But that wasn’t why he was drafted first. He was drafted first because I was dating a “white” girl.