Jackie Robinson (16 page)

Once again, with 133 points, Robinson won the individual league scoring title. Once again, however, top honors eluded him. “
Robinson Fails to Make All-League Cage Team,” the
Bruin
protested; “Prejudice ‘Rumored’ to Have Played Major Role in Selection.” Placing every Stanford starter on the all-conference first team, most of the coaches relegated Robinson to the second. (But Nibs Price of California, who had lauded him the previous year, now failed to vote for Jack on the first, second, or third team. In vain,
Bruin
sports editor Hank Shatford railed against this “
flagrant bit of prejudice” that “makes our blood boil.… It’s more than a miscarriage of justice.”)

Now, although he was still eligible to compete in baseball and the broad jump, Jack was ready to leave UCLA. Where he would find work was a good question. His almost matchless sports record counted little. On February 28, as the basketball season drew to a close, Shatford had reported that Robinson had received job offers from the semipro Broadway Clowns, a basketball team, and from a Mexican baseball club. Unfortunately, the offers were poor; professional sports seemed to be out of the question. No blacks, not even all-American Kenny Washington, played now in the National Football League. (Woody Strode had just made his debut as a professional wrestler.) Also all-white were the National Basketball League and other forerunners of the NBA. Major-league baseball and its farm systems were forbidden.

But despite arguments against leaving UCLA by most of his coaches and by Rachel, Mallie, and Karl Downs, Jack was determined to go. “
I was aghast,” Rachel recalled. “I tried to talk him out of it. He was so close to finishing. He put it all on Mallie, that he wanted to help her financially, because she was still working very hard. But I think he would have left in any case. He had had enough.”

Near noon on March 3, Jack strolled into the registrar’s office. There, he made arrangements that would allow him to leave the university with an “
honorable dismissal,” instead of dropping out casually, without an official blessing. By the end of the day, he was gone.

In the spring, at the annual Bruin football banquet, he was absent, working in a small town up the California coast, when the UCLA Alumni Association gave him its coveted yearly award for outstanding service to the university. Jack sent what an official called a “
very fine letter” of thanks, which elicited “a great burst of applause” when it was read to the assembled guests. “
I was indeed serious about the friends and other things I mentioned in the letter,” Jack later assured the official in another letter. “It really is something to know you have friends like the ones I made while attending UCLA. I certainly hope that Friendship continues on and on.”

Jack’s words were stiff and artless, but sincere. So was his hope that some lasting link could be preserved between himself and his two brilliant UCLA years, when roaring crowds shouted his name and he strode the campus in glory. But even as he wrote these letters, his future had begun to seem dim, even dingy, and the memory of his sporting triumphs at the university in Westwood was fading away.

I
N
A
PRIL
, R
OBINSON REPORTED
to the job that had helped him decide, against all advice to the contrary, to leave UCLA. “
I had offers to join professional football teams,” he later recalled, but had quickly turned them down. This job paid little and lacked glamour, but it offered to train him for what he was now sure would be his life’s work. “
I could see no future in staying at college,” he would write, “no real future in [professional] athletics, and I wanted to do the next best thing—become an athletic director. The thought of working with youngsters in the field of sports excited me.”

Despite his failure to graduate, Robinson was now a far more mature and polished young man than he had been when he entered UCLA in 1939. The adulation showered on him for his amazing athletic feats had not left him vain and self-indulgent; his core moral values, learned from his mother and reinforced by Karl Downs, among others, remained firmly in place. Despite his quick temper in the face of injustice, especially racial discrimination, he lived on the whole a life of discipline, restraint, and self-denial; he thought of himself and his future in terms of moral and social obligations rather than privilege and entitlement. Jack had hardly taken full advantage of UCLA as a center of learning, but he was much more comfortable now than in the past with the world of ideas and books. Welcomed by his coaches and professors as well as by the student body as a whole, he now had an even more inclusive sense of his country and a brighter confidence
in his future as a black citizen—although the maddening contradictions of American democracy were everywhere around him, clouding his sense of possibility.

On the campus of the California Polytechnic Institute in San Luis Obispo, some six hours north of Los Angeles, Robinson signed on as an employee of the National Youth Administration to work at its training camp a few miles away, at Atascadero. Founded by Presidential order as a Depression measure in 1935, the NYA sought to provide jobs, job training, and relief for young people between sixteen and twenty-five years of age. The Atascadero facility took students up to the age of eighteen, and trained about one hundred at a time. Jack was hired as an assistant athletic director, at $150 per month, to help organize sports activities for these trainees; his job was to help make sure, as he put it the following year, “
that their free time was well spent.”

Because he was black, his appointment was news. An NYA official offered solemnly that the agency was “
fortunate, indeed, to secure the services of this outstanding athlete.” This was mainly a preemptive response to people who would question the wisdom and propriety of putting a black man in a position over whites, even white teenagers.

Buckling down to the job, and drawing on his rich experience as an athlete, he quickly set up a number of regular events and programs, including calisthenics, for the youngsters; he also played shortstop on the camp’s baseball team. But learning to supervise and interact with the youths, who came from various ethnic groups and creeds but were almost all poor and from broken homes, was the real challenge. At first, he was not very happy; he could say of his job only that it was “
something that I have wanted to do but it is not quite what I would like.” The sometime delinquent was now a figure of authority, and had to learn to face youngsters from that unaccustomed position. In their young lives, he wrote with sympathy, many of the youths had had it “pretty tough,” and some “don’t know anything about anything”; but while “most of them are really swell guys,” he also faced the fact that “there is that few that you always find in a large group that is bound to cause trouble.”

His concern for young people and his passion for sports saw him through; “
the biggest kid of all come recreation time was yours truly, Jackie Robinson.” The star athlete put on no airs: “I realized that I had been no different than many of these kids, who would make good if given half a chance.” The color of his skin didn’t seem to matter to the white kids, who made up most of the number. Jim Crow reared its head only once. Trying to attend a camp dance at the urging of a friendly fellow employee named Lippman Duckat, who played second base on the camp team, Robinson
was politely but firmly turned away by a doorkeeper. Duckat and Robinson left quietly.

Apart from this incident, Jack “
loved and appreciated” his NYA job. Then, around July, the camp began to disband. In the wake of the Nazi conquest of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, and following the Battle of Britain, American entry into the conflict seemed more and more a certainty. The previous September, 1940, the President had signed into law the Selective Service and Training Act, which called for the registration of all men between twenty-one and thirty-five, and the drafting of eight hundred thousand recruits. The NYA was now superfluous. Nominally Jack remained an employee at the work camp until September, but by the end of July he was finished at Atascadero as the Army moved in and took over the NYA buildings.

Early in August, with no new job in sight, Jack arrived in Chicago for three weeks of football practice before playing in the nationally renowned annual charity game sponsored by the Chicago
Tribune.
The contest pitted an all-star college team against the Chicago Bears, the reigning champions of the National Football League. Although Jack had received more than seven hundred thousand votes in a
Tribune
poll to secure one of the sixty-six places on the college squad, some people undoubtedly questioned his right to be on a team with stars such as Tom Harmon of the University of Michigan, who had won the Heisman, Maxwell, and Walter Camp trophies to capture the finest collegiate honors. However, as one reporter noted, “
it took one scrimmage to establish the Negro boy’s rightful place among the All-Stars.” Pictured as “
a soft-spoken, dark-skinned kid with a flash of illuminating white teeth,” the versatile Jackie Robinson was “the Jim Thorpe of his race.” Jack enjoyed both the three-week camp, with all expenses paid, and the game itself, which took place on the night of August 28 before a crowd of more than ninety-eight thousand fans at venerable Soldier Field. For three quarters, the collegians gallantly battled the Bears, before three touchdowns in the last quarter sealed Chicago’s victory. From Jack’s point of view, the highlight undoubtedly came when he caught a 36-yard pass from Charley O’Rourke of Boston College for a touchdown. “
The only time we worried,” a Chicago defensive end said, “was when that guy Robinson was on the field.”

From Chicago, Tom Harmon and other stars moved to begin their lucrative NFL careers; Robinson headed home. The following month, September, when he made his professional football debut, it was a one-shot deal in a setting far inferior to the NFL. Before a crowd of about ten thousand at Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles, Jack started for the racially mixed but mainly white Los Angeles Bulldogs against a similar team, the
Hollywood Bears, which included his old Bruins teammate Kenny Washington. Jack’s debut was not a success. In the second quarter, he pulled up lame; not for the last time, the right ankle he had injured in his first PJC football season in 1937 let him down. He watched the rest of the game from the sidelines. A week later, however, he accepted an offer to join the Honolulu Bears (formerly the Honolulu Polar Bears) in the semiprofessional Hawaii Senior Football League. Along with Ray Bartlett, Jack was hired by F. J. “Brick” Brickner, the Bears’ team director and a former California college player himself. Brickner offered Robinson tough terms: $150 as an advance payment against his salary, a payment of $100 for each game he played, and the promise of a bonus if the Bears won the league championship (as they had done the previous year). The deal also included a construction job near Pearl Harbor. “
The construction job was a very important part of the package,” Bartlett recalled. “We could use the extra money, because we were both trying to help our mothers. But because the construction job involved defense, it also meant we wouldn’t be drafted—at least, not yet.”

Sailing on the
Matsonia
with Bartlett, Jack arrived in Hawaii a celebrity. His full-length picture adorned a page of the Honolulu
Advertiser,
where a banner heralded the arrival of the “
Century Express,” Jackie Robinson. An advertisement urged football fans to come and “
See the Sensational All-American Half-Back Jackie Robinson.” Soon Jack was installed with Ray Bartlett in a duplex apartment in the Kaimukai district, near St. Louis College. They reported to their construction job by day and then to the practice field at night, when the regular games would be played because of the Hawaiian heat. According to Bartlett, Jack did not make a good laborer. Their jobs were with an outfit called Hawaiian Constructors, under a foreman who had attended college in Berkeley. “
When he found out that Jack and I were from UCLA,” Bartlett recalled, “we were pretty much in. But Jack didn’t like to work. I’ll never forget the scene. He’d pick up one board, maybe eight or ten feet long, about six inches wide—not heavy—and put it on his shoulder, and carry it over to the carpenter. Finally the foreman said, ‘Jack, in the future, I want you to pick up two boards at a time, okay?’ Jack didn’t last long on the job. Either he quit or was fired.”

He was more of a hit playing football. Immediately he boosted his local reputation, and the sale of tickets, with a brilliant performance in an exhibition-game victory over a seasoned team from the 35th Infantry of the U.S. Army. But his success had one adverse effect on the Bears: their top running back of the previous year, Charles “Babe” Webb, formerly of New Mexico State University, allegedly stormed off the club after being passed over. Webb’s rebellion proved to be only a token of the club’s lack of discipline, which showed at once when the six-game league season started. A
record crowd of twenty thousand paid to see the first game, but the Bears lost badly to the veteran Healani Maroons. “
Robinson, almost entirely on his own, reeled off some brilliant runs,” one newspaper reported, “but faltered in his passing, many of his attempts being intercepted.” In other games, Jack was electrifying at times, then injured his right ankle once again. Playing hurt, he performed poorly. By early December, the luster was gone from the league. On December 3, fewer than six hundred persons paid to see the Bears lose.