The Boys of Summer (47 page)

“When we played near the tracks” Jack Heisey said, “the gloves wasn’t bigger than yer hand.” Cox slipped fingers into the glove. “Not bad,” he said. “Ain’t heavy like a catcher’s mitt.” He flexed his hand. “Good leather.” He swept the glove across his chest, one way, then the other. In the movement, eighteen inches, you could see, if you had ever seen baseball close, that the old hand in the new glove was phenomenal.

“All right,” Cox said. “Ya shouldn’t miss too much.”

He sipped beer. His look softened. “Do you think about Brooklyn much?” I said.

“Oh,” Cox said. “Oh.” The long face jerked and he nodded.

“You remember?”

“Hey,” Cox said, “there was this day Preach was pitching. I put on a catcher’s mask and shin guards and a chest protector and I said, ‘Okay, I’m ready.’ Preach said, ‘Wear anything you want, long as you’re there.’ It wasn’t trouble to make the joke. Campy’s locker was right near mine.”

Someone else prattled about niggers. “You was lucky, Cox. It wasn’t like today. You didn’t play with no niggers. Campanella was a gentleman. Robinson been to college. You didn’t play with no niggers.” A film fell over the eyes of Billy Cox. He
walked to the pool table and began practicing shots. “Ah,” he said at a billiard ball. “Get the fuck down.” He was throwing himself into pointless practice.

“New York’s fulla niggers,” the man said.

Before he spoke again, a shapeless woman marched up and shouted, “I know about the redhead.” The woman wore a teal kerchief and brown-rimmed eyeglasses. She started swinging. The man hunched shoulders and held his drink. “You been with that redhead,” the woman screamed. “I know, ya lousy bastard.” But her blows were not equal to her fury. While she pummeled and shrieked, the man sat, feeling embarrassment more than pain, and tried to focus on his glass of Rolling Rock beer.

I stepped off the bar stool. The sign, “
WILLIAM GAYLOR POST, V.F.W.,
#34,” was blue and white.

Cox looked at me, the film lifting from his eyes, and he jerked his head. “Now look at this, willya. Look what the sonsabitches are up to now.”

He bent and stroked the cue ball. It caromed far across the table and gently tapped an eight-ball toward a pocket. The woman swung. She cried, “You rotten fucker.”

No one present, I thought, except myself, witnessing this 2
A.M.
talk of niggers, the ugly woman clouting the sodden man, could have realized that this broad-shouldered, horse-faced fellow tapping billiard balls, missing half a finger on one hand, sad-eyed, among people who would never be more than strangers, was the most glorious glove on the most glorious team that ever played baseball in the sunlight of Brooklyn.

I can never be sure whether it is arrogance, hostility or a streak of good sense that prevents me from taking millionaires as seriously as they would like to be taken. In the course of an education by journalism one frequently sees millionaires naked of press agents, but such intimacy breeds an unpredictable variety of attitudes.

Jack Tibby of
Sports Illustrated
once quoted Henry R. Luce on what he wanted of the magazine. “He put it all into a word,” Tibby said. He paused and made a small, smug smile and said, “Excitement.”

“They want that on the
Tribune,
Jack. Everywhere.”

“Excitement,” Tibby repeated, as though oracular, trying to freight a rich-man’s offhand banality with wisdom.

Having audited many scenes played by millionaire and vassal, and lacking Tibby’s native reverence, my own situations with the rich tend to crumble. George Bernard Shaw said after meeting a film producer, “All he wanted to talk about was art and all I wanted to talk about was money.” That is continually happening in more complicated ways, but Walter Francis O’Malley, of Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles, is a rare millionaire in that he senses the limits of his expertise. I have never heard O’Malley discuss a second baseman’s hands, the speed of someone’s
swing or the rotation of a curve. O’Malley considers people, whom he manipulates, and money, which he appears to coin in incalculable quantities, while saying from time to time, “I’m just a fan.”

Although he pretends to be pure Brooklyn Celt, O’Malley is the offspring of a German-Irish marriage, who grew up at Culver Military Academy, the University of Pennsylvania and Fordham Law School in the Bronx. In the first trough of the Depression, he scratched out a living servicing bankrupts.

Our lives touched after O’Malley had re-entered the middle class and moved into a private home five blocks from the family apartment at 907 St. Marks Place. I had been enrolled in a small grade school called (for the creator of the first kindergarten) Froebel Academy, and housed at the corner of Brooklyn and Prospect avenues in a building once occupied by Charles Evans Hughes. Names such as Kahn and O’Malley appeared rarely in this Protestant bastion where, during the 1936 Roosevelt landslide, my class supported Alf Landon, by nine to one. But rejecting the clichés of a Roman Catholic upbringing, O’Malley sent his daughter, Terry, to Froebel. Presently, with each man pursuing an area of interest, my father was coaching Froebel sports and Walter O’Malley had become a Froebel trustee.

After my first
Herald Tribune
stories in 1952, O’Malley said what pleased him was that they were the work of a Froebel boy. I mouthed thanks, a mute, inglorious Robinson, wishing people would stop calling me “boy.” O’Malley’s style was regal, but he was accessible and responsive to questions. Later I composed an enthusiastic feature about him for the
Tribune Sunday Magazine.

Disenchantment struck after my story about the Gilliam affair. The phrase I had heard, “How would you like a nigger to take your job?” was, O’Malley insisted, the same as “another Jewish judge,” cacophony piped by unchosen lawyers in courthouse smoke rooms. “It’s rude, but doesn’t mean much,” O’Malley
said, “and I’m surprised that you were taken in.”

My defense—“I’d write ‘another Jewish judge,’ too”—drew a wintry response. “A Froebel boy should know how to evaluate things realistically,” O’Malley said, and “Froebel boy” had never sounded so pejorative.

Patches of geniality survived a hardening relationship. O’Malley believed that the first function of the press was to praise, and as his fortune grew, pettiness invaded his style. At one corner of the Ebbets Field press box, a phone was tied into the switchboard. Sportswriters could make local calls without charge, a courtesy that O’Malley ended in 1953, by substituting a pay phone. Subsequently, he complained about “freeloading writers,” and ball players who were “money-hungry.”

But he understood the New York press better than Rickey had. He knew whom to flatter, whom to cajole, whom to browbeat. He discussed stocks with one writer, baseball broadcasting with another and politics with a third. He possessed the high skill of talking into another man’s interest and making that interest appear to be his own. Many baseball writers took him for a warm friend, without recognizing that, as with an under-boiled potato, O’Malley’s warmth was mostly external.

The shock was all the stronger when he led the Dodgers out of Brooklyn and left some journalists to cover golf matches contested by wiry women. Hypocrisy rose from cry to clamor. “For ten years he told us he was a fan. Then he pulls out for money.”

It amazes me to this day that once I stood in the ranks of journalists who, in the most furious words they could summon, indicted a capitalist for being motivated by a passion for greater profits.

The Dodgers prospered in Southern California. After 1958 in which the bones of the team—Hodges hustling in the same infield with Dick Gray, Snider playing outfield beside Gino
Cimoli—finished seventh, the Los Angeles Dodgers rebounded to a pennant and world championship. It had taken Brooklyn seventy-five years to win a World Series; Los Angeles won it in Year Two.

World Series attendance exceeded ninety thousand each afternoon in the Los Angeles Coliseum, but O’Malley’s odd frugality persisted. He insisted on closing the so-called press room, a hotel banquet hall where journalists and baseball men eat and drink without charge, at 10
P.M.
(Bill Veeck, whose White Sox played docile opposition to the Dodgers, responded by keeping the Chicago press room open twenty-four hours a day. “You can have Scotch for breakfast,” Veeck cried, and many did.)

Buzzy Bavasi built the Western Dodgers. The old sluggers yielded to a club of pitchers, Koufax and Drysdale and fast feathery batsmen like Maury Wills. Including 1959, they won three World Series in a decade. The Hollywood community embraced them, and playing at handsome new Dodger Stadium, they drew 2,755,184 customers in 1962, by far the largest total in the history of baseball to that time.

Newspaper accounts described Walter O’Malley entertaining governors, dominating baseball meetings, trudging through East African safaris, a happy man. Then, when the National League expanded to twelve teams in 1969, Bavasi assumed the presidency of the San Diego Padres. Now at length the men who directed the team were co-equals, and after my voyages with Robinson and Cox, Labine and Roe were done, I boarded a plane to California to meet both again. He would book me into the Statler Hilton in downtown Los Angeles, O’Malley said. It was a good functional hotel. “Why not sleep at my place?” said Bavasi. He lived on a mountaintop in La Jolla. “Come over and we can watch the whales migrating in the Pacific.”

Beneath the head of a sable antelope who looked wounded, Walter O’Malley smiled and said that only half the lies the Irish
tell are true. At almost seventy, he appeared as he had at sixty and fifty: round face, round spectacles, bouncy jowls and a voice sounding a pure Tammany basso. Beyond a window wall, Dodger Stadium spread in what Red Smith has called the green and brown and white geometry of the diamond. “I’m proud of this park,” O’Malley announced. “If someone tried to give it to the government, I’d fight. I like things the way they are, private enterprise. I don’t like rebelling students. I’m a Tory. An O’Malley a Tory? Why they’d string me up in County Mayo. But Tory is what I am.”

Despite the girth, no sense of jolliness flows from the man. The chuckles seem a camouflage for growls. Sidney Greenstreet conveyed such things in the movies of the 1940s.

“Have you heard,” O’Malley said, “that anyone mentioning Rickey after he left our office was fined a dollar? I respected Rickey but knew him for what he was. Not quite the idealist some would have him.

“Rickey’s Brooklyn contract called for salary plus a percentage of the take, and during World War II the take fell off. It was then Rickey mentioned signing a Negro. He had a
fiscal
interest.

“Rickey suggested an infielder Leo Durocher said could make any major league club. We anticipated opposition within baseball and they asked if I would fly to Havana. The player’s name was Silvio Garcia. Third base. I flew in a little DC-3 over the Havana waterfront covered with tar, from American tankers that German submarines had sunk. Garcia had personal problems. Besides, he was in the Cuban Army, a conscript. I advised the directors that the Brooklyn club would not do well to hire someone out of the Cuban Army to replace an American boy who had gone to war.

“This episode opened the door. It gave Rickey complete authority to find his own Negro and he found Robinson.

“Rickey played professionally, but I came into baseball in an
unusual way,” O’Malley said. “I never practiced law in Brooklyn. I worked in the Lincoln Building, on Forty-second Street in Manhattan. But I lived in Brooklyn and I needed clients and one season during the 1930s I bought a box to take prospective clients to Ebbets Field. Everyone said I was crazy. Yankee Stadium was the place. But I could get a good location in Brooklyn. That began it.

“Now I was doing legal work for the Brooklyn Trust Company, a bank owed a lot of money by the club. It was possible the Brooklyn franchise might go under, but George McLaughlin, the president of the bank, was a tremendous fan. He kept the club afloat. He was under pressure from the superintendent of banks because he had carried the Dodgers’ loan too long.

“Things got better with Larry MacPhail, but there was still this loan. Wendell Willkie became club lawyer in 1941, and when Willkie resigned, McLaughlin assigned me as club lawyer.

“Do you know when Brooklyn baseball reached its height? Just before the television era. We had a talented broadcaster, Red Barber, good lights, then Robinson, and we drew 1.8 million fans into a bandbox ten years after the club darn near went bankrupt.

“Three of us were the quickest to recognize the wisdom of acquiring stock: Branch Rickey, John Smith, from the Pfizer chemical company, and myself. By the late 1940s we agreed not to sell stock to an outsider without first offering it to ourselves. Then Smith was taken terminally ill. Lung cancer.

“One day I learned Rickey had been talking to Joseph Kennedy, the Ambassador.

“I said to Rickey, ‘What’s going on?’

“ ‘Well, with John Smith dead, I feel it’s time to sell. I told Mr. Kennedy you might disagree, but if he acquired my stock and Mrs. Smith’s, he’d have control. He’s got this son,
John, who is brilliant in politics but has physical problems. Mr. Kennedy thinks running the Dodgers could be the greatest outlet in the world for John.’

“It might have been Jack Kennedy, president of the Dodgers, but Joe rejected the deal when he found he’d face an unhappy minority stockholder in myself. He didn’t buy, but if he had, Jack Kennedy could be in this chair and alive today.

“Next Rickey negotiated with William Zeckendorf. I invoked the old agreement, and whatever Rickey and Zeckendorf were planning, I got the stock. The price seemed high. The total was two million dollars.

“In my first year as president, Bobby Thomson hit his home run. I attended a banquet at the St. George Hotel, and in the elevator this night was Thomson. He got out on one floor and someone said, ‘Hey, you know what that guy cost me? Twenty-five bucks.’ The elevator boy pointed to me. ‘You know what it cost him? A quarter million.’

“Well, then we started winning, but we had to keep on winning and that was expensive. After the Braves moved to Milwaukee I saw some developments you may remember.”

Mentioning Milwaukee loosed currents of recollection. The 1953 Braves, an ordinary team with Andy Pafko playing left, sold out night after night. O’Malley flew into Billy Mitchell Field whenever the Dodgers played at County Stadium. He likes German food and staged parties at restaurants called Mader’s and Karl Ratsch’s. “There’s a problem,” he said one night across platters of Milwaukee bratwurst. “They’re going to draw a million customers more here than we will back in Brooklyn.”

“Temporary thing.”

“But we can’t afford even a few years of this. The Braves will be able to pay bigger bonuses, run more farm teams and hire the best scouting talent. The history of the Brooklyn club is that fiscally you’re either first or bankrupt. There is no second place.”

He had spoken of a roofed stadium, and for years a model stood in the foyer of the Dodger offices, called “O’Malley’s Pleasure Dome” and drawing laughter. Then in 1955 a bill passed the New York Legislature establishing a Brooklyn Sports Center Authority. O’Malley expected the Authority to condemn a sufficient number of buildings to create a site for the new super ball park.

Currents met at the crossing of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues downtown. Two subway lines join there, alongside the Long Island Railroad Depot, the tallest building in Brooklyn and the Academy of Music. But along Atlantic Avenue wholesale meat markets led toward slums. Condemnation proceedings begun by the Sports Authority could clear land there. O’Malley peddled Ebbets Field for $3 million, sold two minor league parks at $1 million and announced that he was prepared to put the $5 million into a stadium in downtown Brooklyn. Robert Moses, politician, urban planner, said the stadium would create “a China wall of traffic.” Until he measured Moses’ power and found it greater than his, O’Malley says he did not intend to move the Dodgers.

In 1956 he purchased the Los Angeles minor league franchise to “get an anchor windward,” and when the Mayor of Los Angeles appeared in Vero Beach, O’Malley demanded that the city improve Chavez Ravine, the ball-park site; build access roads; offer a ninety-nine-year lease; and grant him half the rights to minerals, a euphemism for oil, under three hundred acres. He won most points and the Dodgers, profitable in Brooklyn, fled to the West and Coronado.

“They called me carpetbagger,” O’Malley said. “One man wrote I left because I believed the colored, Puerto Ricans and Jews were taking over Brooklyn. Lies. Pejorative lies. My son, Peter, came home from Penn and said, ‘Dad, what are we going to do? The things in the papers are terrible.’

“ ‘They are, Peter, but they will pass and the great ball park
I’m going to build in California will stand. That will be remembered’ “—he looked through a window wall and beamed—” ‘a monument to the O’Malleys.’”