Junior Gilliam, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson…
That’s how I remember the Brooklyn Dodgers’ 1956 lineup from the one time my dad took me to Ebbets Field to see the team I had loved since my age was in single digits. I can’t recall who was eighth in the batting order (Don Zimmer maybe?) or who was pitching, or who the other team was, or who won. But I do remember exactly where we were sitting—around twenty rows back in the upper deck, halfway between third and home. I remember the tall right field fence, the one Snider’s four-baggers soared over on their way to Bedford Avenue, where there were always kids hanging out, pounding their gloves, listening to Vin Scully on the radio, waiting for the Duke to hit one.
Mainly, I remember the continuous, limb-tingling ecstasy of just being there. What made the day absolutely perfect was the presence of Robinson on the field and in the batter’s box. His playing career was nearing its end; he wasn’t always in the starting lineup. But that day he was. I actually saw him. The light of the sun bounced off his face and entered the pupils of my eyes. That’s how close we were to each other!
Jackie Robinson was incredibly handsome. He had an unmistakable voice—pleasantly reedy, a little high-pitched, precise. (I must have heard him talk on the radio.) He could play just about any position. He was an incredibly exciting baserunner. He played mind games with pitchers—he didn’t just outrun them, he outthought them. And of course he was a hero of the signature political and social struggle of American history, a struggle that my lefty parents (whose longtime friends included James Farmer and Bayard Rustin) had taught me to venerate. Baseball and civil rights! No wonder Jackie Robinson was as close to a god as my thirteen-year-old, precociously atheist self could admit to worshipping.
“42” brought back a lot of those feelings. It’s not a great movie, but it’s good enough. I wanted to give myself over to it, and I did. It’s uplifiting, and I, for one, was uplifted.
I was a Dodger fan for two reasons. My mom grew up in Brooklyn (Rugby Road, in Flatbush)—that was the first reason. Jackie Robinson was the second. Or maybe vice versa. Of course, my faith was momentarily shaken when I learned that neither he nor any of the other Dodgers were native Brooklynites. But that was nothing compared to the shock when, after the ‘56 season, Robinson was sold—a word that had especially unpleasant undertones in this case—to, of all ballclubs, the New York Giants. (Branch Rickey was long gone by then, forced out by Walter O’Malley. Robinson never played for the Dodgers’ National League archrivals, thank God, choosing to retire instead.)
The greatest shock of all, of course, was when O’Malley moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles. He didn’t even have the decency to change the team’s name. The Dodgers were originally the Trolley Dodgers, but L.A. was weak on public transportation. O’Malley could have at least called them something locally meaningful, like the Stars or the Angels. Or, if those were out because they’d been used by the Pacific Coast League teams O’Malley was displacing, the Los Angeles Drivers.
I still love baseball. But after the Dodgers left, and even after all these years, I’ve never been able to bring myself to be a fan of any particular team. I try to like the Yankees, I really do. But it never really takes.
Speaking of movies, I don’t think I’d even known that there’s a film called “The Jackie Robinson Story,” starring Jackie Robinson, until Richard Brody and David Denby wrote about it, along with “42,” a month ago. “The Jackie Robinson Story” came out in 1950, years before I was allowed to go to the movies. Denby likes the new one better; Brody prefers the old. I’m not about to get in the middle of that. I agree with both of them, mostly, he said diplomatically.
Anyhow, I’ve now seen the old one, thanks to the loan of Brody’s DVD. As an actor, Robinson is no Olivier, but, like “42,” he’s good enough. He gets himself right: he is calm, reserved, a little distant, holding it all inside. Robinson was past thirty when the picture was shot, and his belly, though hardly of Ruthian proportions, is noticeable to a twenty-first-century eye, though of course baseball players are not always held to the gym-toned washboard standards of other professional athletes. “The Jackie Robinson Story” is about color, but it was in black and white.
There’s a surprisingly large amount of overlap between the two films. The portrayal of racism in “42” is much rawer and scarier, as you might expect, and therefore probably more accurate. But while the older picture may seem overly cautious by 2013 standards, it must have seemed quite daring in 1950. This was before Brown v. Board of Education, before freedom rides and lunchroom sit-ins, long before Watts and Selma and “I had a dream.” The modern civil-rights movement had barely begun. Jim Crow had the sniffles but no one knew when, if ever, it would sicken and die.
At the end of the older movie, right after Robinson has won the pennant for the Dodgers by stealing second, third, and home, Branch Rickey urges him to accept an invitation to “go to Washington” and “speak.” (The irony, as Brody points out, is that the invitation came from the House Committee on Un-American Activities. But still.) We cut to Robinson, wearing a dark suit, in front of a fat microphone, against a vaguely official-looking backdrop. I took down what comes next:
As the scene shifts to a series of gauzy flashbacks of Jackie as a child, Jackie with his wife Rae (played by Ruby Dee), Jackie at bat, etc., we hear a portentous voice-over.
Sixty-three years later, alas, no child can hope to grow up to play baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers. But as for the other thing—well, as Mel Allen might have said: How about that!
Illustration by Thomas Ehretsmann.
