Jackie Robinson (11 page)

On May 7, the sporting legend of young Jackie Robinson grew even more imposing. Arriving late for a vital division game against Glendale Junior College in Glendale, Robinson had one hit and stole a base in a PJC victory. But he had a good reason to be tardy. Earlier that day, in Pomona, about forty miles away, Jack jumped 25 feet 6½ inches on the last of his three allotted tries at the Southern California Junior College track meet to set a national junior college record. In the process, he erased his brother’s mark, which Mack had set one year before at the Drake Relays in Iowa.

The legend grew some more on May 17 in a game against Pomona, when Coach Mallory tossed the ball to Jack in the third inning for his debut as a pitcher. Hurling the remaining innings, Robinson gave up five hits, walked five batters, hit one, and uncorked one wild pitch. Nevertheless, the Bulldogs won, 12–1, and he gained official credit for the win. Two days later, the Bulldogs demolished Compton to take the divisional title. Playing in twenty-four games, Jack had batted .417 and scored forty-three runs; scoring in all but three of the games, he struck out only three times and stole twenty-five bases. The PJC
Chronicle
pronounced him “
the greatest base runner ever to play on a junior college team,” as well as “one of the most sensational fielders in the business.”

This was surely the moment for a major-league club to sign Robinson and begin grooming him. In March, in a game that pitted a Pasadena youth nine against the Chicago White Sox (in town for spring training), Jack’s brilliance had been clear. After his second hit of the game, he stole second base almost impudently against the White Sox catcher Mike Tresh. In the next inning, after his superb stop of a smash by Luke Appling, the American League batting champion, he started a brilliant double play to snuff out a White Sox threat. A reporter heard Jimmy Dykes, the White Sox manager, declare: “
Geez, if that kid was white I’d sign him right now.”

Signed by a major-league organization, Jack would have joined a group of young and still developing baseball players—such as Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Ralph Kiner, Bob Lemon, and Bob Feller—he would meet later either in the majors or in the Hall of Fame. But in 1938, the prohibition against blacks in major-league baseball was like iron. The years from about this point in 1938 until 1946, when he took the field for the Montreal Royals of the Brooklyn Dodgers organization, would be in effect the lost baseball youth, never to be recovered, of Jackie Robinson.

I
N 1937
, J
ACK HAD ENTERED
PJC a wiry fellow, with a sinewy yet undernourished body; one sportswriter in 1941 would recall him as having been in 1937 “
a rather skinny kid.” Another writer, much later, remembered that “
what struck me then was how thin and fragile he looked and how suddenly he could be the man who wasn’t there when tacklers attempted to down him.” By the time Jack played his last football game for the Bulldogs, however, his body had changed; benefiting from football team “training tables,” his weight had jumped from around 135 pounds to nearly 175. By the fall of 1938 Jack’s shoulders were visibly broader and denser with muscle, his thighs were thick for a person with his relatively modest frame, and he had achieved his top height, just under six feet. Now in his twentieth year, he stood at the peak of his physical perfection.

With his broad-jump record as well as his amazing football, baseball, and basketball exploits, he had emerged completely from his brother Mack’s dominance. Neither brother seemed entirely comfortable with the change. “
I couldn’t get over it, breaking Mack’s record,” Jack recalled. “Mack had always been my idol, making the Olympics and all that, and here I’d broken his record.” Again using his college or university mainly as an outlet for athletics, Mack finally enrolled in the spring at the University of Oregon. In June, on a visit home, he let the press know how pleased he was by Jack’s record jump. But the Pasadena press now needed no prompting to sing Jack’s praises or to see him as a greater athlete than Mack. When the PJC
Chronicle
named Jack its athlete of the year, Hank Shatford saluted him as “
the greatest all-around athlete ever to attend P.J.C.” And that month, to help raise funds to send Jack to the National Amateur Athletic Union’s big track-and-field meeting in Buffalo, New York, Rube Samuelsen of the
Post
paid tribute: “
It is doubtful if Pasadena ever has had a greater all-around athlete and that is saying a lot in a city where champions are produced as regularly as the years roll by.”

The Buffalo meet, on July 3, promised a dramatic clash of the Robinson brothers in the broad jump. But Mack, who won the 200-meter race after being eliminated in the 100, decided late to withdraw from the event. Jack himself placed third. At the end of the summer Mack did not return to Oregon. Instead, he stayed in Pasadena to work for the city, sweeping streets. Some people wondered how he, a college man, could work at such a job. “
I never did understand those people,” Mack remarked later. “I had to take whatever I could get.”

The late spring and summer of 1938 found Jack once again playing some tennis and golf at Brookside Park, but challenged mainly by the nighttime softball Owl League. Again he played on a team made up of young black men from northwestern Pasadena, including his cousin Van Wade in center field and Ray Bartlett in left. Their sponsor this year was Pepsi-Cola, which provided uniforms and some equipment.

Typical of his brilliance was a game against Jones Barber Shop, which ended in a tie “
mainly because the barbers were unable to stop Jackie Robinson.” Playing shortstop, Jack “made two singles for his team’s only hits, stole five bases and scored his club’s two runs. Jack also sparkled in the field by engineering a brilliant double play.” Again and again, Jack was the difference between victory and defeat. He and his team began to attract crowds never before seen at softball games at night in Brookside Park; in early August, five thousand fans turned out for a league game involving the Pepsi-Cola team. On August 17, when Pepsi-Cola played its last regular game of the season, with Ray Bartlett the star that night, the team accorded Jack the honor of pitching the last inning. He retired the side in order. Pepsi-Cola then rolled through the playoffs to take the title.

The fall brought a return to PJC and to football, and a magnificent season for the Bulldog team and Robinson in particular. Santa Ana arrived boasting a twenty-two-game winning streak; it left town with its streak snapped in a game that saw Robinson “
directly responsible for each and every Pasadena touchdown.” Against Ventura, Jack gave “
another scintillating exhibition of broken field running” when he took a lateral at the 40-yard line, “streaked down the north sidelines until he was trapped on the 10, where he suddenly cut diagonally across the field to score.” After five games,
the Bulldogs were undefeated. Although Jack had missed one game with an injury, his 61 points scored was thought to be the second highest by any player in the country that fall. In the Rose Bowl, an assembly of some thirty-eight thousand saw Pasadena smother Los Angeles. One run by Robinson was unforgettable; “
after squirming out of the arms of four would-be tacklers, the Negro sensation went down the south sidelines to a touchdown.”

An even larger crowd, about forty thousand—thought to be the largest to that date in junior college sports history—saw undefeated Pasadena crush hated Compton. A “
phenomenal” Jack Robinson was involved directly in all of the Bulldogs’ twenty points. Duke Snider, the future baseball star, then a young spectator from Compton, recalled a play when Robinson caught the ball after a kickoff, “
reversed his field three times, and returned it for a touchdown. It was as dazzling a piece of broken-field running as you could ever hope to see.” “
Have you ever seen anyone, anywhere, play better ‘heads-up’ football than Robinson?” Rube Samuelsen asked his Pasadena
Post
readers. “He is an opportunist of the first water. He thinks out there. He can evade a tackler with rare finesse. He has athletic sense, in doing the right thing at the right time as few sports stars do. He is a ‘natural’ athlete in the fullest sense.”

In San Francisco, before a huge, expectant crowd, Jack disappointed no one. On his first carry, he sped 75 yards for a touchdown. On another play, he humbled a defensive end with a feint that left the player sprawled on the turf, then sped 55 yards to score. After a punt return that rocked the stadium, he fired two deft passes for touchdowns. Robinson left the game to an ovation seldom accorded a visiting player. He was superb again on Homecoming Day in November before a huge crowd of loyalists in the Rose Bowl against Glendale. On the last play, with victory assured but his team anxious to preserve its scoring average of 33 points per game, Jack took off on an astonishing 85-yard sprint that made the final score 33–6. In the next game, his last as a Bulldog, Jack said farewell with a masterpiece. Setting up behind his own goal line in punt formation, he gathered in the hiked ball, then raced 104 yards for a touchdown against a muddle of disbelieving Caltech players.

After a season of eleven wins and no losses, in which he scored 17 touchdowns and 131 points, Jack was showered with adulation; along with Ray Bartlett of PJC, he was named to the all-Southland first team by the Kiwanis Clubs of Southern California. He was the center of attention when the Associated Women Students of PJC sponsored their annual football banquet for the Bulldog team. Coach Mallory, awarding nicknames to his departing seniors, dubbed Jack “
Gift from Heaven.” And on December 6, he won the honor that had eluded him in 1937, the Most Valuable Player of
the Year award given by the Pasadena Elks. Proudly Jack accepted a “gold” football and a year’s stewardship of the trophy. His popularity among the Bulldogs was clear when the team itself, in a surprise, awarded a custom-made trophy to Coach Mallory. On the trophy, high on a pedestal above tiny statues of the rest of the Bulldog starters, was a taller statue of Jack, dynamic in a broken-field running pose.

A
S
J
ACK’S ATHLETIC
accomplishments mounted, so did interest in him among those colleges and universities willing to recruit and start a black player; he himself recalled “
a number of colleges putting out feelers, offering athletic scholarships.” Jack Gordon remembered Fresno State, in central California, offering Jack all sorts of inducements, including a set of new tires for the ancient car that had come into his possession. Jack recalled that the college with “the most attractive scholarship” was “very far” from Pasadena. Probably this was the University of Oregon; but Jack knew by this point that Mack was probably not going back to the Ducks, and he also was less than enchanted with the rain and cold he associated with the town of Eugene.

Several top schools, committed to Jim Crow, were out of the question. A Stanford alumnus, according to Robinson, offered to pay his college expenses anywhere as long as he did not attend a school in Stanford’s conference; attending Stanford itself, of course, was out of the question. The University of Southern California, located in Los Angeles, as prestigious as Stanford but with an even greater sports program, sometimes took blacks. Its acclaimed football coach, Howard Jones, had praised Jack lavishly at the Elks banquet. But Jack heard Jones’s eulogy with mixed emotions. “
We all knew USC had the best athletic program and the best teams,” Ray Bartlett recalled. “They were
the
team in almost every sport in southern California. But we knew we would just sit on the bench over there. Howard Jones was a good coach, but he was a very prejudiced man.” Hank Shatford recalled that USC offered Robinson “
a real good scholarship,” with “some benefits that he probably wouldn’t get at UCLA.” But he, too, knew that the Trojans had only “token blacks” who seldom got to play, “which was disgusting.”

Helping Jack make this important decision was his loyal, loving brother Frank, “
my greatest fan.” Frank loved to scout opposing teams for Jack, to warn him about this or that player, help him plan his attack or defense, and loudly cheer him on during games. To the two brothers, UCLA made the most sense. The institution was young and its sports programs on the whole weak. But its coaches seemed eager to have Robinson enroll and genuinely determined to use him. Tuition was free, the annual administrative fee only
a token sum, and Jack could continue to live at home while commuting to the village of Westwood, the site of the campus. Above all, Frank would be near, and “I didn’t want to see Frank disappointed.”

On December 1, UCLA became even more attractive to Jack when the school announced that Edwin C. “Babe” Horrell would be its new head football coach. The name Horrell was almost synonymous with sports in Pasadena; the main playing field at PJC was Horrell Field, named after Babe and his brothers. All had been outstanding Bulldogs; after starring in even more sports at PJC than Jack, Babe Horrell had gone on to become an all-American center at the University of California, Berkeley, on its celebrated 1924 “Wonder Team.” Horrell was “
high class, cultured and civilized,” according to one of his black players. “He always dressed right; he always talked right.” Another family member, Jack Horrell, a top sprinter on the current Bulldog track team, had given money publicly to help send Jack to the NAAU track meet in Buffalo. By Christmas, Jack’s mind was made up. On December 13, Rube Samuelsen reported on a visit by the Oregon head coach to the Bulldog campus but warned his readers in the
Post:
“
Don’t bet any money that Jackie will NOT go to U.C.L.A. At this writing the Bruins are Robinson’s No. 1 choice and I can tell you straight that Jackie would be welcomed on the Westwood varsity next fall.”

Jack would leave PJC at midyear, but not before one last round in basketball. Now well known statewide, he was lionized at a state tournament in Modesto. “
He made a decided hit with tournament fans,” according to a reporter, “who cheered his every move. The versatile Negro youth was hailed as the best sportsman and the sensation of the event.” With the Bulldogs reaching Christmas undefeated in conference play, Robinson was a stifling defender, a constant threat to score, and a determined fighter. In a key game against Compton, when PJC trailed at halftime for the first time all season, “
Compton’s old bugaboo in every sport, Jack Robinson, was the man that brought about the Compton loss.” When the winning streak ended and a PJC victory over Los Angeles Junior College became essential, he stepped up again. Before a howling crowd that included his brothers Frank and Mack, Jack sank a free throw with twelve seconds remaining to give the Bulldogs a victory. Scoring 26 of his team’s 49 points, he also broke his own record for the most points ever by a Bulldog in a game. “
The phenomenal Negro athlete,” the
Post
reported, “played one of his best games, dropping shot after shot as the bewildered Cubs attempted to guard him.” Winning its next two contests, PJC took the conference crown.