PART I:

HEROES

Bass, Amy. In the Game : Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umboston/detail.action?docID=307887. Created from umboston on 2018-08-20 14:29:19.

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ONE

“Richie” Allen, Whitey’s Ways, and Me: A Political Education

in the 1960s

Matthew Frye Jacobson

I wouldn’t say that I hate Whitey, but deep down in my heart, I just can’t stand Whitey’s ways, man.

—Dick Allen, Ebony, 1970

“Disrespect” would be a euphemism. Dick Allen was unanimously re- named “Richie” in 1960 by a white press wholly indifferent to the young ballplayer’s protestations that everyone from his mother on down had al- ways called him “Dick.” Later, when Allen finally did insist upon his right- ful name after several years of patiently accepting what he thought a vaguely racist diminutive, the press variously ignored his request, spitefully granted it (“Dick ‘Don’t Call Me Richie’ Allen”), or—worse—depicted the “name-change” as an emblem of Allen’s unstable character (as in: “in mid- career he became, adamantly, ‘Dick.’” Sports Illustrated referred to this as Allen’s “first name sensitivity.”)1 Fans in Philadelphia delighted in throw- ing objects at Allen—pennies, chicken bones, batteries, bolts, half pints— and when he took to wearing a batting helmet in the field, the press

Bass, Amy. In the Game : Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umboston/detail.action?docID=307887. Created from umboston on 2018-08-20 14:29:19.

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20 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON

intimated that he needed the protection because he was bad with a glove. Allen twice appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated: once in 1970 under the heading “Baseball in Turmoil” (a reference to Curt Flood’s challenge to baseball’s reserve clause, but Allen was the sport’s better poster boy for “turmoil”), and once in 1972, smoking what remains the only cigarette in the history of SI covers.

Nor has Allen’s treatment mellowed over the years. The current entry for Allen on BaseballLibrary.com (“The Stories behind the Stats”) begins this way: “Talented, controversial, charming, and abusive, Allen put in 15 major league seasons, hitting prodigious homers and paying prodigious fines. He was praised as a money player and condemned as a loafer.” The site does duly note Allen’s Rookie of the Year season in 1964 and his MVP season in 1972; but its overall flavor tends fairly decisively toward “loafer” rather than “money player.” (The account of his stellar rookie season opens on the odd—but for Allen, familiar—note, “He made 41 errors at third base. . . .”)2 Total Baseball, the baseball encyclopedia, ranks Allen as the eighty-eighth best player of all time in an entry that begins, “Dick Allen feuded with writers, fans, managers, and teammates, earned many suspen- sions and behaved and fielded erratically.”3

In American political life, the phrase “Black Power” will always bring to mind Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, the Black Panther Party, and other black radicals who came to prominence in the latter half of the 1960s. In the too-clever parlance of ’60s- and ’70s- era baseball writing, however, its appropriation conjured figures like Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Frank Robinson, and Richie Allen— the 1.5 generation of baseball’s integration after Jackie Robinson had bro- ken the color bar, black sluggers whose speed and playing style and might were transforming the national pastime. (Absent its black stars, Hank Aaron points out, the National League’s stand-out player of the 1960s would have been Ron Santo.)4

But the two meanings of “black power” were not unrelated, as Dick Allen’s career demonstrates perhaps better than most. The social drama of the Civil Rights movement constituted the inescapable context within which black ballplayers of this generation were understood and measured in the white media—most often, if tacitly, located along an imagined polit- ical spectrum of “good” and “bad” Negroes (Willie Mays at one end of the spectrum, Richie Allen, Bob Gibson, and Dock Ellis at the other). “If [Allen] had been white,” writes Gibson, “he would have been considered merely a free spirit. As a black man who did as he pleased and guarded his privacy, he was instead regarded as a trouble-maker.”5 It is only in the con- text of the wider political and social world of the 1960s, not of the club-

Bass, Amy. In the Game : Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umboston/detail.action?docID=307887. Created from umboston on 2018-08-20 14:29:19.

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21“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME

house and diamond, that one can comprehend Allen’s becoming “a dart- board for the press,” in Pirate outfielder Willie Stargell’s phrase.6

Thus the sports page served as a site of oblique but significant social commentary on the racial questions of the day (indeed it was in relation to the sports page that whites seem to have first acknowledged and accepted that there might even be such a thing as a “white press”). It is not just that the world of Orval Faubus, Martin Luther King, Jr., Strom Thurmond, and Malcolm X supplied the cues for writing about a figure like Richie Allen, but also, contrariwise, that commentary on the likes of Allen—or Muhammad Ali or Cookie Gilchrist or Lew Alcindor—was by its very nature a genre of political writing whose significations reached beyond the diamond, the ring, or the gridiron, to the roiling racial world of a nation in unrest.

By the time Allen’s autobiography appeared in 1989, vernacular polit- ical discourse was better equipped to deal with the experience of someone “enormously talented and black in a game run by white owners, executives, and managers,” as one reviewer put it.7 Across the arc of his career in Philadelphia, however, from 1964 to 1969, the political truths of the sports world were grasped and analyzed chiefly by athletes and writers on the black side of the color line, and only very occasionally by a white com- mentator like Robert Lipsyte or Jack Olsen. Most often, black analyses of how race mattered—along with black protestations that race did matter— were simply folded into white power’s already-scripted tale of the “bad Negro,” as when Cookie Gilchrist mounted a boycott of the AFL’s 1964 All-Star Game in Jim Crow New Orleans, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists on the dais in Mexico City in 1968, or when Dick Allen or Frank Robinson raised the issue of Major League Baseball’s racist hiring practices. Bad boys all. By suggesting that race had anything to do with his image as “the bad boy of baseball,” in other words, a figure like Allen could only prove himself the “bad boy of baseball.”

This essay is not primarily about Dick Allen, but—quite deliberately— about Richie Allen, a creation of the white press, a negative icon of the Civil Rights era, “just about the premier bad boy in sports.”8 It is also about Richie Allen as a persona who—against the odds, one has to con- clude—became a positive icon to me, a white kid growing up in the subur- ban setting of Boulder, Colorado. The sports pages of this era constituted my political education. I was six years old and just beginning to pay atten- tion to baseball during Allen’s phenomenal rookie year. If “black power” signified anything to me at age nine, around the time when the term entered political parlance, it signified Allen’s towering home run to straightaway center in the All-Star Game in Anaheim. But by age ten, always hungry for another story, another AP wire photo, another stat on Allen, I could not help but notice that most of what I found was some brand of vilification.

Bass, Amy. In the Game : Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umboston/detail.action?docID=307887. Created from umboston on 2018-08-20 14:29:19.

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22 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON

My fourth-grade teacher Miss Harms could lecture on Reverend King and the freedom struggle; but what I learned about the injustices and the slan- ders of racism, I learned mostly by following Richie Allen in the Denver Post, waiting in vain for someone to write something good. (“Richie played with fire in his eyes, always,” says Orlando Cepeda. “Never read that in no newspaper.”9)

Reflecting on the odd oasis of adulation that his own fame provided him amid a wider, uglier world of racism, harassment, and danger, Bob Gibson once told baseball writer Roger Angell, “It’s nice to get attention and favors . . . but I can never forget the fact that if I were an ordinary black person I’d be in the shithouse, like millions of others.”10 Allen never did quite get out, even despite his talent and his fame and the awed respect he earned inside the lines. Here, in what stands as both a historical and a personal reflection, I seek to discover what that might say about politics and sport in the 1960s, and also to recover what it did mean to one white fan, thousands of miles and many worlds away from the Philadelphia shit- house called Connie Mack Stadium.

1. Philadelphia

“No baseball season in my fifteen-year career had the highs and lows of ’64,” wrote Allen in his autobiography, Crash. “The Temps said it best baby, I was a ball of confusion.”11 Allen was the National League Rookie of the Year, hitting .318 with 201 hits, 29 home runs, and 91 RBIs. He also had 38 doubles and 13 triples, a single-season combination that the likes of Mays, Aaron, Roberto Clemente, and Pete Rose never matched. Or Jackie Robinson, for that matter. (Joe DiMaggio bested it back in 1936, with 44 doubles and 15 triples). But Phillies fans found ways to sour on him nonetheless, many blaming him for the team’s spectacular September freefall that cost them what had seemed a sure pennant. Fans’ merciless booing became so common at Connie Mack Stadium in ensuing years that by the end of his tenure in Philadelphia, Allen had taken to scratching mes- sages during the game—such as the word “boo”—in the infield dirt with his spikes.12

Jackie Robinson and the magical date of 1947 seem to have long passed by the time Allen cracked the majors, but the key to his bitter expe- rience in the 1960s lies precisely in how little had happened in the inter- vening years. When one thinks of baseball’s falling racial barriers, the players who come to mind in addition to Robinson are people like Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, and Monte Irvin, a generation born in the teens and twenties, who came of age in the forties and played in the Negro

Bass, Amy. In the Game : Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umboston/detail.action?docID=307887. Created from umboston on 2018-08-20 14:29:19.

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23“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME

Leagues before entering the newly integrated majors directly on the heels of Branch Rickey’s “great experiment” in Brooklyn. The intervening glory years make it hard enough to recall that Willie Mays and Hank Aaron played their first pro ball in the Negro Leagues (Mays with the Birmingham Black Barons, Aaron with the Indianapolis Clowns); but even the players slightly younger than they—players with no Negro League experience at all—spent the early part of their careers in a baseball environment no less white and no less hostile than Jackie Robinson’s Ebbets Field.

Hank Aaron himself refers to them as “second generation black play- ers,” though 1.5 generation would be more accurate—Willie McCovey, Billy Williams, Bill White, Orlando Cepeda, Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, Lou Brock. Though associated with the 1960s and a baseball era far removed from the Jackie Robinson moment, “most of them came through the minor leagues in the 1950s, and almost all of them had their own horror sto- ries.”13 In October 1964, David Halberstam writes of this generation,

If they were not the black players of the pioneer generation, they had come up right behind them: most had grown up in ghettos, and their way into the big leagues had been difficult, often through a still-segregated minor-league system. This obstacle course remained the foundation of big-league baseball, and it was rife with prejudice. Playing on minor-league teams in tiny South- ern towns meant the crowds—even the home crowds—were usually hostile. Worse, most of their fellow players were rural country white boys, who, more often than not, seemed to accept the local mores.14

“I didn’t know anything about racism or bigotry until I went into pro- fessional baseball in 1953,” writes Frank Robinson, who grew up in West Oakland and whose initiation in the taunts of “Nigger, go back to Africa” came in Sally League towns like Augusta, Macon, and Savannah.15 As Dock Ellis—ten years younger still than Robinson—put it, “You learn more than baseball in the minor leagues.” For his own part, Ellis recalls going into the stands in a game against the Geneva Senators, swinging a leaded bat at a fan who had called him Stepin Fetchit, or standing defiantly on the mound, middle finger extended to a hostile crowd, after striking out the last batter in a game in Wilson, North Carolina.16

Such incidents—Aaron’s racial “horror stories”—punctuate the biogra- phies of virtually every player of the 1.5 generation. Bill White spent 1953 as the only black player in the Class-B Carolina League, serving, in Hal- berstam’s words, as “a kind of beacon to local rednecks, who would come out to the ballpark and, for a tiny amount of money, yell at this one young black player, who symbolized to them a world beginning to change.” He sometimes carried a bat with him as he left the clubhouse, according to Bob

Bass, Amy. In the Game : Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umboston/detail.action?docID=307887. Created from umboston on 2018-08-20 14:29:19.

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24 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON

Gibson, in order “to get through the hostile crowds that stood between him and the team bus.”17 Aaron and Wes Covington broke the color barrier up north in Eau Claire, Wisconsin (Aaron: “We didn’t exactly blend in”; Cov- ington: “I felt like a sideshow freak”) before Aaron was sent to the Jack- sonville Braves to break the color line in the Sally League.18 The president of the Sally League, Dick Butler, later claimed to have “followed Jack- sonville and sat in the stands to keep a lookout. You were never sure what was going to happen. Those people had awfully strong feelings about what was going on.”19 John Roseboro endured taunts of “chocolate drop” in Sheboygan; Felipe Alou was barred from the Evangeline League because of Louisiana segregation statutes (and shipped instead to the more hospitable Cocoa Indians of the Florida State League, “a class D menagerie”).20 In Fayette, North Carolina, Curt Flood “heard spluttering gasps, ‘There’s a goddamned nigger son-of-a-bitch playing ball with those white boys! I’m leaving’”; and in Greensboro, Leon Wagner faced an armed fan by the out- field fence, issuing a warning, “Nigger, I’m going to fill you with shot if you catch one ball out there.” “What kind of country is this?” Vic Power wanted to know, upon confronting racial mores so different from those that obtained in his native Puerto Rico.21

Even after they had safely reached the majors, far from the redneck sneers of the Sally League circuit, most of the 1.5 generation had to ne- gotiate the southern racial climate and the segregated facilities of Florida sites like Bradenton, Vero Beach, Clearwater, or Tampa during the months of spring training. Most also had to deal with some element of segregation in their team’s travel, lodging, rooming, or eating arrange- ments in cities like St. Louis and Cincinnati during the regular season; many, like Reggie Smith, had epithets and more dangerous objects hurled at them at one time or another, even by the “fans” in their home ball- parks. Some joined major league teams that were themselves deeply di- vided by race. Gibson and White broke into the majors playing for an overtly racist manager named Solly Hemus: “either he disliked us deeply or he genuinely believed that the only way to motivate us was with in- sults,” remembers Gibson. During one clubhouse meeting, in the presence of the full team, Hemus referred to an opposing pitcher as a “nigger.” Or- lando Cepeda, for his part, attributes the perennial also-ran fortunes of the Giants during the early ’60s to the breakdown of team feeling along ethnoracial lines. (Among other things, though his lineup featured Cepeda, all three Alou brothers, Jose Pagan, and Juan Marichal, manager Alvin Dark tried to ban the Spanish language in the clubhouse. Dark— who, ironically, had grown up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the very town that barred Felipe Alou—also openly questioned the “mental alertness” of his “Negro and Spanish-speaking players.”)22

Bass, Amy. In the Game : Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umboston/detail.action?docID=307887. Created from umboston on 2018-08-20 14:29:19.

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25“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME

Dick Allen drew a cruel hand, even by the standards of such a deck: after brief stints in Elmira (New York), Magic Valley (Utah), and Williamsport (Pennsylvania), in 1963 and at the age of only 20, Allen landed with the Arkansas Travelers, the Phillies’ AAA team whose home park was in Little Rock (of Central High fame) and whose lineup had, to that point, been white only. (As Lou Brock, who had been born there, liked to say, Arkansas was indeed “the land of opportunity”—at the very first opportunity he had gotten the hell out.23) “When I arrived at the park,” Allen recalls, “ . . . there were people marching around with signs. One said, DON’T NEGRO-IZE BASEBALL. Another, NIGGER GO HOME. . . . Here, in my mind, I thought Jackie Robinson had Negro-ized baseball sixteen years earlier.” As if to underscore the militant whiteness of this white world, the season’s festivities began with the ceremonial throw- ing out of the first pitch by Governor Orval Faubus. Afterward Allen found a note on the windshield of his car: “DON’T COME BACK AGAIN, NIG- GER.” “There might be something more terrifying than being black and holding a note that says ‘Nigger’ in an empty parking lot in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1963,” Allen comments, “but if there is, it hasn’t crossed my path yet.” That AAA season was filled with this sort of menace and dan- ger; and it was also exceptionally isolating, as off the field Allen was re- moved from the rest of the team by the maze of segregationist civic codes and social rituals of pre-Civil Rights Act Little Rock.24

This was perhaps the beginning of bad blood between Allen and both the Phillies’ white officialdom and Philadelphia’s white press. For one thing, Allen felt that he was ready for the majors already (his nine spring-training home runs in 1963 seemed to argue in his favor), and he saw himself as a sacrificial lamb to the organization’s imperative to desegregate its farm sys- tem. This might have been workable if, for another thing, the Phillies had handled Allen’s situation with some of the forethought and sensitivity that the Dodgers had shown Jackie Robinson. But the organization was quite calloused in its general disinterest in Allen’s Arkansas experience. As Ebony wryly noted in 1970, “During [the] 1963 season with Philadelphia’s minor league team in Little Rock, . . . he complained about racial injustice (Philly writers say they found no prejudice there).”25 Most telling, perhaps, was Arkansas manager Frank Lucchesi’s nonchalance toward the social burden that Allen was made to carry that season: “Richie was upset one night be- cause one person said, ‘Come on, Chocolate Drop, hit one out. . . . That’s not in taste but the fan didn’t realize it. They say worse things to white ballplayers. Richie is sensitive and he is self-centered.”26

And so, one might have thought, the trip north to Philadelphia the fol- lowing year would be an improvement. But Philadelphia baseball had a fairly spectacular history of racism of its own: though Connie Mack had

Bass, Amy. In the Game : Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umboston/detail.action?docID=307887. Created from umboston on 2018-08-20 14:29:19.

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26 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON

tried to smuggle talented black players into Shibe Park as Italians or Indi- ans earlier in the century, the Philadelphia stadium—like the Phillies lineup—remained the most stubbornly anti-integrationist in the National League. The black press of the 1940s reported that Mack himself was among the owners “most bitterly” opposed to integration; and according to historian Bruce Kuklick, when Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947, “the cruelest taunts he received at Ebbets Field came from the visit- ing Phillies. . . .” As for Brooklyn’s visits to Shibe Park, Phillies GM Herb Pennock pleaded with Branch Rickey not to bring Robinson at all: “Branch, you can’t bring the nigger here. Philadelphia’s not ready for that yet.” When Robinson did turn up in Philadelphia, pitchers threw at him, infielders purposely spiked him, and Phillies players once lined up on the dugout steps, pointing their bats at him and making gunshot sounds. By the mid-1950s, the Phillies were the only remaining all-white team in the Na- tional League; and even after the team finally did integrate, it remained among the last major league teams to end segregated housing during spring training.27

Over and above the racialized traditions of Philadelphia baseball, the city itself was entering a heated and dangerous period in black-white rela- tions—it was a “racial tinderbox,” as the head of the city’s Urban League described it.28 In 1964 Allen arrived in a Philadelphia wracked by racial vi- olence over issues of job discrimination, housing, school segregation, and police brutality, and in which an aggressive (and aggressively white) former beat cop named Frank Rizzo was rising rapidly through the ranks toward the commissioner’s office, which he attained in 1967.29 (Faubus and Rizzo: two-thirds of some weird, depressing hat trick. Later Allen worked for Al Campanis.) There had been violent clashes over the integration of Philadel- phia construction in 1963; and in August 1964, during Allen’s rookie sea- son, three days of rioting engulfed a 125-block area of Lower North Philadelphia, one boundary of which was marked by Connie Mack Sta- dium. Players had to pass through a “police state” to get to the ballpark during those days. One black resident lamented, “The only thing I regret about the riot . . . was that we didn’t burn down that goddamn stadium. They had it surrounded by cops, and we couldn’t get to it. I just wish we could’ve burned it down and wiped away its history that tells me I’m noth- ing but a nigger.” Two died and 339 were injured in the rioting.30

Although Philadelphia fans might indeed “boo the losers in an Easter egg hunt,” as Bob Uecker once quipped, and even white outfielder Johnny Callison had objects thrown at him, still these fans found a very special—vitriolic—place in their hearts for the new arrival from the Arkansas Travelers. Even his Rookie of the Year stats (.318, 29 HR, 91 RBI) were not enough to shield Allen from the tense, racial hatreds of

Bass, Amy. In the Game : Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umboston/detail.action?docID=307887. Created from umboston on 2018-08-20 14:29:19.

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27“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME

mid-’60s Philadelphia.31 Fan animosity toward Allen seems a compound of garden variety racism; scapegoating for the Phillies’ 1964 tailspin; venting on the larger race questions facing the city; and a misappre- hending response, as Sports Illustrated noted, to Allen’s expressionless playing style, which to many whites made him look “arrogant.” (Man- ager Gene Mauch’s more generous observation of Allen’s demeanor was that “He doesn’t get way up when things are going good, or way down when things are going bad. And that’s the best approach to any profes- sional sport.”) All of which was further fueled by “some of the harshest press in the city’s sports history.”32

Allen was in fact booed for the first time in the fifth inning of the Phils’ home opener in 1964, and he was booed plenty as the Phillies squandered their six and a half game lead in the final 12 games of that season. But the mutual bitterness began in earnest the next season, in July 1965, when a pregame fight between Allen and Philadelphia favorite Frank Thomas re- sulted in Thomas’ departure from the Phillies.33 The fight, by most ac- counts, was itself “racial.” Thomas was already w

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