"The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball," the book's subtitle promises us. Released 67 1/2 years after Jackie Robinson's major league debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field in April 1947, "Rickey & Robinson" promises to divulge information that seems to have eluded Jules Tygiel (
Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy
), Jonathan Eig (
Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season
), and Harrison Ford (
42
).
It's also Roger Kahn's final book. Roger, author of
The Boys of Summer
, can lay legitimate claim to being one of the most influential sportswriters of the past three generations. He takes this occasion to do a victory lap, so the book becomes far more than just the story of April 1947. Kahn goes backwards and forwards in time and investigates a series of occurrences in the lives of both Branch Rickey, the Dodgers' executive who hatched the plan to integrate baseball 60 years after the last black players had been banished, and Jackie Robinson, the talented athlete who was chosen to be first. The narrative stretches from the turn of the 20th century, when Rickey was still playing college ball, to the early 1970s and Jackie's final moments before his untimely death. A lot of other events are taken in along the way.
Reading Kahn's prose is a delight. This is not a straight Point A to Point B narrative, as Kahn, cleaning out all his old reporter's notebooks and looking to tell long-forgotten stories that his pusillanimous editors wouldn't allow him to print in the mid-1950s, engages in innumerable detours. He's also a character in the narrative, albeit a secondary one, as he retells interviews he did with both principals back in the '50s; we learn about the time Rickey kind-of sort-of offered him a job in the Pittsburgh Pirates' front office, and the time Robinson settled his clothing bill. More importantly, Kahn speaks of what it was like to be a young man of Jewish descent in Brooklyn in the 1930s and '40s (i.e. not nearly as easy as it is for someone like me today). But, the net effect is of listening to a favorite college professor hold court after class, answering one asked question by answering five other unasked ones. Tons of literary allusions (Sartre, Ezra Pound), and descriptions of dinner menus (for example, slipping in a seafood restaurant review while describing a lunch that he had with Tim McCarver at an upscale Manhattan eatery).
What do we learn that's new? A fair bit, actually. Kahn uncovers conversations that Rickey had with his clergyman, and prints statements that Rickey gave in Eisenhower-era interviews that weren't deemed fit for publication at the time. He also prints "the untold story" of events that were only dimly understood by the press when they happened: the Dixie Walker-led revolt by the white Dodgers against permitting Jackie to play on the team, in Havana during Spring Training 1947; the St. Louis Cardinals' (mostly) team-wide effort to refuse to take the field against the Dodgers early in the actual '47 season. Kahn knew a lot of the principals involved during both incidences of labor unrest, and purports to be able to ascribe motivations to those men, which he claims that other reporters and authors missed, or at least misunderstood, when they wrote about such events.
This does lead to some unfortunate bits of name-calling. Kahn settles the score against lots of his long-dead newspapermen contemporaries, and also criticizes more recent books about Jackie Robinson that he claims misinterpreted historical events. If you wrote a newspaper story about baseball in the 1950s and enjoyed your libations, Kahn in 2014 will list every drink you consumed and how many decades it took you to pay the tab. If you are one of the title characters in this book and you enjoyed carnal relations with woman-not-wife, Kahn will out you. And, if a story is suggested in Chapter 3 and told at length in Chapter 5, you can bet that Kahn will tell the story again in Chapter 12 as if it hadn't been mentioned at all before (the fact that this baseball book came out in September and not March or April speaks perhaps to some issues with the editing process).
But those are minor quibbles, really. Kahn, even at age 86, is tremendously entertaining to read, and he does add a lot more texture and insight to the process of integrating baseball than other authors have been able to bring. He unearths observations by Rickey about baseball that are eerily similar to the important "discoveries" that baseball statistical analysts have only just discovered over the past 10-15 years. We will literally never see a new Roger Kahn book again, so enjoy this one right now.
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