From the Archives: Vin Scully says Jackie Robinson went at it with every fiber of his being

When he met Jackie Robinson 47 years ago, Vin Scully was hardly prepared for the history he was about to live. Indeed, Scully was hardly prepared to do what he had been hired to do: become part of the broadcast team of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

He was right out of college, a skinny redhead who had played a little baseball at Fordham and had somehow wangled a chance behind the microphone. As he tells it, he was not quite ready for prime time, but when Walter O’Malley, baseball’s Cecil B. De Mille, says it’s time for your close-up, you don’t get camera shy.

It was the spring of 1950, and the Dodgers loved Scully. But they also loved to tease him. Manager Burt Shotton called him the Fordham Flash, even though Scully resembled Frankie Frisch like Woody Allen resembles Dick Butkus.

“I was this little kid off the streets of New York, and to say I was in awe would be a huge understatement,” Scully says. “They all treated me fine, Jackie included. I was their ‘little one’ and they took care of me.”

They even put him in uniform for an exhibition game in Battle Creek, Mich., that summer, as a fill-in for Gil Hodges, whose wife was having a baby.

“I weighed about 155 pounds, Hodges about 195, but there I was, in his uniform,” Scully recalls. “Before the game, I was out in center field, shagging some flies, and one came at me from Roy Campanella. It was a liner, stayed about shoulder high, and I’ll never forget the concussion when that ball hit my glove. It was like I had been at third base, not center field. I said, ‘I don’t belong out there.’ That was the end of that.”

So it was against this backdrop of time and Dodger history that the Fordham Flash II first crossed paths with Robinson, then already a three-year veteran of baseball’s racial wars and barrier-breaking and still, daily, making sports history.

And now, 47 years later, and the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s entry into the white man’s world of the major leagues, it is altogether fitting and logical that the Dodgers’ living broadcast legend would be among the most eloquent in remembering the Dodgers’ deceased infield legend.

“He was an intelligent man, sensitive and understanding to what was going on around him at all times,” Scully says. “And that made his task so much more difficult.

“He was aware of what he was there to do. He was aware of the tremendous load he carried. Think about it. Imagine being the black man in baseball. Imagine having to think every day, ‘What would it mean to my race if I’m a bust?’ ”

That’s why, according to Scully, Robinson did not take it well when other blacks did not have a sense of the history or a feel for the importance of the moment.

“Sometimes, when we broke spring training, we would travel from Florida to Brooklyn by way of Texas,” Scully recalls.

“I remember one night when thousands of black fans showed up to watch Jackie and the Dodgers play an exhibition. Many of them had used the occasion to do a lot of drinking, and that made Jackie angry. He was very conscious of how the blacks who came to the games acted, and on this particular occasion, he went over, a couple of times, to berate the fans. He told them that this was not an occasion to get drunk, but a time to show the whites that you belong.”

Scully says he saw a burning in Robinson that he has seen in few others. He refers to Robinson’s early years in the major leagues as an ongoing battle to “face down the fires of the competitive desires of others.”

In other words, Jackie Robinson hated to lose.

“It was the winter of 1951, and we were at Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskill Mountains,” Scully recalls. “Jackie brought Rachel [his wife] and she was great with child. I brought my ice skates, those long, pointy things you use for speedskating.

“They had a nice rink there, and I told Jackie I was going skating. He said he wanted to come along, and so he showed up, with Rachel. Well, I laced the skates up and he had a pair he got somewhere and he put them on. But he could barely stand up. Here he was, one of the greatest athletes in the world, falling all over himself.

“So what does he say? He asks me if I want to race!

“I say to him, ‘Jackie, I’m from New York City. I’ve skated all my life. I know how to do this. You’re from Southern California. You’ve never been on ice skates, and you want to race me? There’s no way you could beat me.’

“He said, ‘Maybe, but that’s how I’m going to learn.’ ”

Scully says that, although they never quite got down to racing, Robinson was out on the ice, moving around as best he could on his ankles, never really giving in to the idea that this was something he couldn’t do.

“In everything he tried, he wanted to go 100 mph,” Scully says.

Like when he was stealing bases.

“He never showed any fear of failure,” Scully says. “I talked to Maury Wills years later, and I asked him why he never tried to steal home. Wills admitted that he had this great sense of possible failure.

“You look at the base stealers of today. They take quiet leads. Jackie never took a quiet lead in his life. When he got on first base, he wanted attention. His leads were taunting dances. He always said that, once he got on first, he was thinking that he might steal second, and then third and even home.

“I’ve never seen a player quite as incendiary as Jackie.”

So often, those who make history have little or no idea they are doing so. It is especially true in sports that many of the greatest didn’t know it until they read their press clippings.

Robinson was different. That is the element of him that, to this day, intrigues Scully most. He knew, and he still did it.

“The ideal guy to send to the plate, with two out in the ninth and the World Series on the line, is a dull guy, a guy who just goes up there and swings without thinking about the consequences,” Scully says.

“Jackie Robinson always knew the consequences. In everything. That’s why, to me, it has always been so amazing that he succeeded, and how he succeeded.”