Chandler’s Best Story Was Robinson

Understand, Happy Chandler was not averse to talking about himself or his accomplishments. Whatever else he was in a rich and varied life that ended Saturday, he was a masterful politician of the old school. The man could and probably did filibuster with the best of them.

Chandler invariably prefaced his remarks with down-home stories that drew laughs and ingratiated himself to the audience. There was the time, eight years ago, when Commissioner Bowie Kuhn invited him to address the players and guests at the All-Star Game luncheon in Chicago. During his term in office, Kuhn had resurrected Chandler from baseball obscurity and appeared to genuinely like the man. Conversely, the former Kentucky governor and U.S. senator had become a major supporter of Kuhn, and Kuhn needed all the clout he could muster as he faced an impending vote of owners.

So Chandler got to his feet to deliver a few remarks and remained there for the better part of a half-hour. Before repeating his version of the events that would lead to the signature achievement of his administration, before championing Kuhn’s bid for a new contract (which he did not receive) and embracing the man, he presented some background information.

“My grandpa was shot in the heel at Shiloh,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Grandpa, you must have been running.’ He said, ‘Hell, all of us were running.’ My grandpa also told me, ‘We could have beaten the Union with cornstalks. The only thing was they wouldn’t fight with cornstalks.’ ”

Albert Benjamin Chandler probably had a million such tales in his northern repertoire and just as many contradictory yarns for use in his home state of Kentucky and other precincts south of the Mason-Dixon line. The audience that day particularly liked the story he told about his father, although it sounded familiar in all but the details. The nearest “big town” of his youth, he said, was Evansville, Ind.

“They had a burlesque show there,” Chandler said. “My dad told me not to go because there was something there I shouldn’t see. Well, of course I went there and I did see something I shouldn’t see. I saw my father.”

Those stories fit the image that the man projected as a colorful and largely harmless figure, a stereotypical southern politician nicknamed Happy. It masked the streak of progressiveness and independence that characterized his one term as commissioner. From all evidence, the owners were only too happy to maintain the status quo when Chandler was elected to succeed the late Judge Landis, who had died in the office especially created for him.

It has been reported that one of Landis’ last acts as commissioner, in 1944, was to persuade Gerry Nugent, the owner of the financially and artistically troubled Philadelphia Phillies, to take less money for the team from William Cox rather than accept the offer of Bill Veeck. The maverick, who would later sign the American League’s first black player -- Larry Doby -- after acquiring an interest in the Cleveland Indians, wanted to staff the woebegone Phillies with veterans of the Negro Leagues. He expected they would win the National League pennant but he made the mistake, he later noted, of apprising Landis of his plans.

But with Chandler now in office, Branch Rickey went ahead with the plan he had been hatching to break the color line in Brooklyn.

First, he signed Jackie Robinson to a contract with the Dodgers’ International League farm club. Now a black man was only one step from the major leagues and Robinson responded with a sensational season in Montreal. It left the lodge brothers uneasy.

A vote was taken on the admissability of the player at baseball’s winter meetings, in January 1947, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. “The members voted 15-1 not to let Jackie Robinson in the major leagues,” Chandler recalled at that luncheon in 1983. The positive vote, of course, belonged to Rickey.

“(Rickey) came down to my cabin in Versailles (Ky.) after that meeting,” Chandler said, “and we talked it out. He said, ‘Commissioner, I can’t do it unless I have your support.’ I said, ‘Branch, I know that. I’m the only one that can authorize the transfer of the contract from Montreal to Brooklyn.’ ”

If he wanted to keep his job longer, he certainly would have found it convenient to cite the vote of the owners. In fact, he even chose to categorize the actions of his predecessor as following orders. “Not to be too harsh on the old judge,” Chandler said, “he was just doing what the owners wanted.”

But Chandler chose to go against the wishes of the majority. He approved the transfer of Robinson shortly before suspending the manager of the Dodgers, Leo Durocher, for consorting with gamblers and other undesirables. Baseball was irrevocably changed for the better.

“The records will show -- and I believe in the records -- that I made some modest contributions to baseball,” Chandler said when he was still “a healthy-looking cuss” of 84. “They weren’t enough to insure me another tour.” Indeed, Chandler, who branded himself as a player’s commissioner, was voted out of office after his first term.

Some of what Chandler said was fanciful. He claimed that, as lieutenant governor of Kentucky, he attended the 1932 World Series at Wrigley Field and saw Babe Ruth point to the center-field bleachers before his epic home run. But whatever the politician said in his long life wasn’t as significant as what he did in his one, shining moment as commissioner.