COMMENTARY : Negro League Should Never Be Forgotten

First thing by dawn’s early light, they’d stop the bus on the all-night roll to another game, pick up the newspapers and open directly to the box scores. How did Jackie Robinson do? He was one of theirs.

“He was the idol,” Lester Lockett recalled. “It told them maybe they had a chance.”

Lockett was 35 years old then and understood that his time had come and past in the Negro League. It was 1947, the summer after the great Josh Gibson died, the big leagues were still closed to him, and--forever--nobody would know how good he was and might have been.

But Jackie was in the big leagues and maybe he’d opened the door for the young ones. It was that summer, Lockett recalled, that the Baltimore Elite Giants were stopping in Covington, Ky., across the river from Cincinnati, and the Dodgers were in town to play the Reds.

“The bridge from Covington was loaded,” Lockett said. “People on crutches were going to see him. Boy, I’m telling you, all those people!”

His voice mixed awe and joy, and I’m sure there must have been a well-hidden tear as well. It must have been a wondrous scene.

They played a piece of it at Shea Stadium Tuesday night honoring survivors of the Negro League, 1920-1951, men in their 60s and 90s in replicas of their old uniforms. They raised some money for the Negro League Baseball Players’ Assn., but merely the thought of it was a good thing by itself.

There’s no mention on Robinson’s bronze at Cooperstown that he was the first black man to play in the major leagues and he preferred it that way. He wanted to be recognized for his stunning talent and achievements as a player, which is right and proper. But then there is nothing that says that until 1947, baseball as we know it was for whites only.

And the depth of wonderfully talented black players was relegated and resigned to rickety buses, meals on those buses, and hotels without hot water. “We’d call it Dutch lunch--baloney and cheese and stuff--and we’d buy it before the games so we’d have something to eat after; a lot of places wouldn’t serve us,” Josh Gibson Jr. said.

“Some places wouldn’t sell us gas, either,” Monte Irvin said.

A lot of people have no idea of those times, and we are left with the comment of Vince Coleman a couple of years ago that le didn’t care to know about Jackie Robinson, either. “Books are not hard to find now,” Irvin said. Robinson was a 28-year-old rookie with Brooklyn; Irvin was 30 when he broke in with the New York Giants in 1949.

Willie Randolph knows about those times. “How do you know yourself if you don’t know your history and the history of the game you love?” Randolph said.

Then again, how many others do? “They say they do,” Gibson said with a wave of derision. “You can see in their eyes they don’t.”

What those old men recalled was without bitterness. They’d barnstorm against big leaguers after the World Series, which was in early October then, and got the notion that they were as good as the big-leaguers, but they could never know. They played unbalanced schedules and mixed exhibition games with league games and played on teams with different names from town to town. Film and tape and statistics are scarce.

“You just have to go by what we tell you,” Irvin said. “We didn’t know how good we were, either.”

Gibson may have been the best of them--maybe the best of any of them. He played from 1930-46 as a catcher with a strong arm and speed and extraordinary power. He died of high blood pressure and a brain hemorrhage at 35; legend says he might have followed Robinson to the majors in ’47.

“That’s what’s so ironic,” his son said. “My father was never bitter. The every-day Negro might have felt bitter, but not the players. My father didn’t die of a broken heart. Put that in there.”

So they played three games in one day on occasion, perhaps a doubleheader in the morning in Brooklyn and a night game a couple of hours away. Sometimes they’d stay at private homes or the hotel would have one shower and they’d wait on line until there was only cold water. Meal money at the time the league was winding down reached a high of $2 a day. “You had to laugh a lot; you did, you did,” Lockett, 80, said. Good times there are not forgotten.

“It was like riding the wagon,” Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe said. “Ride all night, play all day, sing all night.”

Radcliffe, 90, is full of memories and smiles. He put out his hand. “See that,” he said. The five fingers of his right hand pointed in five directions. He was a catcher, also a pitcher, which accounts for the nickname Damon Runyon hung on him. There was the time he caught Satchel Paige in the first game and hit a grand slam. “And I was sitting on the bus hustling girls for the night,” Radcliffe said. “Every town we went to was like being on vacation. And I loved the girls.

“The owner comes out and says he needs me to pitch the second game. I said, ‘Sweeten the ante,’ and he did. I pitched a one-hitter.”

Radcliffe played 36 years. At the same time, he was pitcher, catcher, general manager and club secretary for $650 a week. Gibson was the Babe Ruth of the payrolls, too. His son recalled that the great man was paid $1,000 or $1,200 a month at a time I recall my father being paid $80 a week. Ruth, of course, was being paid $80,000 a year then.

Robinson changed it all. Maybe he wasn’t the best player in the Negro League; his peers thought he was the superior man. “Like a lot of things, we had to be better,” Lockett said.

The coming of Robinson meant the opening of doors and meant the best talent was going to the big leagues. It also meant the end of the Negro League. And that’s a little bad, but ultimately good. It shouldn’t be forgotten.