On a spring evening in 1903 the Ohio Wesleyan University baseball team arrived in South Bend, Indiana for a game the following day against Notre Dame. The story goes that the hotel would not give a room to one of the visiting players, Charles Thomas, because he was African American. The Ohio Wesleyan manager, indignant that his player was refused service, was able to get the clerk to agree to allow Thomas to stay in his room that night; but only that night. The next day they would have to find different lodgings for him. When he got to the room the manager found his catcher sitting in a chair crying, violently rubbing his hands down the length of his arms saying, "Black skin, black skin, if only I could make them white."
That manager was Branch Rickey, and he would say years later that the scene of a man trying to strip off his own skin haunted him for decades, and played a key role in his determination to integrate Major League Baseball by signing Jackie Robinson to a Big League contract in 1947, as president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Some have called into question the veracity of this account, though Thomas, who remained a life long friend of Rickey, vouched for it. All agree that something happened that night, even if it didn't proceed exactly like the grizzled old baseball man and spinner of colorful tales related it. Most agree too that Rickey's motivation for breaking the "gentleman's agreement" that kept blacks out of the Big Leagues for sixty years was manifold. A social conscience? Yes. A desire for a bigger gate at the ball park? Sure. A hunger to win with the best players available, regardless of race? You bet. But there was also a little matter of faith, and it's on clear, if understated, display in the movie 42, the new bio-pic about Jackie Robinson.
In 42 (named thus for the uniform number he wore) Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) is the center of the story, but the people around him seem to have the most personality. His wife Rachel (Nicole Beharie) grew up in Southern California where segregation, at least the legal kind, didn't exist. She's a smart, self possessed woman, so the first time she sees a whites only women's room, on a pass through New Orleans, she does the only thing that seems natural; she goes in. Leo Durocher (Christopher Meloni), Brooklyn's manager, is a hard living womanizer who likes to hang with gamblers and gangsters (the latter details strangely left out of the movie), but when his players revolt at the idea of having a "negro" play with them he lays down the law in no uncertain terms: you'll play with Jackie Robinson or you will be traded. Wendell Smith (Andre Holland), a black sports reporter sent to accompany Robinson on his first spring training, has his own color line to break and seems to understand the wider implications of what our hero is doing more than our hero does. Pee Wee Reese (Lucas Black) the Dodger shortstop and a team leader, is a southerner, at once inclined to give the new guy a chance, but struggles with cultural expectations, ultimately showing a very public sign of support for Robinson that helps change the mood both inside and outside the clubhouse.
And then we have Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford): the gravel voiced, cigar chomping, Bible quoting baseball man who had already revolutionized the game by organizing the first minor league farm system when he was GM of the St. Louis Cardinals. When he came to the Dodgers he established the first permanent spring training facility, and promoted the use of batting cages, pitching machines, batting helmets and was doing statistical analysis, stressing the importance of on base percentage over batting average, thirty years before Bill James wrote his first book. Again, details left out of the movie, but show that he would have been a Hall of Fame executive even without his crowning achievement.
A question that is asked repeatedly of Rickey in the film, by Robinson especially, is "Why are you doing this?" As we've seen, this is a man who could have rested on his laurels at this point in his career. But yet something drove him on. Yes, Rickey was a shrewd business man, and we shouldn't discount the material benefits he had in mind. But in choosing a player for his grand move he didn't go for the best or most well known. He went for a college man, a former military officer and a Methodist, perfect because "I'm a Methodist, God's a Methodist." That combination of character and faith, in Rickey's mind, are what made Jackie Robinson the perfect candidate to endure the unspeakable hardships he would have to endure in the years to come. When a rival executive threatens to keep his team from the field Rickey reminds him of his eternal destiny, that God might not judge the reasons for not playing his team that day to be sufficient. Whatever role that long ago incident in the South Bend hotel may have played in the Jackie Robinson story, Rickey's faith was certainly a major factor in answering the question of why he took the risk.
While Rickey's religious convictions are on display in 42, Robinson's are not explored as deeply, though in real life he was just as devout as his boss. I guess that is my one criticism of movie, apart from some slow patches that could have been tightened up, and a bit of contrived suspense at the end to give the story some type of payoff; that Jackie seems to be the least developed character in the movie. Even before he's advised to not react to the abuse, so as not to give his enemies an excuse to point the finger of accusation back at him, he comes off as a tad stoic, a blank slate of sorts. A day after seeing the movie the person who stands out in my mind is Harrison Ford's Branch Rickey, and while I recommend 42, a solid if far from perfect film, I'm not sure that's what the film makers had in mind.
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