During spring training of 1955, Sports Illustrated wanted Willie Mays on its cover, an obvious choice given his previous season. What wasn’t so obvious was who was photographed with him: Leo Durocher and his wife, Laraine Day. Durocher’s celebrity was at its zenith, but the arrangement was still unusual, for the magazine had no story about the three, just a baseball preview. Mays doesn’t know how the alignment came about, but it’s safe to assume that Durocher, who reviewed most media requests for Mays and did not mind the envy of others, was behind it. To be on the front of a national magazine with an elegant actress who was his wife and the country’s most dynamic athlete who was his devoted subaltern was impressive.
Laraine Day adored Mays. In her memoir, she said that while she interviewed many athletes on her television show, “the favorite of all is Willie Mays, who suffers tortures on the air and yet wins the heart of everybody.”
On this day, the trio stood on the grass at Phoenix Municipal Stadium, the green outfield fence in the background. Mays and Durocher wore their home white uniforms, with black letters and orange trim, while Day wore a high-collared patterned dress with a hemline below the knees. Her feet, in open high-heeled shoes, looked dainty next to the massive black spikes of her companions. Her short auburn hair glistened in the sunlight. Her white earrings, red lipstick, and red nail polish accented her delicate features. She looked like a classy, middle-age PTA mom, except instead of walking her children to the bus stop, she stood between Leo Durocher and Willie Mays.
Taking the picture was Hy Peskin, Sports Illustrated ’s first staff photographer, who produced some of the most memorable sports images in the twentieth century: Joe DiMaggio completing a swing, Jim Brown glaring from the field, Ben Hogan swinging a one-iron. In 1953, Peskin had photographed Senator John Kennedy sailing with his fiancée, Jacqueline Bouvier; the picture appeared on the cover of Life and helped promote Kennedy as a national figure.
Mays doesn’t recall what Peskin said for that spring training photograph, but at some point Day put one hand on her husband’s shoulder and the other hand on Mays’s. All three looked cheerful. Peskin clicked his camera, and Sports Illustrated put the image on its cover of April 11, 1955.
The magazine was less than a year old. In time it would publish groundbreaking stories on sports and race in America, but in 1955 it stayed clear of social issues and didn’t use its cover for any agenda beyond showing a good photograph. Whether Peskin had any ulterior motives is unknown, but according to Robert Creamer, then a writer at the magazine, “It wasn’t until the letters came in that we knew of any controversy.”
Sports Illustrated had shattered a great taboo: a white woman was touching a black man, surely a first for the front of any mainstream national magazine.[8] White supremacists had long raised the specter of predatory black “savages” deflowering helpless white women as grounds for segregation, incarceration, and violent oppression. The volatile mix of race and sex had triggered devastating riots, rallied lynch mobs, and turned innocents into martyrs—such as Emmitt Till, a fourteen-year-old African American who that very year was murdered after he spoke to or whistled at a white woman in a small Mississippi town. (The acquittal of two defendants would energize the nascent civil rights movement.)
In the mainstream media, the barrier between white women and black men could not be breached, but now Laraine Day was placing her willful right hand on Willie Mays’s muscular right shoulder, with pleasant smiles on both their faces. The image chipped away at the corrupt armature of Jim Crow, and Sports Illustrated ’s outraged readers sent their letters, some of which were published on April 25.
F. M. Odom of Shreveport, La.: Up until now I have not found anything in particularly bad taste in SI, but by golly, when you print a picture on the cover in full color, of a white woman embracing a negro (with a small letter) man, you make it evident that even in a magazine supposedly devoted to healthful and innocent sports you have to engage in South-baiting.... I care nothing about those three people as individuals, but I care a heck of a lot about the proof the picture gives that SI is part of the giant plan to flaunt all decency, so long as the conquered of 1865 can be reminded of their eternal defeat.
Edward F. Webb of Nashville, Tenn.: To tell you that I was shocked at SI’s cover would be putting it mildly.... The informative note inside the magazine tells me that this is Mrs. Leo Durocher, a white woman, with her arm affectionately around the neck of Willie Mays, a Negro ballplayer.... Let me say to you, Sir, the most appalling blow ever struck at this country, the most disastrous thing that ever happened to the people of America, was the recent decision of the Supreme Court declaring segregation unconstitutional.
T. B. Kelso of Fort Worth, Tex.: Please cancel my subscription.... This is an insult to every decent white woman everywhere.
A. C. Dunn of New Orleans: Such disgusting racial propaganda is not fit for people who are trying to build a stronger nation based on racial integrity.
Those letters generated their own responses, which were published on May 2.
Norwood W. Pope of Jackson Heights, N.Y.: I am embarrassed beyond words and infuriated to the point of battle, concerning those letters from the good Americans in Tennessee, Louisiana and Texas who thought your cover was “racial propaganda” and “an insult to white women.”... Willie Mays is an American baseball player first, last and always. He waves no flags, he stirs no trouble, his teammates like him, he has no axes to grind. He is the personification of liberty, initiative, democracy and fair play. Willie is a top-notch baseball player; his only discriminations are against opposing pitchers, his only philosophy is to play good, clean baseball.
A.P.L. Knott, Jr., of New Haven, Conn.: I was shocked to see that such strong negative reactions to SI’s April 11 cover should prevail in this great democratic country of ours. ... I am quite sure that when SI printed the cover there was no intention of South-baiting, recollecting the Civil War, insulting any women or spreading racial propaganda on the part of the editors, as these gentlemen claimed.
Steve Kraisler of Long Beach, N.Y.: I have never written to a magazine before, but I consider it my duty to do so at this time. I was disgusted at the letters concerning the cover of Willie Mays and Mrs. Leo Durocher. I may be only 15 years old but I have more common sense than any adult with those ideas.
Though unintended, Sports Illustrated had prompted a conversation about race. What’s noteworthy is not the vitriol of the southern bigots but the naiveté of the northern liberals, including the magazine’s editors—their shock that these racist views were even held, let alone tightly embraced, by others. Anyone reading the exchange would have gained insights into America’s racial schism and recognized how fierce the opposition would be to integration.
And what did Mays think? He thought the cover was cool and knew nothing of the controversy.
The modern civil rights movement had no official beginning, but two events are usually cited as its launching point: the Brown v. Board of Education decision, handed down on May 17, 1954; and more than a year later, on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, which led to her arrest but also mobilized blacks to boycott the city’s buses. One year later, the law that required segregated busing was abolished. These victories catapulted the careers of Thurgood Marshall, who represented the petitioners in Brown, and Martin Luther King, Jr., a young Montgomery pastor who led the bus boycott. As the scholar Charles Ogletree pointed out in All Deliberate Speed, Marshall and King had very different approaches to ending segregation. Marshall believed in change through the court system, or legal challenges, while King advocated nonviolent political protests, or extralegal challenges. Both approaches were needed, for resistance to integration was pervasive: from President Eisenhower, who privately disagreed with Brown and, when he did speak out, emphasized that integration should happen slowly; to congressional members from the South, 90 percent of whom signed a “Southern Manifesto,” which vowed to reverse Brown ; to the Supreme Court itself, which one year after Brown refused to rule that schools desegregate immediately but should do so “with all deliberate speed.”
Grassroots opposition was also intense, including the White Citizens’ Councils in the South, which publicly renounced violence in favor of economic tactics, but still contributed to hostilities against blacks. In Birmingham, resistance to Brown quickly surfaced. Before the decision, the city commissioners had abolished the ordinance that had prohibited blacks and whites from sharing any recreational activity. The commission unanimously amended the law so blacks and whites could play spectator sports together, including baseball, which would have more easily allowed Willie Mays to play exhibitions in his hometown. But two weeks after Brown, Birmingham voters resegregated baseball, among other sports, by a margin of 3–1. Throughout the South, local and state legislatures asserted their right to block the federal government from dismantling Jim Crow, and by the end of 1956, southern legislatures had approved of more than a hundred new segregation statutes.
The great milestones of Brown and the Montgomery boycott simply marked the beginning of a long struggle, and while Marshall and King would lead the battle in America’s courtrooms and streets, there was a third assault on segregation, and it came from our national pastime. Racial attitudes don’t change by judicial fiat or adamant protests. But they can be changed by events that challenge assumptions and biases, thus creating an opposing narrative to the outright lies embedded in white supremacy. Baseball created that opposing narrative, giving its black pioneers the perfect stage to defy and inspire.
Tallulah Bankhead said in 1954, “The Negro stars have certainly done something for baseball... and baseball has done something for the Negroes too. If nothing else, it’s unbigoted some bigots.”
Baseball wasn’t the only sport to play a role. Boxers contributed, specifically Joe Louis, who was not only a champion fighter but a soft-spoken patriot. His defeat of the German Max Schmeling in 1938 and his fundraising for the U.S. war effort made him immensely popular with white fans. So too was Jesse Owens, whose four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin discredited Hitler’s racist ideology.
But baseball, with its deep roots in America, was different. Raw ability was not enough. It’s a team game that requires collaboration, intelligence, and finesse—attributes that Major League Baseball had in fact cited to justify its color barrier. In 1946, the National and American leagues established a steering committee to evaluate integration, among other things, and concluded: “A major league baseball player must have something besides great natural ability. He must possess the technique, the coordination, the competitive attitude and the discipline, which is usually acquired only after years of training in the minor leagues.” Since blacks never had a chance to play in the minors, according to the report’s circular logic, “comparatively few young Negro players are being developed.”
Branch Rickey rejected this sophistry, promoting Jackie Robinson the next year, but the report’s patronizing language reflected common attitudes. An influential 1925 report for the army, for example, was blunter in its rationale for segregation. Because of Negroes’ “smaller cranium, lighter brain, [and] cowardly and immoral character,” they were lower on the evolutionary scale.[9]
By the early 1950s, blacks had succeeded in business, law, academia, and the arts, as well as the military, but by virtue of baseball’s popularity, it fell to its Negro pioneers to shatter racist stereotypes, and it’s no insult to Thurgood Marshall or Martin Luther King to say that Jackie Robinson deserves a place in the pantheon of great civil rights leaders. King himself recognized this. One month before he was assassinated, he visited Don Newcombe and said at the dinner table, “Don, you and Jackie and Roy will never know how easy you made it to do my job.”
Willie Mays was often compared to Robinson, for good reason. They were America’s two most prominent black athletes in the 1950s, and they were both fast, intense competitors who imported the Negro League style of aggressive play. They also shared certain habits, such as their shunning of tobacco and alcohol.
But their backgrounds and personalities, as well as their views on social issues, could not have been more different. Everything about the young Mays—apprehensive, amicable, fearful of controversy—Robinson contradicted. Eleven years older than Mays, Robinson grew up amid affluence in Pasadena, California, on a mostly white block in a working-class part of town. Even as a boy, he had a quick temper—he threw rocks at the father of a girl who called him “nigger”—and he channeled his anger through sports. He attended UCLA for two years, and though he didn’t graduate, he was at least immersed in a world of inquiry and analysis. Unlike Mays, he could not abide blacks’ second-class status, which led to repeated confrontations. After he was drafted, he refused to move to the back of a bus at Camp Hood, the army base in Texas where he was stationed. He got into an argument and was arrested, though found not guilty in a military trial.
Branch Rickey saw Robinson’s defiance as a source of strength, which he would need to endure the slurs, the threats, and the isolation of baseball’s “great experiment.” But after suppressing his emotions for two years with the Dodgers, Robinson’s simmering rage could no longer be contained, causing friction with opponents, the National League, and his own club. Robinson was one of the few blacks who openly protested segregated housing during spring training. On his expense account, along with the usual items such as meals, rent, and transportation, he inserted “humiliation,” without specifying an amount, and suggested the Dodgers quantify the indignities he had suffered.
His frequent confrontations with the umpires prompted one, Jocko Conlan, to say that Robinson “was the most difficult ballplayer I had to deal with.... Jackie was one of those players who could never accept a decision.... Almost every time he was called out on strikes or on a close play on the bases, there seemed to be a few words.”
Mays, by contrast, rarely argued with umpires, would greet them as he jogged to center field, and was never ejected from a game—not once in twenty-two seasons. He says he couldn’t help the team from the clubhouse. Nor did he publicly complain about segregated housing during spring training, though he eventually rebelled against the treatment. At some point, the Giants could all stay in the same hotel in Phoenix, but the blacks and Latins could not eat in the restaurant. So Mays, motivated more by the inconvenience than moral outrage, moved to another hotel that was owned by a friend. The public never knew.
Where Robinson bitterly opposed discrimination, Mays turned segregation into a profit center. In St. Louis, baseball teams stayed at the Chase Hotel, which banned black patrons. Robinson demanded that the Chase drop its racial barrier, and in 1954 the hotel finally relented on a limited basis: blacks could sleep there but could not use the dining room, the swimming pool, or loiter in the lobby.
Mays didn’t care about the Chase; he preferred staying in a black hotel. The Giants gave him the cash to cover the expenses for all the minority players, but the hotel waived their bill as long as they hung out in the dining room and bar—it was great publicity—and Mays divvied up the surplus cash among himself and the other banned players. That ended once the Chase was integrated.
As Robinson’s career continued, he became more public and more strident in his demands for racial progress, and he was met with a backlash. “I was a martyred hero to a lot of people who seemed to have sympathy for the underdog,” he wrote in I Never Had It Made . “But the minute I began to answer, to argue, to protest—the minute I began to sound off—I became a swellhead, a wise guy, an ‘uppity’ nigger.” Robinson resented veteran black players like Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, and Monte Irvin for not speaking out with him, and his crusading spirit only intensified in retirement. Jimmy Cannon wrote that Robinson used “anger as a confederate,” and Don Newcombe said, “He was the kind of man who had to make his presence felt. He sometimes overdid it. Like a boiler, he could not keep it all inside him.”
While that smoldering intensity was part of Robinson’s greatness, Mays concealed all his hurts with his joyous veneer and his honest belief that he was fortunate to play the sport he cherished. Robinson’s game was an act of politics; for Mays, it was one of love. Donald Honig said, “Robinson, by virtue of seething pride, unforgiving resentments, his belligerency, and his outspokenness, was always the symbol of racial progress and aspiration. For some blacks, the innocent, laughing young Mays seemed too close to stereotype. Where Robinson threatened the social order, Willie approximated a comfortable fit.”
Mays often had the ear of the most powerful people in the country. In July 1955, he was one of thirty-two “sports leaders” invited to the White House for a meeting with President Eisenhower on how to interest youngsters in competitive sports. Archie Moore, the boxer, gave such an inspiring talk on how to stop juvenile delinquency that Eisenhower suggested he run for Congress. Mays also had a platform. As the group prepared for a photograph on the White House lawn, reporters swarmed him. “What do you want to know, cats?” he asked. “Sure I go for this recreation business. We haven’t got half enough parks for the kids in New York.” Asked if he would give the president any suggestions, Mays said, “Naw, I don’t go for that, but I’m with the program.”
Mays showed a bit more spunk in a brief conversation with Vice President Nixon, who gave Willie some advice on working through a recent slump. “Keep your spirit up—that’s the main thing,” Nixon said. “You have the natural ability. After a good year, you usually have a bad one to settle down a bit and then you come up again.”
Mays respectfully disagreed. “I don’t believe that,” he told Nixon. “A good player’s got to play good all the time.”
Mays’s desire to please may have struck some as “too close to stereotype,” but the ease with which white America could embrace Mays was invaluable at a time when the slightest challenge to the status quo—witness the Sports Illustrated cover—sent tremors. Mays was a transformative player, but he shunned the language of transformation or even triumph and hewed to a nonthreatening script of humility and respect.
After the 1954 season, Durocher launched one of his glowing riffs on Willie, claiming he could “out run, out throw, and out field” Stan Musial, and “he can out hit him as well and has so much power.”
This caused a stir. Musial had already won three MVPs and six batting championships, and he was still near the peak of his Hall of Fame career. For Durocher to assert that a relative newcomer was his superior was heresy, the more so because Musial was a consummate gentleman who shied away from self-promotion.
Several weeks after Durocher’s comments, Mays traveled to Rochester, New York, to accept the Ray Hickok Belt as the Professional Athlete of the Year. In a speech before 550 people, he bluntly contradicted his own manager. “I appreciate the nice things Leo said about me, but Musial has many great seasons in the records, while I am only starting,” he said. “I hope I can become as great as Stan.... I’d like to be able to win this [award] three more times. I’m lucky I’m young enough to try. But most of all, I’d like to hit like Stan Musial.”
By defending Musial’s name and honor, “Mays stole the show,” said Russ Hodges, who was in the crowd. Mays always knew his place.
Mays felt good about his comments, in part because Musial was such a fine person. One or two years later, Mays found himself on a plane with Musial on the way to an All-Star Game. Several black players were in the rear, playing cards, and Musial walked up to them and stood there.
“I’m for playing the game,” he told Mays.
“Stan,” he said, “you can’t play with us. We’re all black.”
“I want to play.”
So Musial sat down and joined them. Mays recalls, “That told me how classy he was, and I never forgot that.”
Willie Mays was rarely asked about civil rights in the 1950s. Both he and the movement were young. He was insulated from criticism, but when he was asked about it, he urged patience. “I’m from the South,” he told the Saturday Evening Post in 1957. “I understand these things. It won’t change overnight. The old generation can’t ever change. You have to wait for the young generation. I think sports have helped a lot. I think sports will help even more.”
His critics later ridiculed his timidity, but ask any white youngster of that era who cheered for him, imitated him, or wept for him, and his contributions are undeniable.
Bill Littlefield, for example, grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, and his passion for sports led to his career as host of National Public Radio’s weekly show Only a Game. As a kid, Bill was a Giants fan. He isn’t sure why but assumes it had to do with his undiluted love for Willie Mays—he was six years old when Willie won his first MVP. Bill saw occasional games at the Polo Grounds and on television, but he also followed Willie in the newspaper that his father brought home each night and on his portable transistor radio, which he would take to his tree house to listen to games. It wasn’t sufficient for him to root for Willie, he had to be Willie. One Halloween, he dressed up in a Giants uniform with number 24 on the back, blacked out his face with burnt cork, and went to his school, which had only white students. He then stopped by his neighbor’s house. “They had a black maid,” Littlefield recalls. “I don’t know what she thought, except she laughed until I thought she was going to fall down.”
He had no racial consciousness about Mays or, for that matter, the world around him. Bill had heard that Willie was looking for a house, so when he discovered the people next door were moving, he naturally thought it would be wonderful for Willie to move in next to him. “I thought he could help me out,” he says. “I had no recognition at all that a black man couldn’t just move into the neighborhood.”
All Bill knew about or cared about was his hero’s special greatness on the field. It transcended race, team loyalty, even baseball itself. He later commented, “His achievement beyond excellence was that he seemed to perform with such joy that he conveyed the impression that he was meant to do what he was doing. When you were watching him, you were watching the confluence of talent, concentration, and enthusiasm that not only allowed the suspension of disbelief—because who could believe that anybody could do some of the things Willie Mays did?—but that also encouraged the mad notion that a world where such grace was possible must be a pretty terrific place.”
To some of Mays’s fans, his blackness added a new layer, a different dimension, to the experience of watching him. Jim Bouton, for example, born in 1939, grew up in the blue-collar town of Rochelle Park, New Jersey. He pitched for the New York Yankees in the 1960s but gained his greatest fame by writing Ball Four, his controversial memoir on the foibles of the major leagues. As a boy, he rooted for the Giants, and on special occasions he went to the Polo Grounds, where he watched Willie Mays. “I saw him his rookie year, one of his first games, and he hit a line drive down the right field line, a triple, and boy, watching him fly around the bases, it was tremendously electrifying,” Bouton recalls. “When he was on the bases, you had to lean forward in your seat. There was a feeling that at any moment, [there would be] a burst of action.”
Mays’s skin color “was part of the mystique,” he says. “He looked different than everyone else, and that difference thrilled us.” Jim got to one game three hours early to get Mays’s signature. When Mays got out of a taxi, he was mobbed by fans but still signed their programs, including Jim’s, and when Jim played stickball with his brother, he would imitate the batting stances of each Giant, including their tics in the batter’s box. What was Willie’s tic? Bouton pauses, then says, “He smiled.” (Mays didn’t smile in the box, but to a kid, it must have seemed that way.)
Bouton reached the majors in 1962 but, unlike most players of his era, he had gone to college and was far more aware of the world outside baseball. He believes Mays was “a tremendous help in civil rights,” citing his own experience as proof. He recalls no racial hostilities in his town. There were also no black people. His exposure to race came mainly through baseball, where he noticed that few blacks sat on the bench. “They were the better players,” Bouton says. And Willie was the best. “There were a lot of kids like me,” he says, “who learned to love him before anybody told us we couldn’t.”
Television magnified Mays’s appeal, allowing, among others, a ten-year-old southern white kid named Bill Clinton to become a fan. Born in Hope, Arkansas, in 1946, Bill tried to be home on the Saturday afternoons when the Giants played on Game of the Week . “Willie was the greatest player playing,” Clinton says. “I saw him make those plays, and I just loved it.” Those experiences contributed to his own interest in the nexus of sports and race in America. In Arkansas, like the rest of the South, the integration of schools proceeded slowly, if at all. In 1957, President Eisenhower had to enlist the Arkansas National Guard and send in army troops to allow nine black students to enter Central High School in Little Rock.
Clinton notes that opposition to civil rights was widespread, but many of those same opponents also followed Willie Mays. “Just watching him on TV, seeing what he did and the way he treated people, it had an effect on people even if they weren’t aware,” he says. Most teenagers and children were too young to understand the intellectual basis for civil rights, too inexperienced to appreciate the great speeches or the spirited debates over integration. But Willie Mays they watched, they understood, and they embraced.
As president, Clinton became a golfing buddy of Mays’s, but even as a kid, he says, he recognized that Mays was different from the other players. “He had that personality that drew people to him,” he says, and suggests that Mays did something important, beyond the score card, each time he took the field, something that helped pave the way for social change: “When you see someone doing something you admire”—like Willie Mays—“the image of that makes a mockery of all forms of bigotry.”
By the time Mays reached the majors, one of the central fears about integration had already been dispelled—that black players would damage the value of a baseball franchise by alienating white fans. The experience of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Cleveland Indians had proven that false. Performance, not race, mattered. The year 1951 was critical for baseball’s integration, in part because Branch Rickey and Bill Veeck, the executives with the Dodgers and the Indians who opened the door to blacks, went to the Pittsburgh Pirates and the St. Louis Browns, committing two more teams to the bandwagon. But Mays’s arrival also accelerated integration. His popularity proved that black players were economic assets — Mays was baseball’s biggest attraction. After watching him play, Dan Daniel of the New York World Telegram wrote: “We wonder how the magnates kept the Negro out so long.” The Giants were to play an exhibition game on April 13, 1956, against the Washington Senators in the nation’s capital. Mays was to be given the day off, but the Senators, citing large advance sales, appealed to him. Mays agreed to play, and the game drew 13,712; Washington had drawn 6,709 two nights earlier in an exhibition game against the Dodgers. With a triple, a single, and a fine catch, Mays delivered as promised.
Mays’s broad appeal contributed to the pressures on those teams without black players. In September 1953, the Philadelphia Athletics and Chicago Cubs put African Americans on their rosters for the first time, with Ernie Banks joining the Cubs. On Opening Day 1954, the Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds, Washington Senators, and St. Louis Cardinals had their first black players. Over several months, the number of integrated teams had doubled to twelve. The Yankees fell in line the following year, and by 1959 the remaining three teams—the Phillies, the Detroit Tigers, and the Red Sox—had purged the final vestiges of Jim Crow.
Jackie Robinson often spoke highly of Mays as a ballplayer, but he had little respect for him personally. He didn’t publicly criticize Mays until the 1960s, when the civil rights movement assumed more urgency and Robinson denounced Mays’s silence. In the 1950s, when they competed against each other, Robinson viewed Mays as a younger Campanella or Irvin or Doby—docile, uneducated blacks who accepted the corrupt status quo. Robinson saw Mays, according to Roger Kahn, as an “Uncle Tom.”
The two men were going to be teammates, or so people thought, when in December 1956 the Dodgers announced that they had traded Robinson to the Giants. Robinson was thirty-seven and had just completed his tenth year in the majors. The last two seasons saw his performance decline. He was slower, thicker in the waist, and prone to injury, but he could still contribute. In his final season, his average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage, compared to his career numbers, were .275/.311, .382/.409, and .412/.474.
Mays was excited about the trade. He craved mentors and believed that Robinson, still one of his heroes, could play that role. The Giants planned to make them roommates. No matter how much his physical skills had diminished, Robinson could surely teach Mays a few things about the game. The Giants, for their part, had no illusions about Robinson’s eroding abilities. Chub Feeney later acknowledged that the principal motive behind the trade was the expected boost in attendance from the fans in Harlem.
The trade never happened. Robinson promptly announced his retirement, taking a position at Chock full o’ Nuts instead. The Giants begged him to reconsider, but his playing days were over. Baseball pundits have speculated that Robinson quit because he didn’t want to play second fiddle to Willie Mays or perhaps because he didn’t want to join the team that had always been his sworn enemy.
Neither consideration likely played a role. Robinson, who had been feuding with Dodger management, had lined up his position at Chock full o’ Nuts before the trade was proposed. His health was likely a significant factor in his decision. In 1957, Robinson was diagnosed with diabetes, but he had probably suffered from high blood sugar for a while. His doctor, at the time of the diagnosis, said that for someone who’d played sports and didn’t drink or smoke, he had “never seen a body so badly deteriorated.”
One can only speculate what would have happened had Robinson and Mays been teammates, as well as roommates, for a year. What impact, if any, would either have had on the other? In fact, Mays says he and Robinson never had a significant encounter or even a meaningful conversation. Their worlds rarely overlapped, and Robinson remained a distant hero. It might have been for the best.