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By Roger Kahn

Starting a Magazine with Jackie Robinson

In 1953, my second season of covering the Brooklyn Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune, Jackie Robinson asked me to join him for lunch near the Flatiron Building, a venerable steel-framed skyscraper in lower Manhattan. There he began to outline the magazine that would be called Our Sports. Reading from notes Robinson said, "Our Sports aims to corral all the activities of Negroes in sport into one interpretive medium for the vast Negro audience." His tenor voice rang with excitement. "I'm going to write a column every month. I want you to help me there. I'm a lousy typist. Then I want you to write a story for us under your own name every other month. Plus give us all the ideas you can." He then mentioned the fee, $150 a month. Since my Tribune salary still was only $120 a week, Robinson's offer was a fine supplement. On top of that, his enthusiasm for the new magazine found a match in my enthusiasm at the chance to work with a complex, brilliant and heroic man.

Looking back at yellowing pages of Our Sports five decades later gives me a sense of, pride. I led one issue with a piece Jackie wanted me to write: "What White Big Leaguers REALLY Think of Negro Players." I must have interviewed 50 baseball people. Walter O'Malley, the Dodger president who had deposed the Great Integrator, Branch Rickey, was particularly interesting:

There's the [Dodgertown] dining room. [He pointed to a large room behind screen doors.] Our Negro players and our white players eat in there side by side. This is Florida, but you couldn't tell it.

See the four boys playing cards over there. Two white boys and two Negroes at the same table in Florida. Look at the gang around the piano. Mixed black and white. We aren't boasting about this, we don't ask for credit. We run our organization the right way and you see what we think is right.

In our barracks here Negro boys and white boys sleep under the same roof in Florida. The other days we had some electricians in from Melbourne [Florida] to fix the lights in our new stadium. They worked a long day. When they were through it was late and I asked them if they wanted to sleep over because Melbourne is a 45-mile drive. They asked me if they'd have to sleep under the same roof with Negro players and I told them, 'Of course.' They said they couldn't. What did I tell them? It doesn't matter. You couldn't print it anyway.

Jack's story that month, "My Feud With [Giant manager] Leo Durocher," turned out to be a peace offering. Robinson said his barbed Durocher relationship finally turned for the better after the 1952 All-Star game, played in the rain in Philadelphia. Robinson homered but someone drove a hot grounder that went under his glove. The National Leaguers won, 3 to 2; even so reporters went to Durocher, managing the Nationals, and asked if Robinson should have made the play. Jack said (and I typed), "If Leo wanted to show me up, this was his chance. But he said on that wet field nobody in the world could have made the play. Then he said. 'Jackie Robinson plays a ton. He doesn't need any excuses.' Anybody can be a needler, but it takes a big man to forget the nastiness and pass up a chance to shoot a sitting duck."

Given the intensity of the Dodger-Giant rivalry this was new and exciting stuff, but later in the summer of '53, with a great Dodger team on the way to winning the pennant by thirteen games, Jack told me that the future of Our Sports was uncertain We marched fearlessly into hot-button issues, the sort of stuff that The New York Times and the Herald Tribune declined to touch. Was the Yankee organization bigoted? (It was.) The Boston Red Sox? (Even worse.) Why were so many reporters hostile to Branch Rickey? (For one thing, his polysyllabic speech made them feel stupid.) The Negro reading public, and many whites, swamped us with mail. But economics ran against us; we were not attracting sufficient advertising revenue. Conventional thinking back then held that sports was for children. What child, specifically what "colored" child, could afford to buy a set of Firestone tires or a Packard convertible?

Robinson then set out to compose a valedictory called "Have I Achieved My Goals?" His goal was this: "that all ball players, regardless of race, creed or color, be accepted in baseball as ball players only and that they be judged simply on the basis of ability."

He talked about on-field needling. "When one or two of the St. Louis Cardinals shouted 'porter' and 'shoeshine boy' at me, I was steamed but not insulted. If a great many Negroes have to earn their living as porters and shoeshine boys, we know where the fault lies. For the most part, it is not with the Negroes themselves." Moving to the press he said he had met many honest reporters but "careless and prejudiced newspapermen have done a great deal of damage - more than the honest men can undo." He singled out several team mates for praise: Carl Erskine, Ralph Branca and Pee Wee Reese. "But my own goal has not been achieved," he said. "I am not just another ball player. I don't suppose I ever will be. But some day -- I hope in my lifetime -- one Negro will be. Until that day comes all of us must work and fight to bring it closer. If we do, it is only a matter of time."

Our brave, purposeful magazine died aborning.. In the very first issue, an advertisement appeared featuring four hairless humans and a sheep. The headline read "Did You Ever See a Baldheaded Sheep?" The copy explained that wool contained lanolin, an oily substance "that keeps hair growing thick, luxurious, soft, shiny and handsome. For great new hair growth, order NIL-O-NAL (lanolin spelled backwards). $3.00 a jar."

We needed ads from Campbell's Soup and General Motors. Rich, ripe, red tomato soup. Big, shiny Cadillacs with fins. We got was lanolin spelled backwards. The magazine folded in autumn 1953 and when the backers failed to pay me my final $150, Robinson walked me into the magazine headquarters, stood over the publisher and glared. I settled for $120. Robinson then took me into a clothing store in which he had an interest and commandeered $30 worth of shirts.

At Jack's premature death in the autumn of 1972 I felt terrible pain at being robbed of so glorious a friend.. Aside from that, I lost the best collection agent I ever had.

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