July 23
“Pee Wee” Reese, legendary shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers and one of sports history’s true good guys, was born 97 years ago today. While he built an impressive Hall of Fame resumé in sixteen seasons with the Dodgers — one World Series championship, ten consecutive All-Star nods, 2170 hits and a .269 career batting average—Reese is perhaps even better remembered for his early support of Jackie Robinson’s inclusion on the team.
Weighing only 120 lbs. his senior year of high school, the Kentucky native didn’t seem to have the makings of a star athlete and was sparsely used on his high school ball club. After graduation, however, Reese joined a church league and soon led the New Covenant Presbyterian team to a championship game played on the Louisville Colonels’ field. His impressive play attracted the attention of the Colonels’ owner, and before long, Reese was on the minor league club himself and drawing notice from the majors. He joined the Dodgers in 1940 and played an integral role in the team’s successful pennant run the following year.
As was common even among the greatest ballplayers of the WWII era, Reese’s career was interrupted for a few years by military service. It was on the trip back home from the Pacific where he learned he was about to become teammates with a black man. The color of Robinson’s skin never bothered Reese for a moment. The fact that he played shortstop did. “But I had confidence in my abilities,” Reese later said, “and I thought, well, if he can beat me out, more power to him.” His position was ultimately safe; Robinson would be assigned to play first base.
Although Reese had very little interaction with blacks in his youth (he had never shaken the hand of a black man before meeting Robinson), he had also been instilled with a sense of injustice about how they were treated; it was with great sadness that his father once took him to a tree where black men had been lynched. Such an upbringing would eventually lead Reese to reject a boycott threatened by his Dodgers teammates if Robinson joined the team.
It wouldn’t be the last time Reese would stand up for his new friend. One such moment in particular has gone down in baseball lore, though there seems to be some controversy among sports historians over when and how it happened. The romanticized version, found in the recent movie, goes like this:
At a Cincinnati game in the middle of Robinson’s first road trip with team, either during warmups or the bottom of the first, he became the target of particularly ugly invective from the home crowd. Reese, sensing Robinson’s distress, crossed the infield and put his arm around his new teammate, offering a few words of support. The crowd was silenced.
While the story has inspired generations (and a statue, pictured above, located outside the Brooklyn Cyclones’ stadium), there are no photographs or contemporary newspaper accounts to confirm it. As odd as it seems now, however, Robinson’s rookie season actually received only cursory coverage in the press, so the story itself isn’t really in dispute. Only the details vary. Some accounts peg the exchange as happening in Boston in 1948, when Robinson was moved to second base, closer to Reese. And Reese may have said nothing at all when he made his outreach.
Whatever happened and whenever it took place, the kind act had a profound effect on Robinson. “I remember Jackie talking about Pee Wee’s gesture the day it happened,” Robinson’s wife Rachel recalled in 2005. “It came as such a relief to him, that a teammate and the captain of the team would go out of his way in such a public fashion to express friendship.”
When he later recalled that event in particular and his friendship with Robinson in general, Reese seemed embarrassed by the adulation his actions had earned; he didn’t view himself as a hero, just someone who did what any decent man would do. (Fine. Decency deserves a statue now and then.)
The two friends would remain teammates for the entirety of Robinson’s ten-year career. Reese retired as a player in 1958 (just after the move to Los Angeles), though he would remain with the team for one more year as a coach. After collecting another World Series ring in that capacity, he moved on to a second successful career in the broadcast booth. Reese died in 1999 at the age of 81.
Sources: Wikipedia entry for Pee Wee Reese; articles from espn.com, sportsonearth.com and villagevoice.com on the uncertainty over when the famous embrace happened; 2005 New York Times article on the unveiling of the statue; Reese bio at sports.jrank.org
