Slugging and Snubbing: Hugh Casey, Ernest Hemingway, and Jackie Robinson—A Baseball Mystery
"The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject. ..." Ernest Hemingway By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches from Four Decades Spring comes early to baseball. For most people living in the Northern Hemisphere, spring arrives officially on or about March 21, but for professional baseball players it starts in February when they gather to begin training for the upcoming season. Nowadays, major-league clubs train in Florida or Arizona, but years ago, trips to more exotic places were not unusual. Thus it was that in 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers and their top minor-league club, the Montreal Royals, found themselves training in Havana, Cuba. This was not the Dodgers' first excursion to the island nation. After making brief visits to Cuba in 1900, 1913, 1921, and 1931, they had trained there full-time in 1941 and 1942. But this trip was unusual, with a purpose much greater than getting players into shape. (1) The 1947 Dodgers were on the verge of doing something truly historic. Just before Opening Day, April 15, Brooklyn's president, Branch Rickey, announced that Jackie Robinson was being promoted from Montreal to the parent club, making him the first African American to play major-league baseball since 1884. The Dodgers had signed Robinson to a contract in the fall of 1945 and assigned him to the Royals. In 1946, both Brooklyn and Montreal had trained in Florida: the Dodgers in Daytona Beach, a relatively progressive southern city thanks to the heroic work of civil rights pioneer Mary McLeod Bethune, and the Royals in Sanford, a small town forty miles south and considerably less enlightened. Despite Rickey's hopes, the Montreal club ran into legal segregation every step of the way. Law enforcement officials cancelled a number of Royals games in several Florida cities and also in Savannah and Richmond as the team traveled north to open the season in Jersey City. Robinson encountered few problems once he and his wife Rachel reached Montreal. They were welcomed into the community, and he had a terrific season. His manager, Mississippian Clay Hopper, and his teammates adjusted. They had little choice. (2) Rickey wanted 1947 to be different. He kept Robinson on the Montreal roster, but he knew that the former UCLA student and Army veteran would be a Dodger when the season began. Aiming for spring training to be free from racial strife, he picked Cuba, a country where he believed the color of a player's skin would not be an issue. Still, when the players arrived in Havana, they noticed a peculiar housing arrangement. The players on the major-league roster stayed at the Hotel Nacional, a stately structure designed in an Andalusian-Moorish style and built in 1930. White members of the minor-league club stayed at the nearby Havana Military Academy. But Robinson and three other black players trying to make the Montreal roster were housed separately, away from their white teammates, in "a musty, third-rate hotel in the heart of town." Robinson, catcher Roy Campanella, and pitchers Roy Partlow and Don Newcombe endured this humiliation together. Robinson at first blamed the Cuban government for the segregated housing, but he soon learned that the idea was Rickey's. "I can't afford to take a chance and have a single incident occur," said the Dodgers executive. "This training session must be perfectly smooth." He was wary, he said, that some white Royals new to the club or American tourists staying at the Nacional might raise a stink. "I wasn't even allowed to go in the lobby of the Nacional to see Mr. Rickey on baseball business," Newcombe remembered. "I had to get permission from the bellhops. In fact, one [white] bellhop put me out of the lobby." (3) Rickey also wanted spring training to make a profit. He enticed three other major-league clubs--the Boston Braves, New York Yankees, and St. Louis Browns--to come to the Caribbean for exhibition games. …
Revisiting Ernest Hemingway and Baseball: Sanity, Success, and Suicide
But I must think, he thought. Because it is all I have left.That and baseball. I wonder how the great DiMaggio would have liked the way I hit him [the big Mako shark] In the brain. (79)1The suicide of Robin Williams on August 11, 2014, sparked a barrage of analyses, the bulk of them allying him with Ernest Hemingway> who died by his own hand in 1961. One indisputable conclusion appears among those controversy-filled analyses: the reasons the two geniuses moved to life-ending decisions remain unknown. In anticipating queries from readers of Papa Hemingway, authored in 1966 by Hemingway's "close friend for fourteen years, right up to the end," A. E. Hotchner confessed that "I cannot tell you why"(xi). Forty-eight years later, a doctor of Clinical Psychology with almost half-a-century of experience sounded similar while declaring TV's popular Dr. Drew "wrong" in his conclusions about the comic's suicide: the Idaho professional argues that "Certainly we can never know the thoughts and emotions he [Williams] privately experienced that eventually led him to end his own life" (Hueftle). A later analysis, "Madness and the Muse," while mentioning Williams and Hemingway in an impressive review of research on its topic, is forced to end with a frustrated and frustrating indecisiveness (Bartlett). Appearing even more recently, "The Persistent Myth of the Mad Genius" merely reinforces that same indecisiveness (Tavris).Yet, neither controversy nor uncertainty disguises an interest that the two shared. Both the writer and Williams enjoyed baseball. The latter was a committed fan, and a long-time admirer, of his adopted city's National League team, the San Francisco Giants (Cassavell). But Hemingway was different. He "fancied himself an aficionado of baseball almost as much as he regarded himself as the American expert of the bull ring..." states Paul Hendrickson (317). That belief, he harbored and cultivated over the bulk of his lifetime until it emerged-full blown-in the last novel of his creation published before his death. The Old Man and the Sea was "an immediate success throughout the world," proclaimed Charles Scribner, Jr., in his "Introduction" to the 1952 edition of the work, adding that it was "specifically cited when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Hemingway in 1954" (9)Overthe decades, scholars and critics have lavished abundant commentary on Hemingway's lifelong fascination with the sport.2 Even as an eleven-year old, it has been noted, he authored a poem about the Chicago Cubs (Gietschier 28), and, a few years later, as a high schooler, he wrote essays under the pseudonym Ring Lardner, Jr., out of respect for the baseball writer he most respected (Smith xxv-xxvi). Lardner's prose, too, left its imprint on Hemingway, his mind and his fiction. In his often-praised Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Carlos Baker notes that Hemingway at one point even "discoursed" in a letter to a friend "on the excellence of Ring Lardner, whom he then placed as high as 'Jupiter on tiptoes'" (51).But adolescent admiration did not equate with adult preference and prowess. Long before his proclamation of 1942 that a writer's "standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be" (qtd. in Baker, "Hemingway's Ancient Mariner" 157), Hemingway had abandoned any thought of casting his short novel in the first-person made famous in acclaimed works of Lardner's like Alibi Ike and in the less-than-literate English allowing their author to amuse the nation's sports fans. Hemingway had immersed himself in Lardner's brash, self-deluding diamond personalities and their unconventional language and had found them entertaining but lacking, unsuitable for the multilayered work involving baseball that he was to write into reality years later. An omniscient point of view was to combine with a minimalist conventional English to allow him to unfold a narrative not simply about fishing, an old man, and a boy but, symbolically, about America's National Pastime, its most majestic performer ever, and the fate of the sport's dynasties and their record-setters. …
Same-Sex Marriage in the United States
This Chapter gives a brief analysis of the status of same-sex marriage in the United States prior to the US Supreme Court decisions of 2013 and the status of litigation and political reforms triggered in part by these court decisions. It shows that marriage is a central institution in the country’s rationale of family law in ways that separate it from other western countries that have allowed same-sex marriage.