If You Can't Beat Him ...

Even after age thickened his hips and time tired his quick hands, the New York Giants never seemed to know what to do about Jack Roosevelt Robinson. Their pitchers threw baseballs at his greying head and their bench jockeys winged epithets at his quick temper. Still his big bat, or darting base running, broke up ball games. The very sight of his pigeon-toed trot to position moved the fans on Coogan's Bluff to borrow from Yankee territory that ultimate complaint, the long Bronx cheer. Even when taking their lumps from every other team in the league, the Giants usually managed to play good ball against the Brooklyn Dodgers, but they never really beat Robby. So last week they did the next best thing: they bought him.

Only One Compromise. The Giants got a bargain. Almost 38, Jackie Robinson is far slower afield and less powerful at bat (.275) than in his heyday of six successive over-.300 seasons. But for upwards of $30,000, plus a journeyman left-handed pitcher, the sixth-place Giants bought one of baseball's alltime great figures, a pro good enough to make his mark in the record books while carrying a blackman's special burden on his back.

Robby was ambitious, yet a little awed after he came off the athletic fields of U.C.L.A. (four letters), and prepped in Kansas City and Montreal before putting on a Brooklyn uniform to become at 28 big-league baseball's first Negro player. To prepare him, his mentor Branch Rickey called him into his office one day, cursed him, swung at him, then spat at him a particularly vile name. "What do you do now, Jackie?" Rickey asked. Robinson replied: "Mr. Rickey, I guess I turn the other cheek." For the next couple of years he played superlative baseball while snaffling his hot, competitive temper under the taunts and slurs of his opponents and even some of his teammates. It was the only compromise he ever made on the ball field. And once he had won his particular Gettysburg, he took the snaffle off to become one of the game's tartest-tongued, terriblest-tempered performers.

Much more interested in catering to his consuming urge to win than in winning friends, Robinson played anywhere he was told--first, second, third, outfield--and proved one of the sharpest spurs to six Dodgers pennants in ten years, as well as one of baseball's prime drawing cards. Said onetime Giant Manager Leo Durocher: "He can beat you in more ways than any player I know."

"Best I Can." It is a late inning in the game for Robinson, and the Giants can hardly expect him to do as much for them. But he has a lot of ball games still in him (the Giants hope he will play regular first base, to replace a drafted rookie) as well as one of the best clutch-hitting faculties in baseball and a healthy desire to keep his $33,000-a-year salary coming in. "Naturally I'm. disappointed to leave the Dodgers," said Robby last week, in quiet amendment to his onetime vow that he would never play for another team. "But now that it's done and I'm a member of a different team, I'll be out to beat the Dodgers as best I can."

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