Man Behind the Plate

From his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948, Roy Campanella looked more like a weight lifter than a baseball player. With 215 lbs. packed on a 5 ft. 9 in. frame, he had a barrel belly and a pair of massive legs. But on a baseball diamond Campanella was an athlete of grace who bolted the bases with a sprinter's furious stride and howitzered the long ball to left with a short, powerful swing.

And when he strapped on his catcher's gear and settled into a crouch behind the plate, Campy was at home. Whistling pegs to second, blocking runners from the plate, chirping encouragement to his pitchers, Roy Campanella was the complete professional (TIME, Aug. 8, 1955).

Three times Campanella was named the most valuable player in the National League. But even when he was not hitting (.242 in 1957), Campy helped the Dodgers by just being around. He coached the rookies who were after his job, relaxed the bench with sly tales of his seven seasons of barnstorming through the hinterlands of Negro baseball. He never got over the fact that he was a grown man being paid to play a boy's game. "You know, I'll play for nothing if I have to," he once told a startled Dodger official during a contract session. "You can write in the numbers yourself."

Last week Campanella was driving to his home in Glen Cove, N.Y. when his rented 1957 Chevrolet sedan went off the road and crashed into a telephone pole. Campy was bent into a pretzel within the overturned car. His bull neck probably saved him from death, but the impact fractured the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae and compressed the spinal cord. He was paralyzed from the shoulders down. For more than four hours, a team of three surgeons worked over him. At week's end sensation and strength were beginning to flow back through his rugged body. But his doctors were cautiously refusing to predict when Campanella would walk again, let alone play baseball.

"The day they take that uniform off me, they'll have to rip it off," Campy once said. If, as seems likely, he has been retired at 36, Campy can look back on a career to be envied. Summed up the New York Herald Tribune's Red Smith: "In the great social contribution which baseball has made to America since 1946, Jackie Robinson was the trail blazer, the standard bearer, the man who broke the color line, assumed the burden for his people and made good. Roy Campanella is the one who made friends."

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