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Golden gesture is bronzed
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Joe Gergen
SPORTS COLUMNIST

November 2, 2005

In the monument, as in life, color was not a barrier between them. Of course,
the pigment of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese in the sculpture unveiled
yesterday outside KeySpan Park is the same - bronze.

At the time of the incident it commemorates, however, there was no greater
division in America than the skin tones of the black rookie from California and
the white shortstop from Kentucky.

Even on the Brooklyn Dodgers, where they were thrown together in the spring of
1947, there were objections to general manager Branch Rickey's grand experiment.
As if the jeers, insults and threats from opponents and the general public
weren't enough for a pioneer to endure, Robinson faced the hostility of
teammates who wanted no part of playing with a man from a different race. For
that reason, the simple gesture of friendship extended by Reese on that May
afternoon in the tinderbox of Cincinnati's Crosley Field remains a defining
moment not just in the world of baseball but in the struggle for civil rights.

"I hope that the symbol before us," Robinson's widow, Rachel, said at the Coney
Island ceremony, "will be an inspiration to all who view it, especially young
people."

As noted by Mark Reese, the son of the late Dodgers' captain, this was eight
years before Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery bus to a
white person and 16 years before Martin Luther King made his impassioned speech
from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The two men, who would play together for
a decade and lead Brooklyn to its only world championship in 1955, ushered
America into an age of equality.

"My father, who came from a heavily segregated part of the country, faced
friends, teammates and, yes, some family members who were opposed to his
stepping on the field with a black man," the younger Reese said. "... he
listened to his heart, not the chorus."

Six years after the idea was proposed by former Newsday columnist Stan Isaacs at
a Bay Ridge memorial service for Reese and seconded in print by the late New
York Post columnist Jack Newfield, it was realized on a beautiful fall morning
in the borough where both players achieved Hall of Fame status. Although New
York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his successor, Michael Bloomberg, embraced the
concept, there were several delays in the privately financed project. Among them
was the selection of the sculptor, for which a meeting was set at City Hall on
the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Understandably, it was interrupted and then
postponed.

William Behrends, whose work includes the statue of Willie Mays outside SBC Park
in San Francisco, ultimately was chosen. Although the two eight-foot figures on
a six-sided pedestal were finished too late to accommodate the 50th anniversary
of the Dodgers' lone World Series triumph, the depiction of Reese placing his
arm around Robinson's back has a timeless quality that speaks to all
generations.

"It was a time in U.S. history when you wanted people to stand up," Rachel
Robinson said after the ceremony attended by Mayor Bloomberg, Brooklyn borough
president Marty Markowitz and other elected officials. "That day was very
intense. We'd gotten seriously threatening letters from that area, including one
that was pretty detailed. That gesture was representative of their
relationship."

According to Markowitz, "When Pee Wee Reese threw his arm around Jackie
Robinson's shoulder in this legendary gesture of support, they showed America
and the world that racial discrimination was unacceptable."

Yet, Reese's widow, Dorothy, conceded that "there was no way [Pee Wee] would
believe his simple gesture would become so important."

What made the moment so remarkable, in retrospect, was that outfielder Dixie
Walker was among those who circulated a petition denouncing Robinson's
promotion. And Walker, from Alabama, was Reese's best friend on the team.

"He was also the best man at my mother and father's wedding," said Mark Reese, a
filmmaker. "My father wouldn't sign the petition but there was a lot of
maturation before it got to that point. He had to do some soul-searching. He and
Dixie were never close again."

In his son's remembrance, Pee Wee also enjoyed the irony that some of the people
in the crowd at Crosley Field that day, perhaps some of the people shouting the
vilest things, had made the short drive from his hometown of Louisville. And
Mark Reese noted that, more than two decades later, his father had taken Jackie
and former teammate Don Newcombe to his country club, which had no black
members, for a round of golf.

"They broke down another barrier," he said triumphantly.

Copyright (c) 2005, Newsday, Inc.

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