Remembering Dick Allen and the sportswriter who helped me grow up
Fifty years ago, baseball and the sports page taught a young boy about racism, individualism, and journalism. Dick Allen’s death triggered these memories.
It came on the already crumbling streets near Connie Mack Stadium on my way to a Phillies game with my father and brother. That was the first time I witnessed racial inequality. I was, probably, 11 or 12 years old. It was 1965 or 1966.
We drove from our narrow and post-World War II rowhouse in the exclusively Jewish neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia to the even narrower streets of late 19th century African American North Philadelphia.
“Watch your car, mister?”
A boy my age asked my father after we parked a few blocks from the ballpark and exited our 1952 light blue, two-door Chevy Impala.
My father looked at him glumly, shook his head, gave him, I’m sure, a quarter, and we marched off. I’d soon learn that my father believed that, with that amount of protection investment, our car’s tires would still be inflated when we returned after the game.
Why, I wondered, was that kid doing what he was doing? And why was my otherwise pleasant dad so dismissive of this little boy?
Once we entered the stadium, the field was so green, the Phillies’ uniforms were so bright red, our seats down the right-field line were so close to the action, and the boos for Richie Allen were so incomprehensible.
By those turbulent mid-Sixties years, I was already a rabid Phillies’ fan, a star (in my mind, anyway) Tarken Boys Club Little Leaguer, and an avid sports page reader. I wanted to grow up to be Johnny Callison, the Phillies’ white right fielder with the accurate arm from the warning track. But I also dreamed of hitting home runs like Black Richie Allen. I wore my baseball sleeves long and, before important pitches, yanked them up like Richie did. With my faux baseball spikes, I gently smoothed the infield dirt like he did.
What was with the boos?
They were, I would conclude not too long afterward, the manifestation of the same racism that caused that kid to ask for a quarter from our invading white family. The same racism that caused the tension when my friends and I innocently took Philadelphia’s Frankford El train downtown in those days when parents felt their 12-and-13-year-olds were safe enough to travel unattended on public transportation. The same racism that led, a few years later, to the rise of Frank Rizzo as the city’s violent police commissioner and, eventually, neofascist mayor.
Yes, the same racism that allowed the Phillies to be the last National League team to employ an African American player, in 1957, ten years after Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball. The team’s customers apparently wanted it that way.
Eight dollars, carfare, and baseball put things into perspective
I saw the racism through the lens of my passion for baseball, and I read about it — almost as if in code — in the sports pages of Philadelphia’s newspapers. At a time when social issues and sports were not supposed to intersect, they did in the mind of this pre-teen who also saw systemic racism in his own home. There, my otherwise FDR-loving, working middle-class parents, the high school graduate children of immigrants, hired a Black maid to clean our house every Thursday.
“Eight dollars and carfare” was what my mother called Irma’s weekly pay. Eight dollars for eight hours of work, and enough change to take the bus and El back to North Philadelphia, not far from Connie Mack Stadium. My mother threw in a tuna fish sandwich for Irma’s lunch, too, the two of them often sitting at the kitchen table together. As my brother and I outgrew our clothes, Irma got those hand-me-downs for her grandchildren.
We of the next generation felt uncomfortable as it added up. The chorus of Allen boos. The Huntley and Brinkley Report telling us nightly of civil rights marches in Selma and riots in Watts. A few years later, the assassination of Martin Luther King. It all created a comprehensive if confusing picture for this kid wondering why we needed to pay protection to keep our car safe at a ball game.
Gaining a social consciousness through the sports pages is an odd path, but my awakening came through Allen’s mistreatment, his response, and the writings of Sandy Padwe, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s pioneering sports columnist. Through Padwe’s reporting and sympathy for Allen, I embraced my baseball hero as more significant than his tape-measure home runs.
At 12 years old, it wasn’t evident to me what Allen meant. In retrospect, before John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists at the Mexico City Olympics, before Colin Kaepernick kneeled on the NFL sidelines, before the Milwaukee Bucks shut down the NBA over police misconduct, Allen was a more subtle activist and a less understood Black athlete. He didn’t even want to be called Richie, which was a name placed on him by team management. He preferred Rich and, after being traded away to smack home runs in other cities, became Dick Allen. His declaration of independence was not unlike the bolder, more political transition for another trailblazing Black athlete, who was once Cassius Clay and became Muhammad Ali.
On the occasion of the Phillies retiring Allen’s Number 15 last September, Matt Gelb of The Athletic wrote an article about Allen and Padwe. Gelb nicely covered the basics of their relationship. But Allen’s death Monday at the age of 78 got me to remembering my youthful idolizing of him and my admiration for Sandy, who became my mentor — and the mentor for other aspiring sports journalists. He ingrained in me the sensibilities that guided my own 30 year-long sports writing career. I wasn’t always successful and, I know, not as principled or courageous as Sandy.
The essence of Padwe’s work emerged in the columns he wrote about Allen. In short, Sandy broke down the myths that continue to protect sports, myths developed over decades by sports journalists far too cozy with athletes and owners, more rah-rah than why-is-that, promoting the fantasy while denying the business. Myths that what’s happening outside of stadiums shouldn’t seep onto the fields of play. Myths that athletes should keep their mouths shut and their desires to themselves.
They are all myths that continue to die hard but, thankfully, have begun mostly to fade away, if only recently.
The rebel athlete and the rebel sports columnist take a stand
Fifty years ago, Dick Allen was fertile ground for Padwe to plant the seeds in a young reader’s mind that sports and society do, in fact, mix and that sports reflects and reinforces the values and politics of a city, of a nation.
What Sandy wrote and I read in my formative years about Rich Allen culminated in 1969 when, after years of ups and downs, Allen wanted out from the Phillies. He engaged in a one-man strike to prove that, leaving the team for 26 days and 29 games. Much preceded that job action. He was the victim of racist taunts and threats while a Phillies’ minor leaguer in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was the National League Rookie of the Year in 1964 but was mercilessly booed for his fielding. In 1965, he fought with a racist teammate who hit Allen with his bat, injuring Allen’s throwing shoulder. In 1967, in an accident pushing his car in a storm, his hand slipped, severing tendons in his right wrist. Some people didn’t believe his story about the incident. It seemed if it wasn’t one thing, it was another.
Then came June 24, 1969, just before my 15th birthday. Allen, who loved and owned horses, was late for a game in New York after attending races in New Jersey. Without getting a chance to explain his absence, he was suspended by manager Bob Skinner. The “bad boy” Rich Allen stories abounded. Labeled the longest suspension in Major League history, Allen actually left the team on his own and, in these days before free agency, said he’d never play in Philadelphia again. He was fed up with rules. Fed up with the boos.
He finally returned on July 20, and four days later, Padwe was the lone Philadelphia sports journalist to support Allen. His column headlined, “Rich the Rebel Is No Hypocrite,” blasted off with this: “This is not the city for a career individualist. It does not encourage or appreciate dissenting or original viewpoints. It does not reward imagination. And it makes no attempt to listen to, or understand, the rebellious mind.”
It is as if he were speaking to his fellow sportswriters, all of whom had been siding with Phillies management in Allen’s struggles, one who called Allen’s actions, “Galling independence.”
“Rich Allen is an individual,” Padwe went on. “A powerful, brawling, let-me-lead-my-own-life individual. It is the wrong thing to be if you are public property in this city, which clings to a Victorian sense of order.”
Remember. This was 1969, as race percolated beneath just about every issue. (As it does today.) Padwe wrote of Allen’s individualism: “Multiply the aforementioned by the color of his skin. Then allow for the normal hostility that we all know goes with it, and we have a difficult situation . . . Rebels are hard enough to take. Black rebels — as so many official government reports have shown — are even more difficult to accept.”
Believe me, FBI harassment of African American civil rights groups was not a regular theme on sports pages those days.
A few weeks later, in a remarkable standoff, Padwe and the Inquirer’s Phillies beat writer Allen Lewis wrote dueling columns — “Two Views of Rich Allen” — that ran across the top of the newspaper’s sports section’s front page.
“A Con Man With Muscles,” wrote Allen Lewis, who blasted Rich Allen for breaking rules and lying about his racist experiences in Little Rock. He took veiled shots at the likes of Padwe, too.
“Reports that he was hard to get along with brought out the feature writers and columnists,” the beat writer moaned, “and Allen conned most of them — for a while. They went away convinced that anyone who couldn’t get along with Richie Allen had something wrong with him.”
Still “Richie” to this writer.
In his counterpoint, headlined, “A Man Ahead of His Times,” Sandy wrote: “Allen’s crime is that he is very different in a field which finds itself challenged any time a person questions its authority with the word, ‘Why?’ . . . Some sportswriters, a few caught in the powerful tide, others too subservient to the teams and sports they cover, often become part of the sporting establishment. Being part of it, they become overly protective. A man like Rich Allen becomes a threat. Threats are dealt with in strange ways.”
Placing the Allen episodes and their coverage into perspective, Padwe added: “I have heard more outrage from the ‘good’ people of Philadelphia concerning Allen’s behavior than I have heard about the military-industrial complex, the stifling social problems of our time or the quality of city government.”
I never met Dick Allen, but long after I’ve outgrown my sports fandom, I have his 1970 St. Louis Cardinals baseball card on my home office bulletin board. My admiration has lasted a half-century.
I am still in touch with Sandy, who’s shy about touting his influence. But he must know that, like Dick Allen, he blazed a trail that respectable sports journalists today must travel. It’s a path that must embrace the rebel, avoid the unquestioning cheering section, and reward imagination.
