He Was Wrong and He Knows It

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Butterfly McQueen, of “Gone With the Wind” fame, recently brought her one-woman stage show to the Augusta College Performing Arts Theatre, here in this provincial Southern town where, nearly 70 years ago, and a couple of decades before confessing to Scarlett O’Hara that she didn’t “know nothin’ about birthin’ babies,” she was a precocious schoolgirl and budding actress.

Even as a child, McQueen was cast in challenging roles for local productions: Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream,” for one. Shortly thereafter, she accompanied her mother to New York, where in time she got a part in a Broadway show. It was fun while it lasted. She was eager to do more.

David O. Selznick obliged her. He was producing “Gone With the Wind” for Hollywood. Big budget. Big stars. It was the sort of project any actor might have found alluring. So, there was no objection on Butterfly McQueen’s part when she was signed to portray Prissy, a scatterbrained, 12-year-old slave girl. It didn’t really bother the actress, even though she was already 27 at the time.

Trouble was, there were too many show-business people who presumed that this was someone made to play dim-bulb domestics, born to the part. “I didn’t mind playing a maid the first time, because I thought that’s how you got into the business,” McQueen said in a recent interview. “But after I did the same thing over and over, I resented it. I didn’t mind being funny, but I didn’t like being stupid.”

Baseball players are no different.

They do not mind performing. They do not mind starting at the bottom and working to the top. But they resent it greatly when the top is sealed off to them. Favoritism they can handle. Nepotism they can handle. Racism, though, even of a sort suspected but not proven, can make humans of every color see red or feel blue.

Al Campanis’ unfortunate comments on ABC-TV’s “Nightline” Monday could very well go down as his darkest hour as a Dodger. Some, understandably, will be calling for a clarification at the very least and for his job as vice president and director of player personnel for the Dodgers at most. Already, representatives of one Los Angeles area NAACP chapter have recommended the latter, and no less a figure than Hank Aaron has called the man’s viewpoints “ignorant” and believes that Campanis, 70, should “apologize to every black man in America.”

Even the diplomatic Ted Koppel could not refrain from twice using the word garbage to describe his reaction to some of the white trash Campanis was unloading on Koppel’s TV show: Stuff about blacks possibly having neither the desire nor “some of the necessities to be a field manager or a general manager.” Stuff about: “How many quarterbacks (are there?) . . . how many pitchers?” Even stuff about: “Why are blacks not good swimmers? Because they don’t have the buoyancy.”

That really sounds like garbage, Koppel said.

“That’s not garbage,” Campanis insisted.

The hell it isn’t.

Worse yet, it is garbage dispersal. Garbage for millions to see and smell. And it bears the familiar odor of execrable sentiments spewed forth in the past decade by other baseball old-timers, men who either spoke without thinking or, more’s the pity, spoke exactly what they were thinking.

Flash back to Calvin Griffith, owner of the Minnesota Twins, addressing the Lions Club of Waseca, Minn., Oct. 1, 1978: “I’ll tell you why we (moved the team) to Minnesota. It’s when I found out you only had 15,000 blacks here. Black people don’t go to ballgames, but they’ll fill up a rasslin’ ring and put up such a chant, it’ll scare you to death. . . . You’ve got good, hard-working white people here.”

How about Howie Haak, a scout for the Pirates, in an interview with the Pittsburgh Press newspaper published May 17, 1982, responding to a question about the franchise’s future?

“It’s hard to say, because of the color situation,” he said. “Every player we have outside of (outfielder Doug) Frobel is black. We might have to trade for a white player. You can’t play nine blacks, I don’t think. I don’t think you can play nine blacks in any big city.”

Oh, brother!

Shades of the days when the running joke of small-town high school basketball coaches would be: “Three at home, four on the road, and five when you’re behind.” No way you can play nine blacks, right, mister? Right, son. Unless you’re playing football.

Chuck Tanner, who was managing the Pirates then, said it broke his heart to see Haak misinterpreted that way, to see branded as a racist someone who “doesn’t have a prejudiced bone in his body.”

The same will be said of Al Campanis--that he misspoke, that his actions over the years speak much louder than his words, that amateur psychologists should not come to the hasty conclusion that his Freudian slip was showing. Campanis is completely color-blind, we will be assured.

It is worth believing. Judge not, lest ye be judged yourselves. At the same time, it behooved Campanis to offer a mea culpa , quickly, before it got out of hand. An act of contrition. It only hurts for a minute to say, “I’m sorry.”

Not everyone will forgive, but someone will, and every someone counts.

Old-fashioned ideas die hard, and have been known to confound the well-meaning individual who still cannot figure out why “some of my best friends are . . . “ is an insult.

Al Campanis was not preaching segregation, not spouting hatred from under a white hood. On the contrary. He was only on the TV show in the first place to advance the goodness and greatness of Jackie Robinson, former teammate and infield sidekick, on the 40th anniversary of Robinson’s having broken baseball’s color barrier. The Dodgers were the ones who finally brought down the Black Curtain.

Campanis saw first-hand some of the treatment Robinson had to endure, and certainly must have understood what Jackie’s widow meant when she said, as “Boys of Summer” author Roger Kahn recounted on Koppel’s program, that her husband worked off his frustration by hitting dozens of golf balls from their yard into a nearby lake. “The golf balls are white, “ he would explain.

But surely the Dodger executive must have been confused when Kahn and Koppel began to look at him funny and talk of “fatheads” who felt minorities could work in the field but not in the front office.

Somehow it did not seem to be sinking in that in complimenting blacks for having “great musculature” or being “fleet of feet,” Campanis was making it worse. Particularly when he followed it up with: “But as far as having the background to become club presidents or president of a bank, I don’t know.”

And on it went, one well-intended remark after another making an inherently decent man come off like Massa Al. It was Robinson’s great talent, for example, that made whites “accept him as a person”--the implication being that if Robinson had been a lesser athlete, he never would have been so accepted.

Koppel offered Campanis “another chance to dig yourself out.”

Campanis just got in deeper, every compliment coming out as condescending. “I have never said that blacks are not intelligent. . . . They are very wonderful people.”

Koppel said he was flabbergasted.

Campanis seemed flabbergasted that Koppel was flabbergasted. Here he was, saying such nice things. Why wasn’t the guy listening?

Some people will never understand, and some will never be understood. Here in deepest but not necessarily darkest Dixie, there are those who will not be able to fathom why anything Al Campanis did or said Monday would cause even a ripple.

Hank Aaron, for instance, heard those words in Atlanta differently from the way they were heard by someone else, someplace else. In all-white Forsyth County, Ga., not far from Atlanta, some will wonder: “What’s the big deal?”

Here in Augusta, where for so many years the only blacks at the Masters golf tournament were the ones carrying bags and trays, some will say: “I don’t get it. What did he say that was so wrong?”

It’s like the old joke about the white kid who runs into the black kid who has just returned home from college.

“I’m working on my master’s,” the black kid says.

“Your master’s what?” the white kid asks.

There are two ways to react to that joke.

You can laugh at it.

Or you can relate to it.