Great article by Jerry Izenberg
http://www.nj.com/sports/ledger/izenbergcol/index.ssf/2014/02/izenberg_happy_95th_birthday_m.html#incart_river
The last Eagle will be 95 years old this morning. Monte Irvin broke the New York Baseball Giants’ color line in 1949 and played in two World Series for them. He was the first African-American to work as an aide in the office of the Commissioner of Baseball. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
That’s for the résumé.
But for me, he will always remain a Newark Eagle.
They played for and against great ballplayers who were born too soon to play for the Dodgers or the Yankees or any of the baseball teams that called themselves the major leagues. They knew in baseball’s racist world the Dodgers and the Yankees and the others were all white men and they expected it to stay that way.
So Monte, the oldest and probably the last survivor of those days, and Larry Doby and Josh Gibson and so many great players whose names you never heard, followed the sun when their all-black league seasons ended. They followed it to Mexico and Venezuela, to Puerto Rico and Cuba, to any place where the sun was shining and a man was judged not by the color of his skin but the speed of his fastball.
Once, when I asked him about his nomad days with the Newark Eagles, the bus trips, the ridiculously low salary of $125 a month and later $150, the greatness of teammates like Doby and Ray Dandridge and Willie Wells and Leon Day that surrounded him, and the icons like Gibson and Satchel Paige and Buck Leonard who played against him, he smiled and then said:
‘‘I played in three countries. I played in two World Series. But I never found anything to match the joy and the laughter those years with the Eagles brought me. The city (Newark) and county (Essex) loved us. We’d go out to hear jazz or to dinner and our fans were always grabbing the check. We were young and the world was new to us. We had never traveled.
‘‘They were the happiest times of my life.
‘‘And we still had this game … this marvelous, beautiful, blessed game … and nobody and nothing could take that away from us, so we just went out and played it. Wherever and whenever we could.”
Played it?
Right.
And Miles Davis just played a trumpet and Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson just played tennis and Billie Holiday just sang songs. They proved you don’t need a paint brush to be an artist.
And that’s what Monte and so many of the Negro Leaguers around him were. He hit .422 and .396 (1940–41) for the Eagles. Then he went down to Mexico, won the MVP award and led the league in batting (.397) and home runs (20).
He could beat you with his bat, his glove and his feet. World War II cost him three years in his baseball prime, but he came home to Newark and led the Eagles to a Negro League World Series title after hitting .401
And then came the time of Jackie Robinson and Doby and white major-league baseball’s integration.
And where was Monte?
Well, he could easily have been the first. Years later, Cool Papa Bell, one of the greatest of all Negro League stars, said he always thought it would be Irvin. In that thought he was not alone among his peers.
Monte signed a contract with Branch Rickey for an all-black team in an all-black league — neither of which existed but served as Rickey’s vehicle to prepare to break Major League Baseball’s color line.
Monte had called Rickey and candidly told him an inner ear infection would prevent him from playing in that mythical league. Rickey decided he could not wait. He picked Robinson to carry out his secret plan to integrate the Dodgers.
Monte’s ear infection disappeared and he went to Puerto Rico, where he was winter league MVP. He came back to the Eagles and then to a pair of winter-league stints in Cuba and, finally, the Giants paid the Eagles $5,000 for him.
Now, after all those years home and abroad in all those ballparks the white world never heard about, all of America got to see Monte Irvin, the artist at work, on integrated playing fields that for so long were whiter than a brand new baseball.
He is the oldest living ballplayer to have been on a winning World Series team (1954) and the oldest living former major-leaguer.
And for some of us — black or white — he will always have a place of honor in our private pantheons as the last Newark Eagle.
He lives in Houston now, but there is a piece of him that never left New Jersey, where as a teenage superstar at Orange High School he won 16 varsity letters in four years … where in his only attempt he threw the javelin farther than any high school track and field guy before him, anywhere in the state … where he and his high school sweetheart, Dee, walked hand-in-hand long before she became his wife, through the park that now bears his name.
The last Eagle was shaped here in this state and the link between him and America’s social history is an unbreakable bond. Chronologically for him, age is just a number, not a lifestyle.
Happy birthday, Monte.