{"id":1745,"date":"2014-03-02T13:54:14","date_gmt":"2014-03-02T18:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/?p=1745"},"modified":"2014-03-02T13:55:42","modified_gmt":"2014-03-02T18:55:42","slug":"happy-95th-birthday-monte-irvinby-jerry-izenberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/?p=1745","title":{"rendered":"HAPPY 95TH BIRTHDAY MONTE IRVIN:BY JERRY IZENBERG"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"izenberg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Great article by Jerry Izenberg
\nhttp:\/\/www.nj.com\/sports\/ledger\/izenbergcol\/index.ssf\/2014\/02\/izenberg_happy_95th_birthday_m.html#incart_river<\/a><\/p>\n

The last Eagle will be 95 years old this morning. Monte Irvin broke the New York Baseball Giants\u2019 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.
\nThat\u2019s for the r\u00e9sum\u00e9.
\nBut for me, he will always remain a Newark Eagle.
\nThey 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\u2019s racist world the Dodgers and the Yankees and the others were all white men and they expected it to stay that way.
\nSo 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.
\nOnce, 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:
\n\u2018\u2018I 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\u2019d 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.
\n\u2018\u2018They were the happiest times of my life.
\n\u2018\u2018And 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.”
\nPlayed it?
\nRight.
\n
\nAnd 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\u2019t need a paint brush to be an artist.
\nAnd that\u2019s what Monte and so many of the Negro Leaguers around him were. He hit .422 and .396 (1940\u201341) for the Eagles. Then he went down to Mexico, won the MVP award and led the league in batting (.397) and home runs (20).
\nHe 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
\nAnd then came the time of Jackie Robinson and Doby and white major-league baseball\u2019s integration.
\nAnd where was Monte?
\nWell, 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.
\nMonte signed a contract with Branch Rickey for an all-black team in an all-black league \u2014 neither of which existed but served as Rickey\u2019s vehicle to prepare to break Major League Baseball\u2019s color line.
\nMonte 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.
\nMonte\u2019s 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.
\nNow, 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.
\nHe is the oldest living ballplayer to have been on a winning World Series team (1954) and the oldest living former major-leaguer.
\nAnd for some of us \u2014 black or white \u2014 he will always have a place of honor in our private pantheons as the last Newark Eagle.
\nHe 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.
\nThe last Eagle was shaped here in this state and the link between him and America\u2019s social history is an unbreakable bond. Chronologically for him, age is just a number, not a lifestyle.
\nHappy birthday, Monte.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019 color line in 1949 and played in two World Series for them. He was the first … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1745"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1748,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1745\/revisions\/1748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}