The long-awaited statue commemorating one of baseball’s most legendary moments was finally unveiled Tuesday morning outside Keyspan Park.
Over 200 people lined Surf Avenue to see the bigger-than-life bronze statue of Brooklyn Dodger Pee-Wee Reese putting his arm around Jackie Robinson, capturing a moment purported to have occurred in May of the 1947 season — Robinson’s first with the Dodgers— in Cincinatti.
While not reported in any press accounts at the time, the event has gone down in baseball lore as the official acceptance of Robinson by his teammates — some of whom had written a petition during spring training stating they wouldn’t play with him on the team. Reese, it is said, refused to sign the petition.
The statue, like the moment it represents, was a long time coming.
Originally suggested by Newsday columnist Stan Isaacs upon Reese’s death in 1999, the cause was written about frequently by the late Jack Newfield, then with the New York Post. Later that year, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced the formation of a committee to study the project and commission the statue.
“We were supposed to select the artist on Sept. 11, 2001,” said Dorothy Reese, widow of Pee-Wee, Tuesday. “So that got canceled. The next time I got the call to come here, I fell at the airport and ended up in the hospital. So I’m REALLY glad to be here today.”
The statue, sculpted in Tryon, North Carolina, by William Behrends, whose work includes a statue of Willie Mays outside SBC Park in San Francisco, was completed last week, according to the artist.
According to baseball lore, Robinson was being taunted by fans and players on the Reds that day, and had received death threats over the days leading up to the game — the closest to the Mason-Dixon line the team had played that season.
Hearing the jeers, Reese, the Dodgers captain and shortstop and a southerner from segregated Kentucky, walked across the field to first base where Robinson was playing, and put his arm around him.
“I think he reacted solely from the gut,“ said Mark Reese, son of Pee-Wee. “He didn’t think philosophically in any way, or that he was going to make this great gesture. He just saw this happening to his teammate and his friend, and my father reacted from inside, and that’s what he did, he made that dramatic cross from short to first base, and the rest is history.”
Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow, said her husband never really discussed the specifics of the event with her.
“I don’t make up stories, so, I’d love to have a nice one,” she said. “He was pleased to have Pee-Wee step forward. But in a way he expected that from a friend. So it wasn’t total surprise. They were friends.”
November 5, 2005 issue