A BIRTHDAY TOAST TO THE SMILE OF CHARLES ALBERT BENDER

Charles Albert Bender had no number to retire. As baseball celebrates #42 throughout the leagues, I can’t help wishing it took time to recognize the great Chippewa pitcher. His Hall of Fame plaque tells so little and is seen by so few. Let’s at least wish Mr. Bender a Happy Birthday!! Oops, belatedly; it was on the 20th. Baseball historians believe that the first Native American to play major league ball was James Madison Toy. Toy played in late 1880’s for the Philadelphia Athletics. To hide his Native American identity , Toy wore a handlebar moustache. Sad. John Tortes Meyers, a pioneering Native American player best known for his great hitting with the New York Giants, as well as being Christy Mathewson’s battery mate, talked of being a stranger in a strange land, a foreigner. He said that given their dark complexion Native American ball players could easily be singled out for the abusive jockeying of fans and players. The first use of the “N” word was aimed at Native Americans. More sad history. Charles Albert Bender, the only Native American in the Hall of Fame, was hardly the crusader that Meyers was. Nevertheless, he knew more than Meyers what it was to be the target of the fans and players' cruel taunting and the thoughtless prejudice of the press. No need to give the litany of the insensitive verbiage and mindless caricatures. With a mix of regret and sarcasm, Bender soon before his death said to an “Anglo” Philadelphia A’s coach with whom he had developed a close friendship that he would leave him his scalps and his tomahawk. You get the point. Bender put up with much, but he had his retorts. When things got too much, he would turn to the fans, smile that smile that became his trademark and proclaim that “Foreigners should quiet down or return to Europe.” Touché, Mr. Bender. The smile had its own power. In one game, Bender had a collision at home plate with an opposing player, Bobby Wallace. The next time up, Wallace was hit by a Bender pitch and charged the mound. He later admitted that it was the smile, not the pitched ball , that provoked the charge. A few days ago, I spoke at a wonderful sports gallery, Bergino’s Baseball Clubhouse on East 11th Street in the Village. Run by Jay Goldberg, “a grand guy” as my dad would say, bugs come together every week. I was asked whether Jackie Robinson and Bender had ever met. I didn’t know and will get to the research as soon as this blog is done. I thought not, but if they had , I want that photo for my desk And Bender’s smile? One Philadelphia writer gushed about Bender’s amazing pitching abilities but then called him “a grinning Indian who had the cunning typical of his race.” So it was this bewitching, mesmerizing smile that accounted for his superlative pitching? As usual, the Native American player couldn’t win. John McGraw was one of the best bench jockeys in baseball history. One ump said that McGraw was as welcomed as the smallpox. Umpires had a way of gaining their own vengeance for his constant abusive behaviors. In one game, McGraw was hit four times by pitches. Strangely, he was never given first base. In the 1913 World Series against the A‘s, McGraw was desperate. So desperate that he attempted to rattle Bender whose World Series performances were legendary. Bender was to complete 9 of his 10 World Series appearances, a combined ERA of 2.44. In 1910, he posted a 1.43 ERA in two games. In 1911, he completed three games against McGraw‘s Giants, winning two of the three and ending with an ERA of 1.04. In his first appearance against McGraw in 1905, Bender pitched two superlative games, winning one and ending with a 1.06 ERA. Of course, that was the Series in which Mathewson pitched three shutouts in six days. Bender won the only game the Giants lost. McGraw was later to admit that it was impossible to get to Bender. That day, however, he was to try yet again. The insults rang from everywhere and as usual were ineffective. In fact, on that day, Bender stood off the mound , smiled that smile, and cupped his ear as if to better hear and invite the barbs. He won the game. Louis Sockalexis once lamented that his tormentors had so penetrated his armor that he forgotten to smile at them. Bender never directly addressed “the smile.” I would like to think it spoke of rendering his opponents impotent, playing his own mind games. To me, it said, “You really think that is going to make a difference?‘ After all I have been through and all the injustice aimed at Native Americans, you think I (we) will succumb? You are going to have beat me on the field. You have no troops to take away the ground I stand on!“. It is tempting to think that Bender was, as the papers stereotypically portrayed him, a stoical “man of the forest,” as hard “as granite.“ Connie Mack, whom Bender considered a father figure, accounted Bender his money pitcher, the one he wanted on the mound when the game was on the line. Considering that two Hall of Fame pitchers were on the A’s staff that included Bender, that is saying something. Yet the stoical, supposedly impervious Indian image was way off. Bender would say later that despite Mr. Mack’s portrayal of him, he got as nervous, if not more so, than most. He spoke of breaking out into hives before and after games. His lifetime bouts with gastric disorders confirm the tensions. Bender explained the pent-up emotional battle. “I couldn’t let it out. Indians can’t.“ Of course, he meant that they couldn’t give the white man ammunition, couldn’t feed the “savage Indian” propaganda that confirmed the supposed superiority of the Manifest Destiny ancestors whose god-given task had been to spread civilization as they defined it. Bender’s struggle is reminiscent of Jackie Robinson’s later battle to internalize his angers and combative responses so that the white community wouldn’t have its ammunition to make him the proof of their racist pudding. Branch Rickey, of course. had warned him that he would have to take on such an unfair if not unnatural burden. Unlike Jackie, Bender was not chosen to be the one to integrate the sport for Native Americans. In Bender’s case, the behavioral restraint came from Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the most prominent of the government’s boarding school “solutions” to the “Indian problem.” Referring to himself as their father, Pratt worked ceaselessly to mold a compliant attitude among the students. How else to prove to the outside world that he had “civilized” them? More on that next time. But for now, ponder if Jackie Robinson had been there when in the early 50’s. the Yankees and A’s came together for Charles Bender Night. There would be mutual respect and admiration, but the conversation might not have been entirely cordial.

#HappyBirthday #April #Bender #smile #Chippewa