Some Cannot Forgive Phillies

WHILE MOST Philadelphians celebrate their entry into the World Series, parts of several generations of African Americans in the city nurse bitter baseball memories.

PHILADELPHIA - Old Bailey's Barber Shop in Germantown is the pure heart of Philadelphia, sure as scrapple and pepper pot soup. For more than 30 years, judges and lawyers, welders and ballplayers have stopped by to get their hair cut and to discuss the day's events.

The men of Bailey's fiercely love their city and its sports teams, so naturally, they're rooting hard in the World Series - for the Blue Jays.

Emmett Bailey, the proprietor, wipes tears from his 73-year-old eyes, clouded this morning with racial memory.

"I just can't forget the Phillies were the last team to give my people a chance," he says. "What they did to Jackie Robinson, the way they treated black ballplayers over the years."

"And how many black players do they have NOW?" calls out one of the younger barbers, Carlon Brown, 35. "Six, seven? It's the same old story. It's always the Dude and Daulton, Daulton and the Dude. I'm SICK of the Dude. When will we be represented?"

While thousands of Philadelphians revel this week in the glory of the local boys of autumn, a significant part of the city population copes with bitter memories.

Many older African Americans won't forgive the Phillies for being the last National League team to field a black player - John Kennedy, sent to the minors never to return after two at-bats in 1956, a decade after Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier. Or for the Phillies' and their fans' racist attacks, verbal and physical, on Robinson, who once said Philadelphia was the worst place he ever played. Or for the team's scuttling of once and future black stars such as Dick Allen, Ferguson Jenkins and Toronto's own Dave Stewart.

Or for having only six non-white ballplayers on the current team - 24 percent of the team compared with a baseball-wide average of 35 percent to 40 percent, according to Rob Holiday of the Phillies.

`People are still angry'

Holiday, manager of fan development for the Phillies, concedes that the team has a serious image problem in the black community.

"People from the Jackie Robinson era are still angry at the Phillies for the treatment of Robinson and for the team taking so long to acquire black players," he said."Even today, you look on the field, and sometimes we field an all-white team. It's not on purpose, but we just don't have any marquee black players like Barry Bonds. Our black players are role players."

In addition, the location of Veterans Stadium in a mostly white community where blacks are sometimes "uncomfortable" walking two blocks to a game doesn't help black attendance, Holiday says. Nor does the perception of some fans that blacks aren't welcome at the stadium.

On Oct. 13, the Philadelphia New Observer, a black weekly newspaper, published a letter to the editor from Curtis McAllister, an African American, who said that Sept. 24 he was made to feel "like a criminal" by an usher who humiliated him for, McAllister wrote, being the only black sitting in a box-seat area.

Last season, Holiday said, about 80,000 to 100,000 African Americans attended Phillies games out of 2 million fans, or about 4 1/2 percent. This year, Holiday estimates the figure at 4 percent.

To reach out to the minority community, the Phillies and two corporations sponsored 6,500 youngsters ages 6 to 16 in 70 summertime baseball leagues in Philadelphia and Camden, N.J. It was the fifth year of a program.

For fans such as Emmett Bailey, owner for 37 years of Bailey's Shop, the Phillies probably can never correct their past.

Bailey remembers sadly an incident in the late '40s that enraged the black community - the time the Phillies threw a black cat out on the field in the direction of Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers, followed by "black-boy" epithets.

And the day in the late '40s that Richie Ashburn, the Phillies star, obeyed Manager Ben Chapman's order to "get that black bleep-bleeper" by cutting Robinson's legs with his spikes, soaking the black man's legs with blood."

Don't be mistaken. Bailey seems color-blind. The largest picture he has on the wall of the shop is General Patton, Bailey's hero. Many African-American Phillies fans get their hair cut at Baileys and hold no bad memories, no grudges.

Bailey tries to forget all about the Phillies' racial history, tries to forgive.

"I hate to remember these things," he says.