Black and white players hadn't appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Black players had an issue with Joe Torre. They weren't treated like everybody else. Even I got called out in a couple of meetings that I thought was unfair.
Those days were very tough. All my teammates are white, and it was a different time. I couldn't go out to eat with the white players; I had to wait until someone brought something out to the bus. We couldn't stay in the same hotels.
I always enjoyed playing ball, and it didn't matter to me whether I played with white kids or black. I never understood why an issue was made of who I played with, and I never felt comfortable, when I grew up, telling other people how to act.
All the colleges I played, most of the colleges, they were white.
My teammates at Duke - all of them, black and white - were a band of brothers who came together to play at the highest level for the best coach in basketball.
And I'd be lying if I told you that as a black man in baseball I hadn't gone through worse times than my teammates.
When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.
When I was a kid, like 14 or 15, I played with the waiters from the hotel, 'cause that was the best game. And these guys, they'd let me play. And they were black guys.
When I started playing, I played in R&B bands. I played James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and all that.
I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.