Game 29: Tommy Hawkins - Veal Scaloppine with Chianti
Just before the start of the 1987 baseball season, on what was the 40th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, the Los Angeles Dodgers were suddenly faced with the biggest public relations crisis in the franchise’s history. Al Campanis, the Dodgers’ longtime general manager and a former teammate of Robinson, was being interviewed by Ted Koppel on Nightline when he was asked why there weren’t more black managers and general managers in Major League Baseball. Over several life-ruining minutes, Campanis listed off nearly every racist reason you could think of: They lacked intelligence, they didn’t have the desire, they couldn’t swim because they lacked the buyuancy of white people. It’s still unclear what that last one had to do with managing a pitching rotation.
48 hours later, Campanis was fired. With a cloud hanging over what should’ve been a celebratory season marking the team’s progressive role in race relations, the Dodgers hired local sportscaster and former Laker Tommy Hawkins as the team’s vice president of communications. Hawkins’ role was “to help restore the confidence of both the players and fans” after Campanis’ embarrassing interview. But this wasn’t just some symbolic hire by the Dodgers, a black celebrity put on the payroll to clean up Campanis’ mistake. Hawkins took on the role because as a college basketball player in the 1950s, he had experienced the lonely torment of being a racial trailblazer firsthand.
““My life has been breaking barriers,” Hawkins said. “I was the first black analyst for NBC. I was the first black to be given a daily two-hour live television show that had nothing to do with sports. I was the first black captain at Notre Dame. I was the racial ambassador for my high school, which was in the process of integrating. Integration and barrier breaking has been my life. No professional athlete has done anything like this. I’m just doing what I do.” - Tommy Hawkins”
Hawkins was born in Chicago three days before Christmas 1936. He survived a tough upbringing in the South Side and earned a scholarship to Notre Dame, where he became the school’s first black All-American. As the only black player on the team and one of only 10 on the entire campus, he faced racism on the lily white campus at South Bend, IN. At one point, he and his white girlfriend were turned away from an on-campus restaurant. But with the support of the university’s president Rev. Theodore S. Hesburgh, who organized a boycott of that restaurant, he remained at the university and graduated as the school’s all-time rebounding leader.
Hawkins -- also known as The Hawk -- was drafted by the Lakers in 1959, their last season in Minneapolis. When the Lakers moved to L.A., the team wasn’t greeted with a ticker tape parade like the Dodgers. Baseball was the national pastime, but basketball was still seen as a niche sport. So to drum up interest, players like Hawkins were driven through neighborhoods so they could shout into a microphone “Hi, I’m Tommy Hawkins of the Lakers. Why don’t you come out and see us play the New York Knicks Saturday night? Plenty of good seats still available.”
Over a ten year career, Hawkins had a four-year stretch with the Cincinnati Royals that was sandwiched in between two stints with the Lakers. His NBA career was unremarkable, but it was emblematic of a life that involved so much more than basketball. For one, his most significant NBA moment came not on the floor, but in the boardrooms of the league offices. Today, the National Basketball Players Association is the strongest union in professional American sports. And it’s now in that position because as a player representative, Hawkins helped negotiate their first collective bargaining agreement with the NBA.
After he retired, Hawkins and his baritone voice was immediately hired as a local sportscaster. Through the ‘70s and ‘80s, Hawkins became an Emmy-nominated presence on radio and TV for KABC, KNBC, and KHJ, the precursor to KCAL 9. He also pursued his other interests, namely poetry and jazz music. From Long Beach State University, where he taught a course on black athletes and the mass media, he hosted a weekly jazz show. Every week on K-JAZZ, he culled songs from his 5,000 vinyl and 3,000 CD collection. Hawkins joked that if it wasn’t for his height, he would’ve become a trumpet player.
A longtime Malibu resident, Hawkins died peacefully in his sleep in 2017 at the age of 80. He retired from the Dodgers in 2004, but continued hosting his jazz show, serving on various non-profit boards, and publishing a book of poetry, Life’s Reflections: Poetry for the People. That book included a poem for Jackie Robinson, “Jackie, Do They Know?” In it, Hawkins speaks directly to the ghost of Jackie, asking if the country remembers the struggles that Robinson went through to break the color barrier. These are questions Hawkins probably asked himself after watching the Campanis interview, wondering how someone so close to Robinson could be so ignorant as to why the same issues remained 40 years later.
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Veal Scaloppine with Chianti
(Serves 4)
2 pounds veal scaloppine
Flour for dredging
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons salt pork
½ cup sweet butter
¼ pound onions, diced
⅓ teaspoon salt
Fresh ground black pepper
1 cup red Chianti
½ pound mushrooms, sliced
2 green peppers, thinly sliced
2 large tomatoes, thinly sliced
1 large clove garlic, minced
8-10 sprigs parsley, leaves only
Sprinkle veal with flour, shake off excess. Place olive oil, salt pork, and butter in skillet; heat. Add veal and brown slowly for 3 minutes, turn and cook for 2 minutes longer. Remove from pan to a platter and then add onions to skillet, using a little more oil and butter if necessary.
Once onions are brown, place veal back in skillet and add salt, pepper, and wine. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes or so. Add mushrooms, peppers, and tomatoes to the veal. Cover and cook for 5 minutes. Mix garlic and parsley together and stir into the sauce. Simmer uncovered for 10 minutes until done.
First, an admission: I didn’t use salt pork. I know this goes against my self-imposed, totally made up rules of Goldstein and Gasol. But I’m cutting excessive salt out of my diet to prevent more kidney stones. And without even looking up exactly what it is, I figured something called “salt pork” was bursting with sodium.
This was my first time eating or cooking veal. I got a great deal from the butcher at McCall’s in Los Feliz, who went into the backroom and found the last hunk of veal they had for that week. They sliced it thin for my scalopinne and I took the baby cow home to prepare. I didn’t know exactly what this dish was going to look like, so I only dredged six of the ten slices (I halved the recipe for 1lb) in flour that could fit in my pan. I would’ve used my much larger cast iron, but apparently tomatoes are one of the only things you’re supposed to not cook in one.
By the end of my cooking, the dish finally started to make sense. I should’ve cooked all the slices because the browning up top is just the start. What really makes this dish is the 20+ minutes the veal spends cooking in the red wine/mushroom/pepper/tomato sauce. The final product wasn’t something I’d ever make again, but if you’re a fan of mushroom sauces, this is a fairly easy restaurant-quality meal for your next in-home date night.
