JACKIE ROBINSON.\o7 By Arnold Rampersad\f7 .\o7 Alfred A. Knopf: 448 pp., $27.50\f7

As the speculating grew, I went with Rickey to a game between the Royals and the Havana All Stars. Rickey regarded me as a sort of nephew since his daughter and I had done a song number in a college musical, and he said to me, "You writers haven't been fair to me in this matter of Robinson. Pressures have been brought to bear on me which I am not at liberty to tell you about, but pressures which are considerable."

My reply is forgotten, but a couple of innings later, as Jack brought off a brilliant play, Rickey said, "See that Robinson. Greatest pair of hands I ever saw."

It was his way of saying, "Trust me."

Much has been said of Jack's combativeness but perhaps not enough about the remarkable fairness that reined in his temper. In the celebrated incident when Enos Slaughter spiked him at first base, a spiking which many believed an act of racism, I learned from colleague Jimmy Cannon that when asked by Georgia's Hugh Casey if he thought it was deliberate--in which case Casey offered to "stick the ball in his ear"--Jack, bleeding and in pain, said that it had been his own fault for covering too much of the bag with his foot.

Rampersad recalls the time that Jack "lashed out" at Gus Steiger, a reporter who wrote for the Daily Mirror and who had used the word "waddled" in commenting on Jack's weight after a winter of sports banquets.

I was present at Jack's outburst in which he said he knew Gus had always been against him. Steiger, a gentle man, was struck dumb. Into that moment of silence came the voice of Pee Wee Reese, who said, "Jack, you're going too far. Gus has supported you all along, and you owe him an apology."

Jack went from rage to consideration in a second, then, still annoyed by the "waddled," handsomely conceded that an apology was in order and gave it.

The baseball portion of this book is thorough and covers a remarkable career, but the most impressive pages are those that cover the post-diamond years in which Robinson, with the purest of motives and the most vigorous of dedication, found himself too often assailed not only by the old enemy, white supremacy, but also by the increasing divergence in approach in the old and new black organizations. The NAACP found him disruptive and abrasive, while the Muslims distrusted his integrationism and his abiding Christian faith and the newer, student-led groups found him old-fashioned.