PHILADELPHIA — Dick Allen’s obligations — the speeches, the ceremony, the news conference — were complete two summers ago, allowing him to finally find a quiet place to sit at Citizens Bank Park. The Phillies retired his number in September of 2020, five decades after he kissed the dirt at Connie Mack Stadium and received his wish to finally leave town.
His first seasons in Philadelphia were defined by home runs that cleared the roof of the old North Philadelphia ballpark. But those shots were not enough to absolve him from the racial taunts by fans and the objects they launched onto the field.
The Phillies were the final National League team to integrate. They did not roster a Black player until 1957, 10 seasons after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, which was celebrated Friday with the 75th anniversary of his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Allen, who reached the majors in 1963, was the Phillies’ first Black star, leading him to have an almost Robinson-like existence in 1960s Philadelphia.
Allen was booed and jeered, and even played the field while wearing a batting helmet to guard against glass bottles a fan might throw. He received death threats. Someone threw a brick through the front window of his home. Cars regularly drove over his lawn at night, ripping up the grass with their tires.
But here he was — three months before his death at age 78 — taking a moment to reflect after being celebrated in the town he once could not wait to leave. Mike Tollin, the Hollywood movie producer from Havertown who struck an unlikely friendship in the 1970s with his childhood hero, slid into a chair next to him.
“He looked at me with an expression that I’ll never forget. It was a combination of amazement, awe, and appreciation,” Tollin said. “He just said ‘Who would have thought that this could happen to me in this town?’ I get chills thinking about it. Man, I choked up.”
‘Stop booing my dad’
Richard Allen Jr. remembers two things most about watching his dad play at Connie Mack Stadium: the pillars that could obstruct a fan’s view and the sounds that came from the seats.
“They announced his name one game and the boos were just so loud that it felt like the stadium was coming down,” Allen Jr. said. “My sister held her ears and yelled ‘Stop booing my dad.’ ”
Allen told his son that he didn’t hear the boos. If you’re listening to the fans, he said, then your mind is not in the game. Allen knew how to block out the noise. Or maybe he was just used to it.
The Phillies sent him in 1963 to Little Rock, Ark., where he was the first Black player to play for the town’s minor league baseball team. Six years earlier, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus had called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent a group of Black students, who later became known as the Little Rock Nine, from entering the all-white Central High School. Allen grew up in Wampum, a small Western Pennsylvania town just outside of Pittsburgh. And now he was a 21-year-old Black man in the heart of the Jim Crow South.
“He might not have been our Jackie Robinson but he was Little Rock’s Jackie Robinson,” Tollin said.
White supremacist groups picketed the games. Allen received death threats; fans shouted racial slurs when he took the field and left intimidating notes on his car windshield. Allen called home, telling his mother he was returning to Wampum. But she told him he had to push through. God had given him a talent, his mother said, and leaving would be disobedient to God.
“I went home and laid across the bed and cried like a baby,” Allen said. “Then I got to thinking and thought ‘Maybe she is right.’ ”
Tollin, who produced the acclaimed documentary “The Last Dance” about Michael Jordan along with other popular sports movies, has been working on an Allen documentary for more than 20 years. It would be good for the film, Tollin thought, to capture Allen returning to Arkansas 50 years after he played there.
“Mike got in touch with me and I said, ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ ” Allen Jr. said. “I said, ‘Dad, let’s take a road trip. Just me and you and we’ll ride.’ I would’ve loved to do it and see him point things out to me. I threw my pitch out there and he said, ‘That’s like walking through a graveyard.’ He hung the phone up on me. He never went back.”
Meeting a hero
Tollin was a student at Stanford when he scored a press credential and found his way into the Oakland A’s clubhouse. By then, Allen was 35 and playing out the final season of a prolific career.
But when Tollin saw Allen at his locker stall, he recalled the player whose at-bats he had to finish watching before answering his mother’s calls that dinner was ready. For a Philadelphia kid in the 1960s, there was something mythical about Allen.
“It’s hard to describe unless you were there. It was visceral,” Tollin said. “The way he walked, the baggy pants, the red pinstripes, the war club that he waved, and the way he kind of chopped wood with it in practice swings and hoisted up his short sleeves. There was just something regal about him and something that just drew me in. Plus the fact that he hit the ball a mile.”
Tollin approached Allen in the clubhouse, reached his microphone out, and asked him a professional-sounding question. Big mistake, Allen Jr. said. His dad didn’t want to always just talk about baseball. Dick Allen responded by talking about horse racing, his passion away from baseball.
Tollin left the clubhouse and regrouped, knowing he had to make a better impression on his hero. He ditched his jacket, messed up his hair, untucked his shirt, and walked back to Allen. He introduced himself, told him he was from Philadelphia, and said he just wanted to say hello.
“Oh, you’re from Philly,” Allen said. “Sit down. Have a beer. We need to talk.”
Becoming a Philly villain
Allen’s first tenure with the Phillies ended eight years earlier with a trade to St. Louis. He was the National League’s Rookie of the Year in 1964 when he hit 29 home runs and posted a .939 OPS, but was vilified the next season.
Already a racially-divided city, Philadelphia became even more so in the summer of 1964 when riots and clashes with police overtook North Philadelphia for three days following the spread of false rumors that police had killed a pregnant Black woman.
“You have to put Dick’s appearance into the context of Philadelphia at that moment in time,” said John Middleton, a Phillies fan in the 1960s and now the team’s managing partner and chief executive officer. “It was a very racially divided city and violently so. That’s what it was.”
That section of North Philadelphia — the unrest stemmed from a traffic stop just a mile south of Connie Mack Stadium — was never the same and neither was Allen’s time in Philly.
In July of 1965, Allen and teammate Frank Thomas got into a fight before the game after Allen objected to Thomas’ racial comment. Thomas hit Allen in the shoulder with a bat, was released days later, and the Phillies ordered Allen to remain silent.
Unable to tell his story, Allen was crushed by sportswriters for costing Thomas — a white player — his job. The fans in an increasingly divided city picked sides. Allen, once a favorite, became a villain.
“I was there at the stadium, I heard the names they called him. It was as despicable as you could possibly imagine,” Middleton said. “Then they started making it worse and throwing stuff at him. He was lucky if he got coins thrown at him. I was sitting with my dad just outside the dugout on the first-base side. Four or five feet to the first-base side of the end of the dugout. When Dick was walking off the field after an inning, this Coke bottle came whistling between my father’s head and mine.
“My father fought on the front lines in the Philippines and Okinawa. He wasn’t really afraid of too many people. He just hopped up. If he could’ve figured out who threw that bottle, that guy would’ve been in big trouble. That was the stuff that was happening.”
Allen internalized those memories for decades, his son said. It wasn’t until the years before his death that Allen began to share stories, finally digging up the pain he long buried.
“He would say things to me like, ‘I wonder what it would have been like to play somewhere where they cheered for you. I wonder what that would’ve been like,’ ” Allen Jr. said. “I used to say that a West Coast road trip must’ve felt like a vacation.
“It made him suspicious or cautious of anyone who would approach him. He just never knew who to trust. It did turn him into that type of person.”
Meeting the real Allen
Somehow, Tollin was able to break through. The beer they shared in Oakland led to a friendship. Allen called Tollin “Stanford” and Tollin called Allen “Wampum.” They were so close that Richard Allen found a picture of Stanford and Wampum in his dad’s truck after he died.
“He was magical,” Tollin said. “It’s the beauty of sports, right? This connection between fans and their heroes. I don’t know if it exists in quite the same way now. We maybe have too much information and it takes away from that worship and idolatry. He was a really powerful force in my life.
“I would say we were close friends in a category of one type of way but close friends in every way that matters. Being there for each other, sharing intimate stories of each other’s lives, knowing each other’s kids, and being there in the toughest of times. When his daughter was murdered, he called me and we spent time shooting baskets on a court in Burbank. When my dad died, I had lunch with him at a Mexican restaurant and he’s like ‘OK, Stanford. You’re the point guard now. You’re bringing up the ball.’ He was really great at helping me.”
His friendship with Allen provided Tollin the chance to meet the real Allen, not the one he read about in the sports pages as a kid in the 1960s.
“It saddens me because aside from just overt racism there was massive misinterpretation of who he was and what he was about. He wasn’t militant. He wasn’t arrogant. He wasn’t aloof. He was just independent,” Tollin said. “This is the sweetest, kindest man. I call him a ‘Momma’s boy.’ He’s a God-fearing, mother-loving, simple, rural man from this small town in Western Pennsylvania.
“I just shake my head at how you guys got it so wrong, so wrong. Yes, he was fiercely independent, but there was no agenda.”
Allen on the big screen?
Allen brought oxygen tanks with him to Philadelphia when the Phillies retired his number in 2020 and had to be seated when he made his speech. Cancer was taking its toll and his body was slowing down. He died that December on the day the results of his latest Hall of Fame bid were originally scheduled to be announced.
Tollin watched the funeral from home via Zoom and was still mourning the loss of Wampum when a Hollywood friend called. He wanted Tollin to call someone at Paramount Pictures.
“So I’m talking to this guy and he said ‘You’re the Philly guy, right?’ OK. I’ve been called worse,” Tollin said. “ ‘I’m the Philly guy. Why?’ He goes ‘I have to ask you a question. Have you ever heard of a guy named Dick Allen?’ I said ‘Who put you up to that?’ He said ‘What do you mean?’ ‘OK. I’ll play along. Yes, I’ve heard of him. Why?’ ”
He told Tollin he was in a meeting that morning and one of the company’s executives started talking about this player who was the first Black star for the Phillies and battled racism before being booed out of town. He thought it sounded like a great movie and wanted to see if “the Philly guy” was interested.
Tollin has 150 hours of footage he’s gathered over 22 years and proposed making a hybrid project that would be a feature film with documentary elements. Paramount agreed, a screenwriter was hired, and the first draft was completed this month. The film — which Tollin started working on when he cast Allen as a scout in 2001′s “Summer Catch” — could happen.
“Well, I don’t count my chickens,” Tollin said. “I don’t know it’s going to happen until someone shouts ‘action’ on the first day of filming. It’s in the works and on the development slate at Paramount Pictures. I’m excited about it.”
The film was supposed to culminate last December with Allen finally being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. His credentials — Allen won the MVP in 1972, made seven All-Star teams, hit 351 homers, and had the highest OPS+ (165) over his prime of 1964 to 1973 — are strong. But Allen was repeatedly denied entry into the Hall as many believed him to be a bad teammate and a clubhouse distraction.
“He was one hell of a teammate,” said Bill White, who played with Allen in 1967 and was later the president of the National League. “I roomed with him. I enjoyed playing with him. He just wanted to play baseball.”
“People want to call him a hothead and things like that, but I never remember him arguing with an umpire or being ejected or anything like that,” Allen’s son said.
Middleton tried to convince the voters before they gathered that what they thought they knew about Allen was wrong.
“The only reason he didn’t get elected unanimously is this quote, unquote, character issue,” Middleton said. “The problem I have with that is when you look at the man’s character over the course of his lifetime, which I think is the true measure of any person, this is a guy who went out of his way to build bridges and make amends.
“You would think he would have a lifelong and animus grudge against Frank Thomas. They made up. Initiated by Dick. They would exchange Christmas cards for years. The Christian notion of forgiveness and love were paramount in his life.”
But that campaigning was not enough as Allen fell one vote shy of election for the second time. He needed 12 votes from the 16-member Golden Days committee but received just 11, the same he garnered in 2014.
This was supposed to be the year Allen finally made it to the Hall but instead his supporters were crushed again.
“It’s a travesty that Dick Allen isn’t in the Hall of Fame,” White said. “He’s one of the best players that I played with and against. There’s something going on at the Hall of Fame that keeps Dick Allen out. The Hall of Fame is crap if he isn’t in it, and I was on the board there.”
“You’d have to be a moron to not realize that statistically this guy produced on the field well enough to be in the Hall of Fame,” Middleton said. “... I ask these people how would you behave if you were treated like this? I think Dick was actually really restrained. If someone threw a Coke bottle at me, I might have gone into the stands.”
Honoring Allen
Madison Turner, the screenwriter, called Tollin. Yes, it was disappointing that Allen fell short, but it could help their project.
“It shows that the uphill battle continues,” Tollin said. “There are vestiges of this misinterpretation of ‘clubhouse cancer’. Even when you get past overt racism, there is this impression that was born in the 1960s by the Philly media and it’s hard to shake it. There are people who might have been in that room who had a false narrative that they’re following and that made it tough for them to vote for him.”
Tollin asked Middleton during a visit to spring training before the 2020 season if he would finally retire Allen’s number. Middleton thought about it, did research, and agreed. A day after the ceremony, Tollin asked Middleton if he could pick just one moment to have from his Phillies’ tenure, what would it be.
“I have to tell you, if I only get to experience one of them I think it’s the retirement,” Middleton said. “Mike said ‘Why?’ As a person, I didn’t change because we won the World Series. Some people undoubtedly looked at me differently or thought I was smarter than I was before. Maybe they thought I was luckier than I was before, but I was the same person.
“Going through this process and learning about Dick’s real history here and trying to understand it, I have to tell you that I’m a better person for having done that and talking to Dick and understanding his life and putting it into a fuller context. I learned stuff that I never would’ve learned, and I think I’m a better person. I would never give up this moment, this experience. It was that special. Doing it for a guy who had been maligned.”
Tollin was such a friend and advocate for Allen that Middleton made sure Stanford was on the phone with him when he called Wampum to break the news.
Allen didn’t say much, leaving Middleton a bit confused. But the next day, Allen’s wife emailed Tollin to let him know how stunned Allen was by Middleton’s call and how proud he was to have his number retired by the Phillies. The town he once couldn’t wait to leave was bringing him home. It felt like a story written for Hollywood. Who would have thought?
“He was sort of in disbelief about the whole thing, saying ‘Why did they do that? They didn’t have to do that. He kept questioning it and I just said ‘You earned it,’ ” Allen Jr. said. “He always felt like Philadelphia was home. He said that was his birthplace. Philly gave him his chance and the fans were true. They let you know when you do right, when you do wrong. They let you know.”
