A scene from “Unfinished Business”

In 1901, a twenty-year-old elementary school teacher named Branch Rickey managed to scrape together enough money to enter Ohio Wesleyan University. His mother sent him a dollar bill each month to help him out, but he always returned it. Rickey was determined to make something of himself and to do it on his own. To pay his school bills, he helped coach the Ohio Wesleyan Baseball Team, urging his players on with a booming voice no one ever forgot. "Rickey is one of the noisiest men who ever played on the field," wrote a campus sportswriter. When the team stopped in South Bend, Indiana, a hotel manager refused to allow the team’s star, a catcher named Charlie Thomas [a black man], to register. The memory of the player’s humiliation never left Branch Rickey.