Remembering Jackie Robinson: The Greatest Man In The History of Sports
By Derek Hart
Sixty-five years ago yesterday (as of this writing), a young, muscular African-American and former UCLA athlete named Jack Roosevelt Robinson stepped onto the baseball diamond at Ebbets Field, in the Borough of Brooklyn in New York City.
He was wearing the home whites of Brooklyn’s local team, the Dodgers, having made the club out of spring training after a stellar minor league season in Montreal the year before, playing first base against the Boston Braves on opening day.
Wearing number 42, he didn’t exactly set the world on fire in going 0-for-3 with a base-on-error – he was even replaced in the last inning for defensive purposes – but he did score a run to help the Dodgers beat the Braves, 5-3, before roughly 26,000 fans.
However, the statistics of that game were insignificant for this reason…
What Robinson did that day changed not only the face of sports forever, but also changed America forever as he did something that no other black person of African descent had been able to do since 1887:
Play in a major league baseball game.
Having been SoCal’s greatest athlete of his day, and perhaps ever as he attended John Muir High School in Pasadena and Pasadena City College before becoming UCLA’s first and only four-sport letterman (incredibly, his worst sport in Westwood was baseball as he only batted .097 in his one season as a Bruin on the diamond, his prowess being more in football, basketball and track), Robinson knew full well what he was getting into when he put on that Dodger uniform that April 15, 1947 day.
He knew that many of the white major leaguers, 60 percent of whom were from the segregated South, would use any means necessary to see him fail and to keep major league baseball a white man’s sport, making sure that the color line drawn by Cap Anson in 1887 stayed intact.
And they did as to put it quite simply, Jackie went through pure hell that first year as a Dodger as…
Balls were thrown at his head on a regular basis, players went out of his way to spike him on the base paths, vicious racial epithets were screamed at him by players and fans alike, and the St. Louis Cardinals even threatened to strike rather than play against an African American.
Not to mention the frequent death threats that were sent to him.
He had to endure all of this while keeping a stoic attitude, which was completely against his nature as he was known as someone with a hair-trigger temper who would fight at the drop of a hat. Robinson had to promise Dodger general manager/owner Branch Rickey that for his first three years, he would not answer back or retaliate at any racial slight, no matter how bad things got.
He knew that as much as he dearly wanted to, punching out a bigot who spiked him would lead the rest of the major league owners – who didn’t want blacks in baseball, either – to say, “See, we knew they couldn’t hack it.”
And it would have likely meant another 20 years before blacks got another chance to play in the majors if Jackie had failed.
The fact that Robinson excelled despite all the forces against him, winning the first Rookie of the Year award (which now bears his name) and leading Brooklyn to the pennant, says much about the kind of character he had and the kind of man he was.
In fact, I would go so far as to call him the Messiah of baseball – and I’m sure that a lot of people would agree with me.
And it all happened 65 years ago this past Sunday.
Perhaps Bob Costas put it best when he said, “Were there better players? Sure. But were there better men? No.”
Putting it another way, Martin Luther King himself told Robinson that what he did made it easier for King to do his job, to commit himself to those legendary boycotts and marches in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma.
Considering who it was coming from, that statement was truly saying something as some have said that the Civil Rights Movement started not with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956, but with Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier nine years earlier.
Major League Baseball absolutely did the right thing when they announced in 1997 that Robinson’s number 42 would be retired by all of the big league teams, as well as making every April 15 Jackie Robinson Day with all the players wearing #42 in his honor; it was a great site to see that number on everyone’s back.
And it’s also a great thing that everyone in baseball takes time to remember and celebrate who in my view was the greatest legend in sports history, as no one else deserves it more.
I’ve taken the liberty of including a video of this great man. Please watch and enjoy: