Long before every team in major league baseball retired the number 42 – and long before everyone ritually began wearing that number every April 15 – there was the man.
Jack Roosevelt Robinson would have been 100 years old today. Instead, he has been dead for very nearly half those years. And if ever there was a great 20th-century man more entombed in myth than he, and more deserving of rescue from hagiography, I can’t name him.
The high drama of Jackie Robinson’s life took place between the day he stepped on to the field in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform – the aforementioned April 15, 1947 – and October 6, the day the Dodgers were beaten by the Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series. That period is captured in one of the most brilliant books about sport I’ve ever read: Jonathan Eig’s Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. (Before and after this book, Eig also wrote well-nigh definitive biographies of, respectively, Lou Gehrig and Muhammad Ali.)
The grandson of a slave and the son of sharecroppers, Jackie Robinson may have been the most complete American athlete of his time. He is the only person ever to have lettered in four sports at UCLA – football, track, basketball and baseball – of which the last was considered his least accomplished endeavor. In a very real sense, he learned to play baseball during his 1946 season with the Dodgers’ minor league team in Montreal – about as far away from the prevalent domestic racism as Branch Rickey could put him – and was still learning when the Dodgers started him at first base, a position he’d never played.
And how he struggled – as a ballplayer, perhaps even more than as a black man. His production was so woeful for the first month of the season that he expected at any moment to be benched, if not sent back down to the minors. He was, Eig writes, “a clenched fist – frozen, cramped, joyless.” But as the racial pressure began ever so slightly to recede, as his teammates got used to him, and as his own preternatural gifts took over – he learned to express his true self in his aggressive style of play, and never looked back.
And it was as a ballplayer that Robinson won first the respect, then the admiration and finally the friendship of his teammates. By the end of that first season, he was the team’s leader. And when the Dodgers lost that seventh World Series game, as everyone was packing up to leave for the last time, every member of the Dodgers approached his locker, shook his hand, and congratulated him on a great season.
The great failing of myth is that so often its subject is actually a far more interesting person. So let it be with Jonathan Eig’s genuinely luminous Jackie Robinson.
© 2019 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.