I'm surprised none of you baseball fanatics started a Jackie Robinson thread.
Sixty years ago, he broke the colour barrier in a lilly-white sport. A good biography is at this link:
Robinson’s season turns out to be less about abuse and threats, more about loneliness and the despair of isolation. In the season’s early going, Eig describes him as “a clenched fist—frozen, cramped, joyless.” Even as many fans—the Dodgers drew 1.8 million to tiny Ebbets Field and even more, 1.9 million, on the road—flocked to ballparks to embrace Robinson as part of a larger crusade, Robinson remained very much a man apart. Eventually his play earned Robinson the respect, if not always the affection, of his teammates.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17872168/site/newsweek/
Canadian fans have a special proprietary interest in Robinson in that he first played in a white man's league for the Montreal Royals, the farm team of the Dodgers at the time.
"The Boys Of Summer," published in roughly 1972, by Roger Kahn, possibly the greatest baseball book ever written, also covers magically the man who was Jackie Robinson, his foibles and ferociousness, as well as the stories of those who played with him on those Dodger teams of the 1950's. The book is probably best appreciated if you're 40 or older but you'll still love the stories of those early days in Robinson's career.
From a review link below:
The book is filled with wonderful prose, with lines such as “… about as well as any man could edit inside a sarcophagus, but he possessed a transcending sense of privacy, which sometimes collided with his craft,” a reference to an editor. It is replete with vivid imagery. But above all, it is redolent with a candor tellingly emphasized by a statement made by Jackie Robinson upon the book’s publication.
In the epilogue to the reissued edition of the book, Kahn quotes Robinson as saying that the book removed any doubts that people had about Robinson being an “Uncle Tom,” a black player who sided with the whites for personal gain. Kahn time and again describes Robinson as a fierce competitor and a proud African American who withstood the constant barrage of racial taunting to cement his place in Dodger history.
This is a book that belongs on every sports lover’s bookshelf. It is a literary masterpiece that masquerades as a sports memoir.
http://www.curledup.com/boysofsu.htm
Robinson was the right man for the job of breaking the colour barrier. Pee Wee Reese said this in the Boys of Summer:
"Thinking about the things that happened, I don't know any other ball player who could have done what he did. To be able to hit with everybody yelling at him. He had to block all that out, block out everything but this ball that is coming in at a hundred miles an hour and he's got a split second to make up his mind if it's in or out or up or down or coming at his head, a split second to swing. To do what he did has got to be the most tremendous thing I've ever seen in sports."
But what did it get him? Robinson said this in his autobiography:
"Today as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey's drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made."---- Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It Made.
Cowperson
Remembering Jackie Robinson, one of "The Boys Of Summer"
