Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson: The Hardest Job in American Sport

In his first baseball game for UCLA he went four-for-four and stole four bases. He then hit .097 for the season. That combination — devastating on the bases, erratic at the plate, and impossible to ignore either way — is a fair summary of the young Jack Roosevelt Robinson, who was better at four sports than almost anyone in California and had no obvious professional future in any of them, because the leagues that mattered would not have him.

Pasadena

He was born on 31 January 1919 in Cairo, Georgia, the youngest of five children, and named for Theodore Roosevelt. His mother, Mallie, moved the family west to Pasadena while he was an infant and raised them there alone. Athletics ran in the house: his older brother Matthew took a silver medal at the 1936 Olympic Games, which is where Jackie's own ambition started.

Four Letters

At UCLA from 1939 to 1941 he lettered in baseball, football, basketball and track — four sports, a feat no one at the university had managed. He led the nation in punt return average across 1939 and 1940, gained 827 yards of total offense as the leading rusher in 1940, and won the NCAA broad jump title that same year. He also met Rachel Isum, a nursing student, whom he married in 1946 and with whom he had three children.

The Bus

Robinson served in the United States Army from 1942 to 1944. Ordered to move to the back of a military bus, he refused. The Army court-martialed him for it. He was acquitted and honorably discharged — three years before Branch Rickey asked him to accept precisely the humiliations he had just refused to accept, and to do it in front of fifty thousand people.

In 1945 he signed with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues, where the travelling conditions delivered their own daily education in American segregation.

Rickey's Bargain

Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was looking for a specific and nearly contradictory person: a player good enough to belong in the major leagues and disciplined enough to absorb whatever the country did to him without answering back. Talent alone would not do; the first man through would define whether there was a second. Rickey was selecting for character at least as much as for ability. He chose Robinson, and Robinson agreed not to fight.

The proving ground was Montreal. With the Royals in 1946 he led the International League with a .349 average and forty stolen bases, which settled the baseball question conclusively and left only the other one.

15 April 1947

He took the field for Brooklyn on 15 April 1947 as the club's first baseman, the first African American to play in the modern major leagues. The abuse came from opposing benches, from the stands, from some of his own teammates, and in threats directed at his family. He kept the bargain. He played first base that day, incidentally, not the second base that would become his position — Brooklyn had a hole to fill and he filled it.

He also won. That season he hit .297, stole twenty-nine bases and was named the first Rookie of the Year in the award's history. In 1949 he led the National League with a .342 average, drove in 124 runs, stole thirty-seven bases and was voted Most Valuable Player.

Ten Seasons

Across ten years with Brooklyn he played 1,416 games and hit .313, with 1,563 hits, 141 home runs, 761 runs batted in, 200 stolen bases and a .410 on-base percentage. The Dodgers won six pennants in that decade and, in 1955, the World Series — the only one Brooklyn ever won, and it came in Robinson's ninth season, with the man who had integrated the league now one of its senior figures. He retired after the 1956 season.

Why Jackie Is Called a Genius

The word does two jobs here, and only one concerns the mind.

The first is craft. Robinson's baseball talent was disruption: a .410 on-base percentage plus the era's most aggressive base-running. Stealing bases at his rate is not raw speed but pattern reading under time pressure. It means decoding a pitcher's delivery for the tell that separates a throw to the plate from a throw to first, and committing irrevocably a fraction of a second before the information is complete. He did it well enough that pitchers lost composure with him on base — a way of scoring runs that never appears in a box score.

The second is temperament, and it is the harder achievement. Rickey's condition was that Robinson not retaliate — and Robinson's documented instinct, on an Army bus in 1944, had been to refuse exactly this. He held to it for years while being spat at and threatened. Deliberate self-suppression of that kind, in public, against every reflex, is executive control most people could not manage for a week.

The counter-case is plain. On the numbers Robinson is a very good ballplayer, not an immortal one: he reached the majors at twenty-eight because the leagues had barred him; 141 home runs is not a giant's total. This is not intellectual genius — no discovery, no body of work. It is craft, perceptual sharpness, and an endurance that changed a country. Martin Luther King Jr. named the consequence rather than the gift: "Jackie Robinson made my success possible."

Legacy

Retirement did not quiet him. He marched in Washington in 1963. In 1964 he co-founded Freedom National Bank in Harlem, an institution built specifically to lend to people the existing banks would not serve. In 1965 he became the first Black television analyst in baseball. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, in his first year of eligibility.

He died of a heart attack on 24 October 1972 in Stamford, Connecticut. He was fifty-three. His own summary of what a life is for was characteristically unsentimental: "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives."

In 1997 Major League Baseball retired the number 42 across every team in the sport, an honour granted to no one else. UCLA retired it across all its programs in 2014. Every 15 April, on Jackie Robinson Day, every player in the major leagues wears it.

Achievements

• Presidential Medal of Freedom
• National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
• Congressional Gold Medal
• Spingarn Medal
• Quebec Sports Hall of Fame
• Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame
• California Hall of Fame
• Major League Baseball Most Valuable Player Award