Friday column: In the race to reason, give sports the edge

Sixty-two years.

That’s what it took to get from Jackie Robinson to Barack Obama. And don’t think those two firsts are not closely connected.

Before there could be an Obama, there had to be a Martin Luther King Jr. And before there could be a Martin Luther King Jr., there had to be a Jackie Robinson.
“Jackie Robinson made it possible for me in the first place,” King once said. “Without him, I would never have been able to do what I did.”

As time passed and society changed, it was increasingly difficult, I think, to fully appreciate the sea change that occurred in America on April 15, 1947, when Robinson took the field for the first time wearing his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform.

It was difficult, that is, until Tuesday.

From what I’ve read about Robinson’s first season, the emotion I saw on the faces of those who packed the National Mall for Obama’s inauguration had nothing on the faces that packed the stands — in some cases, the segregated stands — to see 28-year-old, slightly pigeon-toed athlete take his position at first base throughout 1947.

In Opening Day — The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season, Jonathan Eig writes about the Dodgers’ May visit to Cincinnati.

On the day of the first game of the series, Eig writes, “black people filled the neighborhood as if from nowhere, like some magician’s trick, pouring out of every bus, every taxi.”

He continues: “One newspaper report said about half of the twenty-seven thousand people at the ballpark that night were black. But to some of the Cincinnati Reds, it looked like more. ‘The place was packed — all blacks,’ said Eddie Erautt, a rookie pitcher.”

Robinson’s fans stood and cheered every time he came to the plate. “If they embarrassed him with their overdone hoots and hollers,” Eig writes, “they didn’t care.” Recalled one African American there that day: “Listen, it was quite an affair. It was kind of a revolution, you know?”

To be sure, the desegregation of sports that began in earnest with Robinson has been long and painful and, in fact, is not even complete. Don’t believe me? Check out the number of black Division I college football coaches.

Yet Robinson, voted Rookie of the Year in 1947 and National League MVP in 1949, indisputably changed American history — and did so seven years before Brown vs. Board of Education, 17 years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Which means that athletics — for all its flaws — has something over politics. Of those two ultra-competitive worlds, sports was the first to decide — even in an imperfect way — that talent trumped pigmentation.

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.