Friday column: Players who compete to the very end

It may be my favorite Jackie Robinson story.

On Oct. 3, 1951, at 3:58 EST in New York’s Polo Grounds, Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson hit the most famous home run in baseball history.

His three-run, ninth-inning shot erased a 4-2 Brooklyn lead and gave the New York Giants the rubber game of their playoff series with the Dodgers and, with it, the National League pennant.

Well, it did — but not until Thomson had touched all the bases.

As the Giants celebrated wildly and their fans began to rush onto the field, the Dodgers hung their heads, then began trudging toward the visitors clubhouse.

All, that is, but one.

Robinson, the Dodgers second baseman, followed Thomson’s progress around the infield, making sure he hit every bag and home plate. Then, and only then, did Robinson leave the field.

The man who broke baseball’s color line was the ultimate competitor, and even if there was only one chance in a thousand, or ten thousand, of Thomson missing a base in all the excitement, Robinson was not going to stop competing until the game was over — officially.

If Robinson were alive today — he would be 92 — he would have smiled at hearing the story of one Cole Bryant, pitcher for the Newington High baseball team that this month reached the finals of the Connecticut state tournament.

In the bottom of the eighth (high schools play a regulation seven innings), the score 2-2, Bryant gave up a double down the left-field line to Southington’s Sal Romano. Matt Spruill, who had started the rally with a single, took off at the crack of the bat, hitting second, rounding third and heading home.

He easily beat the throw, and his Southington teammates rushed out of the dugout and began celebrating, for Spruill had just given the team its first state crown in 12 years.

Seemingly.

But like Robinson before him, instead of hanging his head, Bryant watched carefully as Spruill neared the plate; the key word is neared.

Distracted by onrushing teammates, Spruill missed home plate and never went back to touch it. Bryant called for his catcher, Tyler Barrett, to hold the ball, step on the plate and appeal the play.

He did and Spruill was ruled out. The game remained tied. Two innings later, Newington won it. Appropriately, it was Bryant who scored the winning run, making quite sure he touched home.

On the game, Bryant pitched all 10 innings, threw 176 pitches, allowing just six hits and fanning 16. For all that, the most impressive thing he did was keep his eyes open and not give up.

Praised his coach: “He’s got so much heart, he’s such a competitor.”

Bryant kept competing, even when the game appeared to be over.

Yes, Robinson would have smiled.

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.

Not sure how this helps his image

A New York Times story on the daughter of Dixie Walker paints a somewhat sympathetic portrait of the Brooklyn Dodgers star who tried to keep Jackie Robinson from breaking baseball’s color line in 1947.

Walker’s circulation of an anti-Robinson petition was unnerving to hear about, Susan Walker said, “because it didn’t fit the man I knew.”

The story quotes a passage from Roger Kahn’s 1993 book, The Era, in which Walker said, “I organized that petition in 1947, not because I had anything against Robinson personally or against Negroes generally. I had a wholesale business in Birmingham (Ala.) and people told me I’d lose my business if I played ball with a black man.”

So, Walker really wasn’t the virulent racist he was made out to be — just a gutless man worried about money.

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.