Jackie Robinson: Fascinating Hero

Baby boomers' eternal affections for the game of baseball, coupled with that generation's steadfast refusal to quit reading, has assured a healthy literary market for baseball history. In recent years, there has been a trove of new biographies of old players, including Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Roberto Clemente and Lou Gehrig.

In his superb rendition of Gehrig—"Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig"—Jonathan Eig proved particularly adept at separating the man from the myth. He peeled away the Gary Cooper mask from the Yankee hero and revealed a far more complex man than the steadfast stoic of legend. Now, in his second at bat, Eig has taken on the even more daunting challenge of an even more mythic legend: Jackie Robinson.

Robinson has already been the subject of dozens of biographies, including ones by his wife and daughter, as well as an integral part of numerous social histories. Moreover, in the decade since baseball officially retired Jackie's number, 42, Robinson has probably been studied more than any athlete in history. While all that attention has certainly shed light on the man, it has also shored up the considerable mythology that surrounds him and that historic 1947 season, when Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color line.

Eig's "Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season" (Simon & Schuster, $26.00) coincides with the 60th anniversary of that '47 season. And in his introduction, Eig appears acutely sensitive to his story's important place in the American fabric. He summons up names like Fredrick Douglass, George Washington Carver, even Moses. And he finds parallels, or at least gives credence to those who do, between Dodgers owner Branch Rickey's summons of Robinson to Brooklyn and some of this nation's bellwether moments: President Jefferson's instructions to Merriwether Lewis, or General Eisenhower's exhortation to his D-Day troops.

But once past the prologue, Eig's well-written narrative dwells in fact more than portent. While Robinson's story will never lack for dramatics—not when the rookie helped lead the Dodgers all the way to the seventh game of the World Series against the cross-town Yankees—Eig reveals that some of the richest components of the familiar fable apparently never happened. While Jackie encountered hostility from disgruntled teammates, opponents and fans, Eig sees no evidence that it approached the levels previously suggested. Teammates did not genuinely threaten to quit, opponents never actually organized a boycott. In fact, when the Dodgers' famously profane manager Leo Durocher heard a spring-training rumor of protest, he suggested players take any petition and "wipe your ass with it."

If some of the worst reactions to Robinson never happened, neither did some of the best: generations of young fans have been moved by an apparently apocryphal tale of how Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese, a Kentuckian, walked across the field and put an arm around Robinson to quiet racist hecklers. 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.

One question has always been at the center of Jackie Robinson's story: why Jackie? The Dodgers owner had options in the affable and immensely talented catcher Roy Campanella and the big right-handed pitcher Don Newcombe, both of whom later became Dodgers. But Robinson was older, had gone to college and served in the military. Eig maintains that Rickey did not choose Robinson because he was remotely even-tempered or inclined to look the other way at abuse. Throughout the book, Robinson is portrayed as a hot-head—in the army he was court-martialed (and acquitted) as a result of a confrontation over a racial slight—and a man who chafed at the restrictions that baseball and society imposed on him.

Fortunately, Rickey was not looking for a pacifist. He wanted, even needed, somebody who might intimidate others into caution, and Robinson, with an edgy personality and "steely, hard eyes that would flash angry in a heartbeat," certainly fit that bill. In other words: nice guys need not apply. (Robinson, after being subjected to ugly abuse by opposing teams, would later in his career dish it all back, becoming, Eig writes, "one of the game's most vicious bench jockeys.") Finally, Robinson was smart—bright enough to fully comprehend what was at stake in his baseball odyssey.

Eig believes Robinson's trademark style on the base paths—wide turns, steals of home or bases when the game was no longer in doubt, dashes up the line that literally begged for a throw-as more than just tactics aimed at disrupting his opponents. He views it as the best and perhaps only way Robinson could fight back—in-your-face baseball substituting for the fist he might have preferred to use there. Whatever the motivation, his gamesmanship was extraordinarily effective. Eig notes that the two Dodger hitters, Dixie Walker and Pete Reiser, who batted behind Robinson in the lineup, both received the most walks of their long careers, likely the result of pitchers rattled by Robinson's liberties. Robinson would win baseball's very first Rookie of the Year Award, an honor that is now named after him.

Social history has dominated most of the discussion on Robinson. But Eig manages to keep his eye on the ball as well, detailing a fascinating season capped by a dramatic World Series showdown. Reality intruded in the form of the Yankees (as it so often has in baseball), so there was no fairytale ending. After the final Series loss, Robinson proved himself as adept at baseball clichés—"We'll get them next year"—as he was at every other facet of the game. Then something rather surprising happened: one by one, the Dodgers made their way over to Robinson's locker and congratulated him on his superb season.

It was an end that signaled a new beginning. Eig is more succinct and more elegant in his epilogue than in his prologue. He writes: "In 1947, when integration was new and the barriers to democracy for black Americans were concrete, Robinson presented a solution that would soon become a template in the fight for racial equality. Over one spectacular summer, he proved that black Americans had been held back not by their inferiority but by systematic discrimination. And he proved it not with printed words or arguments declaimed before a judge. He proved it with deeds."

The timing of this book seems particularly apt, not so much because of the anniversary, but because African-American athletes today appear to be abandoning baseball. Or possibly the game has been abandoning them. Black players now make up only about 8.5 percent of Major League rosters, the lowest total since official counts began in the mid-'80s and about half that of a decade ago. If the best black athletes prefer football, basketball or even golf, that is not necessarily a sinister development. But it is undeniably sad. Eig's book reminds us of how much Jackie Robinson endured to provide the next generations a chance and ultimately a choice. And that absent such transcendent talents and vivid personalities, baseball—and its fans—are the losers.