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Jackie Robinson: Fascinating Hero
A new biography shows us that he was so much more than merely a symbol or a myth.
 AP Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson, the first African-American admitted into the Major Leagues, is at first base at Ebbets Field, Brooklyn, April 11, 1947. |
March 30, 2007 - 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.
