Hero
As I began this book, many Americans were beginning to be cautious
about whom they called a hero. Athletes, actors, entrepreneurs,
and celebrities had casually and carelessly been described as
such. To do so after September 11, 2001, seemed preposterous.
In the weeks following the attacks on New York and Washington,
D.C., and the foiled attack that sent a plane crashing into western
Pennsylvania, Americans saw the grim and affecting faces of genuine
heroes -- and they were caked in ash, blood, tears, toil, and
sweat. A man or woman might sink a basketball, strike a baseball,
or scintillate before a camera lens. Those talents can be worthy.
But real heroes risk their lives for others. My wife and I were
crossing midtown Manhattan about three weeks after the attacks
and saw an assemblage of broad shoulders in blue uniforms with
red patches standing outside the entrance to a church. The men
and women talked softly; anonymous black cars thrummed their motors
softly; pink and white flowers were piled softly into the crooks
of the concrete stairs. It was the funeral for a New York firefighter.
We went inside, impulsively, and then stayed, decisively. Gerard
Barbara, who was a fifty-three-year-old assistant chief of the
Fire Department of New York, had died risking his life for strangers.
It did not seem strange -- in fact, it seemed important -- to
take a seat amid some of the men and women who had loved him.
They wore blue uniforms, thick-soled black shoes, and red eyes.
Mayor Giuliani got up to speak, a gravelly voiced man in a gray
suit, who also had red eyes. It was Mayor Giuliani's fourth funeral
service of the day. "Your father," he said to Gerard Barbara's
son and daughter, "used his great gift of courage to serve others.
The name he gave you," he continued in the blunt tone of a commandment,
"is now a permanent part of the history of this city. And now,
I would like everyone here to stand and express their appreciation
for your father." We stood, cried, and clapped our hands until
our palms burned like our eyes, then we applauded some more. A
line of blue shoulders with red patches filed softly out of the
church and back onto Fifth Avenue, where, for at least a time,
FDNY had replaced DKNY as a signature of distinction. The following
weekend, we watched Cal Ripken Jr. play his last game of major
league baseball -- his 3,001st. Over a quarter of a century as
a professional athlete, Cal Ripken had become such an insignia
of sturdiness and class that the umpires stood in a line to shake
his hand. His opponents removed their fielding gloves to applaud
him. The signs blooming amid the green seats of Baltimore's Oriole
Park at Camden Yards said WE LOVE YOU CAL; THANKS, CAL; and CAL:
WE'LL NEVER FORGET YOU. But the word hero seemed conspicuously,
deliberately absent. Events had revised our national vocabulary.
At least for the moment -- it would be nice to think even for
longer -- it would be hard for Americans to look out at a mere
playing field and see the kind of heroism we had been reminded
to revere in men and women in blue uniforms with red patches.
But even by this wiser standard, Jackie Robinson was a hero. The
baseball diamond is not simply a playing field in his story. It
was the ground on which he was most open and vulnerable to taunts,
threats, and sharpened spikes. The first African American major
league ballplayer of the twentieth century routinely took his
rolling, pigeon-toed stride out into the infield or batter's box
on days and nights when local police had culled the stadium's
mail to show him an assortment of explicit and persuasive death
threats. It is tempting today, when Jackie Robinson is enshrined
in halls of fame, social studies curricula, classroom calendars,
songs, and statues, to suppose those threats were empty. But in
the late 1940s, beatings, bombings, lynchings, and shootings scarred
the landscape of the United States. They could be just as public
as -- well, as baseball games. Jackie Robinson gave his life for
something great; heroes do. He chose to bear the daily, bloody
trial of standing up to beanballs and cleats launched into his
shins, chest, and chin, and the race-baiting taunts raining down
from the stands, along with trash, tomatoes, rocks, watermelon
slices, and Sambo dolls. And then he performed with eloquent achievement
and superlative poise. Robinson allowed that hatred to strike
him as it would a lightning rod, channeling it down into the rugged
earth of himself. All that America saw for many years on the baseball
field was that iron as upright as a steeple, never bending. But
inside, the strain slowed his body, whitened his hair, thickened
his circulation, aggravated his diabetes, and rendered him slow
and blind. He was dead by the age of fifty-three -- a martyr (a
word as deliberately applied as hero) to trying to make America
live up to its creed. If Jackie Robinson had not been selected
to play the role he performed so well, no doubt other superb African
American athletes would have soon stepped onto the stage. The
skills of Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, Sam Jethroe, Ray Dandridge,
Willie Mays, Monte Irvin, Ernie Banks, and an aging Satchel Paige
were too great not to tempt major league clubs who were searching
for new sources of talent. World War II had moved many Americans
to examine their nation's own self-image as a bulwark of freedom.
Editorial writers and civic leaders were already clamoring for
America to integrate the armed forces, which had just won the
world's liberty, the schools, in which children learned about
justice, and sports, which purported to epitomize American values.
How could a young black man who might be called up to risk his
life backing up Pee Wee Reese in Guam, or Yogi Berra in Normandy,
not be allowed to earn a living alongside them on the same playing
field? America's modern civil rights revolution was already stirring
by the time Jackie Robinson arrived in major league baseball.
With Vernon Johns, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and
many more, it had already produced heroes. But Robinson's courage
and accomplishment put a familiar face on the kind of bravery
that it took for blacks to stand up for their rights. His heroism
was no greater than that of millions of others -- some achievements
simply cannot fit into box scores. But Robinson's renown gave
his heroism reach. It is possible to see, in Robinson's slow,
purposeful walk into the face of taunts and threats, some of the
same unbowed courage that Americans would later admire in the
civil rights marchers who faced down stinging water sprays, sharp
rocks, and snapping police dogs. When Robinson joined Dr. Martin
Luther King's nonviolent campaign in Birmingham in 1963, marchers
called out, "Show us, Jackie!" Jackie Robinson is so highly esteemed
for his Gandhian restraint against the onslaughts of bigotry that
it is easy to mistake him for a social activist. He certainly
became a militant campaigner for civil rights, an outspoken newspaper
columnist, and a combative Republican when that party was more
identified among blacks with Lincoln, La Guardia, Rockefeller,
and Lindsay, while the Democrats were dishonored by Strom Thurmond,
Orville Faubus, and George Wallace. But first and last, Jackie
Robinson was a hard-nosed, hard-assed, brass-balled, fire-breathing
athlete. The Jackie Robinson that his old Pasadena and UCLA teammates
remembered could be a petulant star. He mocked lesser competitors
and came to expect that his regal status on fields of play would
excuse him from the need to attend class or complete assignments;
and so it did. When, on a couple of occasions, Robinson's high
spirits and dark skin brought him into the grasp of the Pasadena
police, his case was considered with compassion by a local judge,
who was loath to deliver a penalty that would cause the accused
to miss next Saturday's game. Few other young black men in Southern
California could rally so effective a defense as Robinson's in
rushing yards, passes caught, and punts returned. Jackie Robinson
played less than a single season in the Negro Leagues, for the
fabled Kansas City Monarchs. Among a group of gifted professionals
who had to endure all-night rides on bone-clattering buses and
blocked doors at whites-only diners and motels, Jackie Robinson
was remembered more for griping about the league's showboating
and lack of training and discipline. He let his teammates know
that he considered the league beneath his talents (and maybe it
was -- for all of them). The Jackie Robinson who stayed on to
become a perennial major league star after he became a hero could
be prickly. Another way to say it is: Jackie Robinson could be
a prick. Even after he had become one of the most admired personalities
in America, Robinson could spring up and cry racism at umpires
with the impudence to call him out on a close slide or a strike.
He could crash into an opponent's knees on inconsequential plays,
just to let them know he could hurt them. He harangued opposing
players, and sometimes his own teammates, with graphic epithets
of the kind that would have once been considered legal provocation
for a duel (although the epithets were never racial and rarely
sexual -- Jackie Robinson was no racist, and he was even a bit
of a prude). But Jackie Robinson was no less a hero for being
a full-blooded human being. When he was summoned by history, he
risked his safety and sanity to give history the last full measure
of his strength, nerve, and perseverance. In the end, real heroes
give us stories we use to reinforce our own lives. Shortly before
nine o'clock on the morning of September 11, 2001, Jackie Robinson's
widow, Rachel Robinson, and Dorothy and Mark Reese, Pee Wee Reese's
widow and son, were in New York's City Hall, along with old Dodgers
Ralph Branca and Joe Black. They were there to choose among five
sculptor's models arrayed on a conference table, each depicting
that fabled moment from the 1947 season in which Pee Wee Reese
had crossed the field from his post at shortstop during a downpour
of racial taunts to slip his arm encouragingly around Jackie Robinson's
shoulders. Before the group could choose a model to be cast in
bronze and put up in Brooklyn, they heard a boom, then a commotion.
New York police officers rushed them onto a bus. The bus got blocked
and could not move through the tangle in the streets. New police
officers sprinted aboard and took the Dodger family members into
the bomb shelter of a nearby bank building, which is where they
were, huddled and held rapt before a television set, when the
first World Trade tower fell from the skyline. Dorothy Reese turned
to her son, who is a California filmmaker. "I'm just glad," she
said in the first gloom of the attack, "that Jackie and your father
aren't here to see this." Mark Reese gently, consolingly, disagreed.
"I think Pee Wee and Jackie are here," he told his mother. "And
we need their courage now." I can't think of a time when we don't.
The story of Jackie Robinson's arrival in the major leagues is
a heroic American legend. It is not in the same rank as Valley
Forge, Gettysburg, Lincoln's trials, Harriet Tubman's bravery,
Chief Joseph's valor, or the gallantry of the police and firefighters
who ran willingly into the firestorm of the World Trade Center.
But Jackie Robinson's story still testifies to the power of pure
personal courage to turn history and transform adversaries into
admirers. It is a story that endures all the nicks and nits of
revisionism because, when the last page is turned, it plays on
in our minds and lives: a bold man, dark-skinned and adorned in
Dodger blue, who displays the daring and audacity to stand unflinchingly
against taunts, strike back at beanballs, and steal home with
fifty thousand people watching and waiting for Jackie Robinson
to spring willingly into the path of a pitched ball and slide
into the ironbound clench of a catcher protecting home plate.
It is a story that still rouses us to shake off dust, blood, and
bruises and keep going. From Jackie Robinson and the Integration
of Baseball Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN: 047126153X
© 2002 by Scott Simon
Back
to Gerry's Home Page