ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 13, 1997 TAG: 9704140145
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: JACK BOGACZYK
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK
Jackie Robinson was buried in Brooklyn in 1972. There are many who figured - and wished - the same thing figuratively would have happened in the same borough 25 years earlier.
This nation already had a Great Emancipator. Robinson was the grandson of slaves, an all-conference athlete at UCLA, an acquitted survivor of a Texas court-martial after he refused to ride in the back of a bus in the still-segregated Army.
Jack Roosevelt Robinson is being remembered this season, and particularly this week, as the first black to play major-league baseball, 50 years ago. And he played it well for the Dodgers, if often out of position. To call Robinson the first black ballpayer in the bigs is to diminish his legacy, however.
He really was the second Brooklyn bridge. So, here's to you, Mr.Robinson.
He changed the game forever, and not just because he was the first - and one of the last - men to daringly steal home plate so regularly. He changed a nation, too. He came along before Rosa Parks on a bus, or before anyone sat at a Greensboro lunch counter. He preceded Brown vs. Board of Education. He was long retired from the game before there was a Civil Rights Act.
It has been written that the two most important blacks in American history were Jackie Robinson and Dr.Martin Luther King. No disrespect to the late reverend, but Robinson went places Dr.King perhaps could not have gone had not an infielder gone first.
A bespectacled chemist named Branch Rickey called Robinson's integration of the game ``the Great Experiment,'' and it worked because Robinson - who could be a Bunsen burner of a man - made it work. Sometimes he turned the other cheek. Sometimes he went in spikes high. More often than not, he was an artful Dodger.
You can argue forever who had the greatest season in baseball history. My vote goes to Robinson, in 1947. Robinson's salary that year was the minimum for a rookie, $5,500. Considering what he endured, isn't he the most underpaid player in history?
It worked because it was part of a game. Baseball was the nation's foremost athletic stage. Robinson's realization of what was a dashed dream for so many of his race still reverberates for many black young men to whom Jackie may be little more than a name in history.
In what occupation do many feel they have the best opportunity to be treated equally with whites? It's in sports. The coincidence is that it's football and basketball where it happens, not Robinson's pro sport. It can be a flawed and often misguided notion, but it is Robinson who opened this door for his race when opportunity knocked.
In his first game with the Dodgers' Class AAA Montreal farm team in 1946, Robinson went 4-for-5 with a homer and scored four runs. He bunted for two hits and stole two bases. He had Jersey City pitchers so unwound, he also was balked home twice in a 14-1 victory.
When Robinson was on the field, as part of an already great Brooklyn team, it was as if he were playing at a different speed. And he was. He changed the game, and while doing so, he changed a nation. Maybe blacks weren't yet sitting at the next restaurant table from whites, but the two races suddenly could be found shoulder-to-shoulder at many ballparks.
Robinson transcended not a sport but a society, a nation. He wasn't even the best player in the Negro Leagues, but he changed the National League, and America.
Statistics and honors do not tell Jackie's story. His epitaph does.
``A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives,'' his tombstone inscription reads.
Robinson didn't just say that. He endured it. He lived it. And only after he did, could we say baseball truly was the national pastime.
LENGTH: Medium: 70 linesby CNB