The Golden Game by Kevin Nelson

Author:Kevin Nelson [Nelson, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO003030 Sports & Recreation / Baseball / History
ISBN: 9780803284234
Publisher: Bison Books
Published: 2015-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

Ted Williams’s boyhood years ended with a trip to a Major League training camp to take the next step in his baseball career. Joe DiMaggio’s early California years ended much the same way. But baseball’s unwritten rule prevented Jackie Robinson from playing in either the Major Leagues or the Pacific Coast League.

It was Robinson, of course, who broke the color line in organized baseball when he signed with the Brooklyn organization in 1945. Taking the field for the Dodgers two years later, he became the first black man in the modern era to play in a Major League game. Baseball then was the biggest professional sport in America. New York City, where the game was born, was the nation’s media capital. What happened there mattered. That a black man, the grandson of slaves, was playing with and against whites in America’s national game—few could miss the significance of this event. Some historians argue that Robinson’s breakthrough marked the beginning of the civil rights movement; after him came other breakthroughs in law, politics, and society. Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people of the twentieth century.

Robinson’s story, like DiMaggio’s and Williams’s, is too big for any one city or state to claim. He was born in the South, trained in the Armed Forces in the Southwest, played a year of Negro League ball in the Midwest, and his big league home was Brooklyn. But he grew up and came to manhood in California, and these years are essential to his story.

Dodgers president and general manager Branch Rickey chose Robinson to carry the burden and honor of being the first black Major Leaguer for a number of reasons. The obvious one was his talent. Another was the fact that Robinson had gone to school his entire life with whites; he had played on integrated sports teams both in school and after school. He was also educated—college educated. Additionally, he was a churchgoing man of principle and earnest purpose who was devoted to one woman. All of these facts, which are intertwined with his upbringing, helped form his character, which was probably the fundamental reason for Rickey’s choice and certainly why Jackie succeeded in his ordeal.

After leaving on that midnight train from Georgia, Mallie Robinson and her five children arrived in Los Angeles in June 1920. In a letter to her relatives back home, she described it as “the most beautiful sight of my life.” The train took them beyond Los Angeles to nearby Pasadena, where her half brother, Burton Thomas, lived. Mallie found an apartment near the railroad station and, the day after she arrived, went looking for work. A white family in town hired her as a maid for eight dollars a week. After they moved away she hired on with another white family, the Dodges, for whom she worked for the next twenty years.

Situated at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, Pasadena was a wealthy, largely white residential community originally settled in the 1870s by midwesterners.

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