Book Review – Opening Day – The Story of the First Season of Jackie Robinson by Jonathan Eig

In our daily lives, we often take the familiar for granted and confuse what we see around us with the natural order of things. In doing so, we miss not only many opportunities to improve the world; we also miss the opportunity to bring perspective to the ebb and flow of events, and to understand how the world is constantly changing around us.

Change itself is rarely easy and it is not always for the better. But sometimes, the painful process of change can reveal what is noble in the human soul. On Inauguration day, author Jonathan Eig tells the story of the year Jackie Robinson changed the face of Major League Baseball and opened doors of opportunity for countless men and women across the country whose only disability was the hatred and bigotry that arose because of to a difference. in the pigmentation of your skin. It is a story that everyone knows, but no one really understands. And the book is an exquisite and inspiring exposition of how mere mortals can overcome adversity with courage and determination.

The year 1947 found American in a different country than today. Segregation laws, in effect throughout the South, were at odds with the ideals of American democracy, and many returning veterans – Americans who had answered the call of duty to protect their country and all that it stood for – found themselves relegated. back doors, segregated slums and separate water sources, all to please the sensibilities of the grandchildren of slave owners, whose views on racial purity were not terribly different from those operating the camps and kilns liberated in 1945, which they had shocked and horrified the world.

One of those veterans who returned was a well-built and well-built college graduate named Jack Roosevelt Robinson. An athletic standout at UCLA, he excelled in soccer and basketball, and in a different era he would have already been a national sensation with his impressive skills and fierce competitive instincts. But this was before the era of big TV contracts and padded athletic salaries: Athletes weren’t yet the media darlings, just being seen as hired helpers. And mainstream American sports didn’t reflect the entire color spectrum. Like American society itself, sports were segregated by race, and baseball, a sport whose culture in postwar America was decidedly Southern, seemed an unlikely place to begin the integration process. And at first glance, Robinson seemed like an unlikely candidate for the job of racial innovator: Baseball wasn’t even his best sport.

But Brooklyn was itself something of a melting pot: immigrants of all stripes made it an amalgam of all things American, and the Brooklyn Dodgers, a collection of misfits and weirdos who looked at once distinctly New Yorkers, but typically American. had a visionary owner who was seized with the idea that doing what he knew to be “the right thing to do” would help his team harvest an untapped pool of talent that was being unfairly denied a chance to shine. Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn owner determined to break the color barrier, secretly explored the old black league for the best players he could find, convinced the time was right to join the big leagues and that all the players they needed were the opportunity to show what they could do. All Rickey needed was the right player.

As the author shows, Jackie Robinson was not the calm, laid-back athlete of the myth we see in history books. Instead, he was an angry man, embittered by the racial injustice around him and fiercely determined to prove his worth as a man and an athlete. It was also, in the end, the perfect choice for Rickey’s daring experiment. Proud and defiant, Robinson was strong enough to withstand the pressures that inevitably followed the attempt to break the color barrier. As a captain in the army, he had faced a court martial rather than back down when a white soldier rudely ordered him to get into the back of a bus. But when, still unsure of Rickey’s intentions, Robinson asked if the Brooklyn owner was looking for someone who wouldn’t defend himself, Rickey replied that what he needed was “with the courage not to.” Although he was initially unsure of the support he would receive from the front office, once Robinson saw how far Brooklyn management would go to stifle dissent from Southerners on the team over his presence, and that even a fall earlier in the season it did not happen. I don’t provide an excuse to have him on the bench for the rest of the season – he began to relax enough to play his own style of baseball. It was a fierce and combative style, because although he had promised Branch Rickey that he would do nothing to give fans and hate mongers something to attack, he found that he could unleash his passions and resentments in the best possible way: by proving himself. same in the field.

And in the end, Jackie Robinson electrified crowds across the country. His exploits in the field did more to open our eyes to the wealth of talent that our old attitudes and prejudices were holding back than any number of lectures on human rights and the brotherhood of man. And as the season progressed, all fair-minded men and women, of all races, were captivated by the human drama unfolding before their eyes: a man, with nothing but his dignity and talent, resisting hatred. and intolerance, and leading his team to a championship through his bravery on and off the field.

Closely written and woven around the personalities of the participants, Inauguration day it reads more like a novel than a biography. Robinson himself is shown not as the holy figure often depicted in baseball legend, but with all his pride and anger intact. In the end, the story he tells laid the foundation for the civil rights movement that followed two decades later. It makes the saga richer, more humane, and by acknowledging the struggle between the needs of the moment and Robinson’s all-too-human shortcomings, it serves to reveal just how heroic a figure was. It shows that courage often consists of more than taking a bold stand on principle: sometimes the bravest among us are those who refuse to give in to our emotions and resist the instinct to lash out at those who mock us. . It is a lesson that would contribute to a better and nobler world if more of us could follow the example of the hero of the story; the world we see today shows how far we fall from their example.