Jackie Robinson: Civil rights icon, angry second baseman

Next weekend, Jackie Robinson's life gets the silver screen treatment when "42" is released,  and whenever I think of Jackie Robinson, this is the image that immediately comes to mind……..

There are no shortage of photos of Jackie Robinson. When you are a civil rights pioneer and one of the Most Important Americans Ever, there will be lots of photos. But with Jackie, so many of those photos lack a human element, something that shows Robinson as something other than the pedestal-dweller that we make of him today. Not that he doesn’t belong on a pedestal, but by nature people in a pedestal lose a part of their humanity, we don’t see them as one of us anymore, and that doesn’t do any good for us or the person on the pedestal.

So many of Robinson’s photos are stage managed by the Dodgers’ public relations machine, like so many player photos were back then, to the point where their humanity is scrubbed right out of them. The ridiculous posed shots of him pretending to field a ground ball……..

or “swinging” a bat with a motion that no major leaguer would ever use……

hanging out with Duke and Gil……

 

stealing home aginst Yogi in the World Series…….

  

 or speaking at the March on Washington…….

 

All these photos are great for establishing Robinson’s place in history, but they only contribute to turning him into an almost mythological figure, not a person, not a ballplayer. He has been given this heroic sheen that is only reinforced by time and that sets him apart from most anyone else.

That’s why I like this photo so much (a reminder of what it looks like)......

It’s taken at one of baseball's most famous moments, when Bobby Thomson's “shot heard ‘round the world” won the NL championship for the Giants in the 1951 playoff with the Dodgers (the “the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant….” game). For starters, the picture is just a great piece of journalism. You can tell what’s happening immediately, by the mob of Giants surrounding Thomson at home plate, and by poor Ralph Branca walking away from the mound, his shoulders slumped, already groaning under the weight of history. Giants win, Dodgers lose.

And then there’s Jackie Robinson, wearing a number you rarely see anymore (and won’t for much longer because Mariano Rivera can’t pitch forever) in a position we’ve rarely seen him—a human being, overshadowed by an historic moment, one in which he played no significant role.

He’s not the man who broke color line in this photo, not a civil rights icon, not one of the Greatest Americans Who Ever Lived. He’s off his pedestal here, the sheen is gone. He’s just a ballplayer who is confused, stunned, pissed off. He seems to be willfully ignoring Branca, angry with that son of a bitch who just gave up the winning home run. He is not thinking in this picture that he is the man who broke the color barrier, or that he is a civil rights pioneer, or that he carries the hopes and dreams of millions of African-Americans. What he’s thinking in this photo is that the Dodgers will not play in the World Series because they just lost the game, a game it should have won, and lost in the most painful way possible.

And that makes him immediately relatable, one of the few things that most of us will ever have in common with Jackie Robinson. We will never know what it’s like to be a myth or be placed on a pedestal or see our names on the list of Greatest Americans Ever. We will never know what it’s like to play major league baseball. But we all know what it’s like to stand there with our hands on our hips, wondering “how the hell did that just happen?”