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Constructing Banality: The Trivialization of the Jackie Robinson Legacy
- University Press of Mississippi
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3 C O N S T R U C T I N G B A N A L I T Y The Trivialization of the Jackie Robinson Legacy JOEL NATHAN ROSEN Did you see Jackie Robinson hit that ball? Did he hit it? Yeah, but that ain’t all . . . —The Count Basie Orchestra, 19491 INTRODUCTION In the days leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking the colorline in baseball in 1947, veteran Major League Baseball star (and conceivably borderline Hall-of-Fame candidate) Frank Thomas was asked if he ever pondered Jackie Robinson’s role in setting the stage for modern American sport. To the bewilderment (read: disgust) of many, Thomas responded almost stoically, “Not really. I’m really more about the New Age.”2 As difficult as it is to imagine, given the atmosphere surrounding the approach of this much-heralded milestone, and whatever Thomas meant when he referred to himself as a product of a so-called new age, his lack of reverence regarding the Jackie Robinson legacy also spoke to the fear of power brokers as well as the keepers of the nation ’s ethical canons who have freely been able to parcel the Robinson saga as part of a much larger repository for well-cherished moral principles. Indeed, the significance of Robinson’s breaking down vestiges of what were then conventional racial barriers, the timing of his struggle, and the level of personal sacrifice he displayed throughout his time in Major League Baseball, as well as in his many post-career undertakings, cannot be so easily dismissed, but whenever these sorts of clashes occur, whenever a younger generation seems determined to turn its collective back on its elders, the results often lead to the more mordant speculation that somehow youth just does not get it. Now whether Thomas’s lack of engagement with Robinson and his struggles can be extrapolated to encompass the modern athlete as a whole may be entirely beside the point, though there is every indication that this may indeed be the case. Still, what is the more pressing point is that for those who contend that sport should stand for JOEL NATHAN ROSEN 4 something more than mere athletic excellence, the Jackie Robinson story can most certainly be construed as the embodiment of such claims. In the case of a figure as celebrated and virtually sacrosanct as Robinson, Thomas’s seeming inability or perhaps even refusal to live and breathe his struggle can in some corners be interpreted as the epitome of heresy while lending further credence to a cynical and increasingly popular assumption that the modern athlete is neither a worthy recipient of public adulation nor appreciative enough to be afforded the trappings of celebrity. PERPETUATING AN ICON Without a doubt, for those of us of a certain age, Robinson has been (and remains) a poignant and heroic figure, one who has been presented in countless retellings of the narrative, some of which have been leftover from our childhood memories while others were brought to us in a much more erudite fashion. Nevertheless, and regardless of presentation, it has long been apparent that his was a struggle born of unfathomable hardship that certainly bears our rapt attention, which is what makes Robinson such an integral feature within the culture—an archetypical figure who in spite of the popular adoration remains cloaked in a most complex and complicated nature. What makes so many of the more recent and even modern-seeming accounts of the Robinson story both so compelling and astonishing at the same time, and to be quite candid here, is that so many of the more recent attempts to chronicle this decidedly central narrative have proven to be not merely banal but, rather, dispiriting attempts to couch the Robinson tale in a language filled with reprimand and reproach that leaves it reflecting less the human capacity to act and to act resolutely, as so readily demonstrated by Robinson himself, and more evocative of a view of human nature that is steeped in the sort of pathos indicative of a much more widespread antipathy consisting of, among other things, anxiety, paralysis, and fear that more often than not typifies our modern age. Thus, while the marking of the anniversary was timely and certainly warranted, a more careful reading of recent portrayals of Robinson and of his place within American cultural spaces leaves the impression that Robinson’s legacy, in spite of the...