{"id":33,"date":"2013-05-12T19:25:53","date_gmt":"2013-05-13T00:25:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/staging\/1734\/?p=33"},"modified":"2013-05-12T19:31:21","modified_gmt":"2013-05-13T00:31:21","slug":"42-baseball-in-transition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/42-baseball-in-transition\/","title":{"rendered":"42: Baseball in Transition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Until this past year, I had served for several years in a row as a biography judge for the Society of Midland Authors\u2019 annual book awards. As a result, a few years ago, I read Judith Testa\u2019s<\/a> Sal Maglie: Baseball’s Demon Barber<\/a><\/em> (Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), which won that award. At the time, I commented to a friend that a good sports biography can serve as a window into an era. One learns about how a player grew up, how the sport groomed its stars, and about the ethos of the cities they played for. Some of the background information such books can supply may be harder to convey in movies, but I believe 42 <\/em>has come as close as any sports movie to detailing the nuances of significant change in an era when baseball changed forever for the better, abandoning a racist whites-only roster of days past and introducing the first black player in Major League Baseball, Jackie Robinson. Much has been written about Robinson over the years, but a movie can reach people in very different ways.<\/p>\n

Among those different ways are the facial expressions\u2014the hateful stares, the condescending sneers–of the actors portraying the skeptics and race-baiters who inhabited baseball at the time, including umpires, managers, and fellow ballplayers, as well as the images of those who were more welcoming and open-minded. Among the latter was Pee Wee Reese, the Dodger shortstop, who hailed from Kentucky. At a game in Cincinnati, Reese embraces Robinson as a way of \u201ctelling my relatives who I am.\u201d<\/p>\n

At an earlier point, however, after Robinson, still a minor league player for the Montreal Royals in the Brooklyn Dodgers farm system, and undergoing spring training in Florida, has been threatened by local roughnecks, one man approaches him on the sidewalk. Robinson is with his wife, who is pushing their first baby in a stroller.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to say something to you,\u201d the man says, and we all get ready for the predictable.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is that?\u201d Robinson asks, bracing himself for yet another racial slur or barely veiled threat.<\/p>\n

The man says that he is not alone in pulling for Robinson, that there are others, and he and his friends believe that, \u201cif a man\u2019s got the goods,\u201d he ought to get a fair shake. Visibly relieved, Robinson thanks someone who had seemed menacing less than a minute before. Life was like that for Robinson. He never knew entirely what to expect. Pitchers from other teams aimed for his head; on one occasion, he was beaned. Philadelphia manager Ben Chapman<\/a> (played by Alan Tudyk) shouted slur after slur from the sidelines until the Phillies\u2019 management insisted that he apologize publicly to spare his team further embarrassment in the press. Challenged by Robinson teammate Pee Wee Reese in a heated argument, Chapman yells as Reese retreats to the dugout, \u201cHow does it feel to be a nigger\u2019s nigger?\u201d Reese replies across the field, \u201cI don\u2019t know. How does it feel to be a redneck piece of shit?\u201d Yet, after the game, as the press is interviewing him, Chapman insists it is no different and no more hurtful than the ethnic slurs he has hurled in the past at Hank Greenberg (Jewish) and Joe DiMaggio (Italian). Yep, all in good, clean fun.<\/p>\n

So much fun that Robinson ducks into the hallway behind the dugout and nearly retches, knowing that he cannot yell back or fight back, lest he trigger the perception that he cannot handle it. Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, played marvelously by Harrison Ford, comes back to support him, man to man. Robinson, often baffled (though grateful) as to why Rickey has brought him into this maelstrom, protests, \u201cYou don\u2019t know what it\u2019s like.\u201d Rickey answers honestly: \u201cYou\u2019re right, I don\u2019t,\u201d before offering further encouragement and finally asking, as the inning is ending, \u201cWho\u2019s going to play first?\u201d Robinson, a consummate professional, puts on his glove and resumes the game.<\/p>\n

Why did Rickey break the ice and take the chance? Already an older man by 1946, when he made the decision and chose Robinson as the pioneer, not well supported even by his own team staff, Rickey notes wryly in an early scene that \u201cRobinson is a Methodist. I\u2019m a Methodist. God is a Methodist.\u201d\u00a0 My wife, who grew up Methodist in Nebraska, whose grandfather was a Methodist preacher, loved that line. It not only humanized the relationship between the two men but revealed an underlying strain of faith that helped guide both toward the moral fortitude it took to ride out the 1947 season in which the Dodgers introduced Robinson to the majors\u2014a season in which he challenged numerous stereotypes and virtually carried the team on his back, at times, into the World Series<\/a> despite numerous obstacles. It is not as if Robinson is superhuman, though that word gets used in the movie at times. He is a gentleman, unlike his adversaries, who is able to rein in his temper for a greater purpose.<\/p>\n

42<\/em>, in the end, is only incidentally a movie about baseball. It is much more a movie about courage and human dignity, and the challenges we all may face when the ugly side of human behavior threatens to undermine the glory of human achievement. I highly recommend it.<\/p>\n

Jim Schwab<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Until this past year, I had served for several years in a row as a biography judge for the Society of Midland Authors\u2019 annual book awards. As a result, a few years ago, I read Judith Testa\u2019s Sal Maglie: Baseball’s Demon Barber (Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), which won that award. At the time, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions\/35"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}