Jackie Robinson: Fascinating Hero

Baby boomers' eternal affections for the game of baseball, coupled with that generation's steadfast refusal to quit reading, has assured a healthy literary market for baseball history. In recent years, there has been a trove of new biographies of old players, including Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Roberto Clemente and Lou Gehrig.

In his superb rendition of Gehrig—"Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig"—Jonathan Eig proved particularly adept at separating the man from the myth. He peeled away the Gary Cooper mask from the Yankee hero and revealed a far more complex man than the steadfast stoic of legend. Now, in his second at bat, Eig has taken on the even more daunting challenge of an even more mythic legend: Jackie Robinson.

Robinson has already been the subject of dozens of biographies, including ones by his wife and daughter, as well as an integral part of numerous social histories. Moreover, in the decade since baseball officially retired Jackie's number, 42, Robinson has probably been studied more than any athlete in history. While all that attention has certainly shed light on the man, it has also shored up the considerable mythology that surrounds him and that historic 1947 season, when Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color line.

Eig's "Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season" (Simon & Schuster, $26.00) coincides with the 60th anniversary of that '47 season. And in his introduction, Eig appears acutely sensitive to his story's important place in the American fabric. He summons up names like Fredrick Douglass, George Washington Carver, even Moses. And he finds parallels, or at least gives credence to those who do, between Dodgers owner Branch Rickey's summons of Robinson to Brooklyn and some of this nation's bellwether moments: President Jefferson's instructions to Merriwether Lewis, or General Eisenhower's exhortation to his D-Day troops.

But once past the prologue, Eig's well-written narrative dwells in fact more than portent. While Robinson's story will never lack for dramatics—not when the rookie helped lead the Dodgers all the way to the seventh game of the World Series against the cross-town Yankees—Eig reveals that some of the richest components of the familiar fable apparently never happened. While Jackie encountered hostility from disgruntled teammates, opponents and fans, Eig sees no evidence that it approached the levels previously suggested. Teammates did not genuinely threaten to quit, opponents never actually organized a boycott. In fact, when the Dodgers' famously profane manager Leo Durocher heard a spring-training rumor of protest, he suggested players take any petition and "wipe your ass with it."

If some of the worst reactions to Robinson never happened, neither did some of the best: generations of young fans have been moved by an apparently apocryphal tale of how Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese, a Kentuckian, walked across the field and put an arm around Robinson to quiet racist hecklers. Robinson's season turns out to be less about abuse and threats, more about loneliness and the despair of isolation. In the season's early going, Eig describes him as "a clenched fist—frozen, cramped, joyless." Even as many fans—the Dodgers drew 1.8 million to tiny Ebbets Field and even more, 1.9 million, on the road—flocked to ballparks to embrace Robinson as part of a larger crusade, Robinson remained very much a man apart. Eventually his play earned Robinson the respect, if not always the affection, of his teammates.