NUMBER ONE: Robinson
after hitting his first home run for the Brooklyn Dodgers
April 15, 1947
Breaking the Color Line
By Richard Corliss
The game wasn't a sellout. It lured 25,623 fans, more than half of them
black, to the 32,000-seat Ebbets Field. What those present saw was a
piece of history in nine innings: a black man played in a major league
game for the first time. Of course, Jackie Robinson didn't break the
color line in baseball all by himself. He needed Branch Rickey to do it.
The president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers was the
one with the will and the power to upend the idiotic myopia of the
sport's other sachems. (Were they afraid that blacks couldn't play
baseball or afraid that they could play it too well?) Rickey had been
searching for an athlete whose poise matched his skills, who could
swallow the racist insults sure to be directed at him by players and
fans—someone, Rickey told Robinson at their first meeting, "with
guts enough not to fight back."
Robinson was the man. The first
four-sport star at UCLA, an Army veteran, a budding Negro League phenom,
Robinson neither smoke nor drank and possessed a heroic reserve off the
field to complement his fiery resolve on it. As he stepped to the plate
in a Dodgers' uniform, he was a mature 28 years old that April day. (By
contrast, Derek Jeter was playing in his eighth major league season when
he reached that age last June.) But in a magnificent 10-year Hall of
Fame career Robinson made up for lost time—his and that of the
great Negro League ballplayers who never got the chance to shine in the
Bigs. When Robinson stepped onto the field, it was the day baseball
finally earned the right to be called the national pastime.
TIME Cover
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