E-mail a friendJonathan Eig
original airdate April 13, 2007
An award-winning journalist and best-selling author, Jonathan Eig is senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal. His book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, won the Casey Award for best baseball book of '05 and, in his latest, Opening Day, he presents a portrait of baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson. Now based in Chicago, Eig has previously worked as a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Dallas Morning News. He also was executive editor for Chicago magazine.
Jonathan Eig
Tavis: Jonathan Eig is a senior special writer for the "Wall Street Journal" whose previous book on the life of Lou Gehrig was a "New York Times" bestseller. His latest is a look at Jackie Robinson's historic first season in baseball sixty years ago this spring. The book is called "Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season". Jonathan, nice to have you on the program.
Jonathan Eig: Nice to be here.
Tavis: I was about to ask and I know the answer already. So much has been written about Jackie Robinson and, God knows, he deserves it, Jackie Roosevelt Robinson. I was going to ask how your book is different, but the first would have to be that it focuses exclusively on that first season.
Eig: That's right. Nobody had ever looked at the first season and, to me, the whole story of Jackie Robinson can be crystallized in that season because, before, you've got an all-white ballgame. Afterward, it's a whole new ballgame not just for baseball, but for America. Jackie shows people the way and it happens in one year. He breaks through.
Tavis: Tell me more about that first year in terms of what makes it, you think, the critical year of his entire career to actually look at.
Eig: Well, it's all on the line. He comes in and baseball's got four hundred players and they're all white. His team is very southern in character. Most of baseball is very southern in character. He's got maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe a couple of months to prove that he belongs, to prove that this is a winning formula, that integration is not only the right thing to do, but that it makes for a winning ball club. If he fails, who knows what happens? Maybe it's years before we integrate baseball after that.
Tavis: How did those teammates get along with Jackie in that first season?
Eig: In the beginning, they really ignored him. They left him alone. In the beginning, they didn't want to play with him at all. In spring training, there was a big petition, or at least an oral movement afoot among the players, saying that they were not going to play, they were going to sit out the season or demand a trade.
Finally, the management said, "We're not going to have any of that. You're either playing you or we're trading you." They were willing to at least try. But even then, there were attempts during the course of the season by opponents to drive Jackie from the game. I think they were all hoping that he would go away and that this experiment would end.
Tavis: How do you go about going all the way back to the first season and getting inside of his head?
Eig: I spent a lot of time with his wife, Rachel Robinson, who is a phenomenal source and has a great memory and really spent a lot of time with me, taking me into their apartment, taking me through their lives, what it was like to be newlyweds, twenty-eight years old, in his case, twenty-four in her case, with a tiny baby in this little apartment, ten by twelve, not even a whole apartment, but a room, and feeling all that pressure, feeling like at any moment it could be over and they could be shipped back home to California.
Tavis: What was he exposed to in that first season? How bad was the first season for him?
Eig: The attacks were brutal. You had other teams coming in to Brooklyn, his home field, and saying, "We're going to ride this guy. We're going to ride him until he begs for mercy." What's more, they were trying to divide him from his teammates. They were not only insulting Jackie, but they were insulting his teammates for playing with Jackie. They were saying that he was going to give you diseases, he's going to sleep with your wives and with your mothers.
So they're trying to drive a wedge between Jackie and all the other guys on the Dodgers in hopes that, one way or another, they were going to make it so miserable for him that he'll run home crying and he doesn't ever give in to it.
Tavis: There are some managers who instructed their team to taunt him on the field?
Eig: Absolutely. It was the policy of the team. There were other teams where they were discussing whether to play at all, whether they would just sit out, boycott the games and shut down the entire league. So every imaginable pressure was coming at him and he really was able to focus by saying, "I'm going to stick to baseball and I'm going to take out my rage on them in the way I play."
Tavis: The fortitude. What do we know about where that comes from? Because Branch Rickey, obviously, picked the right guy, but with all due respect to Mr. Rickey, somebody, Jackie's mom or daddy or somebody, put something in him, those Black parents that allowed him to endure what he endured. What do we learn in the book about Jackie's fortitude?
Eig: Jackie's mother was the source of a lot of that strength. She was a working woman, you know, a maid working in white families and she wanted better for her children. She said, "You can accomplish anything." He happened to grow up in Pasadena where the racial lines were not as strict as they might have been in the south, so he was exposed to integration. He was given a chance to compete against whites and he knew that he could compete with anybody in the world and he just had to have the chance to prove it.
Tavis: Sports at their best can be used as a tool for social change. At least, they could back in the day. Talk to me about that slice of the story, about how the sport of baseball, you know, with the embrace of Jackie Robinson over time, becomes baseball, becomes a tool for social change.
Eig: That's right. We're talking 1947. It's well before the civil rights movement really kicks into gear. It's well before Rosa Park, Brown vs. Board of Education. The war has just ended and people are wondering what democracy means. Black soldiers have come back and they've risked their lives, they've died, and they're saying, "What did I fight for if they're going to treat me like second-class citizens back here?"
Everybody is looking to Jackie Robinson because baseball is this cultural institution that just matters so much to people in this country. Baseball is what makes them feel like Americans and suddenly baseball is integrating and not because a court has ordered them to do it. It's integrating because somebody believes that it actually makes the game better and maybe it makes the whole country better.
Tavis: Tell me the response inside of Black America to what Jackie was able to do in that first season.
Eig: Oh, it was jubilation. Special train runs were being established from all over the country to bring people wherever Jackie was playing. St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Chicago. People would come from all around the country to see them play and white fans were shocked because suddenly they're surrounded by tens of thousands of Black people. They've never been surrounded in this way before and it's an awakening.
But the Black community is ecstatic. They know that this is the most exciting thing they've seen and they know that it's an opportunity for all of them. White factory owners are watching this and thinking, "Maybe I should integrate." And Black people are saying, "Well, if he can do it, I can do it." It just changes everybody's thinking.
Tavis: What do we know about - I don't know this to be the case, but I'm asking. Is there any evidence to suggest that when Jackie started to, because of his success, bring in these Black faces into the stands, were owners happy with that because they saw it as a source of additional revenue or did that itself cause problems with white folk having to sit next to or certainly -I don't know where they were sitting - but all these Black faces in the stadium?
Eig: It was a source of concern for a lot of white owners. They were worried, first of all, that it would drive white fans away and, second of all, that it would destroy the Negro Leagues because the Negro Leagues provided a lot of revenue because they would rent their ball parks to these Negro League teams when the big league team wasn't playing. So there was some concern that it could end up, you know, shooting them in the foot over the long haul. It did kill off the Negro Leagues, which is one of the unfortunate side effects of Jackie's success.
Tavis: Starting with opening day in that first season for Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball, what would you say then is the enduring lesson of his legacy in life?
Eig: You know, I think today the legacy, the lesson, is that integration diversity makes a team better. You bring in something new. You bring in new ideas. You bring in a player who plays the game differently and this is true in all of our lives. You open yourself to something new and good things happen.
Tavis: The new book by Jonathan Eig is "Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season". Jonathan, nice to have you on the program and thanks for the book.
Eig: Thank you.
Back to April 13, 2007