The Colorado-based president of baseball’s highly successful Pacific Coast League delivered a birthday tribute to baseball legend Jackie Robinson on Tuesday — focusing on the man who gave Robinson a chance.
Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey’s signing of Robinson not only began the breaking of baseball’s color line but pitted Rickey against 100 years of legally enforced segregation, said Branch Rickey III, his grandson, in a Denver Forum luncheon speech to 60 members and guests downtown.
“So-called leaders of sport” fought his grandfather’s decision, and sportswriters ridiculed him as a teetotaling do-gooder, Rickey said.
On the eve of Robinson’s 1947 major league debut, the Dodgers’ president received a call from radio journalist Lowell Thomas in Colorado: “I’m warning you, Branch, tomorrow, all hell will break loose,’ ” Rickey said his grandfather was told.
The elder Rickey replied: “Tomorrow, all heaven will break loose.”
He had aimed at desegregating baseball for years, convinced that, a century after the Civil War, “it was unthinkable” for millions of African-Americans to be barred from major league sports, Branch Rickey III said.
In 1947, African-American fans in St. Louis couldn’t buy seats in the stadium, and President Truman had yet to desegregate the military.
When the elder Rickey approached Robinson, the athlete had only a few hours to decide whether to accept risks to his safety and Rickey’s challenge “not to fight back” against taunts. Shattering a nation’s myths via baseball required “superhuman self-restraint,” Branch Rickey III said, recalling Robinson’s assertion: “A life is not important, except in the impact it has on other lives.”
On Thursday, Robinson — who died of a heart attack at 53 in 1972 — would have been 89.
The man who signed him also exemplified true leadership rooted in strong virtues and unyielding conviction, a leadership that may be far more influential over time than “leadership” celebrated in popular culture and academia, Rickey said.
True leaders with beliefs “so right, they can’t be wrong” pass on convictions “day-in, day-out,” without fanfare, to children who are watching adults, Rickey said.
Decades later, he said, sons, daughters and grandchildren “will make fateful decisions” that leaders won’t ever know.
