The Jackie Robinson biopic that could never be made; and the deep-cut Office quote that explains Doug Ford
The story one shares about Jackie Robinson every April 15 should include the factors in him dying at age 53, since we now know much more about how structural racism exacerbates health disparities.
You do you with having a first reference point for Jackie Robinson. As so often happens for me, mine flows from a book I had at that impressionable age, 12 or 13, when one is picking a side in life. It was a coffee table book with a title like Greatest Athletes of the 20th Century.
The opening paragraphs of Robinson’s chapter showed the Black political and sports icon at the end — his last public appearance in October 1972. Robinson, in poor health and nearly blind due to diabetes, had rallied to speak at a pregame ceremony and throw out a ceremonial first ball before a World Series game in Cincinnati. Afterward, a young fan asked him to sign a baseball.
“I don’t know, son… I can hardly see the ball,” Robinson was said to have murmured.
He signed, though. Just over a week later, he was gone at age 53 “from a heart attack, with underlying diabetes and associated complications.”
That chapter in that book, if memory serves, or selectively edits, did not mention Robinson’s parting remarks on the field. He initially demurred from making the appearance in protest of major-league baseball’s failure, to that point, to hire a Black manager. His family also bristled at the possibility of sharing the spotlight on the field with Richard Nixon shortly before the ’72 United States presidential election, since that association had burned them four years earlier when Nixon tapped into the Southern Strategy to win the presidency. Ultimately, the formalities went ahead, without Nixon.
And Robinson left a parting shot at MLB:
“I’m extremely pleased and proud to be here this afternoon, but I’m going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look over at that third-base coaching line one day and see a Black face managing in baseball. Thank you very much.”
Hindsight always makes everything clearer. It is understandable why a coffee table book a mum would buy for her sports-nut, old-soul son would elide a legend chiding his sport over its structural racism, but show his physical decline. The sadness was obvious. The people who got to follow his career in real time hardly needed fancy stats to know Robinson was a top-3 position player in the first decade of the integration era. It might not be too well known that Mike Schmidt and Joe Morgan are the only infielders since Robinson who exceeded him in Wins Above Replacement earned from age 28 through 37, which were Robinson’s start and end dates with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
There is a line, sometimes, with how much of the various -isms faced by sportspeople from marginalized groups can be presented in a narrative. The acceptable range can often border on “inspiration porn,” to borrow the term used by the late disability rights advocate Stella Young that I was introduced to while watching the mordant comedy series Lowdermilk.
In other words, it is OK to show the indignities that Jackie Robinson or another racial and/or gendered cultural pioneer stiff-upper-lipped through or suffered with a smile before the power structure grew the hell up and moved its hard line. But, at least until recently, there was often a no-look pass with how structural racism can age people.
Feeling like something was being kept from me, that depiction of Robinson at his end got burned into a young, mediocre-white-guy mind.1 The contrast was clear as glass: this powerful athlete who, by his early 50s, was beaten down by being a high-achieving and proud Black man. That was a stage in the life of Jackie Robinson that seemed much more fascinating to a novelistic thinker. He had so many health issues. He had buried a son who was killed in a car crash at age 24. His sport accepted African-American athleticism to build its popularity but did not see Blackness as part of its institutional knowledge. That contributed to his energy returning to the earth far, far too soon.
A film about Robinson in the late winter of life would be Oscar bait. It would also ask some pointed questions about structural racism in sports. It would also present health disparities. Dramatized accounts often develop more collective empathy about the cost of an inequality than reams of learned, tightly focused studies.
There are too many reasons why Chuck D of Public Enemy, who is 61 years old, refers to an African-American man reaching age 50 as “crossing the 50-yard line.” It qualifies as an accomplishment. Anecdotes are a proxy for data at most, but there are so many examples of accomplished, mostly Black men who died young.
Please consider the lived experience of one-time most valuable player Dave Parker, who is alive. In 1979, Parker signed the first baseball contract with an average annual value over US$1 million. As he wrote in his new autobiography, he began “receiv(ing) racially charged letters and threats of the ugliest kind.” The hate and the pain of playing on damaged knees in the artificial-turf era led to Parker using cocaine to self-medicate.
“People get vulnerable even if they hardly ever show it. You carry the hate like it’s some bulging tumor on your back ... and when a gorgeous woman sits next to you on a flight and asks, ‘Have you ever been to the mile-high club?’ and you see the wild, intense look in her eye, you indulge that shit. Consequences? Fuck it. You get personally reckless.
“ … My knees were killing me, to the point where I was starting to walk funny. I received racially charged letters and threats of the ugliest kind. Did I start checking out more and more to drown out the pain? What do you think? (Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood, University of Nebraska Press, 2021)
Or how about Minnesota Twins star Kirby Puckett, who died of a stroke at age 45 in 2006, 10 years after glaucoma forced him into early retirement? Puckett “was suffering from at least five of the six major causes” of stroke. Without being judgy, and while emphasizing a need for self-care, one can only wonder why Puckett fell into recklessness.
In Canada, 1960s world record-setting sprinter Harry Jerome should be seen as a tragic hero. He is remembered with a statue in Stanley Park in his hometown of Vancouver. In his day, though, Jerome was pilloried by opinion shapers for “stat(ing) that the Canadian team should better support its athletes, including (having) qualified medical staff at competitions,” after a blown hamstring muscle took him out of medal contention at the 1960 Olympics. Somehow, the sprinter who was labelled as an ingrate and a quitter when he was 19 — a little younger than Andre De Grasse was when he triple-medalled in 2016 — would end up winning an Olympic medal four years later in Tokyo even though the long-term effects of a ruptured quadriceps left him with muscle asymmetry in his thighs.2
Jerome, who was an activist who took up many fights in Canada, including one with “a sports establishment content to emulate Britain’s upper-class amateur tradition,” died of a brain lesion when he was only 42. There is another guy who did not get to the 50-yard line.
Jackie Robinson barely got there. As Tamra Burns Loeb, Alicia Morehead-Gee and Derek Novacek recently wrote for The Conversation, Robinson throughout his early life and early adulthood faced the types of “repeated stressful episodes can lead to cardiovascular disease by increasing what is called allostatic load. When a person repeatedly experiences the stress of racism, high levels of the stress hormone cortisol are released in the body. Elevated cortisol can lead to high levels of blood sugar, as seen in diabetes, and high blood pressure. Robinson had both diabetes and high blood pressure after years of enduring what was likely a high allostatic load.”
While not knowing anything about allostatic load, I always had a morbid fascination with why Robinson died so young. An honest biopic would show the life-shortening effects of it, instead of valorizing Robinson keeping his cool while he was accumulating due to the racist pile-ons.
Of course, I accept why Hollywood will never make that Jackie Robinson movie, certainly not while his widow, Rachel Robinson, and their children and grandchildren have script approval. It would be a major bummer.
Dank does not make bank, either in bricks-and-mortar theatres or on streaming services.
So instead of that, you get something like 42.
It is probably playing on MLB Network as you read this. There should be no begrudging or judging anyone who enjoys the 2013 Robinson biopic in 2021, especially since the great actor Chadwick Boseman has departed short of the 50-yard line. Roger Ebert called it “a high school history lesson, lacking in complexity and nuance,” but that also has value, on some level, if it gets the messageout about acceptance
It is never too late to try to tell it like it was, and is. Some light googling calls up many efforts to remind people about the history. Youngstown, Ohio, is building a statue in honour of the late George (Shotgun) Shuba, the Montréal and Brooklyn teammate who showed acceptance by shaking Robinson’s hand at home plate after Jackie hit a home run in his International League debut in 1946. One of the two extant stadiums that hosted Black major-league baseball is being restored in Newark.
The Philadelphia Phillies — yep, same team! — are going to honor the bygone Philadelphia Stars on Friday. Of course, in a dystopian irony, Jackie Robinson Stadium in Southern California was “used as a detention center during a protest against racial inequality” in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
Yep.
The short versions of the Jackie Robinson story seem to stick only to 1946 and ’47 when he was a rookie in Montréal and Brooklyn. The slightly longer ones might take in his whole 10-year career in Brooklyn and his activism in the first civil rights era. These types of capsules also give the NFL a pass on snubbing Robinson, who showed much more early promise in football than baseball.
Obvious point is obvious: there is a lot of grey area to roam around in outside of the conventional narratives, and as a fan, you owe it to the players to do so.
First Fordism came for Laurentian U; it will come for you next.
Ontario is in a timeline so dark that one has to call up a quote from The Office’s weakest season to explain our government for the property developers. The Ford (For Now) Gang is having a typical week. Scarborough, an area of Toronto that has a 24 per cent positivity rate for COVID-19, has no vaccines. Is that bad? The education minister maintained that schools would stay open, and then they went online-only a whole 17 hours later since the variants of concern move that fast.
That is the day-to-day of populist incompetence. I prefer to focus on what will matter in five years, and hope the supply chain is untangled in the weeks to come, even while medium-suspecting that prolonging the effects of pandemic serves the Progressive Conservatives’ agenda (and it might serve the federal Liberals’ too, sure, but that would not make it OK).
The way that the Ford Gang has let Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., go down the tubes in order to — to… to what, to own the midwives? — betrays the not-so-hidden agenda. Laurentian is an important source of “jobs and unique Indigenous and French programs” in Northern Ontario. A university’s hand being forced with cutting certain programs, including the only bilingual midwifery program in Canada, is part of a wider war on women’s healthcare.
That affects all of us, even if you do not identify as Indigenous, or Franco-Ontarian, or plan on having a midwife help bring your child into the world. The need for a vital university in a regional hub such as Sudbury is evident. And as someone whose undergrad tenure came during the Mike Harris years in Ontario who watched Boomers shrug (“but my tuition was only $800 in 1973!!), I always voted I would never forget the stress of worrying about program cuts enacted by a Resentment Government. It is shameful, but also part of a pattern. The Sudbury area typically elects New Democrats, so… you know.
That is what 40 percent of the folks, folks, folks who voted in 2018 decided should be governing Ontario. They ignored that it is generally a good idea to have elected representatives in government who actually believe good government is in the public interest.
The story arc from The Office this brings up comes from the mostly mediocre Season 8, after Steve Carell left and was replaced by James Spader’s weirdo Robert California character. The ‘Sabre store’ arc in the middle third of that season, when several employees are sent to their parent company’s head office to help launch a retail branch à la the Apple Store, has a payoff that points up that nothing is as costly as cheaping out on paying for something you need.
At the outset of the episode “Last Day In Florida,” Dwight Schrute has been selected to become Sabre’s vice-president of retail and oversee the flagship store in Tallahassee. Of course, it goes to Dwight’s head. “Bye-bye, I win,” he mocks frenemy Jim Halpert at the end of a golf outing with company CEO Robert California.
Dwight peels away in a golf cart. Robert California relates to Jim that he plans to nix the store and Dwight will be fired.
“There’s a reason we sell our products online and over the phone. Have you ever used Sabre products, Jim? They’re cheap. They’re unintuitive. The Sabre store would work if we adopted the carnival model of leaving town once everyone is wise to us.”
Cheap and unintuitive — that is Fordism and right-wing austerity writ large. Ford is just the frontman, or cutout man, since I half-assume his party will dump him before the 2022 election if it needs to throw a Hail Mary. Like Paulie on a Sunday in GoodFellas, it does not move quickly for anybody who is not a donor or part of the voting base. Unprecedented use of ministerial zoning orders for the latter, foot-dragging on trying to contain the third wave of COVID-19 for everyone else. And Ontarians are wise to them.
Of course, in that Office episode, Jim Halpert easily could have flown home to Scranton, Pa., while Dwight lost his job. Of course, he circles back and saves him, because it is the right thing to do.
I know I sound like a negative guy, and the short version of my full name sounds like naysayer. This is an exercise in being a more hopeful person. Part of that is imagining that enough the Janes and Jims will vote in sufficient numbers to make Ford, et al., lose power for a few election cycles.
Then I can break out the references to The Office’s best seasons. That is a nice thought bubble amid our waking nightmare.
That is more than enough for today. Thank you for allowing me on to your screens.
I am not woke or with it. As recently as two weeks ago, I thought Boney M. was a solo act. As Pam Beesly would say, it’s so not.
Details from the late Charlie Francis’s 1991 book Speed Trap were used as background for this section. Francis was the coach of Ben Johnson.