A toast to Jackie Robinson’s legacy

Are you Jackie Robinson-ed out? I’m not. His day is April 15 across MLB, but let’s keep the party going. The more I learn about the man, the more fascinating he becomes.

In Robinson’s honor, some random Jackie tidbits:

It is often said that baseball was Robinson’s fourth-best sport — after football, basketball and track. That may be inaccurate. He was also a tennis champion. As a youth, Robinson won the singles championship of the Pacific Coast Negro Tennis Association.

In 1940, Robinson hit .097 for the UCLA baseball team.

In 1940, he led UCLA’s football team in passing, rushing and scoring. He led the nation in punt-return average. Also caught passes and played safety.

His best sport? Maybe basketball. Before joining the Dodgers in 1947, Robinson spent the offseason playing for the Los Angeles Red Devils, an integrated, independent team. The Red Devils, hoping to become an expansion team in the National Basketball League, beat top teams from that NBA precursor. One player of the time said of Robinson, who was 5-foot-11, “The first player who I ever saw dunking as part of his game was Jackie Robinson.”

In ’41, Robinson played semipro football for the Honolulu Bears, then the Los Angeles Bulldogs.

Harlem Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein reportedly offered Robinson $10,000 a year, more than he was making with the Dodgers. Robinson said no thanks, saying the same to pro hoops squads such as the Canton Cushites, Detroit Wolverines and New York Rens.

In 1945, Robinson was coaching basketball at a small college in Austin, Texas, when he tried out for the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro League team. In 34 games, he batted .375.

He left the Monarchs briefly to try out for the Boston Red Sox, along with two other Black players. Was it legit? Robinson thought they got the runaround, and the Sox would be the last MLB team to integrate, 14 years later.

Robinson held his temper in check in 1947. But before and after? Fire. After a Monarchs game in ’45, both teams dressed in the same clubhouse, and rookie Jackie got into it with a couple of vets on the other team. Said the opposing manager, Quincy Trouppe, “He really had a sharp tongue, and I wondered who this young cat was to be raising all that sand.”

On their way to spring training with the Dodgers’ Montreal minor-league affiliate, Robinson and his wife, Rachel, were twice bumped off flights in Florida, their seats given to white passengers. The final leg of their trip, they rode the hard wooden seats in the back of a segregated Greyhound.

Robinson was the secondtoughest member of his family. That spring of ’46, while the couple waited at the Pensacola, Fla., airport, Rachel used a whites-only restroom and drank from a whites-only drinking fountain.

The season in Montreal was Robinson’s first playing more than 40 games. By June, he was battered and worn, physically and emotionally. A doctor ordered him to take 10 days off. He took one.

The Dodgers’ famed radio/ TV broadcaster, Red Barber, born in Mississippi, planned to quit his prestigious job rather than work for an integrated team. He told his wife, who said, “Have a martini.” Barber reconsidered. When broadcasting Dodgers games in St. Louis, Barber would tell listeners how “Robby” and two other Black Dodgers had to stay in a separate hotel from their teammates and eat separately. Barber later said of Robinson, “He did more for me than I did for him.”

Robinson also won over his redneck manager at Montreal. On Robinson’s second at-bat that ’46 season, the skipper, Clay Hopper, gave him the green light on 3-0 and Robinson drilled a three-run homer.

In ’49, breaking camp, the Dodgers barnstormed through the South, 13 games in 14 days. Robinson played ’em all, hard. Four games in Atlanta, where a Black man had never played pro baseball on the same field with a white man.

Death threats poured in. At the first game in Atlanta, as the Dodgers took the field, Pee Wee Reese joked, “Jackie, you mind moving over a few feet? This guy might be a bad shot.” Dick Young wrote in the New York Post: “To watch Jackie Robinson day after day, night after night, is to gape with ever increasing amazement at the magnificent brazenness with which he takes charge of a crowd — and of a game.”

I feel a connection with Robinson because I was there. Sort of. On Oct. 2, 1947, Robinson, playing in his first World Series, led the Dodgers to a 9-8 win over the Yankees, cutting the Yanks’ Series lead to 2-1. Robinson had two hits, a sac bunt and a steal. It was the first World Series to be televised, but I missed it, being about an hour old when the game started.

Carl Erskine, a Dodgers teammate, later wrote that once a game was over, Robinson was treated as a Black man first, and a man second, “And this broke Jackie’s heart on a daily basis because he gave his all — body and soul — to the game of baseball.”

In doing so, Jackie Robinson raised a lot of sand.