Their 2007 counterparts do nothing but fawn over him, and draw on his “legacy” to demand that people waste money to get more domestic blacks to play baseball, (even as there are institutional barriers against white high school and college talent, such that MLB can essentially rob cradles in the Dominican Republic and raid rosters in Japan), but they might blush to see how Jackie Robinson’s first regular season major league game was covered by their industry in 1947. Nobody today, this writer included, would dare use the phrase “colored boy” to describe a 28-year old man.
Most of the hoopla had to do with the fact that Dodgers’ manager Leo Durocher was not managing that day, as he would not be for all of the ’47 season. Earlier that year, he crossed wires with the owner of the New York Yankees, (not anybody named Steinbrenner at that time), and that owner got the baseball commissioner (essentially his stooge) to suspend Durocher for a whole season for rumored gambling promotion.
That’s all the great liberal brotherhood-of-man egalitarian New York media could write about that day. Except for those condescending 10- and 12-paragraph deep references to the “muscular Negro” or that “colored boy,” and the fact that he went 0-for-3 the day.
Countenance Blog 