The sun blistered down
from the afternoon sky. Sweat rolled down my forehead as I adjusted my cap, my
feet spread and balanced beneath me. The trapper was heavier than the catcher’s
mitt I usually wore, but I was only in Grade 8, my first year in a league that included
high school seniors. First base was the only position available, and like any
good coach’s son, I played where I was needed. It didn’t make me any less
nervous. I’d be catching throws from our seventeen year old shortstop, Tim, who
had a cannon for an arm. Just breathe, I told myself. You can do this. For the
first three innings, I caught every throw on the grounders, and while I tried
to make each play look casual – I just had to catch the ball, something I’d
done since I was five – I still hadn’t relaxed.
With two outs in the
fourth inning, one of the opposing team’s older players hit a rocket headed to
right field. I dove to my left, and to my utter surprise, I caught it. I stared
at my glove even as my teammates cheered and patted me on the back, the older
players nodding in approval. I was still looking at my glove when I got to the
bench.
Mr. Lesco, one of my
coaches, smiled. “Nice catch, Steve. But remember, Mattingly doesn’t look at
the glove.”
I nodded. I understood
what he was saying. You belong here, now act like it. Don't look at your glove. I felt my shoulders
loosen, and when my teammate stepped to the plate, I joined in with the other
boys, excited, but no longer nervous. It was just baseball, a sport I’d played and
followed since I was a child. It was a different league, but the game was the
same.
Willie Mays
I remember the first
time I saw Willie Mays play. I was ten years old, and the grainy, black and
white footage of his famous over the shoulder catch against Cleveland in the 1954
World Series enraptured me. As a kid, I’d been regaled by tales from my father
of those glory days of baseball, back when he was a young man and the world was
changing. Changing so much that even he didn’t realize it. Didn’t realize what
it would mean for his son. For most of my childhood, I pressed my dad for
stories and read whatever I could get my hands on. Stories of the Yankees and
Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants. Willie Mays played his last professional
game when I was a baby, but well into high school, he remained my favourite
player. A black man, idolized by a white boy, twenty years after he retired.
This would have been
impossible when my dad was a kid. Or nearly so. When Mays broke into the major
leagues as a rookie in 1951, it’d only been four years since Jackie Robinson
had obliterated the colour barrier, a wall so thick it had seemed impregnable
only a year earlier. Blacks playing with whites. A black athlete competing with
the best Caucasian players in the world. Jesse Owens had shown a prejudiced world
in 1936 what a black athlete could do, but where I came from, baseball was more
important than the Olympics. Baseball was every day. Baseball was oatmeal for
breakfast, girls learning to be ladies and Father Knows Best. Baseball got it
right.
Before Susan Sarandon
ever uttered her belief in the “church of baseball,” I believed in it, too. As
a boy, the first stories I ever wrote were of Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle
and of course, the, ‘Say Hey’ Kid. In my stories, I turned them into heroes off
the field, saving innocent people from fires and hunting down criminals. I
basked in the warm glow of sports mythology, none of which shone quite as
brightly as my favourite sport. Books like Roger Kahn’s classic, The Boys of
Summer, only fed my appetite for tales of the Great Ones.
When I was seventeen, my
dad and I went with Mr. Lesco and his son, Josh (my best
friend) to see Field of Dreams. When the movie was over, my old coach leaned
over and asked me what mistake they’d made in the film. I answered without
hesitation. Shoeless Joe Jackson was left handed. In the movie, Ray Liotta had
played him as a righty both in the field and at the plate. He’d smiled, nodding
in approval. A seventeen year old shouldn't have known those kinds of things
about baseball, not about a player who’d played his last game around the end of
World War I. From the time I was ten, however, something about the game made me
want to be better. I didn't know it then, but baseball was, and had always
been, the perfect vehicle of change for a culture redefining itself. That it
was mythical didn’t make it untrue. It just meant that it had room for heroes. And
when it came to heroes, no one was bigger than Jackie Robinson.
42
Fifty seven years have
passed since his first game with Brooklyn, and his story now casts such a large
shadow that in some ways it obliterates just how special he was, how much he endured,
and how he not only saved the game itself, but forced the culture around it to
shift. Shifts that still reverberate decades later. For an artist to interpret
that type of story, one as powerful and mythic as Robinson’s, it requires a
uniquely steady and sensitive hand. One that can fashion drama around a story
that has been told and re-told, without removing the inspiration of the story
itself. That is a daunting task for any film maker, and if you read the critic’s
reviews of “42” when it appeared in theatres a year ago, many of them suggested
that the film was “earnest and inspirational,” but “too safe and old-fashioned.”
Nonsense. In time, 42 will
enter the cannon of films that extend the mythos of sports stories beyond the
box score, the ones that highlight the search for human dignity and the fight
for something more, a fight reflected in every civilization throughout history.
The only thing “old-fashioned” about the film is that it presents the
ruthlessness of racism while pushing us towards something better. It allows us
to confront our demons without causing us to cover our eyes. It pushes us away,
then pulls us back and asks us what we truly believe.
There are times the
film underplays the abuse Robinson suffered, aside from one scene with a
particularly loathsome Philadelphia manager, but director Brian Helgeland keeps
the lens centered on a racist culture, if only in the background. (The seeming ubiquity
of a bathroom door with ‘Whites’ on it is particularly galling. And to think
this was only fifty years ago.) And too often for my liking, the movie tilts
towards “The Help” territory, powerful whites helping blacks. Harrison Ford
gives an inspiring, growly impression as Branch Rickey, the Dodger owner who
made it his legacy to integrate the game, and his performance includes moments
of genuine humour. (“Robinson’s a Methodist. I’m a Methodist. God’s a
Methodist.”) Unfortunately, there are times when the movie feels it’s as much
about Rickey as it is Robinson.
Those are minor
criticisms. Boseman is excellent here, and as so much of the film is about the
players and culture responding to him, he is less the driving force of the
movie and more the anchor. He gives Robinson a steady stoicism and athletic
grace on the field. Off the field, however, he allows us to see Jackie’s inner
joy with his wife, and his smile lights up the screen with warmth and charisma.
Helgeland, who also wrote the film and is white, writes with purpose and
sensitivity. He reveals that much of our bigotry, by seemingly decent people,
stems from never having to confront how we feel about certain aspects of our
culture. That sometimes change occurs only when we are faced with extreme views
of those beliefs.
We are all raised to believe certain things. We believe them because of our parents, our church, our
teachers and coaches and everyone else who aided in our shaping. And too often,
we move through our adult life without ever questioning those beliefs, those
beginnings, even when they’re clearly wrong.
Here, the non-racist
players are forced to confront how they really feel by their more adamantly
bigoted teammates, the ones who circle a petition to have Robinson booted from
the team. When the Philadelphia manager (played here with alarming force by Helgeland
alum, Alan Tudyk) starts in on Robinson, the camera pans to the dugout, where some
of the players, the ones who signed the petition, recoil in disgust. This is
the moment they decide. Are black people human? Are they equal? Most people
think we get a lifetime to make those choices, but we don’t. Life is a fast
flowing river, and once we make a decision like that, we’re more apt to justify
it than challenge it again.
PeeWee Reese, the Hall
of Fame shortstop, helps the fans of Cincinnati hollering at Robinson come to that
place by placing his arm around his new teammate at the beginning of a game. When
he slaps Robinson on the shoulder and says “maybe one day, we’ll all wear your
jersey,” my eyes welled up. The line is a Helgeland addition that works like one
of Spike Lee’s signature visuals, pulling us briefly from the story. (It’s a
nod to baseball’s new yearly tradition to choose one game in April where every
player in both leagues wears Robinson’s number.)
Pulling a moviegoer
out of a story is dangerous, and it must be done surgically to work properly.
But even as that line slammed me back into the present, I quivered under a wave
of inspiration.
We do so many damn
things wrong as humans, we screw up so many times that sometimes it’s all you
can do to pull your blanket over your head at our race’s incessant cruelty and
ignorance. And then there are these other moments, the ones that whisper to our
ability to be better, to stand beside our black teammate in the face of a white
crowd, a racist white culture, and say “the hell with it. I can be better. We
can be better.”
More, it’s people like
Robinson, (who some will insist I am canonizing here, which I will not
apologize for) who, simply by being willing to stand up for themselves in the
face of great adversity, and yes, great evil, remind us that human dignity is
not something cheap. That it can’t be bought or plagiarized by the next generation.
That it is something we must never lose sight of, if only because of our very
human tendency to exclude those who are different from us, those with whom we are unfamiliar.
The movie deals delicately with these ideas, grounding them in the players’ slow adjustment
to Robinson. Bit by bit, some of them begin to see what they truly believed, begin
to see the inhumanity of it and what they’ll believe in the future.
When Robinson accepts
his owner’s challenge to “be tough enough not to fight back”, we’re shown how his
frustration occasionally boils over, but it is only because of what he must
endure. We never get the idea that Number 42 is out of place in the white
league. That he feels he doesn’t belong. And by the time he hits the home run
against the Pirates and glides along the bases in slow motion, we realize that
he’s right. It was never about him. We didn’t know it until he showed us, but all
this time it was us. We were the ones looking at our glove.
***** Highly
recommended.
-Steve
NOTE: This blog is
dedicated to my amazing father, Don Burns, who coached (and acted as commissioner) for Welland Minor Baseball
for 35 years (and who coached me most of my life). I still remember the time he used to spend on the phone calling players and planning his practices. Our basement was inevitably crowded with baseball equipment, and to this day, I still love that smell.
I'd also like to dedicate this to Mr. (Don) Lesco, my
former coach and high school English teacher who was beloved by his players (including
me)and inspired students for generations.
And for all of you who take the time to volunteer as coaches, I want to say 'thank you,' the world is a kinder place because of you. The kids may not understand now the sacrifices that you make for them, but they will, and they'll never forget it.
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| My dad and I celebrating his 72nd birthday. |
