Robinson Transcends All Comparisons
Jackie Robinson and Tiger Woods. Each a great non-Caucasian athlete.
Stop right there.
Today is the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s first game in the major leagues. Two days ago, Tiger Woods became the first person of color to win the Masters, or any one of golf’s so-called “majors,” for that matter.
Be careful how far you take the comparison.
Jackie Robinson was Jackie Robinson. He was one of the most distinguished and significant Americans of the 20th century. What he did in becoming the first African-American to play major league baseball in this century was specific to a time and place. Robinson was a true pioneer and a true hero.
The America of 1947 was an unimaginably different place, both better and worse than the America we know today. It was a safer, more innocent, far friendlier, less cynical place for just about all Caucasians and even for many non-Caucasians. The problem was that those non-Caucasins had to know their place, as it were. No matter how famous a black man or woman was (e.g. Duke Ellington, Jesse Owens, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Marian Anderson), there were many places within the boundaries of the United States where he or she dare not tread. Assuming Ellington would even bother to go to Jacksonville, Fla., he would not have been able to drink from the same fountain as the scummiest white man or sit in the same section of a movie theater as some illiterate, toothless piece of white trash. That was reality.
We are talking about 1947. That was seven years before “Brown v. Board of Education” and one year before president Harry Truman (himself completely opposed to “miscegenation”) signed the bill officially outlawing segregation in America’s armed forces. It was 10 years before President Dwight D. Eisenhower found it necessary to send federal troops to Little Rock to desegregate a local high school. It was 16 years before Alabama Gov. George Wallace pledged to “stand in the schoolhouse door” to preserve segregation in his fine state.
If you did not happen to be white, a lot of America, and American life, was off-limits to you in 1947. I might even go so far as to say, if you did not happen to be a white male.
Into this world burst 28-year-old Jack Roosevelt Robinson, a college-educated (UCLA) army officer (until he was court-martialed for refusing a move to the back of a bus) who just happened to be among the handful of greatest athletes this country has ever produced. The simple, unalterable fact is that baseball was his fourth-best sport, behind football, basketball and track. He was not the best available Negro leagues player; everyone knew that. But he was far and away the most qualified human being to tackle the most difficult personal assignment any athlete has ever been given, and just about anyone who knew him understood this to be true.
Robinson was asked to integrate baseball, which was rivaled only by movie-going as the most important leisure activity in the America of 1947. If you were talking about sport in 1947 America, there was Baseball, there was Boxing, and there was everything else.
Robinson simply could not fail. He had to be great on the field and even greater off the field. The entire nation was watching him.
Tiger Woods was born into a far different world. It was not a perfect world, but it was a better world for people of color than Robinson’s world; that’s for sure. And Woods was raised unlike any other baby who has ever been born. The son of an African-American father and a Thai mother, he was raised to be one thing, and one thing only - Tiger Woods. He was raised to be a golfing prodigy who would transcend not only color but many other barriers, as well.
He was never positioned to be black, not, at least, until he hooked up with the insidious entity known as Nike and made a regrettable commercial in which the questionable proposition was put forth that he, Tiger Woods, had not been able to play at this course or that course because of his color. No one familiar with the Tiger Woods saga was buying that one.
But there is now pressure on Woods to be a symbol and a spokesman, which is all right if Tiger can handle it. People now want Tiger to be Jackie Robinson or Arthur Ashe, but that will never happen because all he knows is what it’s like to be the unique and curious person known as Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, the greatest golfing machine we have ever witnessed.
I’m not suggesting that Woods has never come face-to-face with prejudice, because I haven’t followed him around for 21 years. But I know right well he has never, and will never, undergo anything like Jackie Robinson’s 1947 baseball season. And I know right well he did not grow up in the segregation of Richmond, Va., as did Arthur Ashe. I would wager that Woods has led a life far more accurately compared to the isolated suburban splendor of Grant Hill’s than to the existence of the average African-American professional athlete.
Nor would we forget that Woods plays golf in 1997, not baseball in 1947. Suppose he fails. So what? He can always go back to Stanford and get his degree. He can become a male model (I mean, did you catch the current GQ cover?). The world will go on as if he never existed. But if Jackie Robinson had failed, every black man everywhere would have felt let down.
By all accounts, Tiger Woods is a well-adjusted young man. He seems happy in his skin, and I mean that both literally and metaphorically. He should be left free to take on a spokesman’s role only when he is good and ready. He has a chance to be one of the great athletes we have ever produced.
But please skip the Jackie Robinson references. Remember when Sparky Anderson advised people not to embarrass Thurman Munson by comparing him to Johnny Bench? That was good advice.
Well, here’s even better advice. Don’t embarrass anyone - Tiger Woods included - by comparing him to Jackie Robinson.