42, based on the life of Jackie Robinson, an American baseball hero, is the second movie I’ve watched since Invictus, a Movie on How Sports and Politics Became Intertwined, the story of Nelson Mandela using the loyalty to a sports team, bringing White and Black South Africans together, to save his government.
In 1994, a year after South Africa’s first multiracial democratic election and Mandela being elected as President, the country hosted the Rugby World Cup, the White Afrikaners’ sport that ordinarily had the majority of the people — Bantu, Colored, Asian — cheering for the opposition. But Mandela befriended the Springboks captain, Francois Pienaar, and persuaded him to take the players out into Black communities and be in contact with people other than Afrikaners. Fortunately, the team had one very popular and visible Black star player.
From The Guardian, quoting Francois Pienaar,
“During those six weeks (leading up to the final game) what happened in this country was incredible. I’m still gobsmacked when I think back to the profound change that happened. We started obviously with a great leader with a fantastic vision who realised that sport is important for the Afrikaner white community and to earn their respect and trust … … On the other side I have such a respect for what (Mandela) had to go through in the African National Congress because the springbok was a symbol of apartheid. The majority of South Africans never supported the Springboks, … (but) he asked them and we Afrikaners came to the party in terms of playing good rugby, building a nice momentum towards the final, (and) things happened in South Africa that were just magical.”
For the final there were 63,000 people in the stadium and 62,000 were White. With a stroke of PR genius, Mandela appeared in the green-and-gold Springbok jersey and cap: “It’s well documented that Mr. Mandela walked out into Ellis Park in front of a predominantly White crowd, very much an Afrikaner crowd, wearing a springbok on his heart and how they shouted, ‘Nelson, Nelson, Nelson!’ because what he’d promised he delivered. And when the final whistle blew this country changed forever. It’s incomprehensible.”
I needed to get my mind around the fact that people actually identify that strongly with a sports team, care that much about a ball game. I also wondered what the consequences for national unity would be when players on the team come from different, often antagonistic parts of the society. While pondering this, 42 somehow came to my attention and I decided to watch it as a way into understanding how sports fans deal with incorporating society’s diversity into the team. I also wondered how individuals from different sectors of the society, different social classes, essentially different cultures, could play the game together. By definition, each game has its own set of rules and each player in the team has a role, a set of behaviors in relation to the other players. The rules and roles are explicit, known to everyone, to be followed and enforced. Winning or losing depends upon it. A player must be judged by how s/he performs in that role; nothing else about that person should be relevant to the game. So – what happens when society’s rules about the players’ relationships to one another in everyday life contradicts the simplicity and purity of the rules of the game?
I know absolutely nothing about team sports and never watch ball games. My husband, Ravi, came to America as an adult, so I suppose as a boy he followed cricket but he never talked about it or any other sport. Not until I was in my mid-forties did I hear talk of team sports, not until the mid-1970s when I returned to school for an MBA, to the Kellogg School of Management, into an academic environment quite different from that of my anthropology/sociology school days. In the business school classroom students discussing any aspect relating to management used a vocabulary drawn from sports (mostly football, I think) that was totally unintelligible to me, and they carried sports magazines around with them, some of them keeping a magazine open inside an upright textbook on the desk, reading it while the professor lectured.
Then recently, in a long conversation with Arun, I told him I had intended to write a blog post on 42, which is on sports and racism with political implications for our time, but found the movie too upsetting and dropped the idea. At which point my dear son reminded me that in grade school he had been a baseball fan, and I vaguely recalled his keeping statistics on the Milwaukee Braves team, the way he systematically collected information on anything that interested him. He said he had gone to baseball games with his buddies, taken there by one of the boys’ father, that Hank Aaron had been his hero, and one of his classmates
from those years had written “Me & Hank: A Boy and His Hero, Twenty-five Years Later.” He continued reminiscing, telling me that in 1973, when Hank Aaron was baseball’s greatest hitter and coming near to surpassing Babe Ruth’s 714 career home runs (even I had heard of Babe Ruth) Aaron and his family received death threats and an enormous amount of hate mail. Many Whites refused to accept a Black man surpassing the long-standing record of their beloved White player. Aaron was a generation later than Robinson and the racism in sports had continued. I decided to reconsider and write my thoughts on 42.
I agree with Roger Ebert’s assessment of the movie “… 42 is competent, occasionally rousing and historically respectful — but it rarely rises above standard, old-fashioned biography fare. It’s a mostly unexceptional film about an exceptional man. … and that is fine with me. It is still very much worth watching for what it teaches us about the history of racism in America. The exceptional man is Jackie Robinson, the first African American baseball player in the all-White national leagues. In the leagues, each player has a number stitched onto his uniform shirt and 42 was Robinson’s number, the number since … universally retired because he broke baseball’s shameful color barrier. For this reason alone,42 is a valuable film — a long overdue, serious big-screen biopic about one of the most important American pioneers of the 20th century. …”
A true baseball fan might wish to see the 1950 film, The Jackie Robinson Story in which Robinson plays himself. Richard Brody considers it superior in many regards to 42. Whatever its quality, the man and baseball are important enough that the movie is easily available on YouTube as a documentary. I watched Moneyball, with Brad Pitt, on the transformation of baseball into a profitable business. It is highly informative and a good movie, too, but not my thing. The one sports movie I actually cared about is A League of Their Own, starring Geena Davis, Tom Hanks and Madonna, based on the All-American Girls Baseball League that became popular with sports fans while the men were away fighting in World War II.
I discovered, through all the reading I’ve been doing, that baseball is an American game, thoroughly American. It evolved in the northern states of the country, especially in New York, from older bat-and-ball games already being played in England by the mid-18th century. It evolved in the American mode of the players organizing into clubs that set rules of the game, then into larger associations that improved the rules, managed relations between the clubs, and having found audiences, into businesses with players as employees. In 1871 the first professional league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, was founded. Five years later, the National League was created, followed by the American League in 1901. The first World Series between the champions of the two major leagues was held in 1903, and by 1905 it became an annual event. In the 20th century the rules of the game were standardized.
The American dilemma – White people believing that all men are born equal while still being prejudiced against, and accepting social injustice toward, African American men – became part of baseball’s evolution. (This was in the northern states. In the South, both tradition and law dictated that all White Americans are superior in all ways to all Black Americans.) Participation in White organized baseball by African Americans had been precluded since the 1890s by formal and informal agreements, with only a few players surreptitiously being included in lineups on a sporadic basis. The major leagues had a color barrier that lasted until 1947, when Jackie Robinson made his debut, the theme of 42.
In the mid-I800s African American baseball players had their own leagues throughout the country, mostly in the northeast and Midwestern states, apart from the all-White Majors. By the late 1800s a few Black men played on integrated teams or on Black teams that competed in integrated leagues, but by the 20th century segregation was almost absolute. I encourage you to watch this marvelous, funny film of The Clowns entertaining the crowd before the game began. They were great athletes as well as popular entertainers and twice won the league’s Eastern Division title.
Watching 42 and being continually upset by the rude, nasty treatment Jackie Robinson, his wife and Black sports writer Wendell Smith received in dealing with White people in ordinary life situations, by the all-White team’s personal rejection of Robinson and the injustice perpetuated against him during the games – I cannot revisit the movie. Instead, I quote this from Steven Jonas: “As is well known, Robinson was chosen by the Brooklyn General Manager Branch Rickey as much for his potential to be able to stand up — in total silence — to the racism that Rickey knew would be hurled at him in that first year, as for his intelligence and his projected baseball ability. The movie shows: the racist taunts from the stands that greeted Robinson in every ball park he played in (including in the beginning, the Dodgers’ Ebbets Field); the whole team being thrown off a plane in the South by a reservationist because Jackie’s wife, Rachel Robinson, had the nerve to use the “white” rest-room at the terminal; Enos Slaughter’s intentional spiking of Robinson in a play at first base; Ben Chapman, manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, standing in front of his team’s dugout hurling racist slander at Robinson when he was at bat; Dixie Walker of the Dodgers, who started a petition trying to get other players to boycott the game whenever Robinson played (the petition got nowhere and Walker, who happened to be a fine outfielder, was traded away by Rickey the following year); Fritz Ostermueller, a pitcher for the Dodgers who was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates during that first season by Rickey in part because of his racist attitude towards Robinson, and then as a Pirate went on to bean Robinson long before any baseball players wore helmets.” And that’s far from all of the nastiness shown.
Here for an intelligent comment by Dave Zirin on the film and on Jackie Robinson as a civil rights leader.
The photograph is of Jackie Robinson with civil rights leaders Thurgood Marshall, Justice of the Supreme Court, and Roy Wilkins, Executive Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Rachel Robinson, a strong ally for her husband, went on, after his untimely death, into a distinguished career in health care, begun with a UCLA bachelor’s degree in nursing before they married, followed later by further degrees and high positions held, as well as establishing a business and using the proceeds to further children’s education. Her accomplishments and the honors she received are many and varied.
What has changed since the White response in 1973 to Hank Aaron’s outstanding performance? For this I turned to the National Football League because American football has replaced baseball as the nation’s favorite team sport. In the NFL some 70% of the players are Black, but it has only eight minority men in the key role of head coach, and that thanks in part of a diversity mandate called the Rooney Rule. Among the thirty-two NFL teams, thirty are owned by White men, two by men of color. None of the team owners are Black.
Consider this fascinating psychological analysis from the Scientific American of the widespread anger and coverage in newspapers over the action taken by one Black player who in 2016 bent down on one knee at the beginning of the game during the national anthem ritual to silently, peacefully protest the frequent acts of violence against Black men taken by police officers across the country. “It matters that most of the athletes are Black and much of the audience is White, that the ancestors of one group were brought here as slaves and the ancestors of the other were their owners. That’s why, when Pittsburgh Steelers stayed in the locker room as the anthem played, one Pennsylvania police chief called their coach a “no good n*****” on Facebook, amplifying the racial themes of the debate. That’s why Michigan’s police director called them “degenerates.” (n***** means nigger for a Black person, a word so hateful that people should not say it.)
From the New Yorker — A year later, in a game in London, twenty-seven players from the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Baltimore Ravens dropped down and took a knee on the field as “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to swell. According to the Guardian, “there did not appear to be any White players taking a knee.” Standing above the downturned heads of the kneelers, a number of players and coaches interlocked arms. Shahid Khan, the owner of the Jaguars, who donated a million dollars to President Trump’s Inauguration, threaded himself between the tight end Marcedes Lewis and the linebacker Telvin Smith, both of whom are Black. “Our team and the National Football League reflects our nation, with diversity coming in many forms—race, faith, our views, and our goals,” Khan said later in a statement. The sports commentator Art Stapleton tweeted that the image of Khan among his men was “powerful.”
Trump openly bullied the Black players who joined the protest by taking the knee, called on the National Football League owners to fire them and encouraged fans to walk out. His language was unbelievably crude, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired. He’s fired!” Furthermore, as if the athletes were our modern gladiators, he claimed that new NFL safety rules meant to protect players are ruining the game, and this despite research indicating that NFL players are at high risk for concussions and for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE),
Enough on sports teams and political implications. Clearly, integrating Black athletes into professional sports is a positive change in our social order but I have no idea of its overall meaning, other than providing better jobs for talented athletes. Despite important advances having been made in civil rights our communities remain racially segregated and still far from equal in income, wealth or status. As for the Invictus story, it is heartwarming and Mandela did pacify the Afrikaners, bringing them into the government while holding his coalition together, but I doubt that the rugby team’s activities really changed for very long the way Afrikaners and Bantu felt, still feel and act toward one together.
A note – I have a second personal connection with baseball.
I remember my grandfather in the 1930s and ‘40s listening to baseball games on the radio, knowing all the teams, all the players and all the game statistics. When twelve years old I lived in Canonsburg, the town where I was born, and twice an older man, on seeing me, recalled Granddad and told me he had been a great baseball player in the town’s team. (Do towns still have their own sports team? I know of none.) The story was that the Pittsburg Pirates had recruited Granddad but Grandmother said that if he became a professional player she would not marry him, so he stopped playing baseball altogether. The photograph is from a 1918 newspaper. Granddad is in the second row, second from the left.
Hi Iris I just wanted to get back to you about this blog. It really is terrific. I think you hit the nail on the head about how central sports are to politics and by extension racism. It must stir up such deep terrors about not being in control. The blog made me remember my experience of going into the deep south and seeing segregation even though you could see it in Chicago where I grew up. The expression “a level playing field” is ironic in reflection on this sad disgraceful history. Soccer in the Middle East is all about politics.
Good job and so glad to read this. I look forward to your next and I am hoping all is going well. Hugs, n
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