Product Description

April 15, 1947, marked the most important opening day in baseball history. When Jackie Robinson stepped onto the diamond that afternoon at Ebbets Field, he became the first black man to break into major-league baseball in the twentieth century. World War II had just ended. Democracy had triumphed. Now Americans were beginning to press for justice on the home front -- and Robinson had a chance to lead the way.

He was an unlikely hero. He had little experience in organized baseball. His swing was far from graceful. And he was assigned to play first base, a position he had never tried before that season. But the biggest concern was his temper. Robinson was an angry man who played an aggressive style of ball. In order to succeed he would have to control himself in the face of what promised to be a brutal assault by opponents of integration.

In Opening Day, Jonathan Eig tells the true story behind the national pastime's most sacred myth. Along the way he offers new insights into events of sixty years ago and punctures some familiar legends. Was it true that the St. Louis Cardinals plotted to boycott their first home game against the Brooklyn Dodgers? Was Pee Wee Reese really Robinson's closest ally on the team? Was Dixie Walker his greatest foe? How did Robinson handle the extraordinary stress of being the only black man in baseball and still manage to perform so well on the field? Opening Day is also the story of a team of underdogs that came together against tremendous odds to capture the pennant. Facing the powerful New York Yankees, Robinson and the Dodgers battled to the seventh game in one of the most thrilling World Series competitions of all time.

Drawing on interviews with surviving players, sportswriters, and eyewitnesses, as well as newly discovered material from archives around the country, Jonathan Eig presents a fresh portrait of a ferocious competitor who embodied integration's promise and helped launch the modern civil-rights era. Full of new details and thrilling action, Opening Day brings to life baseball's ultimate story.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #220512 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Booklist
The author of the acclaimed Luckiest Man (2005)a biography of Lou Gehrig, turns here to another great American sportsman, Jackie Robinson. So elegant in its logic is Eig's angle--chronicling Robinson's first major-league season (1947) with the Brooklyn Dodgers--it's a wonder no one thought of it before. From Robinson's preseason call-up by Brooklyn's legendary GM, Branch Rickey, to the 1947 World Series, in which the Dodgers took the Yankees to a seventh game (Brooklyn lost), Eig details the dynamics of Robinson's hard-earned acceptance by teammates, the well-chronicled abuse Robinson took from opposing fans and players, the response of local and out-of-town press, and the impact the season had on Robinson's family and on African Americans. Eig also shows what a flat-out great player Robinson was that season. If Eig's workmanlike writing style doesn't necessarily pull the reader along, his account of the Dodgers' dramatic 1947 pennant race will. Even Dodger haters--and they are legion--will cheer on the Bums in this fine account. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Jonathan Eig is a senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal based in Chicago. He was formerly executive editor of Chicago magazine. He is the author of Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PROLOGUE

April 10, 1947

The telephone rang like an alarm, waking Jackie Robinson from deep sleep.

"Hello," he mumbled.

It was early morning in Manhattan. Robinson was alone in room 1169 of the McAlpin Hotel, across the street from Macy's. He had been on edge all week, his stomach in knots. As he listened to the voice on the other end of the phone, he was poised to embark on a journey -- one that would test his courage, shake the game of baseball to its roots, and forever change the face of the nation. Throughout history, heroic quests have often been launched on grand orders. "The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River . . . ," wrote Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis. "The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!" General Dwight David Eisenhower exhorted his troops before the D-Day invasion. But the commanding words that sent Robinson on his way this cool, gray morning were uttered by a humble secretary.

Come to Brooklyn, she said.

He showered and shaved and hurried out of the hotel. He was on his way to meet Branch Rickey, president and part owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and to learn whether Rickey was ready to end the segregation of the races in big-league baseball.

In 1947, some southern states still denied the vote to black Americans. Black children were not entitled to attend the same schools as white children. Lynch mobs executed their own bloodthirsty style of justice while local law enforcement officials looked the other way. "I'm sorry, but they done got him," one sheriff in North Carolina announced that year after a gang of white men made off with one of his prisoners. Black Americans were excluded not only from certain schools but also from parks, beaches, playgrounds, department stores, night clubs, swimming pools, roller-skating rinks, theaters, rest rooms, barber shops, railroad cars, bus seats, military units, libraries, factory floors, and hospitals. In the North, WHITES ONLY signs were far less evident than in the South, but the veiled message was often the same. Black men on business in Chicago, Detroit, or Cleveland usually stayed in black-owned hotels, rode in black-owned taxis, and dined in black-owned restaurants. If a white man became acquainted with a black man, odds were good that the acquaintance stemmed from some service the black man performed for the white man -- shining his shoes, for example, or mowing his lawn, or mixing his cocktails.

Segregation suffused the nation's culture, and yet profound changes were rippling across the country. Black workers moved from South to North in great waves, reshaping urban spaces and lending new muscle to organized labor. Black soldiers coming home from the war declared they would no longer tolerate second-class citizenship. Federal judges commanded southern states to stop obstructing the black vote. President Truman signed an order to end segregation in the military. And in major-league baseball, where there were sixteen teams and every player on every one of those teams was white, a single black man was presented an opportunity to change the equation: to make it one black man and 399 white.

The test case represented by Jackie Robinson was one of towering importance to the country. Here was a chance for one person to prove the bigots and white supremacists wrong, and to say to the nation's fourteen million black Americans that the time had come for them to compete as equals. But it would happen only if a long list of "ifs" worked out just so: if the Brooklyn Dodgers gave Robinson the opportunity to play; if he played well; if he won the acceptance of teammates and fans; if no race riots erupted; if no one put a bullet through his head. The "ifs" alone were enough to agitate a man's stomach. Then came the matter of Robinson himself. He perceived racism in every glare, every murmur, every called third strike. He was not the most talented black ballplayer in the country. He had a weak throwing arm and a creaky ankle. He had only one year of experience in the minor leagues, and, at twenty-eight, he was a little bit old for a first-year player. But he loved a fight. His greatest assets were tenacity and a knack for getting under an opponent's skin. He would slash a line drive to left field, run pigeon-toed down the line, take a big turn at first base, slam on the brakes, and skitter back to the bag. Then, as the pitcher prepared to go to work on the next batter, Robinson would take his lead from first base, bouncing on tiptoes like a dropped rubber ball, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, taunting the pitcher, and daring everyone in the park to guess when he would take off running again. While other men made it a point to avoid danger on the base paths, Robinson put himself in harm's way every chance he got. His speed and guile broke down the game's natural order and left opponents cursing and hurling their gloves. When chaos erupted, that's when he knew he was at his best.

On that April 10 morning, as he rode the subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn, Robinson understood exactly what he was getting into. One prominent black journalist had written that the ballplayer had more power than Congress to help break the chains that bound the descendants of slavery to lives lived in inequity and despair. Before he'd even swung a bat in the big leagues, Robinson was being compared to Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, and Joe Louis, with some writers concluding that this man would do more for his people than any of the others. The time had come, they said, for black Americans to stake their claim to the justice and equal rights they so richly deserved, and now a baseball player had arrived to show them the way. Robinson absorbed the newspaper articles. He felt the weight on his shoulders and decided there was nothing to do but carry it as fast and as far as he could.

A cold wind met him as he climbed out of the subway onto the busy streets of Brooklyn. He walked to 215 Montague Street. Waiting for him there was Branch Rickey, a potato-shaped man in a wrinkled suit. The office was dark and cluttered. Rickey got straight to business, offering Robinson a standard contract for five-thousand dollars, the league's minimum annual salary.

"Simple, wasn't it?" Robinson recalled later. "It could have happened to you. The telephone rings. You answer it . . . and you're in the Big Leagues. . . . Just like a fairy tale. . . . I went to bed one night wearing pajamas and woke up wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers' uniform."

He knew it was no fairy tale, of course. He knew that a happy ending was far from assured. Most big-leaguers in 1947 had never been on the same field as a black man, had never shared a locker room, a shower, a taxi, a train car, or a dining-room table with one. Big-league culture was so thoroughly dominated by white southerners that even rough Italian kids from northern cities experienced shock and isolation upon arrival. There was no telling how Robinson would be received. He was not yet a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and already half a dozen or more of his prospective teammates promised they would quit or demand a trade before they would play with him. Elsewhere, players spoke of a league-wide strike. They were willing to destroy the game they loved rather than see it stained by integration. Others said it would be simpler to take Robinson out with a well-aimed fastball to the head, or with a set of metal cleats driven through his Achilles tendon on a close play at first base -- something that would look like an accident.

Rickey made only one demand of Robinson. He asked the ballplayer to promise that he would never respond to the racist attacks that would surely come his way. When Rickey quoted a passage from Giovanni Papini's Life of Christ -- "But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" -- Robinson sought clarification. Did Rickey want a player who didn't have the guts to fight back? No, the boss answered, "I want a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back."

Rickey turned and walked away while Robinson thought about it for a moment. Though the request would require Robinson to subdue his most basic instincts, and though he had no idea, honestly, whether he could compete without an outlet for his seething sense of indignation, he said he would try. With that, the season's storyline was set.

Robinson became baseball's biggest attraction in 1947. According to one survey, he was the second most famous man in America, trailing only Bing Crosby. Americans yearned for a sense of normalcy in the aftermath of the war, yet everything around them was in flux. Robinson, a human whirlwind, captured the spirit of the time better than anyone. When the Dodgers went on the road, thousands of black men and women traveled great distances to get a glimpse of him, as if to see for themselves that he was real, to share his dignity and glory, to watch this proud, defiant man, the grandson of slaves, stake a claim on their behalf to what Langston Hughes called "the dream deferred." Railroad companies scheduled special runs. Black parents named their children, boys and girls, after him. White kids from small towns in the Midwest sat surrounded by black men and women at the ballpark and wondered why their parents seemed anxious. Jewish families in Brooklyn gathered around their dining-room tables for Passover Seders and discussed what Moses had in common with a fleet-footed, right-hand-hitting infielder with the number 42 on his back. White business owners integrated their factory floors and wrote to Robinson to thank him for opening their eyes. Young ballplayers of every color imitated his style, wiping their hands on their trousers between pitches, swinging with arms outstretched, and running helter-skelter around makeshift bases.

Jackie Robinson showed that talent mattered more than skin color, supplying a blueprint for the integration of a nation. He led the Dodgers to the greatest season the team's fans had yet seen, to a World Series showdown with the New York Yankees, the outcome in doubt un...

Customer Reviews

Before Martin Luther King, There Was Jackie Robinson
The story of Jackie Robinson has been told in several books by many distinguished authors. Now Jonathan Eig, author of the definitive book on Lou Gehrig, has given us a fresh look at the Brooklyn Dodgers of 1947, which was Robinson's initial season with the team. First let me say this man (Eig) can write. This is not a rehash of other stories you may have read. The author skillfully weaves the role of influential individuals such as Branch Rickey, Pee Wee Reese, Harry "The Hat" Walker, Leo "The Lip" Durocher, Burt Shotten, Eddie "The Brat" Stanky, Dick Young of the New York Daily News, and others in this historic story. Baseball rosters were heavily made up of players from the south. The Dodgers were no exception, and they brought their long held prejudices along with them. You may think you have heard all the anecdotes relating to Robinson and the Dodgers, but the gifted author of this book will provide you with nuggets of information culled from a variety of sources. Years after the fact, several former Dodger players said Robinson "made them better men." However, the author notes, these claims were made only after supporting civil rights became fashionable. In 1947, when Robinson needed these friends, he found none on the Dodgers. At least significant ones! Reese developed a genuine friendship with Robinson, but in 1947 Pee Wee was one of the boys and whether the often told incident of him supporting Robinson in Cincinnati when he was being heckled is open to question. At least for 1947. This is quite simply one of the very best of hundreds of baseball books that I have read. It is definitely a keeper for anyone's library. It's a great story, especially with the 60th anniversary rapidly approaching. I can't wait to see what this new author, Jonathan Eig, is preparing for us to read next.

An excellent book - for both history and enjoyment
I just finished Jonathan Eig's book "Opening Day", and loved it. Like his earlier work "Luckiest Man", Eig sticks to facts and historical sources (interviews [old and new], newspaper sources) and is able to separate some of the myths surrounding Jackie Robinson and the 1947 season from the truth. For example, the story about Pee Wee Reese draping his arm around Robinson's shoulder in Cincinnati in 1947. Great story, but not much fact supporting whether it happened. Eig reports the known sources and lets the reader decide whether to believe the facts or the myth (in this case, I like the myth!).

This is the first book that I know of that chronicles the 1947 season (w/some "flashbacks", which are necessary to understand some of the people and the culture and thought of the time). Eig's writing style keeps the reader interested, as Robinson joins the Dodgers after a year with the minor league Montreal Royals, proceeds to take the field and ultimately become Major League Rookie of the Year - there was only one for both leagues at the time. Interviews with Rachel Robinson, Jackie's wife, show both the courage Robinson shows, as well as the emotional turmoil, as Robinson had promised Branch Rickey that he would not fight his tormentors.

As the season progresses, Eig does a great job of how Robinson's Dodger teammates loosen up to him, believing that his playing as a ballplayer is more important than skin color. By the end of the season, Ralph Branca is catching Robinson who is diving for a foul ball, something that might not have happened earlier in the year. There's a great scene where Dixie Walker, possibly unfairly maligned as an instigator of a potential major league strike against Robinson, calls Robinson aside to give him batting tips. Rachel Robinson is even invited to hang with the other players' wives.

All in all, an awesome book. The cliches are true, as this is a book about courage and facing adversity, but it is also a plain old good baseball book, chronicling a very important moment and year in history, not just baseball history. I heartily recommend this book, as well as Eig's first book "Luckiest Man".

A Way to Better Understand America
Once again, another Grand Slam from Jonathan Eig. I never thought there would be a book on sports better than Eig's previous book, Luckiest Man, but Opening Day is.

I'm not a sports fan at all, so it is even more remarkable that I loved both books. The reason that I did is that they both far transcended sports. Both are about universal struggles. The first was about the very personal struggle of Lou Gehrig to come to grips with an unfathomable disease that slowly but surely stripped him of his strength and life. The new book, Opening Day, is about the very public struggle of one man, Jackie Robinson, to integrate baseball.

Eig could have used flowery language and soaring rhetoric to tell this story, as so many before him have done. Ironically, it is precisely because Eig used stripped down, economical language and let the facts and actual, contemporaneous quotes speak for themselves that the book is so powerful. Eig has mastered the first rule of writing: "show, don't tell." The book is thus a matter-of-fact masterpiece. Because it is so understated, you may not realize what a tour-de-force it is until you are done reading and figure out that it knocked you for an emotional loop.

The book is masterful in describing the odd way in which Robinson was merely another worker trying hard to succeed after getting a big promotion (in this case from the minor leagues to the majors), at the same time he - and the world - knew he was making history. That resulted in an odd paradox - while much of America was wishing with all their might for Robinson to be a "credit" to his race (to put it in the patronizing parlance of the time) , and some bigots were hoping that Robinson would prove them right by disgracing his race -- Eig shows that Robinson thought that the outcome of that grand debate hinged more on whether he got base hits or not than whether the nation was emotionally ready to accept black people as equals.

Opening Day is also full of understated, dry humor, which the reader has to be on his or her toes to always pick up on. But such attention by the reader is well worth the effort.

Unlike so many other sport stories, which tell the story only from the perspective of the players, Opening Day is pitch-perfect in also telling the story from the perspectives of the fans in the stands, listening on the radio, or watching on new-fangled TVs at bars. More than that, it tells the story from the perspective of both the insanely-devoted Brooklyn fans and average Americans.

Perhaps the book's greatest achievement is how well it explains just how much Jackie Robinson meant to Black America. It reminded me that Robinson's feat came almost a decade before Brown versus Board of Education and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Eig convincingly explains how revolutionary it was for Black people to have one of their men be able simply to slide into the leg of a white man in public - in the most famous national game, no less - and not only not be lynched, but be hailed as a hero. Before this book, I always thought: "So big deal, a Black guys got to play sports. Surely, segregation in baseball had to end, but it wasn't a big deal like school de-desegregation or voting rights." But this book reminds us that powerful symbols do indeed matter. By helping me understand how important Jackie Robinson was for Black America, the book helped me understand how important he was for all of America.

While the nation is still far, far from perfect, this book is a vital reminder of just how bad things were and how much progress we have made on some fronts.

I particularly enjoyed Eig's repeated quotes from African-American newspapers from around the country, who almost always had a different take on America--and Jackie Robinson - than the mainstream white press. Many of these paper's are still around today - albeit struggling -- and Eig gives them some long-overdue recognition in the wider community. To them, this just wasn't about one ballplayer - it was a crusade. Readers of Opening Day will surely agree.