The man recalls the boy and his horrible introduction to a shameful side of sports

By  Tony Zonca — MikeDragoSports.com senior contributor

Recently we commemorated the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King’s history-making “I Had a Dream” speech.

The iconic event took place 60 years ago and was expected to be a positive influence on Black Americans.

You be the judge in a society that too often regards the color of a person’s skin rather than the substance of their character.

Let’s go back 15 years from that memorable event in 1963.  In the lily-white Anthracite Region of the 1950s where I grew up only the coal was black.  So why were these otherwise honest and law-abiding men so bigoted?

They used the horrible “n” word openly and without recrimination.  After all, who was there to offend?

Well, one little guy, who was supposed to be asleep in the back seat of his father’s Studebaker on the way home from Hershey — he had tagged along to watch the Harlem Globetrotters’ zany act– winced upon hearing the obscenity-laced conversation among the men in the car.

Even the laughter seemed evil. The boy couldn’t grasp the depth of the hatred for one particular race.

After all, he was old enough to realize that neither his father nor his friends had much, if any, contact with, as whites would say, “the coloreds.”

Though he was confused and saddened, the boy knew there was something dreadful going on in that car that night.  And though it would be many years till he knew the meaning of the word “bigotry,” he was ashamed and embarrassed as he lay in bed that night.

Much later he discovered that experience went a long way in portraying who he would become and how he would regard minorities.  Not to mention underdogs everywhere, and not just in sports competition.

He and his father had never discussed that night.  Of course, his father never learned he had been eavesdropping.

So it was not surprising that, growing up in New York Yankees territory, the boy would openly root for the Brooklyn Dodgers, those lovable Bums, where it was always “Wait till next year!”

I would love to tell you our young fellow also grew up rooting for the Dodgers because Jackie Robinson had broken the game’s color barrier that past summer.  But the boy has no recollection of that historical season.  He was only 7 when Robinson changed the face of the game forever.

The thing he found so remarkable was that even later, when he was old enough to recite the rosters of all 16 major league teams, he had no recall of the so-called “Grand Experiment.”

None of us did.

Jackie was just there, a beloved Bum.  So were Newk, Campy and Joe Black.  Junior Gilliam and the others followed.  And the Dodgers were no longer lovable losers.

So the boy, now a teen-ager, rejoiced.  Even felt a curious comeuppance had been delivered.  Why, he wondered, had nobody told him about Robinson’s breakthrough and its significance on not just baseball but society as a whole.

His father was a Boston Red Sox fan.  Loved Ted Williams, the “Splendid Splinter.”   Curiously the Red Sox were the last big league team to integrate.  Pumpsie Green was his name.

The thing is, despite the environment he grew up in, the boy looked at Jacke Robinson as a terrific player — period.  He saw Jackie’s color as blue and white with the No. 42 emblazoned in red on the front.

If truth be told, Robinson wasn’t even the boy’s favorite player.  He was a first baseman so he idolized the steady, stoic Gil Hodges.  

Jackie?  He was right there with Duke, Pee Wee, Oisk and the Reading Rifle, Carl Furillo — the way it should be, then and now.