BoomerZoo Almanac for April 8-14, 2007: Good sports
Take me out to the ballgame! OK, I know baseball has pretty much been supplanted by football as the U.S. national pastime since the Baby Boom ended, but this is an area in which I’m a little old-fashioned. I love baseball—I enjoyed playing it, I enjoy watching it, and I’m a faithful reader of the sports pages from about mid-March until the playoffs finally die out—which seems to be sometime around Thanksgiving these days. Early April seems to be defined by baseball events—for example, Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 10, 1947 (go to article), becoming first African-American baseball player in the 20th century to play in the major leagues.
The Canadians might be more likely to say Robinson was plucked from the Montreal Royals of the International League, a minor league team. Montreal eventually got a major league franchise of its own on April 10, 1969. Lester Pearson—former PM of Canada—threw out the first ball for the Expos, who beat the Cardinals 8-7 in that game, the first regular-season major league baseball game in Canada, and first outside the US. Actually, it was during his short tenure as an Expo that Pete Rose got his 4,000th career hit on April 14, 1984.
Jackie Robinson wanted to manage baseball after he quit playing, but he was never given that opportunity. It wasn’t until 1975, the year after Jackie Robinson died, that another Robinson—Frank—became the first African-American manager of a major league team, the Cleveland Indians. Apparently Al Campanis, general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, wasn’t too impressed by Mr. Robinson’s managing abilities, as he told Ted Koppel in an April 1987 “Nightline” interview that blacks may lack some of the "necessities" for becoming baseball managers. Unfortunately for Campanis, those who make such remarks lack the “necessities” for remaining in executive positions in a major league franchise, and he was no exception: he lost his job.
Campanis apparently also told Koppel that blacks are poor swimmers, because they didn’t have adequate “buoyancy.” He may have been among those who thought African Americans were not so good at golf, either, but Tiger Woods certainly proved that idea to be a fallacy, when he became the youngest golfer ever to win the U.S. Masters tournament on April 13, 1997.
Sports can be controversial, but it can also lead to some cultural insight, as it did in April of 1971 when the People's Republic of China invited the U.S. table tennis team to visit. From this event, we came up with the very cute term “Ping-Pong diplomacy,” which referred to the development of the first official relations between the U.S. and the PRC since Chinese Liberation in 1949. Before that, most of us probably thought the Chinese all talked like the cook, Hop Sing, on Bonanza.
Speaking of international sports, I notice that one long-standing race had a lot of April connections, too. The U.S. chose its first astronauts—the “Mercury Seven”—on April 9, 1959: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Donald Slayton. Still, in spite of the cool moniker given the U.S. space team, as the BBC headline announced on April 11, 1961:
Soviets win space race
Probably not exactly how we in the U.S. would have announced it, but it was true: Yuri Gagarin will forever be remembered as the first human to go into outer space.
We did, of course, eventually win the race to the moon, but sometimes it seems like we never quite got over that initial loss. Maybe the shuttle program is another way we’ve been trying to make up for being second out of the blocks. After all, we were the first—and only—nation to launch a space shuttle. The first of these, Columbia, lifted off on April 11, 1981.
It looks good in the paper—heck, it looks good in the sky—but the whole shuttle program has been controversial from the outset, and with frequent budget cutbacks and lots of other programs wanting a piece of the budget pie, the shuttle has had a tough time.
I know this doesn’t sound like good sportsmanship, but at least the Soviets…er, Russians don’t have one!
