Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season » (Reprint)

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".

Richard Allen is professor and chair of cinema studies at New York University. He is the author of numerous essays on Hitchcock, coeditor of two anthologies, "Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays" and "Hitchcock: Past and Future," and with Sidney Gottlieb he edits the "Hitchcock Annual" for Wallflower Press.

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. In Opening Day, Jonathan Eig tells the true story behind the national pastime's most sacred myth. Drawing on interviews with surviving players, sportswriters, and eyewitnesses, as well as newly discovered material from archives around the country, Eig presents a fresh portrait of a ferocious competitor who embodied integration's promise and helped launch the modern civil rights era.

The New York Times - Jay Jennings

Against this backdrop, Eig recounts the flash points that have grown into myths and largely reduces them from grand opera to folk song, a story of endurance and forbearance rather than sturm und drang. Dixie Walker, a popular Alabamian who supposedly led an internal team revolt, is portrayed as mostly concerned about how playing with Robinson might affect his hardware business back home. A famous gesture of support from Pee Wee Reese, the Kentucky-born shortstop who reputedly threw his arm around Robinson on the field to quiet a hostile crowd, is presented as largely apocryphal, and an alleged strike by the Cardinals as very likely a media exaggeration. Eig s deflation of the extremes of both opposition and support seems more complexly true and does justice to the man rather than the legend.

Prologue     1
Jack Roosevelt Robinson     7
"Some Good Colored Players"     20
The Uprising     35
Opening Day     48
Up in Harlem     62
Praying for Base Hits     79
Cardinal Sins     89
The Great Road Trip     99
Tearing Up the Pea Patch     113
Pee Wee's Embrace     123
The Glorious Crusade     131
"A Smile of Almost Painful Joy"     141
Up and Down MacDonough Street     148
A Real Gone Guy     159
A Good Thing for Everybody     175
The Poison Pen     194
The Unbeatable Yanks     203
Dixie Walker's Dilemma     210
The Footsteps of Enos "Country" Slaughter     218
Shadow Dancing     234
"We Aren't Afraid"     246
"And the World Series Is Over!"     259
Epilogue     263
Acknowledgments     277
Notes     281
Index     311