His significance can never and should never be erased.
Breaking the color barrier in baseball in itself is not political.
Jesse Owens winning 4 Gold Medals in itself was not political.
Jack Johnson becoming the 1st Black Boxing Heavyweight Champ in itself was not political.
They all had political ramifications.
They all challenged the status quo of racial barriers to fair play, race relations and civil rights.
That should always be acknowledged and never forgotten.
They shouldn’t be used as an excuse to push political agendas on sports shows on national television to an audience there to consume sports content.
What in the ever-loving fuck is this babybrained shit. “Breaking the color barrier in baseball in itself was not political”? Excuse me? How? Did Oscar Charleston and Satchel Page and Josh Gibson and the litany of other all-time great Negro Leaguers not make the major leagues because of merit? Should Jackie Robinson not have pushed his political agenda on a 1947 sports fandom watching sports so they can consume sports content?
Josh Gibson was known as “the Black Babe Ruth” and he never played in the major leagues, but MLB has recognized his Negro League stats, and he is baseball’s current all-time leader in batting average and slugging percentage. By some accounts, Gibson hit 1,000 home runs and is easily the all-time home run king. Josh Gibson died the same year that Robinson broke baseball’s modern day color barrier, and the lines drawn between their careers in different leagues are expressly political. I qualify that sentence with “modern day” because Jackie Robinson wasn’t actually major league baseball’s first Black player. John W. “Bud” Fowler was possibly the first to break baseball’s color barrier for New Castle, Pennsylvania in 1878 depending on your definition of “major.”
As the National Museum of African American History & Culture writes, “Three years later, however, Moses Fleetwood Walker joined the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association. The American Association at the time was considered to be a ‘major’ league, and as such, Walker is considered by many of the sport’s historians to be the first African American to break the major league baseball color barrier.” Walker was far from alone, as many other Black men like Frank Grant, George Washington Stovey and Robert Higgins also played major league baseball well before Jackie Robinson was even born.
So explain to me how Robinson breaking a color barrier that was already broken at the infancy of baseball in America, a barrier that was reestablished by a political project to segregate the United States like what Trump is doing right now, is not political. The only logic here to extrapolate from RGIII’s illogic is that the all-timers like Josh Gibson just couldn’t cut it in a league where Babe Ruth took Wally Pipp’s home run record of 12 to 54 in just a few years because he and the handful of other greats of his time realized that hitting with your weight on your back foot is actually how you play baseball. Not signing Josh Gibson to major league baseball was a political decision that cost teams games.
Satchel Paige is an even more devastating example to RGIII’s no politics safe space, as he ended his career in Major League Baseball, signing with the Cleveland Indians the year after Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. Does RGIII think that 1934 Satchel Paige who led the Negro Leagues in strikeout to walk ratio (5.07), strikeouts per nine innings (9.4), hits per nine innings (6), WHIP (0.872), and FIP (1.93) wasn’t good enough to make the big leagues, but 41-year-old Satchel Pagie was? Where in the world does RGIII think politics stops in this entire era of desegregating baseball? Jackie Robinson stepped on to Ebbets Field in 1947 because of politics, not sports. Period.
RGIII Should Know Better
If Robert Griffin III had come up in a time before Marvin Briscoe broke the NFL quarterbacking color barrier in 1968 for my beloved Denver Broncos, RGIII would probably have been converted to a wide receiver before he ever took a snap under center, because the most important position in sports has long been considered a “cerebral” one by football coaches that “athletic” Black players were unsuited to play. RGIII probably would have been a great wide receiver because he was an absurd all-timer of an athlete who could have played any position in any sport (he was accomplished enough in high school track he likely could have run at the Olympics), but he was a terrific quarterback before he got hurt, and it was the position he should have played. The reason he had that opportunity was because of people like Doug Williams who paved the way for him and proved that this cerebral nonsense was not only racist bullshit that wasn’t true, but it became clear it cost teams games after Williams became the first Black Super Bowl-winning quarterback for RGIII’s own Washington franchise.
That’s politics, not sports, and RGIII himself was even a political pioneer in his own respect, as his assault on the NFL alongside Cam Newton and Colin Kaepernick a decade and a half ago birthed this modern, more fun era of NFL quarterbacking where it is not seen as a big deal that the NFL’s best quarterback is biracial while another of the NFL’s “big four” QB’s is Black. A Black quarterback who fell in the 2018 draft due to concerns that echoed classic racist tropes around intellect and his ability to command an NFL offense, even though Lamar Jackson’s esteemed college career in a pro-style offense at Louisville proved otherwise. Jackson’s draft night fall is another in an endless line of examples over the last century of how politics can have a bigger impact on sports than sports can, especially when it comes to America’s longstanding issues with race.
Doug Williams was not the first Black Super Bowl caliber quarterback the same way that Jackie Robinson was not the first major league caliber Black baseball player the same way that Colin Kaepernick was not the first Black quarterback capable of operating a modern, more mobile quarterbacking offense in the NFL. Like the “cerebral” bullshit of yore, mobile quarterback-driven offenses like the one RGIII dazzled the league with were considered beneath the NFL because the faster defenders would shut them down whereas in college, you can get away with leaning on players’ athleticism more. This is the league-wide thinking that led to multiple time MVP Lamar Jackson’s fall in the draft. While the “NFL defenders are too fast” aspect of this concern will forever be true to a degree, Jalen Hurts, a Black quarterback who many would describe as run-first in a run-first offense just won Super Bowl MVP, so you decide how true that is in this rapidly changing NFL world.
From a sports perspective, you simply cannot separate politics from any Black pioneers’ play on the field because doing so diminishes the play of all the Black players who were denied a spot before them, as posts like RGIII’s imply that something other than racism kept them off the field. This is America, as the saying goes, and the pro sports leagues granted monopoly exemptions by Congress have always been impacted by the political structures and dynamics that govern our politics. Racism has cost teams more wins than any other self-inflicted wound in the history of sports.
Ending With a Middle School History Lesson
The Jesse Owens part of his post should not go unnoticed. He needs to repost that one as its own tweet so we can store it in a museum for future generations to understand how America collapsed. Very simple question for RGIII, much easier than the one I opened with: is war political?
If war is not political, then I genuinely do not know what people like RGIII think that word means. If you are unfamiliar with the story of Jesse Owens, he is another Jackie Robinson-era hero who helped desegregate sports by kicking the Nazis asses at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. America learned then something that it needs to learn again: we like beating Nazis more than we like being racist. You can wrap Robinson’s story up in slash lines and MVPs and other sports-coded stuff to try to obscure the truth of why Robinson resonates with the public more than say, Willie Mays, but Jesse Owens’ athletic greatness is impossible to split from politics and only people who want to spend their lives actively sticking their heads in the sand could possibly think this.
ESPN described Owens’ Olympic performance as such in the second paragraph of this 2000 story: “In one week in the summer of 1936, on the sacred soil of the Fatherland, the master athlete humiliated the master race. Owens’ story is one of a high-profile sports star making a statement that transcended athletics, spilling over into the world of global politics.” Owens’ athletic dominance itself at the 1936 Olympics was a political rebuke of Nazi ideology, and it was interpreted as such at the time.
Jesse Owens was not political is in the running for the dumbest political statement I have ever heard. It is tantamount to saying “my feet staying on the ground isn’t in itself about gravity.” It is the kind of thinking that can only come from a wholly broken populace showing all the signs of late-stage empire collapse the hubristic Romans laid out for us centuries ago. The triumphs of political victories won by Jackie Robinson and Jesse Owens and Moses Fleetwood Walker and Jack Johnson built the ground that all of us stand on today–ground that is now eroding beneath us at a rapid pace. Politics touches every part of our lives whether we like it or not, and the Trump administration is doing everything they can to ensure that RGIII and other ignorant and comfortable Americans like him are about to get a literal crash course in that lesson. As Jackie Robinson famously said, “life is not a spectator sport…If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re escaping your life.”
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