ABSTRACT
Among the black baseball players who first broke baseball's color barrier in the late 1940s and successfully integrated America's peculiar national pastime, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Monte Irvin stand out for their Hall of Fame abilities, for the significance of their contributions to integrated baseball and to the larger civil rights battles they participated in beyond their periods of play, and for the differing patterns their lives provide as exemplary or symbolic heroes. Their lives can be interpreted variously. One way is to see Robinson as a hero who triumphed over racism by overcoming its obstacles, and who then died prematurely and tormented, a late victim and sacrifice to the pressures he had endured in his struggles. Roger Angell depicts this Jackie Robinson in Five Seasons, describing him crazily shouting obscenities on the field one day, "without warning" and for no immediate reason either his teammates or the opposition or the umpires could determine. "After that moment, I knew that we had asked him to do too much for us," Angell says. I
One of Robinson's autobiographical books was angrily and accurately titled I Never Had It Made. The title of Roy Campanella's autobiography, It's Good to Be Alive, similarly suggests Campanella's perceived role as an American hero, which is, in the classic sense, comic, for his story portrays a happy man raised high and then smashed as low into the dust as humanly possible without destroying him completely. In fact, showing a man so crushed that death would seem deliverance, Campanella then triumphs over the kinds of horrors Job endured, which reaffirms the greatness and goodness of life. Arguably the most skilled catcher of his day, he lived through
the nearly total paralysis of his body at the end of his baseball career, and experienced--ils did Robinson-the sad public fall from grace of at least one of his children, and yet is revered as one who did not succumb to adversity, whose cry at the end of the story of his life that "It's good to be alive" (p. 215) incredibly enough seems supported by his own triumphant, spiritual vitality.
