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" Today, April 15, is Jackie Robinson Day in Major League Baseball. Today, ballplayers throughout the sport will wear number 42 \u2014 the only number retired league-wide \u2014 to commemorate Robinson&amp;#039;s momentous debut in 1947. Herewith, from our archives, a 1997 story by Mike Lupica about Robinson, fifty years after he broke baseball&amp;#039;s color barrier.  Published in the April 1997 issue There should be a shrine at this corner of Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, but there is a housing project instead. Next to the manager&amp;#039;s office, hidden by some shrubbery, there is the shape of a baseball, seams and all, carved in cement, and these words underneath it: THIS IS THE FORMER SITE OF EBBETS FIELD. Once, this place was everything in Brooklyn \u2014 the capital of the borough, one of the capitals of baseball. Once, this corner was one of the most famous and romantic corners of sports, because the Dodgers played here. Because Jack Roosevelt Robinson stepped onto a ball field here in the spring of 1947 and played a game of baseball. Now there is just a name on the apartment building and a baseball next to the manager&amp;#039;s office and the American flag flying overhead, the way it once did over Robinson and all of baseball. Fifty years later, it does not seem like enough, except that now John Mickens came walking up Bedford Avenue from Empire Boulevard in Brooklyn, walking slowly against a cold, hard morning wind. Some kids passed the old man by, not noticing him, most of them black, many of them from the Ebbets Fields Apartments, wearing their oversize parkas and Nike wool caps. They had only heard about the little ballpark that once stood here, the history that was made here. But they all knew the name Jackie Robinson. And John Mickens, seventy-seven, who seemed to walk out of the past on this morning, brought Robinson with him and the whole grand spring of 1947 as well. Now Ebbets Field was back on Bedford Avenue. Mickens, a proud Robinson fan, a proud black man from the Class of &amp;#039;47, did that. &amp;quot;I wasn&amp;#039;t there the very first day, that I recall,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I must&amp;#039;ve been working. But I got there first chance I could, you better believe that.&amp;quot; John Mickens was a furrier then with the New York Auction Company. He said he has lived in Brooklyn just about his whole life, lived here and raised a family here. His son, Frank, is now the principal of Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, one of the most noted educators in all of New York; the elder Mickens gave me his son&amp;#039;s name before he gave me his own. John Mickens wore an old-fashioned cloth cap pulled down close to his eyes. The eyes smiled now. He said that where we were standing was where right field used to be, and he pointed to his left to where left field had been. Pointing this way and that in what was now April of 1947. &amp;quot;I remember the crowds,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;big crowds every day coming to see Jackie. I remember buses from out of town, unloading black folks who had come from here and there and everywhere to watch him play. And the people from Brooklyn, all colors, walking across the park to come see the ball game. All that happening right here where we&amp;#039;re standing now.&amp;quot; Mickens stopped, as if to catch his breath. &amp;quot;It doesn&amp;#039;t seem like it&amp;#039;s been that long,&amp;quot; he said quietly. He closed his eyes, thinking about something, and said, &amp;quot;How long is it that O&amp;#039;Malley&amp;#039;s been gone out from here?&amp;quot; He was told Walter O&amp;#039;Malley left Brooklyn with the Dodgers after 1957. &amp;quot;Duke Snider could hit those home runs right out onto Bedford Avenue \u2014 you ever hear about that?&amp;quot; he said. Then he was talking about Jackie Robinson again, trying to remember what a general-admission ticket cost then. Maybe it was sixty cents, maybe it was a dollar and a quarter. &amp;quot;But we would&amp;#039;ve paid anything, whatever we could afford,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Because we knew that if we were in the ballpark, we were a part of something.&amp;quot; Sometimes, the old man said, he would bring a milk crate and move down closer to the field, closer to the action, setting the crate down in the aisle. &amp;quot;Anywhere between first and third,&amp;quot; he said. After a lifetime in Brooklyn, he pronounced it &amp;quot;toid,&amp;quot; of course. &amp;quot;And every day was exciting,&amp;quot; John Mickens said. &amp;quot;Every single day. Oh, you never saw a ballplayer like this, least not in Ebbets Field. I&amp;#039;d been going to Negro League games before that, over to [Brooklyn&amp;#039;s] Dexter Park. Seen all the big names. Even there, you couldn&amp;#039;t see anybody like Jackie Robinson in your life. Every day, he was daring. He&amp;#039;d get on first base, and it was electrifying.&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;It was as if Robinson didn&amp;#039;t even want to be bothered with first base,&amp;quot; my friend Jimmy Breslin told me once. &amp;quot;He would get there and immediately start walking toward second and drive them all absolutely crazy.&amp;quot;) April of 1947 certainly was electrifying \u2014 for John Mickens and all the people on those buses. Mickens was twenty-seven that spring. He was a grown man who still loved baseball, and there was a part of him, he said, that wondered if black ballplayers would ever make it out of Dexter Park, where right field was known as Horse Heaven, because there was a steep incline supposedly caused by that part of the field that was built over the actual grave of a horse. Only now the Dodgers&amp;#039; president, Branch Rickey, had signed Jackie Robinson, and Robinson had come out of the minor leagues to the Dodgers, and nothing would ever be the same in baseball, or sports, or the country itself. Robinson and his wife, Rachel, began the year in a hotel in Manhattan, but soon after that first season started, they moved to Brooklyn, to McDonough Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Robinson wasn&amp;#039;t just a teammate to the white ballplayers on the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was a neighbor to John Mickens. That is always the most powerful magic \u2014 or magnet \u2014 of sports: fans and ballplayers, all in it together. Sports at its best takes big places and makes them feel like small towns. It was different in Brooklyn in 1947. Suddenly, this enormous borough became even bigger, because Jackie Robinson was playing first base at Ebbets Field. &amp;quot;To see the world change,&amp;quot; John Mickens said, fifty years later, &amp;quot;in front of your eyes...&amp;quot; He was not pausing just to catch his breath now but to collect himself. This was a powerful place for him. These were powerful memories at the corner of Bedford Avenue. &amp;quot;How can I describe this to you so you understand?&amp;quot; the old man said. &amp;quot;Jackie Robinson was it. You understand? He was it.&amp;quot; Jackie Robinson&amp;#039;s career was too short; he retired at the end of the 1956 season, refusing to be traded to the crosstown New York Giants. There were some lines even Jackie Robinson would not cross. His life ended much too soon as well; Robinson died in 1972, at the age of fifty-three. It was six years before his daughter, Sharon Robinson, gave birth to a son, Jesse. Jesse Simms is a high school senior now at the King &amp;amp;amp; Low-Heywood Thomas School in Stanford, Connecticut. He is a football player, not a baseball player. He weighs 270 pounds, and near the end of the baseball season marking the fiftieth anniversary of his grandfather&amp;#039;s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jesse Simms will enroll at his grandfather&amp;#039;s university, UCLA, on a football scholarship. Before Jackie Robinson made history in baseball, he had already made sports history at UCLA as the school&amp;#039;s first \u2014 and only \u2014 four-letter man. In addition to baseball \u2014 the diamond where UCLA plays features a statue of Robinson and is called Jackie Robinson Stadium \u2014 he was also a star in football, basketball, and track. If he had had the time, he could have letter in tennis, in which he excelled as well. All this time later, his grandson will continue the Robinson legacy at the school. He is so big and so gifted at football, played so many positions in high school, he could end up a linebacker, defensive lineman, tight end, or fullback. He is a handsome, friendly kid, his grandfather easily seen in his round, open face. He sits in the office of his high school&amp;#039;s football coach, Al Orio, wearing a black leather jacket and a black turtleneck, and he seems to take up half the office, constantly switching positions to fit himself into a small folding chair. &amp;quot;Everybody has a story about my grandfather,&amp;quot; he says. His voice is not as high-pitched as his grandfather&amp;#039;s, but it is in the neighborhood. &amp;quot;The first time I met [legendary Penn State football coach] Joe Paterno, he got so excited, he couldn&amp;#039;t wait to tell me about sneaking into Ebbets Field as a kid, the first time he got to watch my grandfather play ball.&amp;quot; Jesse Simms smiles at someone else&amp;#039;s memory. &amp;quot;I get a lot of that,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve obviously learned so much about him from stories my family has told me, my grandma [Rachel Robinson, Jackie&amp;#039;s widow] and my mom. But as I go through life, I see how many people my grandfather touched, how many stories there are. &amp;quot;Everywhere my grandfather was, everyone he touched, those people want to claim him,&amp;quot; Jesse Simms says. &amp;quot;I met someone from Pasadena Junior College, where my grandfather went before UCLA, and they&amp;#039;ll say, &amp;#039;This was your grandfather&amp;#039;s school.&amp;#039; My grandma took me up to Montreal last year when the Expos wanted to honor him [Robinson played minor-league baseball in Montreal before he was sent to the Dodgers], and Montreal claimed him. He touched so many people in such a short time.&amp;quot; Jesse Simms nods and says, &amp;quot;I wish he could have lived long enough that I could have known myself.&amp;quot; Because his last name is not Robinson, not even classmates knew about his family background until Jesse Simms because a star football player his junior year. His jersey number for games was 31, except when Coach Orio would move him into the offensive line. In practice, though, he wore 42, Jackie Robinson&amp;#039;s number. &amp;quot;When some of the first stories started to get into the paper,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;even my best friends would come up and say, &amp;#039;How come you didn&amp;#039;t tell me you were Jackie Robinson&amp;#039;s grandson?&amp;#039; But it worked out well this way. I had a chance to establish myself as a person, make a little bit of a name for myself, before people started to make the connection.&amp;quot; Coach Orio says, &amp;quot;No one could have handled [being Jackie Robinson&amp;#039;s grandson] better than this kid right here has.&amp;quot; Jesse Simms made up his mind early that he wanted to go to college in California. He considered UCLA (his father, Robert, had been a teammate of UCLA coach Bob Toledo&amp;#039;s at San Francisco State), the University of California at Berkeley, and even UCLA&amp;#039;s archrival, USC. As he went through the recruiting process, he says, he felt no emotional ties to UCLA, despite his grandfather&amp;#039;s historic legacy there. But from the start, it was clear that he was not just another recruit at UCLA, not just another star football player from back east. He was a member of one of the first families of American sports. He was Jack Roosevelt Robinson&amp;#039;s grandson, Rachel Robinson&amp;#039;s grandson. At UCLA, they wanted the young man as much as they wanted the young player. &amp;quot;I was leaning toward UCLA anyway,&amp;quot; Simms says. &amp;quot;But this conversation [with UCLA vice-chancellor Winston Doby] clinched it. Mr. Doby told me this wasn&amp;#039;t just about football; it was about everything my grandfather stood for. And somehow, his words really hit home. I was hooked after that, my mother was hooked, my grandmother was hooked. If this was another way for me to continue his legacy, so be it. I am his grandson. I am always going to be his grandson. I&amp;#039;m going to UCLA knowing that there&amp;#039;s no way to avoid the added expectations of being his grandson. But I&amp;#039;m willing to rise to the occasion. Character must run in the family. &amp;quot;I grew up in the system,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I really think of it that way. My grandfather&amp;#039;s values were passed on to my mother; she passed them on to me. And if there was one thing that has been drilled into me about Jackie Robinson for as long as I can remember, it is that family was more important to him than anything else. I learned that about him before I even learned all the baseball stuff.&amp;quot; Jesse Simms knows there will be more interviews like this as the baseball season approaches. Throughout the year, there will be ceremonies honoring his grandfather, many of which he will attend with his mother and his grandmother, whom he refers to as &amp;quot;my second mother.&amp;quot; The young man says he is ready for all of it. &amp;quot;I know I have a responsibility to the Robinson family that I will carry with me the rest of my life,&amp;quot; Jesse Simms says. &amp;quot;I know I&amp;#039;m going to be more in public from now on.&amp;quot; Jackie Robinson&amp;#039;s grandson smiles. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll try to make him proud,&amp;quot; he says. Al Orio, his football coach, turns to him: &amp;quot;Oh, I believe you already have.&amp;quot; There have been other black athletes who made a difference. Joe Louis did in the thirties, and Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe helped redefine America in the sixties. And more than twenty years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball, Curt Flood challenged the sport&amp;#039;s reserve clause and became the true father of free agency. Flood sued baseball and sacrificed his own career in the process and is one of the few who could ever be discussed in Robinson&amp;#039;s weight class. Robinson is always remembered differently, though. There was always this question later: What if he had failed? But, of course, he did not. Before long, it wasn&amp;#039;t just Jackie Robinson who was something to see at Ebbets Field; it was Willie Mays at the Polo Grounds, and then Henry Aaron in Milwaukee. It took too long in baseball, and Robinson did not live long enough to see it, but there would be black managers and black general managers, and black coaches in football and basketball. Not enough, not fast enough. But change finally came to sports the way it came to the country. Jackie Robinson played ten years in the major leagues, batted .311 for his career, appeared in six World Series, led the league twice in steals, stole home nineteen times (including once in the 1955 Series), and was named National League Most Valuable Player in 1949 after batting .342 and knocking in 124 runs. He played with flash and arrogance and made ferocity an art. People still talk about how in the 1947 World Series, Yogi Berra \u2014 a kid himself then \u2014 was taken out from behind the plate because what Robinson was doing on the base paths was driving Berra out of his mind. It wasn&amp;#039;t just catchers; he tormented pitchers and scared the daylights out of anybody who had to stand in at second base when he was stealing or trying to break up a double play. Baseball did not look the same after Jackie Robinson. It was so much more than the color of his skin. Jackie Robinson was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1962 and died ten years later. He testified for Curt Flood, spoke out in the sixties against Muhammad Ali&amp;#039;s refusal to be drafted. He was complicated and completely himself until the end. And now, fifty years later, he has finally made it onto a Wheaties box and will be the central figure of this baseball season. &amp;quot;What they will talk about all year,&amp;quot; says Frank Mickens, &amp;quot;is what my father has been telling me about Jackie Robinson my whole life.&amp;quot; John Mickens took his son, born in 1946, to his first Dodgers game in the early fifties. Before long, they were making the trip by subway to see Mays go against Robinson at the Polo Grounds. And even after Ebbets Field had been leveled by a wrecking ball, it happened that John Mickens moved his family to the apartments that were built on the site. &amp;quot;He was proud of the address,&amp;quot; Frank Mickens says.  If you walk down behind the Ebbets Field Apartments toward Prospect Park, you come to Sullivan Place, and there to the right is Jackie Robinson Middle School 320. From the outside, it is a run-down building in what has become a run-down neighborhood. And on the side of a wall facing Empire Boulevard is a mural of Robinson. The backdrop is bright yellow, so you can see it from blocks away. There are three drawings of the most famous Brooklyn Dodger of them all. One is of his face; another has him in a fielding position. The third shows Robinson in his batting follow-through, wearing number 42 forever. Underneath it is a drawing of the Hall of Fame plaque that hangs in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Above the plaque are these words: FRIEND. LEADER. FATHER. ATHLETE. HUMANITARIAN. BUSINESSMAN. And finally, this: PIONEER. One of the teachers at Jackie Robinson 320 comes out the door as I stand in front of the mural. She smiles when asked her name and says, &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s just have the only name be Mr. Robinson&amp;#039;s.&amp;quot; I ask if the students at this school know why the school was named after Mr. Robinson. &amp;quot;They are told as soon as they get here,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;They are told that a school named after a baseball player now stands in what was once a parking lot for the ballpark here. They are told why Mr. Robinson was important. What they do with that knowledge is up to them.&amp;quot; She smiles again and says, &amp;quot;And from what I know, that is exactly the way he would want it.&amp;quot; I had been directed to the school, and the mural, by John Mickens. He had pointed in the direction of Sullivan Place the way he had pointed to right field and left and the place on Bedford Avenue where Duke Snider, the Duke of Flatbush, used to hit home runs into the streets. On this morning fifty years later, Mickens could see Robinson and those first April afternoons so clearly, the way he could see the people getting off the buses, coming across Prospect Park, turning the little ballpark that once stood here into the most exciting baseball place in the world. John Mickens said he did not have to walk down to the school mural to see an image of Jackie Robinson. He just pointed to his head. &amp;quot;I got it all saved,&amp;quot; the old man said. &amp;quot;I got Jackie Robinson right up here.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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