During the 1947 baseball season, Jackie Robinson maintained complete composure in service of the greater good. Along with boxer Joe Louis, Robinson helped lay the integrationist groundwork for the civil rights movement that would follow in the 1950s. And for that, he's the only major league baseball player honored with a retired number by every franchise.
In the rush to celebrate Robinson the social iconic figure, some forget the greatness of Robinson the player. He was already 28 when he reached the majors, so his career totals don't pop the eyes. But Robinson was a perennial contender for the batting title, reached base more than 40 percent of the time, hit with terrific power for a middle infielder and panicked defenses with his daring base running.
"He beat me a thousand times in a thousand ways," wrote Leo Durocher, Robinson's one-time manager and later antagonist. "Getting a base hit, making a play, making the double play, hitting the home run, stealing a base, stealing home, upsetting my pitcher with his antics on the bases."
Here's how sports figures remember Robinson:
Don Newcombe
Pitcher Don Newcombe signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers about a week after Robinson, though he didn't reach the majors until 1949. Like many black players at the time, he wasn't sure why team president Branch Rickey chose Robinson.
"There were better ballplayers than Jackie," Newcombe remembered. "But as it turned out, he just had more going for him overall. He was educated. He had been a second lieutenant in the war. And he had been through the mess of bigotry before as an athlete at UCLA."
The young pitcher roomed with Robinson in 1949 but said he didn't get to know him well at first.
"Jackie had so much going on off the field that you hardly ever saw him in the room," Newcombe said. "People were just exorbitant in using Jackie's time. No one realizes how exhausted he was before he even got to the ballpark, but he never turned anyone down."
Newcombe often witnessed Robinson's courage firsthand. At the team's first game in St. Louis in 1949, a crowd of 10,000 blacks massed outside Sportsman's Park, unable to fit into the cramped section of bleachers reserved for non-white fans. Robinson said he, Newcombe and Roy Campanella wouldn't play that day if the stands weren't opened to black patrons. Cardinals officials opened the stands.
"He was doing these things long before any civil rights leaders came along," Newcombe said.
Years later, the pitcher hosted Martin Luther King Jr. for dinner about a month before King was assassinated. "He said to me, 'Don, you have no idea how much easier you and Jackie and Roy made it for me,'" Newcombe said. "Jackie feared no man. He did everything he could to make this a better country for people of our color."
And he could play a little baseball, too.
"He was the most electrifying player I've ever seen," Newcombe said. "He didn't have the strongest arm, he wasn't the fastest guy in the league or the most powerful. But he could find more ways to beat you than anybody. If you had a losing attitude, Jackie Robinson didn't want to have anything to do with you."
Patterson, the Orioles' center fielder, spent time as a kid in Florida and Georgia, Jackie Robinson's home state, but no matter where he was attending school, Patterson heard tales of Robinson.
"All the kids knew who he was and what he had accomplished," Patterson said.
The son of a former NFL player, Patterson grew up loving baseball. And he said he soaked in as much as he could about Robinson.
"I have learned about him ever since I was pretty much a little kid, whether it was from my parents or from grade school," Patterson said. "For what he had to go through, not only on the field but off the field, too, I don't know how he could have handled it.
"And then, on top of that, he had all that pressure to play well and we all know baseball is the most mental game out there."
When he heard that Major League Baseball was honoring the 60th anniversary of Robinson breaking the color barrier, Patterson wanted to be a part of it. He was asked to wear Robinson's No. 42 today, and he enthusiastically agreed.
"I think it is great," he said. "I think it is another way to recognize what Jackie Robinson did not only on the field for African-Americans, but what he did for society as well."
Cal Ripken Jr.
Ripken was born too late to have seen Robinson on the field. But the Hall of Famer-elect has devoted his post-playing career to spreading the gospel of baseball among children.
No one deserves more credit than Robinson for opening the game to a wider populace, the former Oriole said.
"Jackie Robinson was so courageous and opened so many doors in so many ways," he said. "We don't really know how great Jackie could have been, because he played with such a greater weight of responsibility on his shoulders. But we can all be thankful for him."
On Monday, Ripken announced that his foundation would contribute $1 million over the next two years to Major League Baseball's efforts to bring the game back to inner cities.
Bert Simmons
It was a night just after the 1947 season and the Jackie Robinson All-Stars made a barnstorming stop in Greensboro, N.C., to play a game against the best the region had to offer.
Simmons, a semipro player in his early 20s with a wicked curve and knuckleball, was chosen for a pitching staff that had to face the likes of Robinson, Roy Campanella, Satchel Paige, Monte Irvin and Larry Doby - all future Hall of Famers.
"These guys could play. To play against them was an honor," recalled Simmons, 82, who lives in Baltimore. "Robinson was the main attraction. The ballpark was packed. This was in the days before everyone had TV, so a lot of people had never seen him before."
Robinson's All-Stars won "something like 8-6. We managed to scratch out some runs; we made it respectable."
Simmons remembers talking baseball with Robinson, and still has a picture of some of the team posing on the steps of the administration building of North Carolina A&T; State University, where Simmons got his degree.
"Several players were put off by Robinson's selection. They felt he wasn't the best player. There were resentments," said Simmons, who played for several Negro leagues teams, including the Baltimore Elite Giants in 1950. "But he was a college athlete, an Army officer, someone with the intellect and fortitude to withstand difficult situations.
"Overall, I think [Branch] Rickey made a good decision. [Robinson] did a good job. The race is proud of him."
Roger Kahn
Kahn met Robinson as a Dodgers beat writer for the New York Herald Tribune and later immortalized him in his classic book The Boys of Summer. He shared memories of Robinson the player and Robinson the man.
Kahn said he spoke to a grade-school class a few years ago and faced questions about why Robinson didn't hit more home runs or steal more bases.
"He wasn't that type of player," he told the kids.
"He had that fiery spirit, and he seemed able to dominate the game," Kahn said. "He had a great mouth - one of the great bench jockeys of all time. And he was this great, commanding presence. The numbers just don't work in conveying the kind of player he was."
The writer and player became close, even publishing a magazine together for a time.
Kahn took his children to visit Robinson in 1971 when the Dodgers great was ailing. In Robinson's trophy case sat a football signed by all the members of the 1940 UCLA football team on which he starred.
"Oh, boy, Dad, a football," said Kahn's 7-year-old son, hinting that he wanted to play catch.
"That's not a ball that you throw around," the author replied.
But Robinson stepped in and insisted that father and son have a catch with his trophy. The ground was muddy from a recent rain and Kahn remembered urging his son not to drop a single pass.
"I don't think he did," he said with a chuckle.
Meanwhile, Robinson showed off every nook of his house to Kahn's older son, who dreamed of becoming an architect. And he tickled his young daughter.
"People talk of the great man and his feats, of course," Kahn said. "But I remember the Jack who was so kind to my children."
David Halberstam
Robinson's feat meant more to the country than to baseball, which would have integrated at some point without him, says Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. What baseball gave Robinson was a national platform to make his statement with his bat and his legs and his tremendous presence.
"In this most open arena, he triumphed against great pressure. ... He was out there, alone, and he passed a great test. ... If he had gone to Harvard Medical School or Yale Law School and been the first black there and done well, a few people would have known about it and that might have been a nice, small breakthrough.
"All the things that were being said about blacks at that time - they weren't good enough, they weren't tough enough, they weren't smart enough, that they would fold in the clutch - were a cruel thing. ... He overcame and destroyed all these cliches. He ended all those lies and he did so in a public arena that everyone, every schoolchild, every adult, could understand."
With the number of African-American ballplayers declining in the major leagues, does baseball need another Robinson?
"It's another time and another era," Halberstam said. "The color line has been broken. It's up to young people to do what they want to do. It doesn't need another Jackie Robinson; it needs more people who appreciate what Jackie Robinson did."
Len Elmore
Former University of Maryland and NBA basketball star Elmore, now a TV analyst and attorney, grew up in New York, where his baseball awakening occurred in 1958 when he was 6 years old at a game between a Negro leagues team and a Cuban all-star squad. He had just missed Robinson's career; the Dodgers and Giants had recently left for the West Coast, and Elmore, now 55, fancied the powerhouse Yankees, who went on to beat the Braves in a comeback World Series.
"Meanwhile, my grandparents were die-hard Dodger fans because of Jackie Robinson, and the Yankees had a pretty dismal record with black players then," Elmore said. "But here I am, 6 years old, and I didn't understand, so my grandmother would gently chastise me and my grandfather would patiently explain the history of Jackie Robinson."
It was in listening to his grandfather's stories, Elmore said, that "it became engrained in me the courage and the restraint and the discipline it took for Jackie Robinson to accomplish what he did." In turn, Elmore has passed that legacy to his two teenage sons.
Robinson's example bridged to Elmore's experience as an All-America player at Maryland. When the Terrapins traveled Tobacco Road in the early 1970s, often with several black players on the court, Elmore recalled, "You'd hear things from the stands."
"But by applying those qualities that Jackie Robinson had shown, we were able to win respect just by playing the game," Elmore said. "In doing that, we were not only making our parents proud, but we hoped that it would make Jackie Robinson proud. And, for me, that's where it hit home."
Lenny Moore
Moore was an impressionable 13-year-old growing up in Reading, Pa., when Robinson broke major league baseball's color barrier in 1947.
"I was just happy because he was black," Moore said last week. "I didn't know anything about him."
Moore would learn a lot about - and from - Robinson in the ensuing years. He watched Robinson's trial by fire and learned how to be an African-American in a white man's world, succeeding when so many wanted him to fail.
Today, Moore, 73, calls Robinson the No. 1 role model for his Hall of Fame career in the NFL with the Baltimore Colts. The two athletes grew close, having traveled the same path.
"He was a dear friend," Moore said. "Not only did I admire him, I held him in the highest esteem [because] he was such a beautiful human being."
When Moore made his way to Penn State and ultimately Baltimore, he gained appreciation for the price Robinson paid to be a pioneer.
"As I started moving up in football, I often thought, 'How in the hell did he handle it?' Because the older I got, the more I started running into racism. ... Years later, I asked him. He said, 'Lenny, there were times I don't know myself because there were incidents where I felt the top of my head was coming off. How I cooled it, I can't tell you.' "
Robinson not only befriended Moore, but he also advised him often.
"I was listening and holding on to every word when he was telling me to be careful," Moore said. "The things he told me, I found to be absolutely true, the things I would run into."
Sun reporters Childs Walker, Candus Thomson, Bill Ordine, Ken Murray and Dan Connolly contributed to this article.