Adults crush kids’ dreams

By Don Wycliff

Chicago Tribune

I guess I knew it was coming. I had seen reporter Mark Konkol’s stories in DNAinfo Chicago about the controversy over potential rules violations by the Jackie Robinson West All-Stars, the team that brought us all such pride and happiness last summer as it marched to a U.S. championship and the finals of the Little League World Series.

But it still hit me like a sledgehammer when I read the bulletin on my cellphone saying the team had been stripped of its title and all of its victories.

I cried. For the kids. For the community. For myself.

When I was a kid in the 1950s in Texas and Kentucky, we played baseball for hours every available day. America’s pastime was our daily delight.

And as we would take the field — in somebody’s yard or at a local park — we would each shout out which of our big league idols we were that day.

“I’m Jackie Robison!” was always the most commonly heard cry. (For some reason we always elided the “n” in the middle of his last name.) The only name that even came close in popularity was that of Willie Mays.

Jackie Robinson was the embodiment of all our pride and hopes and ambitions. He was for our generation what Joe Louis and Jesse Owens had been for an earlier generation of black youth — a hero who had crashed through every barrier white society had erected and forced it to acknowledge his greatness. He was our champion.

Worthy of the name

So the choice of Jackie Robinson’s name for the Chicago Little League team was freighted with significance for me, and, I suspect, for many other black men of my generation. And when those kids performed with such grit and skill — and success — my heart soared. Surely, I felt, these kids are worthy of that name on their uniforms: “Jackie Robinson.”

This scandal — this fraud — in no way diminishes those kids. They played their hearts out, and they deserved better than this belated disgrace.

As for the adults who perpetrated the fraud, I don’t know why they did what they did. They’ll have to answer to their own consciences for it. But I have to tell them that I am taking this thing very, very personally, because, still, after 60-some years, “I’m Jackie Robison!”

Don Wycliff is a former journalist and editor of the book “Black Domers: Seventy Years at Notre Dame.” He wrote this for the Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.