Mickey Z

Cool Observer

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Sports fans of the world...uh, unite?

April 15 marks sixty years since Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line. Amid all the hoopla, I doubt you’ll hear much about Lester Rodney. So, here’s a link to an old article of mine...just in case.

Lester Rodney was Sports Editor at the Daily Worker for 25 years. When the communist newspaper first launched its sports section in 1935, it did so with the following explanation:

“It happens that baseball is the American national game. I would say that nine out of every ten America workers follow it intensely, as well as other sports. You can condemn them for it, if you are built that way, and you can call baseball a form of bourgeois opium for the masses. But that doesn’t get around the fact that...the vast ocean of Americans of whom we are yet a minority, adore baseball. Are we going to maintain our isolation and make Americans stop their baseball before we will condescend to explain Communism to them? When you run the news of a strike alongside the news of a baseball game, you are making Americans workers feel at home. It gives them the feeling that Communism is nothing strange or foreign. Let’s loosen up. Let’s prove that one can be a human being as well as a Communist.”