"42" and the Search for a Good Life

            In one scene, a ballplayer for the Giants gashes Jackie Robinson’s leg with his spikes as he rounds first base. Later, lying on a table after the team surgeon has repaired the wound, Robinson asks Branch Rickey, “Mr. Rickey, why are you doing this?” Rickey is the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the one who has taken the risk of opening baseball to African Americans. It is about 1948. Robinson has already endured physical injury, when a Pirates pitcher beaned him, and intense verbal assaults. A PG-13 rating keeps most obscenities out of hearing range, which is good, because their absence foregrounds the worst thing Robinson could have heard, and he heard it often: “You don’t belong here.”

            By this time, Rickey has indicated several reasons why he pulled Robinson onto the team. Now he starts on a new one, saying, “I love this game.” Robinson interrupts him: “No, Mr. Rickey. Why are you doing this?” To answer him, Rickey goes back to his youth, telling the story of a college team he played on that included a talented black catcher. In later years he saw that man ruined because of the color of his skin. This was the beginning of what he was trying to accomplish by drafting Robinson.

            Watching the scene, I had two thoughts. First, I wondered whether every movie has one turn of dialogue which is its center point and fulcrum. Second, I began to realize that this movie was really about Branch Rickey. It was really about white America’s nagging worry that it will never undo the wrong of slavery.

            Robin W. Lovin begins Christian Ethics: An Essential Guide (2000) with a discussion of the good life, a concept I had always related to material possessions and success. Actually, it goes back to Aristotle’s formulation of ethics, where he wrote on the first page: “It is thought that every activity, artistic or scientific, in fact every deliberate action or pursuit, has for its object the attainment of some good. We may therefore assent to the view which has been expressed that ‘the good’ is ‘that at which all things aim.’” Lovin continues: There are what “the philosophers call ‘basic goods,’ meaning that they are essential to almost every idea of a good life that we can imagine” (25). They include food, clothing, shelter and medical care when we are ill. We also need education and opportunities for employment.

            “42” demonstrates that, as the more basic goods are acquired, we can strive for loftier ones. It depicts Jackie Robinson’s capacity to meet the challenge set before him as grounded in the goods of courage and self-respect. Branch Rickey had acquired courage as well, but also power; he could afford to step into the fray of racial injustice. Now he needed the self-respect that would come with closing the moral gap that opened in his life when he was young. He must have said to himself then, “Someday I’ll do something about this.”

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