By Jim Becker

updated 1:46 p.m. ET April 13, 2007

EDITOR'S NOTE: Jim Becker covered sports and news for the AP for a quarter of a century. Now retired in Hawaii, he manages to see at least a dozen major league games every year.

On a chilly, gray, early spring day, a black man in a sparkling white baseball uniform walked, alone, from the dugout onto the green grass of Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field.

It was April l5, l947, and Jackie Robinson was about to break the shameful color line in major league baseball, a feat that would have a lasting impact on sports and society.

There was a feel of history in the air overlaid, perhaps oddly, by a sense of somewhat calculated nonchalance.

I was standing by the batting cage along with a handful of other sports reporters when Robinson strode onto the field with that slightly pigeon-toed walk of the natural athlete.

About 10,000 of a crowd that would swell to almost 26,000 at the tidy old park, many of them black, had gathered well before game time. They made no special sound when Robinson appeared. No cameras flashed. Television was in its infancy, and there were no TV cameras on hand.

It was as if all of us — writers, fans and players on both teams, the Dodgers and the visiting Boston Braves — had come to an unspoken agreement to behave as though it was just another opening day at the ballpark. And, by the way, a black man played for the Dodgers.

There were good reasons for this. The writers knew that the owners of the other l5 teams in the major leagues had voted unanimously to oppose the introduction of a black player.

We knew that Branch Rickey, the Dodgers’ major-domo who had signed Robinson against all opposition to a minor league contract the year before (he was the Most Valuable Player in the International League in l946), had hoped his Brooklyn players would have been impressed by Robinson’s obvious talent to ask that he be added to the roster. Instead Rickey had been greeted with a petition signed by some key players — with the conspicuous exception of captain and shortstop, PeeWee Reese, a Kentuckian — that they did not want to play with a black man. We had heard rumors that at least one national league team was organizing a strike rather than play against Robinson.

JACKIE ROBINSON, 60 YEARS LATER Brooklyn Dodger second baseman broke color line on April 15, 1947 Baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson Day Ventre: Jackie's legacy is far beyond baseball Wilbon: Sad that blacks have lost interest Newsweek: The real man behind the myth Opinion: Make tribute a lasting appreciation Opinion: Jackie would have ignored Imus The Grapevine: How do blacks stand in MLB? Milestone debut flew under national radar How debut was covered by national media

It was a time in our country when in many places blacks couldn’t stay at the same hotel as whites, eat in the same restaurants, attend the same movie theaters or even drink from the same water fountains in the South. They rode in the back of the bus there.

Schools were segregated in the South, where the majority of major league players had grown up. So were neighborhoods, north and south, some by law, others by tacit agreement.

It was into this atmosphere that the black man in the dazzling white uniform strode, alone, carrying for all of us the banner of decency and dignity and fair play that is the American promise.

There is no rooting in the press box, but many of us in it that day, like Robinson, had served in the Armed Forces and had just helped to defeat Hitler and thought it would be a good idea to defeat Hitlerism at home.

So those of us assigned to cover the game seemed to be of one mind that to turn this day of uncommon courage into a media circus would be both unseemly and unfair.

In the Dodger clubhouse before the game we talked to Robinson one at a time, and then only after interviewing a couple of veteran players first. Robinson said he was nervous, as he always was before a big game, but he was sure the feeling would wear off when the game started. He said he had been made to feel welcome by his new teammates, which may or may not have been true.

On the field Robinson was carrying, somewhat awkwardly, an unfamiliar first baseman’s mitt. A middle infielder by trade, he played first for the Dodgers that season.

Robinson glanced around for a few seconds, then picked up a baseball and began playing catch with a utility outfielder named Al Gionfriddo, who would make one of the most famous catches in World Series history that fall, and then disappear from the major leagues.

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