Lest We Forget, Jackie Robinson Was Also a Great Football Player

Robinson left UCLA before he graduated to take a position as an assistant athletic director with the government's National Youth Administration. He also took on with the Honolulu Bears, a fully-integrated semi-pro team. In December, 1941, Robinson decided to play with the Los Angeles Dons of the Pacific Coast Football League (another integrated league when the NFL was certainly not), but the December 8 attack on Pearl Harbor waylaid his football dreams, and Robinson was drafted into a segregated Army Cavalry unit in Fort Riley, Kansas. 

Robinson was dismissed from the Army in November, 1944 after being acquitted in a military tribunal on charges of insubordination after refusing to sit at the back of a military bus when the driver ordered him to do so. 

Soon after, Robinson was summoned to Brooklyn by Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, and the most important and consequential sports story of the century was underway. 

How good was Robinson on the gridiron? Pretty darned good. From NCAA.com: 

"He's the only football player I ever saw who can do a complete pivot without losing speed," UCLA assistant coach Ray Richards told the Santa Cruz Evening News in the preseason. Soon, UCLA's offense was based around Robinson. "They've 'simplified' their offense by running almost every play from the same formation — but the variations which this set-up can produce is what confuses the opposition," wrote the Oakland Tribune's Bill Tobitt after UCLA's 2-0 start to the season, following a 14-7 win over Washington. "It's a single wing with the right half, Jackie Robinson (the fastest back on the coast), stationed just outside right end. He's the man in motion."

On October 28, 1939, Dick Hyland of the Los Angeles Times published an article entitled "Miracle Eye Camera Shows How Jackie Robinson Does His Stuff." 

It's a fascinating article, and one of the first I'm aware in which the technology of the time was used to scout a player in the media. Hyland brought along a photographer to detail Robinson's angles through certain defensive constraints. 

"He flowed — there is no better word for it — forward, and the first tackler watched him carefully," Hyland wrote of Robinson. "About two yards in front of him, Robinson's hips swing towards the inner field, and it looked for all the world like he was going to drive by inside. The tackler made his lunge — and Robinson's hips slid over the sideline, he pushed off his powerful left leg, and he was past on the outside. 

"The second tackler coming up had Jackie on the cross. Nailed tight. Because of the angle and speed he was traveling, it seemed impossible for the ballcarrier to do anything but go outside or turn right into the tackle. [Robinson] turned faster and farther than anyone had a right to, and just as the tackler made the grab, zip! Slither and away went Robinson! He'd pulled both legs out from under him, threw them sideways, and the tackler missed him by a foot. He seemed to pivot his entire body from his hips while defying all laws of inertia and gravity."

At 6-foot-0 and 180 pounds — a very good size for a back in that era — Robinson's size/speed combination, not to mention his overall athleticism and agility and his ability to play on both offense and defense, would have held him in good stead in the NFL of the time. 

But by the time the All-America Football Conference, and later the NFL, finally ended their Black player bans, Robinson was already headed in another direction with a mission to integrate the nation's most popular sport. Professional baseball had its own "gentlemen's agreement" to prevent people of color for playing in their league, and that had been going on for decades.

There are so many ways in which Jackie Robinson should always be remembered as an inspiration to all citizens of the world. But as this is a football website, and as Jackie Robinson was as remarkable in that sport as he was at so many things, this is how we will remember him. 

Because we should never, ever forget him in any capacity.