gary smith does it again

Pee Wee Reese was 28 years old in April 1947, a grown man and a natural leader who had been to war and had his own fully formed opinions about life. He was secure in his place on the team and he didn't have to answer to anyone for his actions. He did what was right and he deserves all the credit in the world for it, but he was able to do it in large part because he was carrying out the wishes of his boss, Branch Rickey.

He wasn't a teenaged kid living at home in a Jim Crow city where things weren't as evolved as they might have been in Brooklyn. The football players saw a lot of their parents and other adults trying to do the right thing, and taking an incredible amount of heat for it from other members of their community. The players had also been directed quite specifically by their coach and mentor to stay clear of the whole thing, and they obeyed him, as expected.

You know, it's real easy for people 50 years later to say these guys should have done this or they should have done that. I imagine it's just as easy for those guys to beat themselves up over what they think they ought to have done. I say such thoughts and attitudes are worthless, because none of them will change anything that happened. These guys did what their parents and coach expected them to do. Anything more than that would have taken cojones bigger than Pee Wee Reese himself (and Reese, his nickname notwithstanding, was a man of average stature).

Needless to say, I enjoyed this article. That football team deserved every word Gary Smith devoted to it.

 

Sure, it would have been a better story had things happened the way you wish they would.

So what?

The Challenger disaster would have been a better story had the astonauts all parachuted to safety.

You write about what happened.

Smith wrote about what happened. And he did it exceptionally well.

That's all you can ask for.