FROM THE ARCHIVES: LEGENDARY:

Legend of the Fall: Before breaking major league baseball's color barrier, Jackie Robinson was a superb football player at UCLA (Shav Glick, April 14, 2005, LA Times)

Ten years before Martin Luther King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and became an icon in the civil rights movement, Jackie Robinson was already a trailblazer, opening doors for black Americans by integrating major league baseball.

Seven years before that, before he'd taken the field as a Brooklyn Dodger on April 15, 1947, he was a nationally known football player at UCLA, electrifying fans at the Coliseum with his spectacular broken-field running, a star halfback on the school's first undefeated team.

The Coliseum Commission and UCLA will honor his memory today by placing a plaque in the Coliseum's Memorial Court of Honor. It will honor his accomplishments in breaking the racial barrier in baseball, his work as a civil rights exponent and his days as a Bruin, when he became the only athlete in the school's history to win letters in football, baseball, basketball and track in the same year. [...]

Robinson, who died in 1972 at age 53, earned his greatest fame in baseball, yet "Jackie Robinson" is the answer to one of baseball's most amazing trivia questions: What player who batted .097 in college later became National League most valuable player and was voted into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot?

[originally posted: 4/14/05]

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