John U. Bacon

The first quarter of this year has been filled with endless sports stories about salaries and steroids and sex – and pretty much everything but sports. So I welcome a look back at a time the stakes were real, and the men were equal to the moment.

Well, we’re in luck, because this week marks the anniversary of the most important day in sports: April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson made his major league debut.

Even people who don’t know about sports know about Jackie Robinson – and they should. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Jackie Robinson made it possible for me in the first place. Without him, I would never have been able to do what I did.”

But, without a much less famous man named Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ president and a University of Michigan law school graduate, Robinson might never have gotten his chance.

At first glance, Rickey was a very unlikely candidate for such an important mission. He was a staunch conservative who hated Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal and welfare in equal measure. But if you look a little closer, it makes more sense.

Rickey was born in 1881 in Lucasville, Ohio, a hotbed of the abolitionist movement. He went to Ohio Wesleyan, where he coached a baseball team that had a black catcher. When Rickey took his team to South Bend to play Notre Dame, the hotel clerk would not give the catcher a room. After lots of arguing, Rickey told the clerk the player would stay in his room.

Fifty years later, Rickey recalled, “When I got to the room, here was this fine young man sitting there crying and pulling at his hands. I asked him what was wrong. ‘Oh, Mister Rickey,’ he said, ‘it’s my skin. If only I could pull it off everything would be all right.’ All these years I have heard that boy crying.”

After Rickey tried pro baseball – hitting a lukewarm .239 – he enrolled in the University of Michigan law school. But he couldn’t shake the baseball bug, so he managed Michigan’s team on the side.

He tried practicing law, but hated it, and returned to baseball as an executive. Rickey once asked, “why a man trained for the law devotes his life to something so cosmically unimportant as a game?”

One thing is certain: Rickey never treated baseball as just a game. He didn’t just return to it. He reinvented it, twice – first by creating the modern minor league system, which produced the St. Louis Cardinals’ famous Gashouse Gang that won four World Series. Then Rickey moved to Brooklyn, where he finally hatched his plan to change the game – and the country – forever. He still heard that catcher crying.

A few years ago, I had the chance to interview baseball legend Buck O’Neil, who told me, “It took a big man to do what Rickey did. It could have killed Rickey in baseball if this thing had blown up.”

But whom could he find to take on such an incredible task? There were better Negro League ballplayers than Jackie Robinson, and certainly more passive ones. But Rickey said, “I don’t like silent men, when personal liberty is at stake.” Rickey didn’t make the safe choice. He made the bold one – and the best one.

In 1965, Branch Rickey died at age 84. When a reporter called Robinson to pass on the sad news, Robinson fell silent. Finally, he turned to his wife Rachel and said, “Rae, take this call. Mr. Rickey has just died.”

Later, Rachel said, “Rickey needed Jack as much as Jack needed Rickey.”

Baseball great Buck O’Neil agreed. “Don’t ever forget,” he told me. “When you say Jackie Robinson, to say Branch Rickey too, see, because you couldn’t have one without the other.”

We were lucky to have both.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the New York Times, and ESPN Magazine, among others. His most recent book is “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller. Bacon teaches at Miami of Ohio, Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.

The Ann Arbor Track Club and the Michigan All Stars shared the lanes at the University of Michigan Indoor Track Building on Tuesday night.

Last Tuesday evening at the University of Michigan Indoor Track building, runners were spinning  through at least two different workouts: (i) 400-300-200-meter ladder repeats with 30-second recoveries between rungs, and a 4-minute recovery between the four total set, and (ii) run at your goal 5K goal pace until you just can’t maintain it any longer.

If you were a member of the Michigan All Stars, a youth track club that competes in Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) events, you did the ladder repeats. And if you were a member of the Ann Arbor Track Club, you did the run-til-you-drop drill.

The occasion actually gave The Chronicle the chance to renew a previously-made acquaintance involving another kind of drill – the kind of giant drill that’s used to bore for soil samples.

Why The Chronicle Attended a Track Workout

Meetings of public boards, commissions, and councils don’t take place at the UM Indoor Track Building – so it’s fair to ask why The Chronicle was there in the first place. First, just to be clear, not everything at The Chronicle revolves around public meetings. What prompted us to check out the indoor track was something we heard um, er, yeah, okay  … at a public meeting – the last board meeting of the Downtown Development Authority, specifically.

Race director of the Dexter-Ann Arbor Run (May 31, 2009), Hal Wolfe, spoke to the DDA board about some frustrations he was experiencing with organizing this year’s race. The Ann Arbor Track club, which organizes the race, holds its Tuesday night workouts at the UM indoor track, so we figured we’d check it out.

Michigan All Stars athlete training at the University of Michigan Indoor Track.

Incidentally, at the DDA board’s operations committee meeting on Wednesday morning, at least some of Wolfe’s frustrations were addressed. First, the DDA will communicate to the holders of premium permits at the Ann-Ashley parking structure that if they are unable to get access to their spaces on race day, the DDA will find alternate parking spaces for them.

Second, the DDA will waive the parking meter bag fees for the race (when a street is closed, as for a race, any parking meters have bags placed over them). And finally, direction would be provided about how to request a waiver of street barricading fees.

The Giant Drill Connection

Tyrone Coleman, one of the assistant coaches for the Michigan All Stars, struck up a conversation with The Chronicle because he was keen to know who the other group on the track was – the traffic on the inside lanes was not optimal for the kind of hard intervals his guys were doing. Later, after the groups had finished their workouts, he ventured, “I think we’ve met before? Out in the Pioneer field when we were drilling that hole?” Why, yes, of course! Tyrone was one of the three-man crew we met out in that snowy field back in early December of 2008.

Tyrone Coleman.

Coach of the Michigan All Stars, Rad Greaves, said that they were getting ready for the Michigan Indoor High School Championships, to be held at Central Michigan University this Saturday (Feb. 28), as well as the Michigan AAU Indoor Youth Track and Field Championships at Eastern Michigan University’s Bowen Field House on March 15. The mid-March track meet goes from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and costs $5 for spectators.

Track Club News: Reciprocity Agreement with Triathlon Club

While chatting before the workout with Jon Woodard, who was wearing an Ann Arbor Triathlon Club T-shirt, he tipped us to a recent reciprocity agreement between the Ann Arbor Track Club and the Ann Arbor Triathlon Club: the arrangement will allow members of one club to join the other at a discount of $10.

Stani Bohac, coach of the Track Club’s Tuesday night workouts, cautioned that the membership forms still needed to be revised to reflect the agreement, approved by the boards of both organizations,  and that revision might take a couple of weeks.

Mitch Garner, president of the AATC, confirmed the agreement between the clubs by email, saying that “The AATC Board felt that the two clubs have a lot of common ground, and the AATC wants to reach out to other running-related clubs in the area to promote physical fitness and good health in our community.”

UM Indoor Track

During a snowy winter in Ann Arbor, athletes looking for a place to run hard without fear of slipping and falling on their heads can find such a place in form of the 200-meter University of Michigan indoor track. There’s a couple of different options for getting access. Drop in during open hours (mornings and evenings, but not afternoons) for $5 a visit. For Ann Arbor Track Club members to participate in their Tuesday night workout, that drop-in fee is reduced to $2.  Or the general public can purchase a membership to use  the track ($135 for the season).

Stopped.Watched. correspondent in training?

Post-workout, Rad Greaves with Michigan All Stars.

Center in the blue Ann Arbor Triathlon shirt: Jon Woodard.

Dexter-Ann Arbor Run T-shirts leftover from last year. They were available as self-administered rewards for Ann Arbor Track Club members who were satisfied that they had "run hard."

Ann Arbor Track Club workout at the University of Michigan Indoor Track.

Ann Arbor Track Club member warms up. This is not jogging. It's running.

Stani Bohac, Tuesday night workout coach for the Ann Arbor Track Club, warms up.

Along Main Street, race workers were unfurling red netting across metal barriers. In addition to providing space to print advertising, the netting served the practical function of keeping the crowd from squeezing between the widely spaced metal bars and onto the street into the path of speeding cyclists. “You’d be surprised how many people would try to crawl through there,” explained a yellow-slickered man with an handful of zip-ties.

The remote camera gets some rain protection.

The pole-mounted camera with a feed to the VIP seating area required some improvised weather protection from Tim Sundt of Viking Creative, who was busy lashing an umbrella into place to deflect the rain drops. Tim and his colleagues were up at 5 a.m. to start their technical work after arriving in Ann Arbor at 11 p.m. from Grand Rapids, where the previous day they had worked the Grand Cycling Classic, the first of two events in the Priority Health series.

As the rain faded to a light drizzel, Rachel Brunelle, one of two Huron Valley Ambulance bicycle-mounted EMTs, told us that their assignment to the event by HVA was by sign-up. Membership on the HVA bicycle-mounted team requires a practical skills test on a bike fully loaded with its 40-pound panniers: an obstacle course, plus a ride for time over distance.

Senior Women’s Race

The Chronicle soon met up with Dawn Lovejoy, who rides with the Priority Health women’s cycling team. For today’s race she wasn’t riding, but rather serving a managerial role for the team. Because the event sponsor was also their team’s sponsor, she wanted to make sure that coordination between the team and the sponsor was seamless, so she opted to sit out.

She explained Priority Health’s interest in bicycle racing: “Bicycle racers are mascots for health and fitness.” She went on to describe that much of the team’s sponsorship arrangement involves community outreach, like visits to schools to promote health and fitness.

Aimee Lahann of Team Priority Health

Women’s seniors were first up on the racing schedule and the Priority Health women went into the race with a strategy – put their rider Aimee Lahann in position to see if she could just ride away from the field. Why would Lovejoy think Lahann was even remotely capable of pulling that off? Because, says Lovejoy, Lahann has national-caliber physical talent. Lovejoy first spotted that talent watching Lahann ride the spinning machines at the YMCA, where Lovejoy coordinates the spinning program, and asked Lahann if she’d ever thought about racing bicycles.

With a only a couple of years of bicycle racing experience, Lovejoy says that what Lahann is working on now are race tactics and bike-handling skills. Her motor, says Lovejoy, is already plenty strong.

But Lovejoy said their goal for the day was not to put Lahann on the top podium place. Instead, their aim was to keep the race really hard by making a hard tempo: “We’re looking at making the race a race.” Acknowledging that it seems a little odd to approach a race without results in mind, Lovejoy explained, “If we keep the race a race, the results will follow.”

Aimee Lahann trying to maintain a gap on the chasers.

When the race left the start-finish line, located just north of William Street on Main, The Chronicle walked with Lovejoy as she traversed the course in reverse direction. By the time we reached the southern edge of Ashley Mews, it was evident that the women of Priority Health were executing their pre-race strategy. Lahann was hammering away towards us, off the front of an already strung-out field. We walked around the corner of Main and Jefferson and paused at Jefferson and Ashley as the racers took the corner made treacherous by the wet conditions and the angled crossing of railroad tracks.

Even in dry conditions, the gaps between the rails and road would have posed a risk to a 23mm tire. But today, at least, they were covered with a layer of carpet. Later, Lovejoy’s husband, Mark, who had a hand in procuring the carpet remnants from Lowe’s and tacking them down, would report that racers through the day said the solution worked out pretty well.

As Lahann cruised by, her gap on the field narrowing, Lovejoy exhorted her, “Pedal through the corners, there’s better traction!” By the time we reached William Street, a few laps later, Lahann had been joined by some other racers. And soon after that the leading group was down to three: Lahann plus two others. One of the three saw a chance to guarantee themselves a podium spot: “Okay, ladies let’s work together!” As we left William Street behind us, a stray SUV wandered onto the course – unclear how – and Lovejoy dashed back to move the barricades at William enough to open space for the marshalls to shoo the errant vehicle off the course.

The women of Team Priority Health control the head of the race.

We made our way past the Fleetwood Diner and down the hill to First Street. At some point a teammate of Lahann’s, Laura Johnson, who had disappeared from the field on a previous lap, re-appeared in the thick of things. Later she would report that the rider in front of her had crashed at the corner of First and Liberty and that she had T-boned into her. She’d taken advantage of race rules that allow crashed riders (or riders with mechanical problems) to keep moving along the course in the same direction as the race – or to cut through the course – until they reached the neutral support area, then re-enter the race at that point on the same lap as the race leaders. Later, Johnson said when the team started the race, “We really wanted to do Priority Health proud – it’s our sponser and it’s their race. So when I crashed, all I could think was, I’ve got to get back in it, because I’ve got a teammate up there, I’ve got to help her!”

We finished our reverse walk of the course briskly, because it was not clear to us how many laps were left and we wanted to make sure we saw the finish. As we hit Main Street we heard the race announcer say, “Four laps to go!” So it was a leisurely stroll to a spot to watch the finish. As the final lap began, Lahann was driving a hard tempo at the front in an apparent attempt to ride the others off her wheel so that the finish would not come down to a straight-up sprint. But at that point, Lovejoy knew it was too late: “Oh, she’s not going to be able to ride away now.”

In the inevitable sprint that unfolded, Lahann finished just off the podium in fourth place. By the time that race concluded, the rain had abated and skies were beginning to clear.

Second from left, Aimee Lahann takes 4th place in the sprint.

Other
Vignettes

Kids Race: Eli Hausman shows off an elbow scrape from a pre-ride of the course. During the race itself, though, he reported, "I didn't fall down!" Not bad for someone who learned to ride just a week ago.

Fanslow: We're looking at you, Dave Fanslow, that's who. Dave was racing basically the same course he'd first raced 20 years ago. Strategy: go from the gun and scare people out of the race who didn't belong there. "It's not a Buddhist approach," he said, "it's bike racing." His efforts earn him a solid 6th place.

Time Gaps: Course marshal Mark Spahr timed gaps of chase groups to the leaders and and called them out to riders.

Getting dropped: Seeing a rider get dropped, course marshal Larry Baitch (Dakota Laser Vision Center) declared, "There's no worse feeling in the world than getting dropped." Larry said he enjoyed 5 seconds of fame on ABC's Wild World of Sports back in the 1980s when they covered the Boul-Mich Criterium and they showed him ... getting dropped. Back then he rode for the Cyclery North team.