By Lee A. Daniels

This week Major League Baseball is celebrating one of its most transcendent moments and its most transcendent player, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, better known as Jackie Robinson.

Robinson, starting at second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, broke baseball’s twentieth-century color barrier on April 15, 1947. Despite facing vicious taunts from fans of opposing teams around the league and voluminous death threats that summer, Robinson went on to earn National League Rookie of the Year honors – the first of his on-the-field achievements that would after his retirement catapult him into Baseball’s Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.

But those achievements, as impressive as they are, have always been a secondary factor in the hold Robinson had on the imagination of those who saw him play and those who honor his achievements today. The real reason Jackie Robinson is so honored today is that he was a man of indomitable character. In the face of extraordinary pressure, he did not merely endure, he thrived – and the sense of triumph and hope he offered those waging the black freedom struggle was incalculable.

Jackie Robinson’s legendary baseball career is all the more remarkable given that a case can be made that baseball wasn’t Jackie Robinson’s best sport.

Some who know of Robinson’s glittering, four-letter high school career in Pasadena, California, and his collegiate career at UCLA in the late 1930s and early 1940s have contended that Robinson was better in football, as a feared half-back; better in track and field as a sprinter and long-jumper; better in basketball; better even in tennis.

That’s an astonishing measure of the athletic talent of the man. But then, that Jackie Robinson could do so well in what may have been his “worst” sport underscores the secret ingredient he possessed that magnified and disciplined his bountiful athletic talents – and also transcended them. It was the determination to pursue excellence in everything he did.

In fact, life was Jackie Robinson’s best sport. That he played superbly; and that, more than his athletic achievements, is the reason he is so justly honored now.

Lee A. Daniels, editor in chief of TheDefendersOnline.com, worked with Rachel Robinson on her pictorial biography, Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait