Published for The Wall Street Journal, August 24th, 2010:

The Rickey-Robinson partnership changed America.

In a day when American business could use some help with its public image, baseball may offer an answer.

Sixty-five years ago this coming Saturday, an innovative businessman named Branch Rickey signed a ballplayer named Jackie Robinson. The partnership that began in a Brooklyn office would radically change both baseball and the nation for the better. In the many retellings of this story, alas, one point is often overlooked: The Rickey-Robinson relationship was at bottom a business partnership.

To describe it this way is not to belittle it. To the contrary, recognizing the business aspect of this enterprise helps explain not only why it succeeded, but why it succeeded as smoothly as it did.

Robinson, of course, bore the brunt of the pain in that partnership. He was the man on the front lines, the one who endured the ugly racial epithets, who bit his tongue when his every instinct was to fight, and who was forced to prove himself to men and ballplayers who were not his equal in either category.

Rickey understood this going in. If the published accounts of that first Brooklyn meeting are accurate, Rickey may have better understood the terrible things that were awaiting Robinson on and off the field. Yet to his dying day Rickey insisted that he was just a businessman.

“My grandfather never accepted any effort to recognize him as a champion of civil rights, because he believed that you don’t accept awards for doing what’s right,” says Branch Rickey III, president of the Pacific Coast League. “His partnership with Jackie was perhaps the most daring in American sports history, but he knew, too, that it was a good business move, and he never ran away from that justification.”

Full article here