Two Icons: Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente

(Photo by Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images)

I was typing up my Gen Ed (short for General Education) English paper on icons, when I remember my paper was on Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente. I figured I would post it here and let you the readers think about how these two legends of the diamond are true icons of American culture.

I did use other sources and information that I did borrow, so I will give credit to those whose information and articles I used to help me write this essay.

This great nation has had its share of icons. Some of these icons are born and bred American, and some icons are born and bred elsewhere around the world. Many of these so called “icons” are not icons at all but rather “anti-icons.”

“Anti-icons” are “figures magnified to larger than life proportions not because they really are larger than life but precisely because they aren’t outstanding at all” (Massik and Solomon 712).

As Jake Brennan, a lifestyle commentator for AskMen.com states, “one of the only ways to get attention consistently is to shock people in new and ‘interesting’ ways” (Massik and Solomon 729). Two real American and Non-American icons are Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente.

Robinson and Clemente are no the prototypical sports icons. No. They pioneered not only social change but cultural change as well.

Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente pioneered social and cultural change in the United States and around the world. This social and cultural change was not just in baseball alone, no, but rather in society as well.

While both icons were prolific and legendary players in their own time, hence the fact that both Robinson and Clemente are in Major League Baseball’s (MLB) Hall of Fame in Cooperstown New York.

Both players/icons faced tremendous challenges along their career paths. Both pioneered said social and cultural change by methods that would seem different to most people, but were very, very, similar in nature.

The majority of challenges faced by Robinson and Clemente were through racial and cultural dogmas and stigmas by the general public. Both players in reality did not want to pioneer social changes, but rather just to achieve their own personal success at Major League Baseball.

Jackie Robinson, full name: “Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born in the town of Cairo, Georgia in 1919 to a family of sharecroppers” (Estate of Jackie Robinson). Robinson was a four sport star at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

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