WASHINGTON – When Dave Winfield was growing up in Minnesota, he thought his future lied somewhere far away from where he ended up. For Winfield, the Hall-of-Fame baseball player, his childhood career ambition was to work in politics.
That all changed when Winfield was 16 in April of 1968. That’s when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and everything changed. Young Dave Winfield had second (and third) doubts about a career in politics and the rest, as it turned out, was baseball history.
One has to wonder which career path Winfield would take if he were 16 in January of 2009. Would athletics be as alluring (Winfield was drafted by a team in the NBA, ABA and NFL as well as MLB) for a kid looking to carve out his path in life nearly 41 years after that April day in 1968?
It’s hard to say. But it is worth noting that Winfield made his Major League debut a little more than 26 years after Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play in the Major Leagues. Imagine that… Major League Baseball, holder of the mantle of the so-called American pastime, refused to allow good ballplayers to play for its teams simply because of the color of their skin.
For decades after Robinson first played for Brooklyn in 1947, integrated teams could not stay together in some hotels in certain parts of the United States. They couldn’t eat together in certain restaurants and they certainly weren’t socializing in public in some places.
In fact, not too long before April of ’68 there were some restaurants in Washington, D.C. that would not have allowed Winfield to enter. Just beyond the Lincoln Memorial in Virginia, forget it…
Yet on Tuesday, as the morning became the afternoon, Winfield mixed in with the masses on the Washington Mall to watch a man whose father was born in Kenya and a mother born in Kansas be inaugurated as President of the United States.
“It's just a unique time and place,” Winfield said. “My wife and I felt we should be a part of this one.”
“This is something you want to say you were there to witness.”
Before a sea of humanity stretching from the U.S. Capitol all the way to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge heading into Virginia, the first African-American gave an address in which the themes were inclusion, duty, honor and sacrifice. He put the injustice of slavery in context with other hardscrabble lives. He made it part of the immigrant experience no different than the inscription on the Statue of Liberty.
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Just that bit of imagery took America to a place it had never been.
So maybe in the crowd beneath the memorials in monuments surrounding that great lawn could be a talented kid just like Winfield was. And maybe instead of a career playing baseball or football or basketball he (or she) opts for a life of service.
Perhaps a 16-year-old kid will see Jimmy Rollins taking in the big moment and see that even sports stars and MVPs can be inspired. A historian of the Negro Leagues and a gatekeeper of Robinson’s legacy, Rollins closely followed the 2008 election and reported that he was really interested in learning as much as possible about the candidates.
Sixers’ guard Andre Miller also made it to Washington for the inauguration though he says he never moved and preferred to keep his political views to himself. Miller was simply moved by the history of the moment and allowed himself to be swept up in it all.
Meanwhile, former Sixers’ center and Georgetown star, Dikembe Mutombo, also attended the events, joining other notable athletes like Tiger Woods, Muhammad Ali and John Thompson in Washington.
Needless to say, the moment was not lost on Mutombo, who first came to the U.S. from The Congo to attend Georgetown with the hope of becoming a doctor. Like Winfield, sports were a better fit.
“We have the son of an African man, not from a second or third generation, from the first generation. That brings so much joy and so much pride for me,” Mutombo said.
“Now I can tell my son, ’You cannot tell me you can’t be the next Bill Gates or the next senator.’ I’m feeling good about my children,” Mutombo said. “I know I’m going to cry a lot, but I want to be there.”
Certainly Mutombo's words were a popular sentiment on Tuesday.