What is going on these days? So many legendary figures passing away. I guess it’s inevitable. The heroes of our younger days have grown older and death comes to us all.
While neither Jesse Jackson nor Robert Duvall were directly associated with baseball, they both had seminal if ancillary moments around the national pastime.
Jesse Jackson died yesterday at the age of 84. It seems almost trivial, given the gravitas of his career, but according to sources like CNN and ABC, the civil rights icon “was a gifted student and athlete, graduating from high school with offers for a minor league baseball contract and a Big 10 football scholarship.”
He gave the eulogy at Jackie Robinson’s funeral in 1972 and decades later spoke at the Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony for Robinson.
Here’s Jackson’s obituary from The New York Times.
Robert Duvall‘s connection with baseball was, in a sense, more professional. He played the sportswriter Max Mercy in the film version of The Natural. (Why is it that journalists in baseball movies tend to lean towards the evil side?)
A tribute on SB Nation called The Natural “the best baseball ever made.”
Here’s an excerpt from a piece about Duvall’s passing on Sunday at the age of 95 from LoneStarBall, a Texas Rangers-centric site:
Robert Duvall as Max Mercy, the sportswriter who first discovers Hobbs, who covers him years later when he’s with the New York Knights, feels like the moral center of the film, the character whose eyes the audience watches through. It is a role that could have been a cut-out or a cartoon in the hands of a lesser actor, but Duvall brings a depth to Mercy, allows you to see and feel the ambiguities and moral complexities of the sportswriter that mirror the ambiguities and moral complexities of the movie as a whole.
Frankly, I never thought of Mercy as the “moral center.” He just struck me as the stereotypical, self-aggrandizing newsman looking to make a name for himself.
Here’s Duvall’s obit from the Times.
