Jackie Robinson's Faith

Great post on WSJ about the religious faith of Jackie Robinson and his boss, Branch Rickey. I'm a big baseball fan, and I didn't know any of this stuff:

After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Robinson, who had been a stand-out athlete at UCLA, signed up in the spring of 1945 to play baseball for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues. Robinson openly scorned his whiskey-drinking and promiscuous teammates, once tossing a glass of scotch into a lighted fireplace to demonstrate how lethal liquor is. He also stunned his teammates by declaring that he was waiting until he was married to have sex. 

As influential as Rev. Downs had been, though, no one had a more profound impact on Robinson's life than Branch Rickey, whose religious devotion was such that he didn't attend baseball games on Sundays. During their first meeting, after Rickey had read aloud the passage from Papini's "Life of Christ," he also asked Robinson to read from the section about "nonresistance." Robinson understood what was needed for him to succeed. 

Nobody in sports had ever faced the sort of pressure, and abuse, that Jackie Robinson did when he took the field for the first time in a Brooklyn uniform on April 15, 1947. And yet Robinson didn't merely endure, he thrived.