What Happened to Jackie Robinson’s Statue?

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2024

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When a six-foot tall, 265-pound bronze statue of Jackie Robinson went missing from McAdams Park in Wichita, Kansas, it felt like a hate crime. An ugly echo of America’s unjust past and a crime leveled not just at the man who broke Major League’s color barrier in 1947 but also at an urban community within the city. But as Bob Lutz, the founder of League 42, a youth organization geared towards exposing the city’s black and brown youth to baseball and more, learned, Jackie Robinson was more of an accidental victim than a target. So ESPN’s Anthony Olivieri, who spent weeks trying to understand what happened, joins the show to tell us how the people of Wichita reacted to the theft and how in the aftermath, the community could be made whole. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Our story today takes place in Wichita, Kansas, and it starts with a guy named Bob Lutz.
0:10.0	One day we were talking about this issue on radio, why aren't more African American kids playing baseball, man, it'd be awesome to start a league, and somebody called me after that show and said, you really talk about about this a lot why don't you do something?
0:25.8	Bob is a former sports writer for 43 years. He's a long time Wichita area guy and he runs a youth baseball league in Wichita, Kansas called League 42.
0:37.0	ESPN writer Anthony Oliveri spoke to Bob earlier this spring.
0:41.0	We were able to finally get things rolling pretty good.
0:45.2	And we went to the streets to try to recruit enough players to have a league.
0:50.5	We ended up with just over 200. We were able to put four teams in each division in four divisions.
0:57.0	So we had 16 teams that very first year, which I look back on that as a little bit of a miracle.
1:08.4	One day in late January he leaves his office and it's you know part of his normal practice to look across the street.
1:16.0	For whatever reason I didn't look over when I pulled in that day and nobody had so every day when I leave I definitely look over because I like seeing the
1:27.3	statue. It's actually a statue of Baseball Hall of Famer and Civil Rights icon Jackie Robinson, a six foot
1:36.4	265 pound bronze statue. And I looked over it was kind of a foggy rainy day and I didn't see it and I kind of
1:47.5	squinted my eyes and I just didn't see it so I called Jacqueline out to our administrative assistant to look over. She didn't see it.
1:57.2	So he asked his administrative assistant if she could take a closer look. She does, and she reports back something
2:05.6	that he tells me that he could have never fully prepared for.
2:09.5	She went over and checked it out
2:11.0	and she came back with news I had sort of prepared for but I don't know that I was
2:16.1	completely prepared and he said they cut it off at the feet and it was gone.
2:21.8	She told Bob that they had cut the statue off at the feet and it was gone.
2:27.0	It's the crime scene reduced to nothing but a pair of bronze cleats.
2:31.0	The Jackie Robinson statue at McAdams Park stolen by thieves in the
2:36.0	middle of the night. A brazen theft at a public park that for many in
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