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other Dodgers became more like him—they were with his arrival much more a warrior team that fought you all the time than they had ever been in the past, and they would remain that way for the duration of his career. As a player no one was more explosive. Pitchers in particular feared him once he was on the base paths because of his explosive initial burst of speed. Years later, the Yankees pitcher Vic Raschi, talking about how he had lost a 1–0 game in the 1949 World Series by giving up a hit to Gil Hodges, said that it was Robinson, bluffing a dash from third toward home, who had beaten him. “I had just never seen anything like him before, a human being who could go from a standing stop to full speed in one step. He did something to me that almost never happened. He broke my concentration, and I paid more attention to him than to Hodges. He beat me more than Hodges.”
    If Robinson’s stunning success against the myths of the past marked the first great breakthrough of the postwar era, then the second one was driven by technological change. It was the coming of network television and it started as a true national phenomenon roughly a decade after the end of the war. It inaugurated nothing less than another golden age in sports. For in truth the world of sports as the postwar era started actually had two golden ages ahead, both of them driven by technological breakthroughs, the first one wrought by the coming of network television which dramatically boosted football as a sport, especially the professional game, and the second some 25 years later with the coming of satellite transmission, which created the world of cable television and aided all sports, most particularly basketball.
    It was the power of an instrument—the power of the camera—which now revolutionized American society. Nothing changed the culture and the habits of Americans more than the coming of television. Television had a kind of greenhouse effect on the society around it: What the camera liked grew and prospered beyond anyone’s expectations (often growing too quickly and too large for its own good, of course); what the camera did not like just as quickly withered.
    In particular, the camera liked professional football. What the camera caught and savored about football, which radio had always missed, was the speed of the sport, and, above all, the violence. For the camera more than anything else loved action. Football—fast, balletic, often brutal, with its bone-crushing hits—was made to order for the camera. Baseball, with its slow, leisurely pace, a sport which had its roots in an agrarian America where the pace of life was slower, had been perfect for radio, where an announcer could paint a gentle portrait and measure his cadence to the casual pace of the game.
    Before the coming of television, professional football was, in comparison to baseball, virtually a minor league; it was a very good game, indeed a connoisseur’s game, played by immensely talented athletes before passionate, diehard fans, but it had somehow never quite broken out of its rather narrow place in the sports spectrum. Radio revealed neither the talent nor the fury with which it was played. To the degree that ordinary sports fans committed their time to football on fall weekends—it was on Saturday when they could pick up a Notre Dame or Michigan game on the radio, not Sunday.
    Sunday became in the new televised age the day which was set aside in the fall for American males. It introduced the pro game to a vast new audience, and the pro game began to enter the consciousness of average sports fans as never before. Very quickly in the mid- to late Fifties, as the country was wired nationally for television, pro football went on a dizzying rise to a point where it began to rival professional baseball as the national sport. In those days not that many people owned sets, and many young American males would agree to meet at a neighborhood