"Mr Rickey, " asked Robinson, "are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?"

"Robinson, " replied Rickey, "I am looking for a ball player with guts enough not to fight back."

In the spring of 1947, once the day dawned, Robinson's own teammates threatened to rebel rather than play alongside a black man. Rickey quelled the revolt by telling them he'd gladly accept their resignations. The St Louis Cardinals considered going on strike in protest at Robinson's arrival into the National League. The Philadelphia Phillies showered him with racial abuse from the dug-out during their first meeting with the Dodgers that season. In several venues across America, fans threw black cats onto the field and opponents used every opportunity to dig their spikes into his shins.

"I had started the season as a lonely man, often feeling like a black Don Quixote tilting at white windmills, " wrote Robinson in his autobiography later. "I ended it feeling like a member of a solid team. I had learned how to exercise self-control - to answer insults, violence and injustice with silence - and I had learned how to earn the respect of my teammates. They had learned it's not skin colour but talent and ability that counts. Maybe even the bigots had learned that too."

The grandson of a slave, the son of a sharecropper, Robinson had been gifted in several sports and was the perfect person to shatter the prejudice which restricted black players to their own Negro Leagues for too long.

At the end of his first season, he was awarded rookie of the year, and in a nationwide poll finished second to Bing Crosby for the title of most popular man in America. He was the Most Valuable Player in the league in 1949, played in six World Series, and won one.

The excellence of his performances on the field was matched by the class he evinced off it. Once his career ended, and before his premature death from diabetes-related health problems in 1972, he juggled a career in business with a social conscience.

Involved in the founding of a community bank in Harlem, he spoke eloquently on civil rights issues and once absented himself from an old-timers' game at Yankee Stadium to call national attention to the lack of black coaches in the sport.

"He was taking us over segregation's threshold into a new land whose scenery made every black person stop and stare in reverence, " said Hank Aaron, a black kid who'd follow in Robinson's footsteps and go on to hit more home runs than anybody in history. "We were all with Jackie. We slid into every base that he swiped, ducked at every fastball that hurtled toward his head. The circulation of the Pittsburgh Courier, the leading black newspaper, increased by 100,000 when it began reporting on him regularly. All over the country, black preachers would call together their congregations just to pray for Jackie and urge them to demonstrate the same forbearance that he did."

By the time Aaron hit the last of his 755 home runs in 1976, around one in four baseball players were African-American. Today, that statistic has dropped to less than one in 10 as generations of black kids have turned away from a game that has become increasingly Hispanic. The reason for the decline in popularity has less to do with race than the proliferation of rival attractions.

"I've just noticed over the last 15-20 years that baseball isn't being played in the inner city for a lot of different reasons, " said former Boston Red Sox pitcher Dennis 'Oil Can' Boyd recently. "One reason is that kids are acting illegitimate. By that, I mean our kids are vulnerable to society and fast money and that's filtering down to the inner city. Since drugs have been in the streets - that's what I mean by fast money - drugs have destroyed a lot of talented future baseball players. Kids that should have grown up and become major league ballplayers are in the state penitentiary. I know kids like that."

Many are hopeful today's 60th anniversary of Robinson's Major League debut - the feature event is a televised clash between the Los Angeles Dodgers (they left Brooklyn in 1957) and the San Diego Padres - may help in a renewed effort to bring black kids back to the baseball diamonds of America. It says much for the enduring appreciation of what he went through that Cincinnati Reds outfielder Ken Griffey junior phoned up the commissioner of baseball recently to get permission to wear number 42 today. A decade ago, that jersey had been retired in every stadium in Robinson's honour but Griffey wanted to pay his own tribute. Once that news broke, dozens of other African-American stars decided they should do likewise.

"If it weren't for Jackie Robinson, I wouldn't be able to put on the uniform I'm wearing today, " said Griffey.

"He should be an inspiration not only to baseball players but to anyone who fights prejudice and hatred."

A fitting tribute.