Jackie Robinson UCLA Football Program Sells for Record Price on eBay
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It may not be hyperbole to say that EVERY sports fan knows Jackie Robinson as the athlete and worldwide icon who broke major league baseball's Color Barrier when he took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. What fewer realize is that baseball may have been Robinson's worst sport of the four he lettered in as a UCLA Bruin nearly a decade earlier.
When Jackie arrived in Westwood in the fall of 1939, he was joining a college football team that had gone a respectable but not electrifying 7-4-1 the season before. The program was still relatively new and had never once entered the national conversation as a football powerhouse. However, the Bruins were a program with potential.
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At halfback, a position that functioned in the Bruins offense much like today's quarterback, the squad had Kenny Washington, arguably the best player in the nation. Kenny's favorite receiving target, who doubled as a defensive back, was Woody Strode, who may have won decathlon gold in Berlin in 1936 had summer school not kept him in Los Angeles. Though neither has been properly recognized, the two men would integrate the NFL as Los Angeles Rams in 1946, one year before Jackie Robinson did similar for baseball. (Strode would later go on to a legendary career in Hollywood.) All that separated the Bruins from greatness was a single player: Jackie Robinson.
When Jackie, along with friend and teammate Ray Bartlett, transferred from Pasadena Junior College to UCLA in 1939, the Bruins were the only integrated team in their conference and one of only thirteen integrated college football teams in the nation. Apart from HBCUs there were only 39 Black players on college football teams that year and the Bruins had five of them: Jackie, Ray, Kenny, Woody, and fullback Johnny Wynne.
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If fielding the best players available could be called an experiment, as it sometimes is, then the experiment was 100% successful. The 1939 UCLA Bruins not only went undefeated for the first time in program history but opened their campaign by knocking off the defending national champion Texas Christian University Horned Frogs. (Before you imagine Jackie scoring four touchdowns and rushing for 275 yards, it was a different game back then. The final score was 6-2!)
Programs from Jackie's first season as a Bruin pop up frequently on eBay and, depending on condition, often sell in the $40 to $300 range. As such, when a 1939 TCU-UCLA program appeared on Jackie's birthday, January 31, a final sale price in the low triple digits seemed about right. On one hand the program marked Jackie's UCLA debut. On the other hand, the program was hole-punched all the way through in two places. With roughly 30 minutes to go, the program looked like it might go on the low side as bidding sat around $50.
Instead, the last 30 minutes saw more action that Jackie's fabled second half against Washington State in 1939, which you can watch in its entirety on YouTube! In the span of half an hour, the program shot up from its $50 perch to a final strike price of $1358, an eBay record according to tracking site Watch Count! It's safe to say that whoever won the auction, not the mention the underbidders that send the price tag into the stratosphere, were well aware of the program's significance as Jackie's "rookie" program. As for the bidders hoping to land the keepsake at a far lower cost, the good news for them is they can download the program for free courtesy of TCU!
Jason A. Schwartz is a collectibles expert whose work can be found regularly at SABR Baseball Cards, Hobby News Daily, and 1939Bruins.com. His collection of Hank Aaron baseball cards and memorabilia is currently on exhibit at the Atlanta History Center, and his collectibles-themed artwork is on display at the Honus Wagner Museum and PNC Park.