Damn.This one hits hard.
In some kind of tragic coincidence that just screams #2020, Chadwick Boseman, the man who played Jackie Robinson in the film 42, died on the very same day that Major League Baseball was recognizing Robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947.
That actually occurred on April 15th of 1947, not August 28th, but since there was no April 15th on the baseball calendar in 2020, August 28th was -- as far as I can tell -- randomly chosen as a substitute date.
It might have seemed logical just not to recognize the anniversary this year, except as it turned out, honoring Robinson was something that ended up feeling very important not only this year, but this week, as the country reels anew from another heinous police shooting of a Black American.
Instead, there's a kind of cruel irony in this day, as Boseman ended up passing from colon cancer on the same day. He didn't just play non-fictional heroes to the Black community -- like Robinson and Thurgood Marshall -- but he also played one of the Black community's greatest fictional heroes, T'Challa, otherwise known as Black Panther.
It didn't feel like Wakanda would last #forever on this particular day.
Boseman's death would have been painful anyway, but what made it especially painful was that I had no idea he was sick. None. And had been so for four years. I don't suppose most people knew. Last I heard, Black Panther 2 was all systems go and he would be front and center. He had been revived from Thanos' snap and could live to fight another day, many other days, on into Phases 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 of the MCU.
Now ... he's gone.
Just like that. In a snap.
I did a double take when I read the headline. I guess that's always the reaction when someone so young, so vigorous, so apparently overflowing with joie de vivre, is taken from us. I mean, he played an incomparably gifted athlete and a superhero so lithe, so quick and so agile that his character's name evoked the feline. There wasn't a thought in my head that we were about lose him.
You walk around with a number of names in your head of people whose obituary you could expect to see any old time. Like, when Olivia de Havilland finally died at 104, it was almost like a sigh of relief that someone else could finally occupy one of those spots. Someone like, say, Sean Connery, who just turned 90.
But Boseman? I didn't wake up Saturday morning (my time) thinking Chadwick Boseman could die today. And yet he did.
I was not as big a fan of Black Panther as most people were, but I was a huge fan of Boseman. Being the baseball fan that I am, I was more of a fan of 42 than most, I think. Those were some pretty big cleats to fill to play Robinson, one of the all-time baseball greats and baseball ambassadors, and yet he was the perfect choice. Quiet dignity, inner fire. That was Boseman to a T.
The Robinson biopic was where I first learned of Boseman, who got a late start on his movie career, only appearing in his first movie role after age 30. (He had been appearing on TV for five years before that, but not on shows I watched.) But he shot up quickly into other immediately interesting work. 42 was followed the next year by Draft Day and Get on Up, the latter a biopic of another hero of the Black community (though a bit more problematic than Robinson or Marshall), James Brown. I don't really remember him in Draft Day (though I liked that movie), though of course he's the central force in the highly effective Get on Up, a role that was expected to earn him awards consideration.
At this point his career became quite occupied playing T'Challa in four Marvel movies, though he did continue to make what I assume was interesting work, as I have not yet seen Marshall, Message from the King or 21 Bridges. The last movie released in his lifetime was Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods, in which he plays a character seen only in flashback, because he died during the Vietnam War. Died young -- just like Boseman.
Because Boseman got a late start in movies, he seemed even younger than 43. And because he radiated star power, that contributed to the sense that he was just at the beginning of a long and rich career that would alternate between serious and crowd-pleasing work -- and in the best cases, work that would be both at once.
My heart aches. Rest in peace, Panther.
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