Word: robin
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...Could've Done Worse. Robin Roberts began the rounding-off process early. By the time he was seven he was nourishing a well-developed dislike for his allotted chores on the Roberts farm near Springfield, Ill.; everything came second to learning how to play games-basketball, baseball, anything at all. "He never had a ball out of his hand," his mother Sarah Roberts remembers. "Ah well," says his proud Welsh father Tom. "He could've done a lot worse...
...time young Robin's goldbricking held less appeal to a man who had come up the hard way from the back-breaking labor and pocket-pinching strikes of a Lancashire coal mine. Father Roberts recalls his barely controlled anger the day Robin deliberately broke a hoe to avoid work. The outraged father took a fly swatter to his son's well-padded bottom ("It don't hurt your hand and it don't mark the kid"). But Robin went right on playing. When he couldn't talk one of his three brothers into playing catch...
Impartially athletic, Robin switched to basketball with the season. When his mother would try to get him to do some work around the place, he would put her off: "Naw, Mom. I'm a ballplayer. You just wait till I get into the major leagues. Then I'll build you a house." Even Tom Roberts came to respect his son's determination. "You just had to go along," he says today. "He wouldn't do nuthin' else...
Will to Win. On the way to bigger things, Robin stopped off at Springfield and Lanphier High Schools, where he pitched and played third, was a competent end on the football team and a promising shotputter. When he went to Michigan State in the fall of 1944, he was good enough to earn a basketball scholarship the next year. (He majored in physical education, graduated in 1948 with a B.S. degree...
...They Won't Tell Me Anything." Now, nine successful years away from those awkward summers in Vermont, Robin Roberts still turns for help to the man who polished him up for the Phillies. Last fall Roberts surprised his old coach by stopping off in Ann Arbor and asking permission to work out with the Michigan pitchers. Puzzled, Fisher said, "Sure." He watched Roberts throw a few. Fisher saw right away that the familiar three-quarters motion had been replaced by a sidearm delivery; Roberts was unconsciously favoring a sore arm. Fisher walked over. "Robby," he said...