President Obama Awards Baseball Hall of Famer Ernie Banks With The Presidential Medal of Freedom

President Barack Obama awards Baseball Hall of Famer Ernie Banks, of the Chicago Cubs, with the Presidential

Medal of Freedom, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2013, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington

“Ernie became known for his 512 home runs as for his cheer, and his optimism and his eternal faith that someday that the Cubs would make it all the way,” said President Obama.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is given to individuals who spend their life enriching the lives of others.

Ernest Banks, born in Dallas, Texas in 1931, was his family’s first son and second born child. Ernie was an introverted, good hearted child, devoted to helping around the house, and attending church and Sunday School, and for a time his mother thought he would follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and become a minister. Growing up, he participated in a number of sports. He was a talented basketball player, averaging 20 points per game in high school, and a high jumper who could clear nearly six feet. In summers and fall, when he wasn’t working in the cotton fields near Dallas for $1.75 a day, he played pick-up softball.

Banks’ father played for the Dallas Green Monarchs and the Black Giants, two teams in the Negro Leagues that existed while major league ball was still segregated. Ernie served as batboy on his father’s teams, but he did not play baseball himself until well he was into his teens.

In 1947 William “Bill” Blair, a Elite News publisher and ex- Negro League pitcher, saw a softball game in which the sixteen-year-old Banks slugged a long homer off an established pitcher named Brannon. “Brannon was the fastest pitcher I had ever seen,” Blair recalled to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Barry Horn. “I never saw anyone who could throw like him. I never saw anyone get the solid licks off him. And here was this willowy kid walloping ball after ball off him. Ernest, I could tell right away, was going to be something special.” With Blair’s help, Banks joined a black baseball team from Amarillo that barnstormed from New Mexico up to Nebraska. He played that one summer at shortstop and learned rapidly. “You had to show Ernest everything one time, and he learned it,” Blair told Horn.

Cub’s legend Ernie Banks left Dallas in the 1950s when racial inequalities reigned. Mr. Banks says Wednesday’s ceremony was powerful and served as a symbolic passing of torch when he gave the first African-American president an official Jackie Robinson bat. Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball in 1947.

Mr. Banks played 17 years and a bronze statue bears his likeness, the marquee was lit up to honor the man known to his fans as Mr. Cub. But Banks says Wednesday’s ceremony is his greatest accomplishment.