CLICK HERE to read the Sports Illustrated story

Sports Illustrated today featured the historic handshake between Youngstown native George “Shotgun” Shuba and professional baseball’s first black player, Jackie Robinson, a moment that soon will be memorialized with a statue in downtown Youngstown.

The moment is part of a story about what fears of spreading the COVID-19 virus will do to the tradition of handshakes in sports.

The historic first interracial MLB handshake, occurred on Opening Day 1946, when Robinson and Shuba were teammates for the Montreal Royals, a farm team for Major League Baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson was making his debut as the first African-American player in modern professional baseball.

“An opening sentence is a handshake, to paraphrase the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, and it’s true that a good one draws you in, delivers you into capable hands and introduces you to a subject of interest–in this case, George (Shotgun) Shuba, for whom a handshake was an opening sentence,” the SI story begins.

The SI story goes on to share the story as told by George Shuba’s son, Mike Shuba, who lives in Youngstown.

The Youngstown statue project was announced in late November.

The statue committee has set a fundraising goal of $400,000 for the project. Plans call for the statue to be dedicated on April 18, 2021, the 75th anniversary of the handshake. The proposed site for the statue is near the Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre.

A photo now owned by George’s son, Mike Shuba of Youngstown, will be the basis of the statue, which will stand nearly 7 feet tall and feature the two players shaking hands, with Shuba holding his bat. Marc Mellon, a world-class Connecticut sculptor whose works have honored Pope John Paul II, President George H. W. Bush, President Barack Obama and many award-winning athletes, has agreed to craft the bronze Robinson-Shuba statue.

CLICK HERE for more information or to donate to the Robinson-Shuba statue project.

For more on this story, read Friday’s Vindicator print edition.