A sports milestone to be commemorated in Youngstown with a statue plays a key role in a new Sports Illustrated cover story called “Left Hangin’: An Ode (and a Wave Goodbye) to the Sports Handshake.”

The moment is the historic 1946 handshake of Jackie Robinson and George Shuba.

The issue is whether the handshake — a “special element of sportsmanship” — can return on account of the coronavirus.

“This is a remembrance of the ‘Put ‘er there,’ the soul shake, the hand slap, the high (and low) five. Those, and myriad other forms of dap, are done. For a while, at least,” writes Steve Rushin for SI.

“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,” Rushin wrote in the article.

A group is planning a statue in Youngstown to celebrate the historic shake. Its sculptor, Marc Mellon, is developing a clay model, standing nearly 7 feet tall, that will be used to cast the figure of Robinson, the first African American in Major League Baseball. Still under construction is the model for Shuba, the Youngstown native who was Robinson’s white teammate with the Montreal Royals, a Brooklyn Dodgers Minor League affiliate.

The 1946 handshake at home plate after Robinson hit a home run in his debut game has been hailed as the “handshake of the century,” as it marked the racial integration of pro ball, which helped accelerate the breakdown of racial barriers in other areas of American life.

Mellon is working with a group of Youngstown-area leaders to build and dedicate the statue near the Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre on April 18, 2021 — the 75th anniversary of the historic handshake.

But America’s top pandemic doctor would like to wave goodbye to the handshake, SI notes.

“I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said in April, because abandoning the ancient practice would not only curb the spread of the coronavirus, but it would dramatically decrease flu cases in America. “Just forget about shaking hands,” Fauci said. “We don’t need to shake hands; we’ve got to break that custom.”

Rushin reponds: “But can we? In sports, the handshake has long held us in its grip. Perhaps too long, like those overeager greeters who pump your hand as if trying to draw water from a well. There are pregame handshake lines in soccer and at the net in tennis — a sport that begins with a handshake grip. Postgame, there are handshake lines in softball. And hockey players remove their gloves on two occasions: to punch out opponents and later (in the playoffs) to shake those opponents’ hands.”

Mike Shuba of Youngstown, now 58, accompanied his father all over North America spreading the gospel of the handshake, the SI story concludes.

“Once installed downtown, in Wean Park, Mellon’s 7-foot statue of Robinson and Shuba shaking hands at home plate might serve as a tombstone for the handshake itself, a bronze memorial to a fading custom. But the statue also is meant to look forward — a handshake of Hello, not Farewell,” Rushin writes.

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