No one in sports will ever endure what Jackie Robinson did when he broke the color barrier in professional baseball.

There are no parallels.

He was not only breaking down a cultural wall in professional sports in 1947, he was pushing through the racial prejudice of an entire nation.

He was jeered and berated and faced countless death threats. New York Post writer Jimmy Cannon called Robinson “the loneliest man I’ve ever seen.”

Even before Robinson arrived with the Brooklyn Dodgers, some of his future teammates had started a petition to keep him — a Black man — off the team.

One who wouldn’t sign was Dodgers’ shortstop Pee Wee Reese.

There are no parallels to what Robinson endured, but often — as they say — history rhymes.

And this summer, history is rhyming as a white woman works to break through a cultural — not color — barrier of women’s professional basketball.

The WNBA is a league built mostly by Black women athletes who are proud of that accomplishment and see it ignored by all the hoopla around a young white player who had become the league’s biggest star even before she suited up for her first game.

If they resented that, they were right to resent it.

Why does a white player get all this attention and praise when she hasn’t done any of the heavy lifting over the........

© Arizona Republic