Chadwick Boseman’s Kansas City connections: A movie premiere and hanging with Mahomes
Before he was Black Panther, the king of Wakanda and a beloved Hollywood celebrity, before he played Thurgood Marshall and James Brown, Chadwick Boseman made his major film debut as civil rights pioneer Jackie Robinson in the biopic “42.”
And Kansas City played a role.
Boseman died Friday — baseball’s Jackie Robinson Day — after four years of quietly battling colon cancer. He was just 43. And the memories have been pouring forth. We’ll get to the one from Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in a bit.
But first, back on April 9, 2013, “42” (named for Robinson’s jersey number) had its official premiere in Los Angeles. Two days later, Kansas City — where Robinson spent a year playing for the Monarchs of the Negro Leagues — had the honor of hosting what was basically a second premiere, complete with a red carpet.
Outside the AMC Barrywoods theater, the stars greeted fans and basked in the glow. Boseman wasn’t well known at the time, so the biggest cheers from the crowd went to co-star Harrison Ford, who played Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers general manager who recruited Robinson from the Monarchs, paving the way for Robinson to break Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947 and make history.
On the Kansas City red carpet, Royals players also caused a stir, including Billy Butler and, especially, Eric Hosmer, as well as former Royals greats George Brett, Frank White and Willie Wilson.
Special guests included David Robinson, youngest child of Jackie and Rachel Robinson, as well as a handful of former Negro Leagues players.
“I thought it was excellent,” David Robinson said of the movie that night. “It was honest. It was historically accurate. It was inspiring, and hopefully it will be empowering.”
Boseman said it was an honor to play the baseball legend, and he did plenty of research for the part — learning Robinson’s moves on the field and getting to know the family, especially widow Rachel Robinson.
“She’s hard not to love, you know?” he said that night. “She’s stately and beautiful and wise. And very kind to me. My heart opens up every time I see her. When you do something like this, you share a bond with each other.”
In a ceremony on the red carpet, Boseman and Ford presented a Monarchs jersey from the film to Bob Kendrick, president of Kansas City’s Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. The next day the stars visited the museum for satellite television interviews with national media before leaving town.
“Heartbroken by the news of the death of Chadwick Boseman!” Kendrick tweeted on Friday. “I had the honor of taking Chadwick & Harrison Ford on a tour of the NLBM in 2013, the day that the blockbuster film, ‘42,’ was released! He proudly brought Jackie Robinson to life!”
About 1,350 guests attended the premiere, which included an auction of memorabilia from the movie, signed by the cast.
The event raised about $200,000 for the museum and the Kansas City Sports Commission.
How did our city come to host this event? Connections. Legendary Pictures, which made the movie, was a holding in one of the mutual funds managed by Overland Park-based Waddell & Reed. Legendary’s chairman and CEO, Thomas Tull, had invited some Waddell & Reed executives to a private screening of “42” the previous December in Pittsburgh. (Tull is also a minority owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers.)
At the screening, “We mentioned to him the presence here of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum,” said Tom Butch, who was executive vice president of Waddell & Reed Financial and chair of the Kansas City Sports Commission. His company, Kendrick, the Royals and Leawood-based AMC Theatres worked to make the event happen.
That Ford and Boseman chose to come “is really high praise for Kansas City and its role in Jackie Robinson’s life and for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum,” Butch said.
Boseman has a couple of other KC area connections. He co-starred in “Da 5 Bloods,” the Vietnam drama that Lawrence-based filmmaker Kevin Willmott co-wrote with Spike Lee. It debuted on Netflix in June.
And Boseman appeared with Mahomes on an episode of HBO’s “The Shop” this offseason, the LeBron James-produced show where celebrities basically sit in a barbershop and talk.
“I got to meet him after that,” Mahomes said Saturday at a press conference at Chiefs training camp. “We obviously had a conversation there, and then we went to the NBA All-Star Game. We sat right beside each other. His wife and my girlfriend, they talked. Just great people. Obviously rest in peace to him. He was a great person. Total respect and a total fan of him and his work.”
Includes reporting by The Star’s Sam McDowell.
