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It was 1948, during high tea in London’s Buckingham Palace, when U.S. Olympic basketball player Jackie Robinson met Great Britain’s royal couple, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and their daughter - the future Queen Elizabeth II. Robinson, a spry 21-year-old, was awfully nervous. “They told me that he [the King] stuttered, and he did.  And they told me he had big ears and I caught myself looking as I talked to him. I remember thinking, ‘You dope, look away,’ and I did.” 

Now, when most people think of the late 1940s and the name “Jackie” Robinson, they think of the courageous baseball player who broke baseball's race barrier, but this Jackie Robinson who met the King and Queen during the ’48 London Games was a white basketball player out of ...

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Related Topics: Olympics 2012