by Ian O'Connor

But the president-elect will be the first whose ascension to the nation's highest office was inspired in part by the barriers cleared between the lines of athletic competition.

This isn't about Obama's call for a college football playoff tournament, or his lessons learned under a tough-love high school coach, or his willingness to humor the prominent sportscasters and sportswriters who ask for a few minutes of his time.

It's about the African-American athletes, coaches and executives who have used their very public forum to shatter stereotypes and project lasting images of leadership, dignity and grace.

Obama would've never gotten the chance to defeat John McCain without the parade of pioneers that came before him, and so many of those pioneers used sports to erect a bridge between separate and unequal sides of a segregated society.

Television was their weapon of mass construction, building a case for Obama long before the presidency was a flicker in his eye. White families that had little contact with black families, that had never had an African-American guest for dinner, suddenly had successful African-Americans in their living rooms three or four nights a week.

"For decades many white people never lived around black people, never came in contact with black people, never had their children do sleepovers and play dates with black children," said Newsday columnist Shaun Powell, author of "Souled Out?," a terrific book on the legacy of black athletes.

"But then all of a sudden you have white fans rooting for Jackie Robinson and Bill Russell and Gale Sayers and then Michael Jordan. Sports was the only arena where blacks were allowed to be on equal ground, and it opened the doors to all facets of society."

Powell called Joe Louis "the first black athlete white people let their sons cheer for," even as Louis was denied service at all the finest restaurants and hotels. Though hardly the Nazi sympathizer some made him out to be, Max Schmeling proved to be the rare antagonist who could unite black and white in America.

But the seminal moment along the racial divide in sport and society unfolded on April 15, 1947, before 26,623 witnesses inside Ebbets Field. During pregame ceremonies that day, Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca stood next to Jackie Robinson on the first-base line. Some friends later asked Branca if he was concerned about getting hit with an assassin's wayward bullet.

Jackie Robinson paved the way for more than just athletes. (STR/AFP/Getty Images / Getty Images)

"I think Jackie accomplished more for black people than Martin Luther King did," Branca told me more than once.

As major-league baseball's first black player, Robinson weathered unfathomable abuse from fans, opponents, even some teammates. Some Dodgers signed a petition in an attempt to keep him off the team. One such Dodger, Bobby Bragan of Alabama, would make this concession:

"Where I grew up, blacks went out the back door. So on our first train trip, I wouldn't go near Jackie. On our second train trip, after Dixie (Walker) and (Eddie) Stanky and me got to know him, after we saw he was the best player we had, we were fighting to get inside his dining car."

Decades later, Bragan would run a foundation in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that offered scholarships to kids in need, many of them black. "Look at what Jackie did to my life," Bragan once told me.

Larry Doby quietly made the same impact in the American League. Althea Gibson came along in tennis, and her generosity of spirit was later matched by the great Arthur Ashe.

Muhammad Ali used his fists and his voice to become one of the planet's most recognizable and influential men. Doug Williams beat John Elway in the Super Bowl, dispelling the absurd myth that black athletes didn't possess the leadership qualities required in a quarterback and allowing for a day when NFL teams draft black quarterbacks without a second thought.

Jordan proved that the black athlete could transcend race and become a commercial attraction with staggering appeal to a white consumer base. While reinforcing the point, Tiger Woods emerged as the most popular figure in the history of a sport with a shameful exclusionary past, a sport that went 28 years after Robinson's debut at Ebbets Field before it delivered a black player to the Masters.

Coaches left their footprint on the nation's consciousness, too. When Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith met in the Super Bowl as the first two African-American coaches to get there, a message was sent to the colleges and high schools that had never seriously considered a black man to run their programs.

Dungy and Smith weren't just successful leaders at a time when the NFL needed its Rooney Rule to ensure that teams interviewed candidates of all colors; they were black coaches whose best players (Peyton Manning and Brian Urlacher) were white stars thriving under their watch.

On the management front, Jerry Reese, the great-grandson of a sharecropper, rose out of a backwoods childhood of gutting farm animals and chopping cotton to become the general manager of the New York Giants. He got the job on the Martin Luther King holiday, spoke of his need to succeed for the sake of young black executives, and then shaped the roster that beat the unbeaten Patriots in the Super Bowl.

The scene of Doug Williams marching the Lombardi Trophy to Reese's podium was as profound as the upset itself.

"Jerry came up the hard way," said Reese's predecessor, Ernie Accorsi. "He's allowing a lot of African-American kids to dream the dream."

Nobody has breathed life into that dream that quite like Barack Obama, the most charismatic president-elect since John F. Kennedy. Plenty of great public figures outside of the athletic arena helped pave Obama's way.

Frederick Douglass. Booker T. Washington. King. Rosa Parks. Thurgood Marshall. Colin Powell.

But scores of dignified African-American sportsmen from Jesse Owens, gold-medal sprinter, to Joe Dumars, championship player and executive, played a significant role in leading America -- very slowly but very surely -- to Obama's victory speech in Chicago.

"Sports broke down a lot of ignorance and a lot of walls," said Shaun Powell, the columnist and author. "Eventually, people realized it's not such a bad thing having a black man with a Harvard degree running your company."

Or having a black man with a Harvard degree running your country.