I watched two movies this weekend that are going to be in my head for a while. While they couldn’t be classified as remotely similar, it strikes me just how important the overall theme was the same.

The first was “Right To Play,” a documentary produced by ESPN that is the feature film of the traveling Telluride Film Festival. I saw it last night at the Kenworthy in Moscow (an excellent location for films like this). The second was 42, a well budgeted period film on the first season of Jackie Robinson’s career with the Dodgers. Both touch on the theme of sport as a unifier.

I never got into actually playing sport. I wish I had. But I am also happy enough to know the reason why I didn’t play was because I chose not to play. Right to Play, a foundation started by a Noreseman has a simple goal. Just give every child the chance—the right—to play. Because if they play, they’re less likely to fight. If a child can play, then even the bleakest moments have moments of joy. Millions of children are starving and they’re bringing soccer balls. It’s exactly the right thing to do too, because everybody needs purpose, and for children play is that purpose.

With that simple premise still in my head, I went to watch 42. And once again, I’m watching a movie where the central idea is so simple, yet so important: that everybody has the right to play. It’s a hard movie to watch—it’s hard for me to believe that we were so callous, so institutionally racist. But we were. It was baseball the game of baseball that showed us what we were doing to ourselves. It was baseball that showed us that we can in fact be better than that. Jack Roosevelt Robinson might not have been the best player in the history of the game (though he is clearly one of the greats), but his importance to the the fairness of baseball—the egalitarian ideals of baseball—is second to none.

Which leads to to modern day. Race in sport is now a nonissue. Society is still creeping behind in fits and starts, but the progress continue. Now the big thing is sexual orientation. But that too is changing. When Robbie Rogers came out, the reaction from Major League Soccer was not one of revulsion, but one of enthusiastic endorsement. “So what.” I hope that he some day plays again, because just as Jackie showed in 1947, when it comes to sport, who you are is not as important as what you can do.

Where sport goes, society follows. Eventually.