YANNIS - So is it Jackie Robinson or Jack E. Robinson?
The candidate doesn't mind if you get it wrong.
The latter Robinson - running for US Senate against incumbent Edward M. Kennedy - says he's in no rush to correct voters who think he's related to the civil rights legend, the first black player in Major League Baseball.
In fact, while previous news reports said he had no family ties to the Dodgers star, Jack E. Robinson now says they're kin, after all.
''I am a distant relation,'' he told reporters this week, as he campaigned on Cape Cod. ''Not close enough to be anything fancy. ... It's a cousin on my father's side, down in Mississippi or Alabama or somewhere.''
That's news to Rachel Robinson, the Hall of Famer's wife, who created the Jackie Robinson Foundation.
''Ms. Robinson does not recognize the name at all,'' said her assistant, Daren Gaskins. She can't rule out the possibility, Gaskins said, because Jackie Robinson didn't know his father. ''She just finds it a coincidence that after 50 years, he decided to say it is his relative. It's a funny time now that he's running.''
But now is when Robinson needs all the name recognition he can get, as he challenges one of the most recognizable people in the state. And confusion with the baseball star is hard to avoid: Robinson rarely introduces himself without using his middle initial. (The E, incidentally, stands for Errol.)
Math works in his favor, too: Jack E. Robinson is 40, and Jackie Robinson, who died in 1972, would be 81 this year. So Jack E. sometimes encounters voters who are certain he's the baseball player's son. In Barnstable Town Hall this week, a stranger looked at him reverently and said, ''I have an original '55 Dodger yearbook. An original.''
Robinson nodded graciously and left without correcting the mistake.
''It's happened all my life, so I don't consider it out of the ordinary,'' he said later.
The nod-and-ignore tactic turns out to be something he learned from his real-life dad. Jack E. Robinson Sr., a businessman and former president of the Boston chapter of the NAACP, says he's often been mistaken for the baseball player, especially because he had a baseball career of his own: He played in the Negro League in the 1950s, as a shortstop for the Homestead Grays and the Baltimore Elite Giants.
Relatives have always said the two players had blood connections, the elder Robinson said.
''We are both from the South, and there have been rumors that we were related, distant relatives. It's a family-type situation, in rumors and family conversation.''
But it's nothing he's tried to prove, he said. ''There's very little objective data that links one person to another, because of the basic way that America was in the '40s.''
So when fans hounded him for signatures, believing him to be somebody else, Jack E. Robinson Sr. said he would calmly oblige.
''Sometimes, it's easier to give an autograph,'' he said. ''It's simply too difficult to explain that you're not the one that's dead.''
