October 1964

by David Halberstam

  When Bob was in high school, he was small for his age and the football coach turned him down. Josh was pleased because he did not want his brother’s basketball and baseball careers jeopardized by a football injury. Even though Bob was relatively small, he was quick and a good all-around athlete, with a strong arm. By his senior year in high school he began to grow, and he was six feet tall and 175 pounds by graduation. He became a good high school basketball player, missing the All-State team, he believed, only because he was black. He was fast enough to run the 440 and the 880 in major track meets. He played baseball in summer leagues, under Josh’s auspices, on a Y team that toured throughout the region, and was good enough at the end of his third year in high school to receive an offer from the Kansas City Monarchs. There was even a feeler from Runt Marr, the Cardinal regional scout, and some talk of a minor-league contract, but Josh Gibson insisted that his brother go on to college.

  Josh made sure that his brother always played with kids several years older so that he had to reach for more. There were times when it was too much and Bob would on occasion burst into tears. But Josh did not back down. At all times Bob had to push himself to be the best. In addition, he was to handle himself with pride and dignity. It was important to dress well, to carry himself well, and to speak well. Small things, acts of social carelessness, which did not offend when they were done by white people, could easily be seized on and held against a black man. Among other things, there was to be no smoking in the Gibson household. Bob once got hold of a small silver pipe and figured out how to tear open cigarettes and use the tobacco from them in his pipe. He hid in a closet one day and was smoking away when Josh found him. His older brother whacked the pipe right out of his hand. “Don’t you ever do that again!” he said. Bob had a small space between his front teeth, and as a boy he mimicked the way he had seen older boys spit; it was a way of showing that he was grown up. Josh put a stop to that as well. If he saw his brother spitting he would slap him. “Don’t ever do that! That’s not the person you’re going to be!” He was going to be a man who knew how to comport himself and to gain the respect that was rightfully his.

  Slowly over the years, certain qualities of toughness and resilience were instilled in Bob Gibson, which would enable him to play sports in a white-run world. Playing with Josh’s all-black YMCA baseball teams against the all-white local teams, Bob saw that the all-white umpires were so prejudiced that Josh on occasion had to threaten to take his team off the field unless they were willing to give the visitors a break on calls. It was a given that Bob would go to college—he was not going to enter an unwelcoming white world without an education. He applied to Indiana University, hoping to win a scholarship to that basketball powerhouse, but was told in a return letter that Indiana already had its quota of Negroes for that year, which, Gibson later found out, turned out to be all of one. Josh thereupon talked his brother up to Duce Belford, who was the athletic director and basketball coach of Creighton, the local Jesuit college. Since Gibson was one of the best high school basketball players in the state, Belford eventually offered him a basketball scholarship, and Gibson went on to be an outstanding athlete at Creighton, where he was the first black to play on the baseball and basketball teams. Still, on occasion, he had to stay in a different hotel and eat at different restaurants because of local customs, even there, in the heartland of America. He was a good enough basketball player to get offers to play with the Harlem Globetrotters upon graduation, but he was attracted more and more to baseball, which in those days was the professional sport that offered the greatest and most immediate financial rewards.

  As Josh Gibson had once talked up his brother to Belford, now, as Bob’s college graduation approached, he began talking him up to Bill Bergesch, the general manager of the St. Louis Cardinal Triple A farm club, the Omaha Cardinals. The two were acquaintances, and Bergesch admired Josh Gibson considerably—Josh was always asking Bergesch for used baseballs, old bats, and used uniforms for his Y teams. In the spring of 1957, Bob Gibson’s last year at Creighton, Josh started telling Bergesch, “I’ve got this kid brother who’s going to play in the major leagues.” Bergesch would ask what position and Josh would say he was a pitcher, but, then again, he was a hell of a hitter, and could also play the outfield. And the infield, too, as a matter of fact. And catch, by the way. The general manager of a Triple A farm team tended to hear that kind of thing from almost everyone he dealt with—legendary prospects being hidden away in a tiny town, or pitching for a sandlot team nearby—and those reports tended to be met with considerable skepticism. But Josh Gibson had a reputation for being a careful man, and he had never been boastful before about anyone or anything else. He was very persistent, and so Bergesch decided, both as a courtesy to someone whom he liked and because a good baseball man never knows when he’s going to find a diamond in the rough, that he would watch Josh Gibson’s kid brother pitch for Creighton. He went to two Creighton games, but he never saw Bob Gibson pitch. The first time, Gibson played the outfield, and Bergesch got a quick sense of the boy’s speed and power and that he had a very strong arm. The second time, Gibson caught. This time, seeing the way he blocked the plate, Bergesch sensed his competitive fire. Bergesch asked Duce Belford about him. Belford, who, besides being the baseball coach, was a bird-dog scout for the Dodgers, was not impressed. “That kid’s never going to make it,” he told Bergesch. “He’s much too wild. Why, he’s not even our best pitcher.” That, thought Bergesch, was the difference between coaching college baseball, where you wanted a finished product, and working in the minor leagues, where you looked for raw ability. As far as Bergesch was concerned, Bob Gibson was all potential—the only question was which position he would play. So he told Johnny Keane, who was managing the Omaha team, that young Gibson was a genuine prospect and suggested they bring him in for a tryout. At the tryout Gibson was awesome: first he took batting practice and showed exceptional power, driving a few balls over the fence. Then Bergesch had him throw to the Cardinals’ regular catcher. Neither Bergesch nor Keane had ever seen a kid throw like that before, and, though they did not have the resources to clock him, years later Bergesch estimated that he must have thrown at about ninety-five miles an hour. In addition, his fastball already had movement. That meant they were likely to be able to teach him how to put more movement on it. “That’s some arm,” Keane told Bergesch. “Let’s sign him and start him off as a pitcher. I’ll guarantee you if he doesn’t make it as a pitcher, he’ll sure as hell make it as an outfielder.” A few days later the signing took place, ironically at the end of the college World Series, when all sorts of scouts had gathered in Omaha and were eager to sign that year’s hot prospect, Ron Fairly of USC. There was no small irony in that, Bergesch thought: all those scouts clustered around, waiting for the Series to end so they could make their pitch to Fairly. For if Bergesch was right, and he suspected he was, then he was about to sign someone who was a good deal more talented than Ron Fairly.

  That did not mean that the Cardinal organization was going to shower bonus money on Bob Gibson. He was not highly touted, he had no reputation, he had played for a relatively obscure college, he was black (which was one reason he was not highly touted and had no reputation), and in those days black talent still came significantly cheaper than white talent. There was also a danger in giving Gibson too large a bonus, for it would mean they would have to put him on the big-league roster and not let him develop in the minor leagues. That had happened to Sandy Koufax, and it had almost surely slowed down his development. Gibson’s case was similar, for he obviously needed time to learn to control and master his awesome talent. Going directly to the majors and sitting on the bench would be disastrous for him. Gibson, who always had a strong sense of his own value, had thought in terms of a bonus of thirty thousand dollars, and he was not pleased with the offer of a tiny bonus, even though it allowed him to go to the minor leagues for an apprenticeship; it seemed to him he got the short end of the stick, which he believed was the end bl
ack people inevitably got. As far as he was concerned, the small bonus, and the rationalizations that went with it, was just one more consequence of being black in America. The one player to whom the Cardinals gave a big bonus that year was a pitcher named Bob Miller, who won nine games in four years for the Cardinals, and who became a journeyman relief pitcher. Bob Gibson, in years to come, never ran into Bill Bergesch without reminding him of Bob Miller and comparing his own signing and his own Cardinal career with those of Miller’s. “There’s Bill Bergesch who got me for four thousand dollars, because he thought Bob Miller was a better pitcher,” he liked to say.

  Gibson was so disappointed with the first offer from the Cardinals that he hesitated for a time between professional-sports careers. He had not gotten a basketball offer from an NBA team, for Creighton was not yet a basketball power and the NBA teams did not yet throw out as fine a net for college prospects as they would later, but the Globetrotters were interested in him because he had once played well against them on a college all-star team. So he worked out a deal whereby he signed with Omaha for a $1,000 bonus and $3,000 in salary; that done, he negotiated with Abe Saperstein of the Globes for $1,000 a month for four months. That gave him $8,000, which was a lot of money for a ghetto kid in 1957, he thought. At his first full practice with the Omaha Cardinals, he was told to go out and throw batting practice. Though he was not throwing with full speed, the Omaha hitters were fouling the ball off and not even getting it out of the cage. Johnny Keane told him to throw some curves. No one seemed to be able to hit them either. “Should I start throwing hard?” he asked Keane. No, Keane told him, what he was doing was just fine. “I just knew I was going to make it,” he later wrote of that moment. “As an outfielder. As a catcher. As a first baseman. As a pitcher. I would play wherever they wanted me to, but I was going to make it.”

  Gibson was a man who had to win, at baseball, at the daily bridge game with his Cardinal teammates (his bridge partner, Dick Groat, was very much aware that he was not supposed to let Bob Gibson down, that if they had a makable bid in the game and they did not complete it, there was going to be a price to pay), and, later, even with his young son in tic-tac-toe games—for letting his son win, he was sure, would teach the boy the wrong lessons. His teammate Mike Shannon, who watched Gibson closely over many seasons, first as a player and then as a broadcaster, decided that it was not so much that Gibson needed to win, but that he hated to lose, and above all, he did not want to be a loser. There was, others thought, more than a little truth in that, for Gibson was less demonstrative in victory, even in critical victories, than many of his teammates. He kept his pleasure in success oddly private; he did not sit around the locker room afterward soaking in the glory and the champagne and noisily proclaiming the triumph of the moment. Rather, he was, given the considerable nature of his own contributions, surprisingly quiet and almost distant from any celebration taking place around him. It was as if winning merely confirmed Gibson’s role as a famous, admired, and well-paid professional athlete. Losing, on the other hand, threatened to reduce him to what he had once been, a poor, sickly black kid from the Omaha ghetto, always on the outside looking in.

  He was not just a gifted pitcher, he was a gifted overall athlete. When his Cardinal teammates talked about him as a possible NFL player, most of them assumed that, because of his arm, he would have been a quarterback. But Lou Brock thought otherwise. “No way he’s a quarterback with that mind-set,” Brock said. “Bob plays only one position in football—linebacker.” His teammate Roger Craig thought of him as being like a great heavyweight boxer, in part because he was so strong, but even more because of his determination—if he ever got a lead on you, Craig thought, if he put you down on the canvas, then you were almost surely finished because he was so single-minded, he would never let you back up. Sometimes, before a game in which he was not pitching, Gibson liked to work out at shortstop (“with more range there than Groat,” Curt Simmons liked to joke); Frankie Frisch, the great former Giant infielder, took one look at him there and thought, with his speed and his great arm, he could have been the best shortstop in the league.

  For a young, relatively untutored (even as he was trying out with the big-league club he did not seem to know the difference between a curve and a slider) power pitcher, Gibson developed surprisingly quickly. He pitched for a while in Omaha and then was sent to Columbus in the Sally League; he pitched well enough there and showed enough promise that the Cardinals raised his salary sufficiently so that he would quit the Globetrotters, thereby reducing the risk of injury and permitting him to concentrate on baseball. In 1958 he started the season at Omaha under Johnny Keane. Keane was the ideal manager for him—sensitive, steady, patient—and Gibson came to think that Keane was one of the best men he had ever met. He brought Gibson along slowly, never put him under unnecessary pressure. Rather, he focused on what Gibson could do, which was to throw hard, and not, as some managers might have, on what he could not do, which was to show great control. Keane was never negative. He understood that he was dealing with a proud young man who was a potentially great, great player. As a result, Gibson thought Johnny Keane was as color-blind as a man could be, not by liberal social conscience, but by innate human decency.

  Johnny Keane was unusually sensitive to all young players, very much aware of the stress they were under. His own career was one that tested a man’s love of baseball. He had been a career minor-league player, a marginal one at that, and then a career minor-league player-manager, and then, finally, a career minor-league manager. Starting in 1930, he reached the Triple A level twice: in 1932, after three years in professional baseball, for all of eight games and twenty-two at bats with Columbus in the American Association; and three years later, for three games and five at bats for Rochester in the International League. If any man was an expert on the anxieties experienced by young players in the lower rungs of baseball, it was Johnny Keane. While he was very strict about certain rules, he nonetheless never sought to denigrate his players, or, as some baseball managers did, to assault them about their weaknesses. Rather, he tried to reinforce their strengths, hoping that, over time, their vulnerabilities would diminish. He was essentially a kind man, surprisingly gentle in the relatively crude world of baseball in those days. He had studied for the priesthood, had spent six years as a seminarian, and when he switched professions, he managed to retain his humanity. Bill Bergesch, who worked closely with Keane, thought Keane’s younger players were like part of an extended family to him.

  To Gibson, Keane made a world filled with all sorts of pressures and dangers seem a simpler and less threatening place. What Keane offered him was basic and essential: a belief in Gibson’s future. During the 1958 season, Gibson did well enough to be sent to Rochester, which was also a Triple A team. In 1959 he spent a part of the early season with the major-league team, and then was sent back to Omaha, this time under Joe Schultz’s management. Gibson’s job was to work on his control, and to some degree he succeeded. His record was 9-9, and in 135 innings he struck out 98 and walked 70. He threw hard enough to start gaining a reputation as a fireballer, and later in his career, when major-leaguers started to complain about batting against him, players in the minors would remind their teammates what it had been like to go against Bob Gibson where the lights at the ball parks were so much weaker and when his control over his fastball had been less certain.

  Gibson was certain that 1960 was going to be his year, when he would finally make it with the big-league club. He did go to the majors that season, but it quickly became the worst moment in his professional career. The manager at the time was Solly Hemus, replacing the recently fired Fred Hutchinson, and as far as Gibson was concerned, Hemus was the absolute opposite of Johnny Keane as a manager. Hemus, he thought, needed to show the world the kind of self-conscious toughness that seemed to come with being a small man in a world of bigger men. “Mighty Mouse” was his nickname. Hemus had been a marginal big-league player himself, fighting hard to maximize limited s
kills and compensating by being fiery and combative; some thought he was the kind of player who wore his uniform too large because he figured that he might get a couple of calls each year on tight pitches that might otherwise not have hit him. As a player, he was a holler guy, making up for his size with his noise. When he and Curt Simmons had played together on the Phillies, Simmons had once been in a minor jam out on the mound, and Hemus, the second baseman, came over to the mound to give him a pep talk. That irritated Simmons, who felt the crisis not that grave and did not want a boost from his second baseman, so he brusquely waved him off. Hemus seemed almost apologetic. “If you can’t hit, you can’t run, and can’t throw, then you’ve got to holler at them,” he said as he retreated back to second base. As a manager, he was a product of the Leo Durocher school, raging at umpires, opponents, the world, and, of course, his own players. He was absolutely determined, thought Jack Buck, the Cardinal broadcaster, to show that he was tougher than everyone else. He seemed not merely to lack the flexibility to deal with different kinds of players, but also to lack the ability to let go of defeat, to get over the anger and frustration created by whatever it was that had gone wrong that day on the field. In 1961, when Hemus was still managing the Cardinals, he used Curt Simmons, a good all-around athlete, as a pinch runner in one game. Johnny Keane was then the third-base coach, and he flashed a sign a little late, and Simmons ended up being picked off at second. Simmons returned to the dugout disgusted with himself, with the play, and with Keane. He knew he was going to be ripped by Hemus in the dugout and he was—the manager was out of control. When the game was over, the Cardinals had lost by one run, and Hemus exploded at him again. Simmons took a shower, Hemus walked into the locker room, and the sight of Simmons sent him into another tirade. By this time Simmons had had enough. When the team arrived back at the hotel, Hemus started in again, but Simmons shouted back: “Solly, if you can believe it, I’m more pissed off than you are. The goddamn fault is Keane’s because he was late with the sign, and besides, I’m a pitcher and I don’t want to be used as a pinch runner in the first goddamn place. Now get off my ass.” Hemus, Simmons thought, was not cut out for managing—a manager had to know, above all else, when to let go.