Distance

On the afternoon of October 2, 1968—a warm, sunshiny day in St. Louis—Mickey Stanley, the Detroit Tiger shortstop, singled to center field to lead off the top of the ninth inning of the opening game of the 1968 World Series. It was only the fifth hit of the game for the Tigers, who by this time were trailing the National League Champion St. Louis Cardinals by a score of 4–0, so there were only minimal sounds of anxiety among the 54,692 spectators—home-town rooters, for the most part—in the stands at Busch Stadium. The next batter, the dangerous Al Kaline, worked the count to two and two and then fanned, swinging away at a fastball, to an accompanying roar from the crowd. A moment later, there was a second enormous cheer, louder and more sustained than the first. The Cardinal catcher, Tim McCarver, who had straightened up to throw the ball back to his pitcher, now hesitated. The pitcher, Bob Gibson, a notoriously swift worker on the mound, motioned to his battery mate to return the ball. Instead, McCarver pointed with his gloved hand at something behind Gibson’s head. Gibson, staring uncomprehendingly at his catcher, yelled, “Throw the goddam ball back, will you! C’mon, c’mon, let’s go!” Still holding the ball, McCarver pointed again, and Gibson, turning around, read the illuminated message on the center-field scoreboard, which perhaps only he in the ballpark had not seen until that moment: “Gibson’s fifteenth strikeout in one game ties the all-time World Series record held by Sandy Koufax.” Gibson, at the center of a great tureen of noise, dug at the dirt of the mound with his spikes and then uneasily doffed his cap. (“I hate that sort of thing,” he said later.) With the ball retrieved at last, he went to work on the next Tiger, Norm Cash, a left-handed batter, who ran the count to two and two, fouled off several pitches, and then struck out, swinging at a slider. Gibson, a long-legged, powerfully built right-hander, whose habitual aura of glowering intensity on the mound seemed to deepen toward rancor whenever his club was ahead in the late stages of a game, now swiftly attacked the next Detroit hitter, Willie Horton. Again the count went to two and two and stuck there while Horton fouled off two or three pitches. Gibson stretched and threw again, and Horton, a righty batter, flinched away from the pitch, which seemed headed for his rib cage, but the ball, another slider, broke abruptly away under his fists and caught the inside corner of the plate. Tom Gorman, the home-plate umpire, threw up his right hand, and the game was over. McCarver, talking about this moment not long ago (he is now a radio and television broadcaster with the Phillies), said, “I can still see that last pitch, and I’ll bet Willie Horton thinks to this day that the ball hit him—that’s how much it broke. Talk about a batter shuddering!”

Bob Gibson’s one-game World Series record of seventeen strikeouts stands intact, and so do my memories of that famous afternoon. In recent weeks, I have firmed up my recollections by consulting the box score and the inning-by-inning recapitulations of the game, by watching filmed highlights of the play, and by talking to a number of participants, including Gibson himself. (He had had no idea, he told me, that he was close to a record that afternoon. “You’re concentrating so hard out there that you don’t think of those things,” he said.) Gibson seemed to take absolute charge of that game in the second inning, when he struck out the side on eleven pitches. By the end of four innings, he had run off eight strikeouts. Not until I reëxamined the box score, however, did I realize that there had been only two ground-ball outs by the Tigers in the course of nine innings. This, too, must be a record (baseball statistics, for once, don’t tell us), but the phenomenally low figure, when taken along with the seventeen strikeouts, suggests what kind of pitching the Tiger batters were up against that afternoon. Most National League batters in the nineteen-sixties believed that Gibson’s fastball compared only with the blazers thrown by the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax (who retired in 1966 with an arthritic elbow) and by the Reds’ Jim Maloney. Gibson’s pitch flashed through the strike zone with a unique, upward-moving, right-to-left sail that snatched it away from a right-handed batter or caused it to jump up and in at a left-handed swinger—a natural break of six to eight inches—and hitters who didn’t miss the ball altogether usually fouled it off or nudged it harmlessly into the air. The pitch, which was delivered with a driving, downward flick of Gibson’s long forefinger and middle finger (what pitchers call “cutting the ball”), very much resembled an inhumanly fast slider, and was often taken for such by batters who were unfamiliar with his stuff. Joe Pepitone, of the Yankees, concluded the All-Star Game of 1965 by fanning on three successive Gibson fastballs and then shook his head and called out to the pitcher, “Throw me that slider one more time!” Gibson, to be sure, did have a slider—a superior breaking pitch that arrived, disconcertingly, at about three-quarters of the speed of the fastball and, most of the time, with exquisite control. Tim McCarver, who caught Gibson longer than anyone else, says that Gibson became a great pitcher during the summer of 1966 (his sixth full season in the majors), when he achieved absolute mastery of the outside corner of the plate while pitching to right-handed batters and—it was the same pitch, of course—the inside corner to left-handed batters. He could hit this sliver of air with his fastball or his slider with equal consistency, and he worked the opposite edge of the plate as well. “He lived on the corners,” McCarver said. A third Gibson delivery was a fastball that broke downward instead of up and away; for this pitch, he held the ball with his fingers parallel to the seams (instead of across the seams, as was the case with the sailer), and he twisted his wrist counterclockwise as he threw—“turning it over,” in mound parlance. He also had a curveball, adequate but unextraordinary, that he threw mostly to left-handers and mostly for balls, to set up an ensuing fastball. But it was the combination of the devastating slider and the famous fastball (plus some other, less tangible assets that we shall get to in time) that made Gibson almost untouchable at his best, just as Sandy Koufax’s down-diving curveball worked in such terrible (to hitters) concert with his illustrious upriding fastball.

“Hitting is rhythm,” McCarver said to me, “and if you allow major-league hitters to see only one pitch—to swing repeatedly through a certain area of the plate—eventually they’ll get to you and begin to hit it, even if it’s a great fastball. But anybody who can control and switch off between two first-class pitches will make the hitters start reaching, either in or out, and then the game belongs to the pitcher. Besides all that, Bob had such great stuff and was so intimidating out there that he’d make the batter open up his front shoulder just a fraction too fast, no matter what the count was. The other key to good hitting, of course, is keeping that shoulder—the left shoulder for a right-handed batter, I mean, and vice versa—in place, and the most common flaw is pulling it back. Gibson had guys pulling back that shoulder who normally wouldn’t be caught dead doing it. Their ass was in the dugout, as we say.”

Mike Shannon, who played third base behind Gibson in the 1968 Series opening game (he didn’t handle the ball once), remembers feeling pity for the Detroit batters that afternoon. “Most of them had never seen Gibby before,” he said, “and they had no idea what they were up against.” Shannon, who is now a television game announcer with the Cards, told me that he encounters some of the 1968 Tigers from time to time in the course of his baseball travels, and that they almost compulsively want to talk about the game. “It’s as if they can’t believe it to this day,” he said. “But neither can I. I’ve never seen major-league hitters overmatched that way. It was like watching a big-league pitcher against Little League batters. It was frightening.”

Gibson, of course, was already a celebrated winning pitcher by 1968. Like many other fans, I had first become aware of his fastball and his unique pitching mannerisms and his burning intensity on the mound when he won two out of the three games he pitched against the Yankees in the 1964 World Series, including a tense, exhausting victory in the pennant-clinching seventh game. Then, in 1967, I had watched him capture three of the Cardinals’ four October victories over the Red Sox, again including the seventh game—a feat that won him the Most Valuable Player award for that Series. I had also seen him work eight or ten regular-season games over the previous five years or more. Although he was of only moderate size for a pitcher—six feet one and about a hundred and eighty-five pounds—Gibson always appeared to take up a lot of space on the mound, and the sense of intimidation that McCarver mentioned had something to do with his sombre, almost funereal demeanor as he stared in at his catcher, with his cap pulled low over his black face and strong jaw, and with the ball held behind his right hip (he always wore a sweatshirt under his uniform, with the long, Cardinals-red sleeves extending all the way down to his wrists), and with his glove cocked on his left hip, parallel to the ground. Everything about him looked mean and loose—arms, elbows, shoulders, even his legs—as, with a quick little shrug, he launched into his delivery. When there was no one on base, he had an old-fashioned full crank-up, with the right foot turning in mid-motion to slip into its slot in front of the mound and his long arms coming together over his head before his backward lean, which was deep enough to require him to peer over his left shoulder at his catcher while his upraised left leg crooked and kicked. The ensuing sustained forward drive was made up of a medium-sized stride of that leg and a blurrily fast, slinglike motion of the right arm, which came over at about three-quarters height and then snapped down and (with the fastball and the slider) across his left knee. It was not a long drop-down delivery like Tom Seaver’s (for contrast), or a tight, brisk, body-opening motion like Whitey Ford’s.

The pitch, as I have said, shot across the plate with a notable amount of right-to-left (from Gibson’s vantage point) action, and his catchers sometimes gave the curious impression that they were cutting off a ball that was headed on a much longer journey—a one-hundred-foot fastball. But with Gibson pitching you were always a little distracted from the plate and the batter, because his delivery continued so extravagantly after the ball was released that you almost felt that the pitch was incidental to the whole affair. The follow-through sometimes suggested a far-out basketball move—a fast downcourt feint. His right leg, which was up and twisted to the right in the air as the ball was let go (all normal enough for a right-handed pitcher), now continued forward in a sudden sidewise rush, crossing his planted left leg, actually stepping over it, and he finished with a full running step toward the right-field foul line, which wrenched his body in the same direction, so that he now had to follow the flight of the ball by peering over his right shoulder. Both his arms whirled in the air to help him keep his balance during this acrobatic maneuver, but the key to his overpowering speed and stuff was not the strength of his pitching arm—it was the powerful, driving thrust of his legs, culminating in that final extra step, which brought his right foot clomping down on the sloping left-hand side of the mound, with the full weight of his body slamming and twisting behind it. (Gibson’s arm never gave him undue trouble, but he had serious difficulties with his knees in the latter stages of his career, and eventually had to have a torn cartilage removed from the right knee, which had pushed off to start all the tens of thousands of his pitches over the years and had then had to withstand the punishing force of the last stage of his unique delivery.) All in all, the pitch and its extended amplifications made it look as if Gibson were leaping at the batter, with hostile intent. He always looked much closer to the plate at the end than any other pitcher; he made pitching seem unfair.

The players in the Detroit clubhouse after Gibson’s seventeen-strikeout game had none of the aggrieved, blustery manner of batters on a losing team who wish to suggest that only bad luck or their own bad play kept them from putting away a pitcher who has just beaten them. Denny McLain, the starting Tiger pitcher, who had won thirty-one games that summer but had lasted only five innings in the Series opener, said, “I was awed. I was awed,” and Dick McAuliffe, the Detroit second baseman, said that he could think of no one he had ever faced with whom Gibson could be compared. “He doesn’t remind me of anybody,” he said. “He’s all by himself.”

I was awed, too, of course, but nothing I had seen on the field at Busch Stadium that afternoon startled me as much as Gibson’s postgame comportment in the clubhouse. In October of 1964 and again in 1967, I had noticed that Bob Gibson often appeared to be less elated than his teammates in the noisy, jam-packed, overexuberant World Series locker rooms—a man at a little distance from the crowd. But somehow I must have expected that his astounding performance here in the 1968 opener would change him—that his record-breaking turn on the mound would make him more lighthearted and accommodating; he would be smiling and modest and self-depreciating, but also joyful about his feat, and this would diminish that almost immeasurable distance he had just established, out on the field, between himself and the rest of us. He would seem boyish, in short, and we, the grown-up watchers of the game, would then be able to call him by his first name (even if we didn’t know him), and forgive him for what he had done, and thus to love him, as is the ancient custom in these high sporting dramas. But Gibson was unchanged. Talking to the sportswriters gathered in a thick, uncomfortable crowd around his locker, he looked at each reporter who asked him a question (Gibson is an exceptionally handsome man, with small ears, very dark skin, and a strikingly direct gaze) and then answered it gravely and briefly. When one writer asked him if he had always been as competitive as he had seemed on this day, he said yes, and he added that he had played several hundred games of ticktacktoe against one of his young daughters and that she had yet to win a game from him. He said this with a little smile, but it seemed to me that he meant it: he couldn’t let himself lose to anyone. Then someone asked him if he had been surprised by what he had just done on the field, and Gibson said, “I’m never surprised by anything I do.”

The shock of this went out across the ten-deep bank of writer faces like a seismic wave, and the returning, murmurous counterwaves of reaction were made up of uneasy laughter and whispers of “What did he say?” and some ripples of disbelieving silence and (it seemed to me) a considerable, almost visible wave of dislike, or perhaps hatred. This occasion, it should be remembered, was before the time when players’ enormous salaries and their accompanying television-bred notoriety had given birth to a kind of athlete who could choose to become famous for his sullenness and foul temper, just as another might be identified by his gentle smile and unvarying sweetness of disposition. In 1968, ballplayers, particularly black ballplayers in near-Southern cities like St. Louis, did not talk outrageously to the press. Bob Gibson, however, was not projecting an image but telling us a fact about himself. He was beyond us, it seemed, but the truth of the matter is that no one at Busch Stadium should have been much surprised by his achievement that afternoon, for it was only a continuation of the kind of pitching he had sustained all through that summer of 1968—a season in which he won twenty-two games for the Cardinals while losing nine, and also compiled an earned-run average of 1.12 runs per game: the best pitching performance, by that measurement, in the history of modern baseball.

When Bob Gibson retired, at the age of thirty-nine, at the end of the 1975 season, after seventeen summers with the Cardinals, he had won two hundred and fifty-one games, and his record of 3,117 strikeouts was second only to Walter Johnson’s 3,508. Last year, however, Gaylord Perry, who is still going strong at the age of forty-two, passed Gibson on the lifetime-strikeout list (Perry is now with the Yankees and has 3,267 whiffs to his credit at this writing), while three other active pitchers—Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver, and Steve Carlton—may surpass Gibson’s mark next summer. This kind of erosion of the game’s most famous fixed numbers—the landmarks of the pastime—by swirling tides of newcomers is always happening, of course; it is the process that makes baseball statistics seem alive and urgent to the true fan. But Gibson’s displacement unsettled me, and when I read in the sports pages last spring that he was among the players who would become eligible for election to baseball’s Hall of Fame at the end of this season, after the obligatory five-year post-retirement waiting period (the qualifications for official immortality are established by the Baseball Writers Association of America, whose three hundred-odd members conduct a Hall of Fame balloting in the off-season each year), I sensed that Gibson might be about to slip away into the quiet corridors of baseball history. It is always a discomfiting moment for a long-term follower of the game when a favorite player, whose every feat and gesture on the field still retain their clarity and color, is declared safe for embronzement, but the possibility of Bob Gibson’s imminent apotheosis at Cooperstown came as a shock to me. He seemed too impatient, too large, and too restless a figure to be stilled and put away in this particular fashion; somehow, he would shrug off the speeches and honorifics when they came, just as he had busied himself unhappily on the mound when the crowd stopped the rush of the game to cheer him at Busch Stadium that afternoon in 1968. For me, at least, Bob Gibson was still burning to pitch to the next batter. But in another, oddly opposite sense it seemed wrong to think of Gibson as a participant in the soft, sweet rituals with which newly elected baseball immortals are inducted into the Hall of Fame at the ceremonial in Cooperstown each August—the reading of the players’ records and their official citations; their speeches of acceptance and gratitude; the obligatory picture-taking, with the still young heroes, in civilian clothes, holding up their plaques and standing among the smaller, white-haired, earlier great figures who have come back for the occasion: old gents at a reunion, blinking in the hot upstate sunlight—because baseball up to now has never quite known what to make of Bob Gibson, and has slightly but persistently failed to pay him his full due as a player and as a man. With this conviction in mind, I determined early this summer to look up Gibson and try to get to know him a little better. I wanted to see how he was faring now that he could no longer stare down at the batters of the world from the height of the pitcher’s mound. I knew that he was still living in Omaha, his home town, and when I reached him there by telephone he told me to come on out if I wanted to. Not a warm invitation, but not a wary one, either. In the next week or two, I mentioned my forthcoming trip to some friends of mine—good baseball fans, all of them—and noticed that many of them seemed to have forgotten Bob Gibson’s eminence and élan, if, indeed, they had ever been aware of them. In the history of the game, it seemed, as in his playing days, he already stood at a little distance from the crowd, a little beyond us all. But then I talked about Gibson with some players—old teammates or opponents of his—and they responded more warmly.

Pete Rose, who talks in the same runaway-taxi style in which he runs bases, said, “I’m always afraid I’ll forget some pitcher when I start rating them, because I’ve faced so many of them. I started out against people like Warren Spahn, you know. But the best pitcher I ever batted against was Juan Marichal, because he threw so many goddam different kinds of good pitches against you. The hardest thrower of them all was Sandy Koufax, and the greatest competitor was Bob Gibson. He worked so fast out there, and he always had the hood up. He always wanted to close his own deal. He wasn’t no badman, but he never talked to you, because he was battling you so hard. I sure as hell don’t miss batting against him, but I miss him in the game.”

Billy Williams, now a coach for the Cubs, who hit four hundred and twenty-six home runs during his sixteen years with that team and two years with the Oakland A’s, told me, “Bob Gibson always got on with it. He didn’t stand around out there and look around the park, you know. You always got the same message from him: ‘Look, I’m goin’ to throw this pitch and either you hit it or I get your ass out.’ You like a guy like that. The infielders were never on their heels out there behind him. Everyone’s on their toes, and it’s a better game for everybody. I used to love the afternoon games at Wrigley Field when Gibby pitched against our Fergie Jenkins, because you could always plan something early for that evening. They hurried. Gibby was as serious as anybody you ever saw, and you had to be ready at all times. There was hitters that tried to step out on him, to break his pace, but if you did that too often he’d knock you down. He let you know who was out there on the mound. Made himself felt. He never let up, even on the hottest days there in St. Louis, which is the hottest place in the world. Just walked out there in the heat and threw the ball past people.”

Tim McCarver said, “He was an intimidating, arrogant-looking athlete. The arrogance he projected toward batters was fearsome. There was no guile to his pitching, just him glaring down at that batter. He wanted the game played on his own terms. He worked very fast, and that pace was part of his personality on the mound, part of the way he dominated the game. One of the things he couldn’t stand was a catcher coming out there to talk to him. In my first full year with the Cardinals, when I was only twenty-one years old, our manager was Johnny Keane, who was a fanatic about having a catcher establish communications with his pitcher. So I’d get a signal from Keane that meant ‘Go on out there and settle him down,’ but then I’d look out and see Hoot glaring in at me.” McCarver laughed, and shook his head. “Well, sometimes I’d walk out halfway, to try to appease both parties!”

McCarver is an intimate friend of Bob Gibson’s, and he told me that Gibson was much the same off the field as on the mound. “Bob is relatively shy,” he said. “He’s a nice man, but he’s quiet. He doesn’t enjoy small talk. He doesn’t like to waste his time with anything that’s weak or offhand. He wants to deal from strength all the time. That’s why he projects this uppity-black-man figure that so many people in baseball seem to hate. He’s very proud, you know, and he had a ghetto upbringing, so you could understand why he was so sensitive to bigotry—up to a point. But we have a great relationship—me, a kid from Memphis, Tennessee, and him, an elegant black man from Omaha. Any relationship you get into with Bob is going to be intense. He’s a strong man, with strong feelings.”

Joe Torre, the manager of the New York Mets, who played with Gibson from 1969 to 1974, is also a close friend. When I called on him late in June, in the clubhouse at Shea Stadium, and told him I was about to go west to visit Gibson, he beckoned me over to a framed photograph on one wall of his office. The picture shows the three friends posing beside a batting cage in their Cardinals uniforms. Torre, a heavy-faced man with dark eyebrows and a falsely menacing appearance, and McCarver, who has a cheerful, snub-nosed Irish look to him, are both grinning at the photographer, with their arms around the shoulders of Bob Gibson, who is between them; it’s impossible to tell if Gibson is smiling, though, because his back is turned to the camera. “That says it all,” Torre said. “He alienated a lot of people—most of all the press, who didn’t always know what to make of him. He has this great confidence in himself: ‘Hey, I’m me. Take me or leave me.’ There was never any selling of Bob Gibson. He’s an admirable man. On the mound, he had very tangible intangibles. He had that hunger, that killer instinct. He threw at a lot of batters but not nearly as many as you’ve heard. But he’d never deny it if you asked him. I think this is great. There’s no other sport except boxing that has such a hard one-on-one confrontation as you get when a pitcher and a hitter go up against each other. Any edge you can get on the hitter, any doubt you can put in his mind, you use. And Bob Gibson would never give up that edge. He was your enemy out there. I try to teach this to our pitchers. The more coldness, the more mystery about you, the more chance you have of getting them out.

“I played against him before I played with him, and either way he never talked to you. Never. I was on some All-Star teams with him, and even then he didn’t talk to you. There was the one in Minnesota, when I was catching him and we were ahead 6-5, I think, in the ninth. I’m catching, and Tony Oliva, a great hitter, is leading off, and Gibby goes strike one, strike two. Now I want a fastball up and in, I think to myself, and maybe I should go out there and tell him this—tell him, whatever he does, not to throw it down and in to Oliva. So I go out and tell him, and Gibby just gives me that look of his. Doesn’t say a word. I go back and squat down and give him the signal—fastball up and in—and he throws it down and in, and Oliva hits it for a double to left center. To this day, I think Gibby did it on purpose. He didn’t want to be told anything. So then there’s an infield out, and then he strikes out the last two batters, of course, and we win. In the shower, I say, ‘Nice pitching,’ and he still doesn’t say anything to me. Ask him about it.”

Torre lit a long cigar, and said, “Quite a man. He can seem distant and uncaring to some people, but he’s not the cold person he’s been described as. There are no areas between us where he’s withdrawn. Things go deep with him. I miss talking to him during the season, and it’s my fault, because I’m always so damn busy. He doesn’t call me, because he never wants to make himself a pain in the ass to a friend. But he is my friend. The other day, I got a photograph of himself he’d sent me, and he’d signed it ‘Love, Bob.’ How many other ballplayers are going to do that? How many other friends?”

Most ballplayers who are discussing a past rival or a teammate go directly to the man’s craft—what pitches he could hit, his arm, his range afield, or (with pitchers) his stuff and what he threw when the count was against him. But I had begun to notice that the baseball people talking about Bob Gibson all seemed anxious to get at something deeper; Gibson the man was even more vivid and interesting to them than Gibson the great pitcher. Bill White, the well-known TV and radio announcer with the Yankees, played first base behind Gibson with the Cards for seven years, and was then traded to the Phillies and had to play against him. “He was tough and uncompromising,” White told me. “Koufax and Don Drysdale were just the same, with variations for their personalities—they had that same hard state of mind. But I think a great black athlete is sometimes tougher in a game, because every black has had it tough on the way up. Any black player who has a sense of himself, who wants to make something of himself, has something of Bob Gibson’s attitude. Gibson had a chip on his shoulder out there—which was good. He was mean enough. He had no remorse. I remember when he hit Jim Ray Hart on the shoulder—he was bending away from a pitch—and broke his collarbone. Bob didn’t say anything to him. I’d been his roomie for a while on the Cards, but the first time I batted against him, when I went over to the Phillies, he hit me in the arm. It didn’t surprise me at all.”

And, once again, Mike Shannon: “I think every superior athlete has some special motivation. With Bob Gibson, it wasn’t that he wanted to win so much as that he didn’t want to lose. He hated to lose. He just wouldn’t accept it.”

It was ninety-seven degrees at the Omaha airport when I landed there early one evening in July, and when I called Bob Gibson from my motel he invited me to come on out and cool off with a dip in his pool. He picked me up in his car—a black 1972 Mercedes SEL, lovingly kept up, with CB equipment (his call signal is Redbird) and terse “BG” license plates. Gibson looked well kept up himself, in tailored jeans, a white polo shirt, thin gold spectacles, a gold bracelet on his left wrist, a World Series ring, and a necklace with a pendant “45” in gold—his old uniform number. He is forty-four years old, but only his glasses spoiled the impression that he was perfectly capable of working nine tough innings the next afternoon. I asked him what he did for exercise these days, and he said, “Nothing.” I expressed surprise, and he said, “I played sports hard for thirty years, which is enough. Now I’m tired of all that.” No apology, no accompanying smile or joke: no small talk. He spoke pleasantly enough, though, in a light, almost boyish voice, and when he did laugh—a little later, after we were more used to each other—the sound of it made me realize that only in the world of sports would he be considered anything but a young man. There were some quiet spells in the car during our longish drive out to his house, in Bellevue, a comfortable suburban district on the south side of town, but by the time we got there I had lost any sense of foreboding that I might have had about imposing myself on such a famously private man.

Bob Gibson has done well for himself in Omaha. He was born and grew up there in the black North Side ghetto; his mother was a laundress, and his father died before he was born. He was the youngest of seven children—his three sisters and three brothers are all still living—and at the time of his birth the family lived in a four-room shack. When he was an infant there, he was bitten on the ear by a rat. By the end of his playing days, Gibson was earning more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, which made him one of the two or three best-paid players of his time, and he invested his money with care. Today, he is the chairman of the board—an interracial board—of the Community Bank of Nebraska, which he helped get started seven years ago, and which does most of its business in the black community of Omaha. He is also the co-owner and the active, day-to-day manager of a new and successful medium-sized bar-restaurant called Gibby’s, a couple of blocks away from Creighton University, which Gibson entered as a freshman on a basketball scholarship in 1954. Much of Gibson’s life these days seems new. Gibby’s opened in late 1978, and last November he was married to Wendy Nelson, whom I met at their home, to the accompaniment of frenzied barking from their four-month-old miniature schnauzer, Mia. (“Kill, Mia!” Gibson said delightedly. “Kill, girl!”) Wendy Gibson, a composed, striking-looking blond woman in her late twenties, is in the financial division of the local telephone company, where she works, by preference, on the very early shift, driving to work each day shortly after dawn in the family’s other Mercedes. (Gibson’s previous marriage, to Charline Johnson, ended in divorce some years ago; their children, Renee and Annette, are grown up and have moved away from Omaha. A captivating oil portrait of the two girls and their father—all of them much younger then—hangs in Gibson’s study in his new house; the artist is an old friend and teammate, Curt Flood.) Wendy and Bob Gibson moved into their house last May. It is a spacious, comfortably furnished and carpeted three-story contemporary wooden structure, with a sundeck that looks over a steep hillside and a thick green growth of oaks and cottonwoods. A flight of steps leads down from the deck to a big swimming pool, which had had its inaugural only a week before my arrival. Bob Gibson is handy. He helped design the new house, and he put in the deck stairs and built a raised wooden patio beside the pool, and also did most of the landscape work on the grounds, laying in some old railroad ties to form a rose garden and planting shrubs and young trees everywhere. The pool was built to Gibson’s design; its sides and bottom are painted black—a da Vinci-like idea of his, meant to help the water hold the heat of the sun in the spring and fall. Somehow, though, he had not remembered the warmish midsummer Nebraska sunshine, and when he and I slipped into the inky waves, the water temperature stood at ninety-two degrees—only a fraction cooler than the steamy, locust-loud night air. “Another mistake,” Gibson said mildly. Swimming was a bit like sloshing through black-bean soup, but after a couple of turns up and down the pool he and I settled ourselves comfortably enough on the top steps at the shallow end, with our legs dangling in the water, and while Mia sniffed and circled me warily we talked a little baseball.

I asked Gibson if he recalled the low-and-inside pitch he had thrown to Tony Oliva in that All-Star game, against Joe Torre’s signals.

“Well, I never really liked being on the All-Star team,” he said. “I liked the honor of it, being voted one of the best, but I couldn’t get used to the idea of playing with people from other teams in the league—guys who I’d have to go out and try to beat just a couple of days later. I didn’t even like having Joe catch me—he was with the Braves then—because I figured he’d learn how to hit me. In that same game, he came out and told me not to throw the high fastball to Harmon Killebrew, because the word was that he ate up that pitch.” Gibson’s voice was almost incredulous as he said this. “Well, hell. I struck him out with three high fastballs. But in any of the All-Star games where I got to pitch early”—Gibson was voted onto the National League All-Star squad eight times—“I’d always dress right away and get out of there in a hurry, before the other players got done and came into the clubhouse. I didn’t want to hang around and make friends. I don’t think there’s any place in the game for a pitcher smiling and joking with the hitters. I was all business on the mound—it is a business, isn’t it?—and I think some of the writers used to call me cold or arrogant because of that. I didn’t want to be friends with anybody on the other side, except perhaps with Willie Stargell—how could you not talk to that guy? None of this was meant to scare guys, or anything. It was just the way I felt. When Orlando Cepeda was with us, I used to watch him and Marichal laughing and fooling around before a game. They’d been on the Giants together, you know. But then Cepeda would go out and kill Marichal at the plate—one of the best pitchers I ever saw—and when it was over they’d go to dinner together and laugh some more. It just made me shake my head. I didn’t understand it.”

I had been wondering how to bring up the business of his knocking down his old roommate Bill White, but now Gibson offered the story of his own accord. “Even before Bill was traded, I used to tell him that if he ever dived across the plate to swing at an outside pitch, the way he liked to, I’d have to hit him,” he said. “And then, the very first time, he went for a pitch that was this far outside and swung at it, and so I hit him on the elbow with the next pitch. [Some years earlier, Gibson hit Duke Snider after similar provocation, and broke his elbow.] Bill saw it coming, and he yelled ‘Yaah!’ even before it got him. And I yelled over to him, ‘You son of a bitch, you went for that outside ball! That pitch, that part of the plate, belongs to me! If I make a mistake inside, all right, but the outside is mine and don’t you forget it.’ He said, ‘You’re crazy,’ but he understood me.”

I mentioned a famous moment when Gibson had hit Tommie Agee, of the Mets, on the batting helmet with the very first pitch of the first inning of the first Cardinals spring-training game in 1968. Agee had come over from the Chicago White Sox and the American League in the previous winter, and when Gibson’s first swallow of the spring conked him, several Gibson students among the Mets and Cardinals baseball writers in the press box at Al Lang Field called out, “Welcome to the National League, Tommie!” (Agee went to the hospital for observation, but was found not to have suffered serious injury.)

Gibson was silent for a moment, and then he said, “It’s very easy to hit a batter in the body with a pitch. There’s nothing to it. It’s a lot harder to hit him in the head. Any time you hit him in the head, it’s really his own fault. Anyway, that was just spring training.”

Joe Torre had told me that the Agee-plunking was an accident, but I noted now that Gibson had not quite denied intention in the affair. He had put doubt in my mind, just as Torre had told me he would. He still wanted that edge.

“I did throw at John Milner in spring training once,” Gibson went on, paddling his legs in the water. “Because of that swing of his—that dive at the ball.” Milner, an outfielder then with the Mets and now with the Pirates, invariably takes a full-scale, left-handed downtown swing at the ball, as if he meant to pull every pitch into the right-field stands. “I don’t like batters taking that big cut, with their hats falling off and their buttons popping and every goddam thing like that. It doesn’t show any respect for the pitcher. That batter’s not doing any thinking up there, so I’m going to make him think. The next time, he won’t look so fancy out there. He’ll be a better-looking hitter. So I got Milner that once, and then, months later, at Shea Stadium, Tom Seaver began to pitch me up and inside, knocking me down, and it took me a minute to realize that it must have been to pay me back for something in spring training. I couldn’t believe that.”

There was a little silence at poolside while I digested this. Gibson sounded almost like a veteran samurai warrior recalling an ancient code of pain and honor. I suggested that there must be days when he still badly missed being out there on the mound, back in the thick of things.

“No, I have no desire to get out and throw the fastball again,” he said quietly. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”

I had noticed that Gibson limped slightly as he walked around the pool, and the accounts of some of his baseball injuries and how he had reacted to them at the time came back to me. In July of 1967, while pitching against the Pirates in St. Louis, he was struck just above his right ankle by a line drive off the bat of Roberto Clemente. He went down in a heap, but after the Cardinals trainer had treated the injury with a pain-deadening spray, Gibson insisted on staying in the game. He walked Willie Stargell, retired Bill Mazeroski on a pop-up, and then, firing a three-two pitch to Donn Clendenon, came down hard on the right leg with his characteristic spinning follow-through and snapped the already cracked bone. Dal Maxvill, then a Cardinals shortstop and now a Cardinals coach, said to me recently, “That was the most extraordinary thing I ever saw in baseball—Gibby pitching to those batters with a broken leg. Everyone who was there that day remembered it afterward, for always, and every young pitcher who came onto our club while Gibson was still with us was told about it. We didn’t have too many pitchers turning up with upset stomachs or hangnails on our team after that.”

Gibson came back to win three games against the Red Sox in the World Series that fall, but his next serious injury, in midseason of 1973, took a heavier toll. Leading off first base in a game against the Mets at Shea Stadium, he made a sudden dive back toward the base after an infield line drive was caught, but collapsed when his right knee buckled. The trainer and the team doctor came out to succor him, but Gibson cried “Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it!” and again refused to be taken out of the game. When the inning ended, he walked to the mound and began his warmup tosses and fell heavily to the ground. The surgeon—Dr. Stan London—who performed the cartilage operation the next day said afterward that Gibson had the knees of an eighty-year-old man. Gibson recovered in time to pitch and win a game that September, and he continued for two more full seasons on the mound, although, as he told me now, he sometimes had to sit in the clubhouse for two hours after a game before he felt able to head for the showers. “I’d had the left knee drained about seventeen times, too,” he said. “I’d sit like this”—he hung his head and arms like a broken puppet—“and I’d think, Why do I put up with this? Why, why?” He laughed now, mocking himself. “I just couldn’t give it up,” he said. “Couldn’t let go.”

I asked if he’d become a different kind of pitcher then, using change-ups and slip pitches, the way many older hurlers do in their final seasons.

“No, I always threw hard,” he said. “They didn’t use me much in my final season, after I’d announced I was going to retire—I never did understand that. But once, when I hadn’t pitched in three weeks, they brought me into a game against Houston in extra innings—I was the last pitcher we had—and I struck out the side on nine pitches that were nothing but fastballs. So I still had something left, even at the end. I always had pretty good control, you know, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know what I was doing out there. But later that season I gave up a grand-slam home run to Pete LaCock, of the Cubs, and that told me it was about time for me to get off the mound for good.” Gibson spoke lightly enough, but at the time this home run was an almost insupportable blow to his pride. A pitcher who was with the Cubs that year told me that as LaCock (who is not exactly famous as a slugger) circled the bases Gibson stalked after him around the base paths, reviling him for what he had done.

“Pitching is about ninety per cent thinking,” Gibson went on. “I threw hard when I was younger, but I didn’t know how to get people out. I don’t care how hard you throw, somebody’s going to hit it if you don’t think out there. It’s not all that detailed—you don’t think three or four pitches ahead. But one pitch might set up the next two you throw—it depends what the guy does with it. You know. If he misses a fastball by a foot, then he’ll see another one. If he fouls it off or just misses it, he’ll probably get a breaking ball next. It isn’t exactly scientific, or anything.”

Gibson suddenly laughed in the darkness beside me. “But not everybody understands what a pitcher does,” he said. “About his control, I mean. I remember when Mike Shannon was moved in from the outfield and began playing third base for us—back in the middle sixties, it was. He was really nervous over there. He kept asking me where I wanted him to play—up or back, near the line or away. He wanted instructions. I always told him I didn’t give a damn where he played unless there was a right-handed batter coming up with a man on first and less than two out, but then he should be ready, because he’d be getting a ground ball, right to him or around his area. And I’d throw a sinker down and in, and the batter would hit it on the ground to Mike, to start the double play, and when we came in off the field Mike would look at me with his mouth open, and he’d say, ‘But how did you know?’ He didn’t have the faintest idea that when I threw that pitch to the batter he had to hit it to him there! He didn’t know what pitching was all about.”

To go back a little, Gibson also won his second start in the 1968 Cardinals–Tigers World Series—a 10–1 decision in the fourth game, during which he fanned ten batters and whacked a home run. It was Gibson’s seventh straight World Series victory—an all-time record. The Tigers, however, captured the Series, rallying in stimulating fashion after trailing by three games to one, and beating Gibson in the memorable finale, when Detroit outfielder Jim Northrup, batting with two out and two on in the seventh inning of the scoreless game, smashed a long drive that was misjudged by Curt Flood in center field, who then slipped on the turf and allowed the ball to go over his head for a triple. The Tigers won the game by 4”1, and the Most Valuable Player award for the Series went to Mickey Lolich, a portly left-handed sinkerball specialist, who won the second, fifth, and seventh games. Gibson, however, had established a Series record of thirty-five strikeouts (still standing), and a few weeks later he was named the Most Valuable Player of the National League for 1968 and became the unanimous winner of the Cy Young Award as the league’s best pitcher. The following year, 1969, Gibson compiled a 20”13 record, with an earned-run average of 2.18, and in 1970 his 23”7 won-lost mark and 3.12 E.R.A. won him the Cy Young again. Injuries began to gnaw him after that, but he declined only stubbornly, throwing a no-hitter against the Pirates in 1971 and running off eleven straight victories in the course of a 19”11 season in 1972. His lifetime earned-run average of 2.91 runs per game is the ninth-best in baseball history. (Walter Johnson’s 2.37 leads all comers, while Tom Seaver, at 2.62, and Jim Palmer, at 2.73, stand third and fourth on the all-time list at this writing.)

Many observers (including this one) believe that Gibson’s 1.12 earned-run average in 1968 is one of the Everests of the game, ranking with Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-consecutive-game hitting streak in 1941 and Hack Wilson’s hundred and ninety runs batted in in 1930. Gibson’s record, however, was not much noted or celebrated in its time, partly because it was achieved in a summer during which the pitchers in both leagues established a mesmerizing dominance over the batters. The leagues’ combined batting average fell to an all-time low of .237, and twenty-one per cent of all games played were shutouts. Many pitchers came up with startling performances that summer. Gaylord Perry, of the Giants, and Ray Washburn, of the Cardinals, threw no-hit games on successive days at Candlestick Park; Jerry Koosman, a rookie, won nineteen games for the Mets; Denny McLain, as I have noted, won thirty-one games for the Tigers; and Don Drysdale, of the Dodgers, ran off fifty-eight and two-thirds consecutive shutout innings—a record that still stands. At the end of the year, the baseball fathers studied these figures and determined to rebalance the game by shaving five inches off the height of the mound (reducing it to ten inches), and by closing up the upper and lower limits of the strike zone. Gibson’s golden season may always appear a mite tarnished by these circumstances, but even a brief rundown of his 1968 summer outings suggests that in that single season he came as close to some ideal of pitching as most of us are ever likely to witness or wish for. Younger fans may argue for Ron Guidry’s marvellous 25”3 season for the Yankees in 1978, when he threw nine shutouts and wound up with a 1.74 earned-run average. Others will cite Steve Carlton’s one-man-band performance in 1972, when he finished with an earned-run average of 1.97 and a record of 27”10—all this for a frightful last-place Phillies team that won only fifty-nine games in all—while geezers may bring up Carl Hubbell’s 23”12 and 1.66 earned-run mark for the Giants in 1933. But no matter: these great case studies of the game are forever moot.

On May 28, 1968, Bob Gibson lost to the Giants, 3”1, and saw his record for the year decline to three victories and five defeats. Surprisingly, however, his earned-run average of 1.52 for the young season was fifth in the National League at this point—an oddity explicable by the fact that his teammates had supplied him with a total of four runs in the five games he lost: starvation fare. On June 2nd, Gibson pitched the Cardinals into first place (this was before the leagues had been subdivided into East and West sectors) with a 6”3 victory over the Mets; the final Mets run—a homer by Ed Charles—came in the seventh inning. It was also the final run that Gibson surrendered in the month of June, for he threw shutout games in his next five outings. Only the last of these brought him much attention from the national press, and that came because reporters had noticed that his next appearance, on July 1st, would be against the Dodgers in Los Angeles, and that his mound opponent there would be Don Drysdale, whose record shutout skein of fifty-eight and two-thirds innings had been set over a span of six games in late May and early June. A matchup between the two seemed exciting indeed, for Drysdale, who was six feet five and threw almost sidearm, had a hostile scowl, a devastating fastball, and a reputation for knocking down batters he didn’t care for: another intimidator. Gibson by now had forty-eight scoreless innings to his credit, but the tension of the famous confrontation vanished in the very first inning, when two Dodgers singled and Gibson, while pitching to Ron Fairly, let go a wild pitch that allowed Len Gabrielson to score from third base. Gibson had lost the duel with Drysdale and a shot at his record, but he won the game, by 5”1. He then pitched a shutout against the Giants, beat Houston by 8”1, and afterward shut out the Mets and the Phillies in succession. On July 30th, once again facing the Mets, Gibson surrendered a run with two out in the fourth inning, when Ed Charles scored on a double by Eddie Kranepool—the same Ed Charles who had homered against him on June 2nd. In that span—from June 2nd to July 30th—Gibson had given up two earned runs (and two runs in toto) in ninety-six and two-thirds innings.

Gibson won that Mets game, and he did not lose a game, in fact, until August 24th, when he fanned fifteen Pirates but lost, 6”4, after giving up a three-run homer to Willie Stargell. Between May 28th and August 24th, Gibson had won fifteen straight games, ten of them shutouts. He threw two more shutouts in his next two outings, and somebody figured out that in the course of three straight games in August, Gibson’s infielders had to make only eight assists. (His shortstop, Dal Maxvill, told a reporter, “It’s like having a night off out there when he’s pitching.”) Possibly tired by now—or perhaps a bit understimulated, since his club had run away with the league by this point, having established a fourteen-and-a-half-game lead over the second-place Reds by August 1st—Gibson lost three games in September, one of them to the no-hitter by Gaylord Perry. His final victory, on September 27th, was a 1”0 decision over the Astros—his thirteenth shutout. His season was over; the World Series and the Tigers were just ahead.

A further thin cement of statistics will finish the monument. Gibson completed twenty-eight of the thirty-four games he started in 1968, and was never removed in the middle of an inning—never knocked out of the box. His 1.12 earned-run average is second only to the all-time low of 1.01, established by the Red Sox’ Hub Leonard in 1914, and it eclipsed the old National League mark of 1.22, set by Grover Cleveland Alexander in 1915. Gibson’s thirteen shutouts are second only to the sixteen that Alexander achieved the following summer. But those very low early figures, it should be understood, must be slightly discounted, for they were established in the sludgy, Pleistocene era of the game, when aces like Leonard and Alexander and Walter Johnson and the White Sox’ Red Faber regularly ran off season-long earned-run averages of two runs or less per game, thanks to the dead ball then in use. The lively ball, which came into the game in 1921, when the owners began to notice how much the fans seemed to enjoy watching a young outfielder (and former pitcher) named George Herman Ruth hit towering drives into the bleachers, put an end to the pitchers’ hold over the game, and none of the four worthies I have cited ever pitched consistently in the less-than-three-runs-per-game level after 1922. Bob Gibson, we may conclude, was the man most responsible for the next major change in the dimensions of the sport—the lowering of the mound and the shrinkage of the strike zone that came along in 1969. Gibson, like all pitchers, complained bitterly when these new rules were announced, but Bob Broeg, the sports editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the dean of Cardinals sportswriters, told him he had only himself to blame. “I said, ‘God damn it, Gib, you’re changing the game!’ ” Broeg told me not long ago. “ ‘It isn’t fun anymore. You’re making it like hockey.’ ”

On another day, Omaha slowly came to a broil under a glazy white sun while Gibson and I ran some early-morning errands in his car—a visit to his bank, a stop at the drive-in window of another bank, where he picked up the payroll checks for Gibby’s—and wound up at the restaurant, where the daytime help greeted the boss cheerfully. Gibson seemed in an easy frame of mind, and he looked younger than ever. I recalled that many of his teammates had told me what good company he was in the dugout and on road trips—on days when he wasn’t pitching. He was a comical, shrill-voiced bench jockey, and a grouchy but lighthearted clubhouse agitator, who was sometimes known to bang a bat repeatedly and horribly on the metal locker of a teammate who was seen to be suffering the aftereffects of too many ice-cream sodas the previous evening. While he drove, Gibson, with a little urging, recalled how he had pitched to some of the prime hitters of his day—inside fastballs to Willie Mays (who feasted on breaking pitches), belt-high inside deliveries to Eddie Mathews, low and away to Roberto Clemente, and so on. He said that Frank Robinson used to deceive pitchers with his plate-crowding (Robinson was a right-handed slugger of fearsome power, whose customary stance at the plate was that of an impatient subway traveller leaning over the edge of the platform and peering down the tracks for the D train), because they took it to mean that he was eager for an inside pitch. “Besides,” he said, “they’d be afraid of hitting him and putting him on base. So they’d work him outside, and he’d hit the shit out of the ball. I always tried him inside, and I got him out there—sometimes. He was like Willie Mays—if you got the ball outside to Willie at all, he’d just kill you. The same with Clemente. I could throw him a fastball knee-high on the outside corner seventeen times in a row, but if I ever got it two inches up, he’d hit it out of sight. That’s the mark of a good hitter—the tiniest mistake and he’ll punish you. Other batters—well, somebody like Joe Adcock was just a guess hitter. You’d pitch him up and in, and he’d swing and miss every time. He just didn’t give a damn. I don’t know what’s the matter with so many hitters—it’s like their brains small up.” He shook his head and laughed softly. “Me, too. I got beat by Tommy Davis twice the same way. In one game, I’d struck him out three times on sliders away. But I saw that he’d been inching up and inching up toward that part of the plate, so I decided to fool him and come inside, and he hit a homer and beat me, one-oh. And then, in another game, I did exactly the same thing. I tried to outthink him, and he hit the inside pitch for a homer, and it was one-oh all over again. So I could get dumb, too.”

I said that he didn’t seem to have made too many mistakes in the summer of ’68. Gibson thought for a moment or two and said, “You can’t say it was a fluke, although some people have said that. Just say it was totally unusual. Everything I threw that year seemed to go where I wanted it. Everything was down, all year. I was never that good again, because they went and changed the rules on me. The next year was a terrific struggle. I had a good season, but I never worked so hard in my life, because so many of my breaking pitches were up. I’ll never know, but I doubt very seriously I’d have had another one-point-one-two E.R.A., even if they’d left the mound where it was. I’d like to think I’d really perfected my pitching to that point, but I’ll never know.”

The talk shifted to pitchers, and Gibson (echoing Pete Rose) said he thought that Juan Marichal had been the best hurler of their time, because of his absolute control. “I had a better fastball and a better slider, but he was a better pitcher than me or Koufax,” he said. Among contemporary pitchers, he had warm things to say about the Phillies’ Steve Carlton, once a young teammate of his on the Cards. “He’s always had a great arm,” he said. “And if you have a good arm and you’re in the game long enough, you’re going to learn how to pitch. He sure knows how now. What makes a player great to me is longevity.”

I named some other mound stars of the sixties and seventies, and Gibson shrugged and shook his head. “I guess I was never much in awe of anybody,” he said. “I think you have to have that attitude if you’re going to go far in this game. People have always said that I was too confident, but I think you’ll find that most guys who can play are pretty cocky.” The locution “He can play”—as in “George Brett can play a little”—is a throwaway line, the professionals’ designation for star-quality athletes. “They’re not sitting around worrying about who they’re going to pitch against or bat against the next day. You hear a lot of talk about the pressure of the game, but I think most of that comes from the media. Most guys don’t let things worry them. Pressure comes when you’re not doing well. I’ve always thought that you only really enjoy baseball when you’re good at it. For someone who isn’t at the top of the game—who’s just hanging on somewhere on down the totem pole—it’s a real tough job, every day. But when I was playing I never wished I was doing anything else. I think being a professional athlete is the finest thing a man can do.”

I asked about the source of his great confidence in himself, and he said, “I’ve always been that way. After all, I was playing basketball with grown men when I was thirteen years old. I always thought I was good enough to play with anyone. I don’t know where that came from.”

When Gibson was playing baseball, he was considered one of the two or three very best athletes in the game. His early basketball experience had come when he was a water boy with an itinerant black basketball team, the Y Travellers (named for Omaha’s North Branch Y.M.C.A.), which was coached by his grown-up oldest brother, Josh; whenever the Travellers ran up a comfortable lead over some local Nebraska or Iowa all-star club, Josh would send his kid brother into the game, just to rub things in a little. Bob Gibson won city and statewide basketball honors at Technical High School, in Omaha, and a few in baseball, too (he was a catcher in the beginning), and he broke every basketball record at Creighton, where he was the first black student to be given a basketball scholarship—and, for that matter, to play on the team. After leaving Creighton, he played for the Harlem Globetrotters during the 1957-58 season, after he had signed on as a pitcher with the Cardinals organization. “It was all right being with the Trotters,” Gibson told me, “but I hated that clowning around. I wanted to play all the time—I mean, I wanted to play to win.”

In spite of Gibson’s spinning, staggering pitching motion, which certainly did not leave him in the squared-away, weight-on-both-feet attitude that coaches recommend as the proper post-delivery fielding stance for the position, he was agile enough out there to win the Gold Glove award as the best defensive pitcher in his league every season from 1965 through 1973. Fans and writers and players still talk about some of his fielding plays in the same awestruck tones they use for the seventeen-strikeout Series game. In one play (I can still see it) in the 1964 World Series, he scampered over and plucked up a hard-hit ball struck by Joe Pepitone that had nailed him on the hip and caromed halfway to third base; Gibson leaped and turned one hundred and eighty degrees in midair and made an overhead throw to first—a basketball one-handed fall-away jumper—that nipped Pepitone at the bag. There was also a nationally televised game in which he ran down a ball that a Giants batter had bounced over his head out on the mound; Gibson caught up with it while running full tilt away from the plate and toward second base, and he flipped it, underhand and away from his body (try it), to first for the out. Tim McCarver, who weighs a solid hundred and ninety pounds, told me that one day when he and Gibson were horsing around on the field, Bob had suddenly seized him and lifted him above his head at arm’s length, holding him aloft like some Olympic weight lifter at the end of a clean and jerk. “The man is somewhat startling,” McCarver said.

Gibby’s is a welcoming sort of place—a squared-off, three-sided bar downstairs, with strips of stained-glass decoration on the far wall and a short flight of steps up to the sun-filled upper level, where there are some comfortable wooden-backed dining booths and hanging plants everywhere. On a busy night—on Saturdays, for instance, when a jazz group comes in to play—Gibby’s has room for about a hundred and thirty diners and twenty more customers at the bar. I was not surprised to learn that Gibson had had a hand in the restaurant’s design and construction. He is there every day, starting at eight in the morning, when he turns up to check the books for the previous night’s business, to inspect the incoming meat and produce (the menu is modest, and is built around steaks and shrimp and delicious hamburgers), and generally to keep an eye on things. “I want to make sure nobody is throwing out the forks with the garbage,” he said lightly. He went to bartenders’ school for three months before Gibby’s opened—not so much to learn how to mix cocktails, although he can now whip up eighty different drinks, as to learn how veteran waiters and bartenders can fleece a rookie owner. “What I should have done was to become an accountant,” he said. “About ninety per cent of the job is damned paperwork.” Gibby’s clientele is an interesting mixture of races and ages and sexes—a “neat crowd,” according to the owner (“neat” is a favorite word), and perhaps the only such cosmopolitan mixture in Omaha. The waiters are mostly young black men, and the bartenders mostly young black women. Gibson is a calm and approachable boss; the staff seems to care about him, and vice versa. When a small, very young waitress began putting coins into a cigarette machine near us, Bob said reprovingly, “Those aren’t for you, are they?” (They weren’t.) Later on, he let slip that the previous week he had taken the four-year-old daughter of one of his female bartenders out to his new pool for the afternoon when her mother couldn’t find a babysitter. At the last moment, he also asked the daughter of one of his regular customers to come along, too. “I used to have little girls myself,” he said to me. A lot of the arriving diners and drinkers at Gibby’s say hello to him in an easy, friendly way, but there isn’t much hearty bar chatter with the host. Not many people would feel impelled to buddy up to Bob Gibson. I suggested that he must be exposed to a good deal of barside baseball expertise at his place of work, and he said, “Who wants to talk to fans? They always know so much, to hear them tell it, and they always think baseball is so easy. You hear them say, ‘Oh, I was a pretty good ballplayer myself back when I was in school, but then I got this injury . . .’ Some cabdriver gave me that one day, and I said, ‘Oh, really? That’s funny, because when I was young I really wanted to be a cabdriver, only I had this little problem with my eyes, so I never made it.’ He thought I was serious. It went right over his head.”

Gibson’s impatience with trifling or intrusive strangers accounted for considerable coolness between him and the media during his playing days—a mistrust that may even keep him out of the Hall of Fame for a year or two, since some members of the Baseball Writers Association have been known to allow personal pique to influence their judgment. (Each writer selects up to ten names of eligible former players he thinks worthy of the Hall of Fame, and a player must be named on seventy-five per cent of the ballots in order to be immortalized.) A couple of years ago, when Willie Mays first came up for election, twenty-three members of the B.W.A. resolutely omitted him from their ballots. A good many St. Louis reporters still recall the time in 1967 when Gibson had the cast removed from his broken leg and then, annoyed by their clubhouse importunings and questions, taped a sheet of paper to his shirtfront on which he had written “1. Yes, it’s off; 2. No, it doesn’t hurt; 3. I don’t know how much longer;” and so on. The club was in a pennant race, of course, and Gibson’s condition was a matter of daily concern to Cardinals fans everywhere, so his broadside was not taken in good part.

“I don’t like all this personal contact with the press,” Gibson told me. “The press expects everyone to be congenial. Everyone’s not congenial! They want to put every athlete in the same category as every other athlete. It’s as if they thought they owned you.” I had been told of a St. Louis television reporter who had once done something to offend one of Gibson’s teammates and had then tried to reassure Gibson about their relationship. “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you, Bob,” he said. Gibson looked at him incredulously and said, “Why, hell, the only way you could ever hurt me is if you happened to be a pretty good fastball hitter!” One longtime Cardinals writer said to me, “Bob was a thorny, obdurate personality, and there weren’t too many people who were crazy about him. If he’d had a little more give to him, he could have owned this city. If he’d had Lou Brock’s personality, he’d still be working for the Cardinals somewhere.”

There is a standoff here. The price of Bob Gibson’s owning St. Louis seems to be his agreeing—in his mind, at least—to let the press own him. I have considerable sympathy for any writer who had to ask Bob Gibson some sharp, news-producing questions two or three times a week over the span of a decade or more, but wanting Gibson with a sunny, less obdurate temperament would be to want him a less difficult, less dangerous man on the mound—not quite a Bob Gibson, not quite a great pitcher. The man is indivisible, and it is the wonder of him. It is my own suspicion that both sportswriters and fans are increasingly resentful of the fame and adulation and immense wealth that are now bestowed so swiftly upon so many young professional athletes, and are envious of their privileged and apparently carefree style of living. The resentment is a half-conscious appreciation of the fact that they themselves—the fans and the media people, that is—have to a great degree created these golden youths, and because of that there is indeed a wish to own them; to demand ceaseless, inhumanly repeated dazzling performances from them on the field, and to require absolute access to their private lives as well. Most athletes, who are very young when they first come to prominence and, for the most part, have a very limited experience of the world, respond to these demands either with a convulsive, wholly artificial public “image” of affability, or (more often, of late) with surliness or angry silence. Bob Gibson did neither. Somehow, he has always kept his distance and his strangeness, and there is something upright and old-fashioned about such stubborn propriety. He is there if anyone really wants to close that space—the whole man, and not a piece of him or an image of him—but many of us may prefer not to do so, because at a distance (from sixty feet six inches away, perhaps) he stands whole and undiminished, and beyond our envy: the athlete incarnate, the player.

Gibson had allowed me to close this space a little by his willingness to talk about himself, and I had begun to sense the intensity of relationships with him that Tim McCarver had told me about, and the absence of any withdrawn places in him that Joe Torre had mentioned. There is reason to believe that he has allowed himself to become more approachable since he left the game. Bob Broeg, who covered Gibson from his first day in spring training as a rookie, in 1958, to his retirement at the end of the 1975 season, said to me, “Bob didn’t know how his personality worked against him. I don’t think I wrote many things about him over the years that weren’t appreciative of his great skills—he and Dizzy Dean were the two best pitchers I ever saw here—but he was always indifferent to me. One day, late in his career, I was in the clubhouse with him, and he was as closed off as ever, and I finally said, ‘You’ve never said a kind or personal word to me in the years I’ve known you.’ I walked away, and he chased me all the way across the room to ask what I meant. I’d pinked him, and he was extremely upset. He just didn’t realize how cold he could be in everyday relationships.”

But other intimates of Gibson’s from his Cardinals days have a very different view of him. Gene Gieselmann, the team’s trainer—he is thirty-three years old but looks much younger—counts Gibson among his closest and warmest friends. “My memories of baseball are all shiny where he’s concerned,” he said. “I cherish him. I think his problems with people go back to his never having had a father. He never knew him, you know. He dearly loved his mother, but I don’t think he was very close to anyone else in his family. So when somebody, especially a white person”—Gieselmann is white—“showed him over a long period of time that he could be more than just a trainer or more than just another ballplayer, and that there could be something deeper in their relationship—well, that meant a lot to him, and then he showed how sensitive and generous he really was.”

Gibson is a compulsive truth teller, and he appears to have a wry understanding of the burdens of that self-imposed role. At one point, he was talking with me about the difference between himself and Joe Torre when it came to dealing with writers and other strangers, and he said, “Joe knows everybody, and he recognizes them right away. I don’t. I always had a hard time remembering people’s names and recognizing their faces.” There was a moment of silence, and then he added, “That’s only half of it. I didn’t care. And if I think somebody’s wrong I’m going to say it.”

I suddenly recalled an incident some years ago involving Gibson and another player, a well-known American League infielder, who were members of a small troupe of ballplayers making a post-season tour of military bases in the Pacific. Gibson’s roommate on the trip was a public-relations man with one of the major-league teams, who was acting as an escort and travel agent for the group. Early in the trip, the infielder let drop some plainly anti-Semitic remarks about the P.R. man, who was Jewish, and Gibson stopped him in mid-sentence and advised him to keep his distance and not to talk to him for the remainder of the trip. “And if I ever pitch against you,” Gibson said levelly, “I’m going to hit you on the coconut with my first pitch.” Fortunately (or perhaps _un_fortunately), the two never did play against each other.

Gibson told me that racism had been easy to find when he came into baseball. When he first reported to the Cards’ spring-training camp, in St. Petersburg, in 1958, he presented himself at the Bainbridge Hotel, where the club was quartered, and asked for his room, but he was guided out a side door, where a taxi picked him up and drove him to the house of a black family on the other side of town; the same arrangement had been made for all the team’s black players. (Three years later, the entire club moved to a different, unsegregated hotel in St. Pete.) Earlier, when he was an eighteen-year-old sophomore at Creighton, Gibson and the rest of the college’s basketball team had gone to Oklahoma by train for a game against the University of Tulsa, and on the way Gibson was told that he wouldn’t be able to eat or sleep with his teammates there. “I cried when I was told that,” Gibson said to me. “I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known. I wasn’t ready for that.”

At one point, I said to Gibson that when I had seen him play I had always been very much aware of the fact that he was a black athlete; somehow, his race had always appeared to be a considerable part of what he brought to the mound when he went to work out there.

He didn’t respond—he simply said nothing at all—and I understood that my remark was not a question that anyone could easily respond to; it was not a question at all. But a little later he mentioned the many times he had been harassed by semi-official white people—hotel clerks and traffic cops and the like—who later began fawning on him when they learned that he was the Bob Gibson, the famous pitcher. “It’s nice to get attention and favors,” he said, “but I can never forget the fact that if I were an ordinary black person I’d be in the doghouse, like millions of others.” He paused a moment, and then added, “I’m happy I’m not ordinary, though.”

All this was said without surface bitterness or cynicism but with an intensity that went beyond his words. Some days later, Bill White, who is also black, commented on this tone of Gibson’s. “He was always so proud,” he said to me. “You could see it in his face and in the way he met people and talked to them. He never dropped it. I used to tell him, ‘You can’t be as tough on people as you are—it hurts you.’ And he would say, ‘You can do that, take all that, but I can’t.’ We didn’t agree. But, of course, you never know what it’s been like for another person. Some people have the ability to forget these things, but Bob Gibson always had the ability to make everybody remember what he had been through.”

Gibson and I spent the afternoon at the restaurant, and he and Wendy had me to dinner at their house that night: steaks and mustard greens, prepared by the Gibsons together, and a Cabernet Sauvignon. (He is a demanding, accomplished cook; when he was playing, he invariably got his own meals at home when he returned from road trips and road cooking.) It was our last evening. Bob showed me some of the nineteenth-century American antiques he collects—a delicate bevelled-glass-front walnut secretary, an immense Barbary Coast-style sideboard, and so on—and took me into a basement room where he keeps his HO-gauge model-railroad set: an entire railhead in miniature, with yards and sidings and a downtown terminal, complete with surrounding streets and buildings. He said he didn’t use the trains much anymore. The three of us took another swim in the pool, and Bob and I played a little noisy one-o’-cat with Mia in the living room with an old tennis ball. Gibson was relaxed and playful, but, as always, there was a silence about him: an air not of something held back but of a space within him that is not quite filled. At one point, I asked him if he liked Omaha, and he said, “Not all that much. It’s all right. It’s what I know.” Then I asked if he liked the restaurant business, and in the same brusque way he said, “It isn’t much, but it sure is better than doing nothing.”

I knew that Gibson had had a brief career in sports television with the American Broadcasting Company, shortly after his retirement as a player. He was a “color man” with ABC’s “Monday Night Baseball,” and on one occasion he conducted an impromptu, nationally televised interview with the Pittsburgh Pirates’ John Candelaria, just after Candelaria had pitched a perfect game. Gibson’s questions centered on the future financial rewards of Candelaria’s gem, but this insidey banter between co-professionals was evidently not a line of sports talk that the network brass approved of, and Gibson’s media career declined after that, although he has since done some baseball broadcasts with the HBO cable network. It was a disappointment to him.

When Gibson was out of the room for a moment, I said to Wendy that I sensed something missing or incomplete in Bob, and she said, “Yes, he’s still looking for something, and I don’t know if the right thing for him will ever come along. It’s sad.”

Last winter, Gibson made inquiries with the Cardinals and the Royals and the Mets and the Giants in the hope of landing a job as a pitching coach; interest was expressed, but nothing quite worked out. One difficulty may be the very modest salaries of big-league coaches, but when I talked to Bob about his joining some team in this capacity I got the feeling that he might be willing to make a considerable financial sacrifice in order to get back into the game. Several of Gibson’s old friends and teammates told me later that they had heard of his wish to get back into baseball, and without exception they hoped he would. They said that the game would be better off with a man of Gibson’s character back in uniform. But some of them went on to express their doubt that he would be satisfied with a job of such limited rewards as that of a pitching coach. “It won’t be enough for him,” one man said. “Nothing will ever be enough for him now.”

“I don’t miss pitching,” Gibson said to me on that last evening, “but I can’t say that I don’t miss the game. I miss it a little. There’s a lot I don’t want to get back to. I don’t want the fame or the money or all that attention. I always hated all the waiting around a pitcher has to do. I used to wish I could press a button the minute I’d finished a game and make the next four days just disappear. I sure as hell don’t miss the travelling. I think it’s the life I miss—all the activity that’s around baseball. I don’t miss playing baseball but I miss . . . baseball. Baseball. Does that sound like a crazy man?”

For the first time in our long talks, he seemed a bit uncertain. He did not sound crazy but only like a man who could no longer find work or a challenge that was nearly difficult enough to nurture his extraordinarily demanding inner requirements. Maybe there was no such work, outside of pitching. Baseball is the most individual and the most difficult of all team sports, and the handful of young men who can play it superbly must sense, however glimmeringly, that there will be some long-lasting future payment exacted for the privileges and satisfactions they have won for themselves. Like other team sports, baseball cannot be played in middle age; there is no cheerful, companionable afternoon to the game, as there is for old golfers and tennis players and the like. A lot of ex-ballplayers become sentimental, self-pitying, garrulous bores when they are cut off from the game. Some of them, including some great stars, go to pieces.

Thinking of what Wendy had said, I told Bob Gibson that I was sometimes aware of a sadness in him.

“Sad?” he said uncomprehendingly. “No, I’m not sad. I just think I’ve been spoiled. When you’ve been an athlete, there’s no place for you to go. You’re much harder to please. But where I am right now is where the average person has been all along. I’m like millions of others now, and I’m finding out what that’s like. I don’t think the ordinary person ever gets to do anything they enjoy nearly as much as I enjoyed playing ball. I haven’t found my niche now that that’s over—or maybe I have found it and I don’t know it. Maybe I’ll still find something I like as much as I liked pitching, but I don’t know if I will. I sure hope so.”

Maybe he will. Athletes illuminate our imagination and raise our hopes for ourselves to such an extent that we often want the best of them to become models for us in every area of life—an unfair and childish expectation. But Bob Gibson is a tough and resolute man, and the unique blend of independence and pride and self-imposed isolation in his character—the distance again—will continue to serve him in the new and even more difficult contest he is engaged in. Those who know him best will look to him for something brilliant and special now, just as they have always done. Even those of us who have not been spoiled by any athletic triumphs of our own and the fulfillment of the wild expectations of our early youth are aware of a humdrum, twilight quality to all our doings of middle life, however successful they may prove to be. There is a loss of light and ease and early joy, and we look to other exemplars—mentors and philosophers: grown men—to sustain us in that loss. A few athletes, a rare handful, have gone on, once their day out on the field was done, to join that number, and it is possible—the expectation will not quite go away—that Bob Gibson may be among them someday. Nothing he ever does will surprise me. ♦