Steve Lentz
Posts: 36196
Joined: 7/19/2007
From: Omaha
Status: offline
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Omaha and all of Baseball lost one of the all time greats today. RIP Mr. Gibson.
My thing was winning,” Gibson said in his autobiography, “Stranger to the Game,” written with Lonnie Wheeler and published in 1994. “I didn’t see how being pleasant or amiable had anything to do with winning, so I wasn’t pleasant on the mound and I wasn’t amiable off it.”
“For my money, the most intimidating, arrogant pitcher ever to kick up dirt on a mound is Bob Gibson,” Tim McCarver, the Cardinals’ catcher and a longtime broadcaster, recalled in his 1987 memoir, “Oh, Baby, I Love It!”
“If you ever saw Gibson work,” McCarver said, “you’d never forget his style: his cap pulled down low over his eyes, the ball gripped — almost mashed — behind his right hip, the eyes smoldering at each batter almost accusingly.”
Profiling Gibson for The New Yorker in September 1980, Roger Angell told how after his 17-strikeout game against Detroit, a reporter asked if Gibson had always been as competitive as he seemed that day.
“He said yes,” Angell wrote, “and he added that he had played several hundred games of tick-tack-toe 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.’”
Pack Robert Gibson was born on Nov. 9, 1935, in Omaha, Neb., the youngest of seven children, and grew up in a housing project there. His father, Pack Gibson, died a few months before his birth and his mother, Victoria, worked in a laundry. His brother Josh, a graduate of Creighton University in Omaha, became his mentor and introduced him to recreational programs he oversaw. Bob Gibson became an all-city basketball player in high school and played several positions on an American Legion baseball team that won a city title.
His favorite sport was basketball, and he became the first Black athlete to play basketball and baseball at Creighton. He averaged more than 20 points a game for his collegiate basketball career and pitched, caught and played several other positions for the baseball team.
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" I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization"
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