Leo Adam Biga's My Inside Stories

The first time I met Major League Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson he threw me  for a loop, pun fully intended, when instead of the hour or so interview he agreed to he accorded me nearly five hours of his time. I had been steeled to expect the worst, having read and heard how difficult he could be to media types like me, but he was thoroughly charming, patiently answering question after question.  Only once or twice I was on the receiving end of his icy stare, the same glowering, suffer-no-fools-gladly stare that had intimidated hundreds of batters.  That marathon interview ended up feeding two profiles I did of him on the occasion of his second autobiography’s release.

The following story resulted from a second interview he gave me, this time by phone, that concentrated on his relationship with his late older brother Josh.   He confirmed for me what an important figure Josh was in his life and in the lives of many young blacks in north Omaha.  As the story reveals, it was Josh who really drove Bob to be the supreme competitor we came to marvel at. It was Josh, himself a fine athlete and coach in his day, who like so many blacks of an earlier era never got his own chance to shine.

A version of this story first appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com) as part of an Omaha black sports legends series I wrote called Out to Win:  The Roots of Greatness.  I later updated it for Nebraska Life Magazine.

My Brother’s Keeper, the competitive drive MLB Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson’s older brother, Josh, instilled in him (from my Omaha Black Sports Legends series, Out to Win: The Roots of Greatness)

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published in Nebraska Life Magazine (2005); an earlier version published in The Reader (2004) as part of my Omaha Black Sports Legends series, Out to Win: The Roots of Greatness

When Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson dreams, he dreams baseball. “Oh, I dream all the time about it. It drives me crazy. I guess I’m going to do that the rest of my life,” he said. He may even relive some of the boyhood nights spent throwing from the crude mound his oldest brother Josh fashioned for him. He may see himself pitching and Josh catching, critiquing his every move. Together again, two brothers linked in a legacy of competitive excellence.

Gibson perfected the art of intimidation in a 17-year playing career with the St. Louis Cardinals. From atop the mound, he threw glaring daggers into batters, who felt the fury of his inscrutable game-face. Those foolish or brazen enough to lean-out over the plate got his trademark calling-card — a 95-mile-per-hour fastball, riding-in high-and-tight, perhaps grazing their shirt or helmet, sending the cowed interlopers cartwheeling backwards or even sprawling face down in the dirt.

The brushback or knockdown pitch sent a clear message: Back off, sucker, or I’ll put you down if you crowd the plate. It was all a mind game meant to gain Gibson an edge. He was a master at it. If anyone molded him to be this ultimate competitor it was his late brother, Leroy Josh Gibson, a guru, mentor, coach, teacher and worst nightmare all rolled into one. Growing up in the Logan Fontenelle Housing Projects of north Omaha, Bob learned from Josh how to be a winner.

‘Big Guy’

Born into a poor family, Bob was the asthmatic youngest of five brothers whose father, Pack, died before he was born, leaving much of his rearing up to Josh, 15 years his senior. From the time Josh wrapped a sickly 3-year-old Bob in a quilt and carried him to the hospital, his big brother was his “protector.” The formidable Josh was a hard-boiled World War II Army vet disenchanted by racism in the service and at home. A standout athlete, he briefly attended Alabama State, where he played some football. He was also adept at basketball and baseball. Bob wasn’t around to see Josh in his athletic prime, but he said even in his 30s his older brother “could run. He could move for a big guy.

Intent on being a public school teacher and coach, Josh found opportunities denied him and settled, temporarily, for a Swift packinghouse job. He began working at the local north Omaha YMCA and Boys Club, organizing and coaching teams in basketball, baseball and softball (with the late Marty Thomas), all the while pursuing a bachelor’s degree from then Omaha University and, later, a master’s from Creighton University. Before they were called select teams, Josh recruited top athletic talent from north O to form the High Y Travelers, an elite adult basketball team, and the High Y Monarchs, a crack youth baseball team. “He got the best of the best,” said former Traveler John Nared. The teams, comprised wholly of blacks, took on all-comers across Nebraska, western Iowa and northern Kansas.

Josh left a big impression on Bob and hundreds more he taught athletic and life lessons to. “More than anything else, he was a father-figure to most of the kids down in the housing projects, me included,” Bob said. “There were a lot of kids there like me that didn’t have fathers at home and he was respected even more for the role he played in that capacity than for being a coach. What impressed us more than anything else was him coming down to the ballpark carrying his college text books, which he’d put aside to train us. We figured, Hell, here’s an ‘old man’ still going to school — it’s gotta be important. You’d be surprised how many of those kids out of the housing project were influenced by that.”

Jim Morrison, a teammate of Bob’s, said Josh had “the ability to elicit the best out of young potential stars. He started with the head down, not the body up. He taught you how to compete by teaching the fundamentals.”

Indeed, Bob called Josh “a fundamentals freak.” Bob explained, “We would have a basketball practice and everybody, you know, wanted to shoot and score points and, instead, he’d make us play defense for I-don’t-know-how-long while he and some of his friends played offense. He made sure we knew how to play the game and that every one of us knew exactly what to do and when to do it. He taught us to think on our feet more than anything else.”

Josh was not content with players knowing the basics and going hard. They had to win, too. “You know how you’re growing up and people are always telling you, It’s not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game? Well,” Bob said, “he didn’t have that thought. Winning is everything — that’s the attitude he had, and I grew up with that. It was like, Hey, I’m not out here just to play and have fun — I’m out here to win. I want to be better than the next guy.”

Josh’s fire burned so deep he sometimes lit off during games when he felt his team was getting jobbed or dis’sed. “Oh, no, he wouldn’t stand for it at all,” Bob said. “He was a fierce competitor.” He recalled how during  Monarchs road game, typically played in some backwoods town, an irate Josh would get so worked-up he’d walk “out to the middle of the field… challenging to fight everybody there. Nobody wanted to take him on. You know, he was a pretty big guy. I mean, he was an imposing figure…about 5’11 and 240 pounds.”

That defiance came to define Bob’s own disposition. “You see that stuff and that gets in the back of your mind,” he said, “and you ask yourself, Is this the way it’s supposed to be? Maybe you’re supposed to fight like that. Well, I had no problem fighting.” Bob also felt Josh’s fury during pick-up basketball games, something the Gibson brothers often engaged in. Even with his little brother, Josh gave no quarter, “Oh, yeah, Josh was a bully,” Bob said, laughing. “He wouldn’t hesitate to run right over you…It was really kind of funny because as a real young kid I was small and skinny. I was 5’0 tall and weighed 99 pounds when I got to high school. But as I got older and I got bigger he used to try and run over me and couldn’t do it because I was just as much a competitor as he was.”

‘Professional Man’

As hard as Josh drove his charges, he drove baby brother hardest. In his 1994 book Stranger to the Game Gibson writes, “There were…times when I wondered if Josh was going kill me himself. He was much harder on me than he was on the rednecks…no doubt because I had committed myself to becoming a pro ballplayer and Josh wasn’t going to let me default on the commitment. The other guys on the team would watch silently after practice when Josh would order me back on the field and hit me vicious ground balls until the sun set.”

It was the summer of 1947 when Josh first sat him down for a tough lecture about the then-11-year-old’s future as a “professional man,” by which Josh meant a pro athlete, a once distant dream made more real that summer by Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color barrier in major league baseball. Bob recalls Josh talking to him about making “the commitment” to become a ballplayer and for the next few years the big brother pushed his young sibling to the edge and back. Bob, who says his best sport from early youth on through college was basketball, naturally figured playing hoops would be his best shot at the pros. “I was actually a better basketball player and he realized that, too.” But he suspects Josh saw baseball as his ultimate ticket out of the ghetto. Indeed, it was Josh who first taught the future Hall of Famer how to pitch, even catching the wild but hard throwing youngster on a makeshift diamond outside Kellom School. Josh built-up a mound and marked-off a spot for home plate for what became a daily ritual.

“He used to have me pitch a lot,” Bob said.” He’d correct me on various things and teach me things. After I got a little bit older and I started doing a little thinking on my own, I disagreed with him a lot…the way kids do.” Under Josh’s tutelage, Bob’s natural gifts became apparent. “From March until the snow flew I had him out there throwing at me — starting at 10-minute stretches and moving up to a half hour,” Josh said in a 1964 Omaha World-Herald interview. “It wasn’t long before Robert could really hum that ball. There were times when he wanted to be off with the other boys, but I kept him at it.”

In games, Josh rarely pitched Bob. “I played outfield or shortstop most of the time, but I also played first base and I caught, too,” Bob said. The molding of Gibson did not go unnoticed and led to Bob and his friend, the late Jerry Parks, playing for different legion and sandlot teams. The pair were even recruited to play for a frequent road competitor — the Woodbine (Iowa) Whiz Kids, coached by Red Brummer. “We were kind of like ringers.”

But baseball was neither Gibson’s first love, nor his best sport. Former college basketball great and NBA All-Pro Bob Boozer, a teammate of Gibson’s for a short time at Omaha Technical High School and with the High Y Travelers, said, “He was a finer basketball player than baseball player. He could play. He could get up and hang.” When Gibson was coming up, word traveled fast that Josh’s kid brother had game. The buzz was, “This kid can really jump, man,” Tech teammate Lonnie McIntosh recalled. “He had to duck his head to dunk.”

As a prep hoops star, Gibson had few peers. His Tech High basketball coach, Neal Mosser, said, “He could have played today — that’s how good he was.”

Despite the time he spent developing his skills on the mound, Bob said Josh did not try swaying him to pursue baseball in favor of basketball. “He never tried to influence me one way or the other which I should do. Not at all.”

While his baseball prowess was more raw potential than reailty, Jim Morrison said, “He threw so hard, we called it a radio ball. You couldn’t see it coming. You just heard it.” He said Gibson exhibited his famous ferocity early on. “On the sideline, Bob could be sweet as honey, but when he got on the mound you were in big trouble. I don’t care who you were, you were in big trouble.”

During the summer American Legion baseball season before his junior year at Tech, Gibson earned all-city honors as a utility player. His talent was such that before graduating he got an offer from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues and long looks from scouts of several major league clubs. Even those credentials could not overcome racism back home in an era when public school coaches were uniformly white and either openly opposed playing blacks or did so sparingly. He even found himself turned-away by then-Tech baseball coach Ken Kennedy. It wasn’t until his senior year, under new coach Tom Murphy, he even got a chance to play baseball for Tech, making the team at shortstop.

Where the hard-driving Josh left off grooming Bob, Tech’s Mosser took over. “Neal Mosser was so much like my brother,” Bob said. “He taught fundamentals, too. He did a lot as far as me going from a young boy to a young man. It was more the way he carried himself than anything else and the respect he had for us as players.” By all accounts, Mosser was color-blind. “Race just never seemed to be a part of his thinking,” Gibson said. “As a matter of fact, we went to the state tournament in Lincoln my senior year and he started five black players. I give him a lot of credit for that. That night, you could hear a pin drop. And he didn’t give a shit. He just wanted to win.”

With the fast-breaking Tech team frustrated by Fremont High’s slow-down tactics, the referees seemingly conspired to give the edge in the nip-and-tuck stalemate to the Tigers. It was neither the first time nor the last time that a predominantly black team from Omaha got the shaft. As if he still can’t accept it, Gibson said, “By the end of the first-half four out of our five starters fouled-out, and within a couple minutes of the second half I fouled out, and I never fouled out. They were cheating us. It was that blatant. And Mosser did the same thing Josh did — he was out in the middle of the floor screaming, and I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”

There was nothing Mosser or anyone could do. Tech lost 40-39. Losing a game is one thing. Having it taken away is quite another. The pain of it made Gibson cry. He said it was the last time he ever shed a tear over a loss.

‘Desire to Win’

Gibson had his sights set on a major college hoops scholarship. He played summer AAU ball in an effort to capture the interest of powerhouse Indiana University. When Mosser contacted the Hoosiers’ head coach, he was told the program already had its “quota of blacks.” At Josh’s urging, hometown Creighton courted Bob and he accepted their scholarship offer, thus breaking the sports color line in the modern era there. He became CU’s career scoring leader. He also showed promise on the mound, further cementing his status as a pro prospect with his play in summer semi-pro ball.

Bob Gibson at Creighton University

Upon graduation, the only NBA feelers came from the Minneapolis Lakers, but when his play for a college all-star team sparked a rare win over the famed Harlem Globetrotters, he was promptly offered a contract to join the traveling hoops circus. Around the same time, he also signed with the St. Louis Cardinals. For a year, he pulled a Bo Jackson — playing two pro sports, pitching for the Cardinals Class A club in Omaha and, in the off-season, hooping it up with the Trotters on cross-country tours.

He moved quickly up the Cardinals’ farm system, joining the big league club in 1959. He became an everyday starter in ’61 and, by the mid-’60s, established himself as one of baseball’s premiere pitchers. In a 10-year stretch from 1963 to 1972 he was arguably the game’s best hurler, posting a 191-105 record, winning two Cy Young Awards, annually ranking near the top in strikeouts and ERA and leading the Cardinals to two World Series titles, capturing the series MVP award each time. His dominant 1968 MVP season was, as he put it in his book, “the year I mastered my craft.” In compiling a 1.12 ERA, 13 shut outs and 28 complete games, he enjoyed perhaps the best single year performance by a pitcher in the modern era.

Gibson, who’s observed his share of fine athletes during his days as a pitcher, coach (with the New York Mets and Atlanta Braves) and broadcaster, believes all the greats share some qualities. It’s no coincidence they include some of the same characteristics Josh helped instill in him years before. “Desire to win. Desire to be better than average,” he said. Then there are the unteachable things. “The will to stick with it. The focus to block out everything else going on around you. Ability doesn’t hurt, either.”

Along the way, Josh reveled in Bob’s ride to stardom and 1981 first-ballot induction into the Hall of Fame, although the two rarely talked about it. Not long before his enshrinement, Bob paid Josh the ultimate compliment, saying, “He’s the one who taught me to be an athlete.”

‘Mutual Respect’

During and after his career Gibson earned a reputation as a blunt, uncompromising man in speaking out against unfair housing practices and employment opportunities in St. Louis and Omaha, where he had various business ventures. For the past two decades, he’s lived with his second wife and family in Bellevue. Today, he maintains ties with the sports world by serving as a Cardinals special instructor in spring training and participating in fantasy baseball camps. From 1997 to 2004, he hosted an annual charity golf tournament that brought in dozens of sports legends.

He enjoys getting together with other athletes from the past and reminiscing about their shared youth. “I think one of the things that makes athletes different than the rest of society,” he said, “is that regardless of what game you play it allows you to remain as a youth…a child. You don’t get any older. You have that same type of feeling. As an athlete you want to cry when you have to quit. It’s something you’ll never be tired of.”

Hanging with Sandy Koufax or Bill Russell, Gibson feels young again. Then, too, there’s the unspoken warrior fraternity he and the others embody.

“There’s a mutual respect you have without even talking about it. It’s just simply understood.”

It’s the same way he and Josh felt about each other.

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