Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (5 page)

After three weeks of prescribed rest, he traveled to northern Arizona to train at seven thousand feet, the approximate height of the Mexico City Games. With the Olympics less than five months away, Ryun and the powers that be feared he wouldn’t be ready. One night Ryun made a single entry in his training journal. “Worried,” it read. In June, America’s top track star planned to run a 3:50 mile. Now he was pressed to break four minutes in his specialty. After years of training for the Olympic Games, he feared that he might “not even get a chance to try out.”

Ryun’s struggles, however, went well beyond one man trying to make the Olympic team. ABC Sports’ Roone Arledge had paid $4.5 million, three times the amount NBC laid out for the Tokyo Games four years earlier, for the rights to broadcast the Mexico City Games. Using his popular
ABC’s Wide World of Sports
as a media springboard, Arledge planned to offer live coverage of the Olympics to the American audience. Four years earlier, in the Winter Games from Innsbruck, Austria, the action was taped and flown back to New York before being aired. Ultimately, Arledge’s goal was to one day have the Olympics become as popular as the World Series. But he realized that could happen only if the best-known athletes—and in the track world nobody was more famous than Ryun—found their way to the starting line.

No sport cast a bigger shadow in 1968 than major league baseball. The’68 World Series was on NBC and ranked among the first major sports events to be rated. Nobody was surprised when it drew a 50-plus percent market share—an amazing number compared with today’s fragmented audience. If anything, people tuned in to the Fall Classic to be reassured. A drug scandal had tainted that year’s Kentucky Derby and golfer Roberto De Vicenzo missed out on a play-off in the prestigious Masters tournament when he signed an inaccurate scorecard. “ W hat a stupid I am to be wrong here,” De Vicenzo said.

The Mexico City Summer Games were scheduled to begin days after the baseball season ended. Earlier in 1968, skier Jean-Claude Killy and American figure skater Peggy Fleming were gold medalists at the Winter Games in Grenoble, France. While their performances drew strong audiences in the United States, the Grenoble coverage paled in comparison to what Arledge was putting together for Mexico City. By employing personalized storytelling, augmented by satellite feeds, upgraded graphics, and videotaped highlights, Arledge planned to broadcast forty-four hours of coverage, three times as many hours as any previous Games. All of it would go a lot better with Ryun running in the 1,500 meters, the Olympics’ equivalent of the mile and one of track’s showcase events.

Among Ryun’s advisors was Dr. Jack Daniels, who decades later would be named the world’s best coach by
Runner’s World
magazine. Back in 1968, however, Daniels had difficulty getting anybody to take him seriously. His program to better prepare athletes, especially distance runners, never had sufficient funds. In addition, U.S. track officials told Ryun to simply train, often by himself, and not worry about races right away. He would receive another chance to make the American team in mid-August.

Daniels contended such an approach would only set Ryun up for failure. Ryun might make the U.S. team, only to come apart in the high altitude at Mexico City. “Racing at altitude is like changing events,” Daniels said, “you need some races at the new distance.”

Nobody in power took the time to listen.

Pack Robert Gibson was born during the Depression, November 9, 1935, in Omaha, Nebraska. His father, Pack Sr., died a few months before Gibson came into the world. While Gibson said he missed not having a father around when he was growing up, he so disliked the name Pack that he had it changed as soon as he was on his own.

Some philosophers contend that we accept our parents and even their particular worlds as part of the price for being born again, returned from whatever purgatory or state of spiritual limbo we may enter when we die. Before souls enter human life, they pass through the plain of Lethe (oblivion, forgetting). We agree to the circumstances and then we forget about such a contract when the higher power seals our lips, allowing us to also forget our previous lives, mistakes, and compromises.

“[The] evidence for this forgetting ,” psychologist James Hillman wrote, “of the soul’s prenatal election, is pressed right into your upper lip. That little crevice below your nose is where the angel pressed its forefinger to seal your lips.”

When one looks back upon Gibson’s childhood, one wonders if he remembered more than he forgot after passing through the plain of Lethe. With his father gone before his birth, Gibson was raised by his brother, Josh, who was fifteen years older than him. It was Josh who wrapped him in a quilt and carried him to the local hospital when Gibson became “deathly sick” with pneumonia as a small boy. As Josh Gibson handed over his little brother to the doctors, he told the boy that he would buy him a baseball glove after he pulled through. That may have been the last warm and cuddly act ever performed by Josh Gibson on behalf of his little brother. When Bob was eleven, the two of them had a conversation that would shape the rest of the younger Gibson’s life. Jackie Robinson had just broken baseball’s color barrier, signing to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The door was now open for black men to play sports professionally.

“I decided on the spot to be a ballplayer,” Gibson remembered. “I didn’t know if the sport would be baseball or basketball, but I would play one of them professionally.”

With that in mind, and with his big brother as the head coach for many of his youth sports teams, Gibson made the rounds of Iowa and Nebraska, playing local all-star teams. In some of those locales, it was difficult for a predominately black team from Omaha to catch a break from the officials. That’s when Josh would call everyone out, from the umpires to the hostile crowds. Several times he strode out to the pitcher’s mound and invited anybody who cared to take him on to settle things right there.

Bob sometimes feared for his big brother’s life. Several times the entire team would be lucky to get out of some far-flung crossroads in one piece. But Gibson soon learned that one way, perhaps the best way, to battle adversity was head-on.

In 1951, the Gibsons’ Y Monarchs won the Nebraska state baseball championship. This was American Legion ball and Bob Gibson was fifteen years old. Sometimes there’s a misconception that Gibson, especially in those early years, was more comfortable playing with blacks, and that his world broke down into black versus white, Us versus Them, perhaps at the urging of his big brother. But the common denominators for Gibson’s youth teams had more to do with location and class than race. In fact, his catcher at one point was a white kid, Andy Sommer.

In high school, Gibson starred in basketball and his coach wrote to Indiana University about his interest in playing hoops there. The Hoosiers replied that they had filled their quota of black players—one was already on the roster. From there Gibson broke the color line at Creighton University’s basketball team. He held the school scoring record until Paul Silas, who would go on to play for the Boston Celtics, surpassed it six years later. For a time, it appeared that professional basketball would be Gibson’s career path. He was an exceptional guard, able to score and set up his teammates, as well. Yet at the time there was no clear-cut path to making a living in professional sports. After finishing college in 1957, Gibson signed a pair of $4,000 contracts. One was with the Cardinals’ baseball farm team in Omaha. The other was to play basketball for the Harlem Globetrotters, whom he joined after the baseball season was over.

While Gibson liked the money and travel, he never really embraced the clowning that is so much a part of the Globetrotters’ act. His favorite moments came in the second and third quarters when the Globetrotters played things more or less straight up. For a time Gibson roomed with the legendary Meadowlark Lemon, whom he discovered was “a sincere, serious guy.” It fell to Gibson to break the squad’s warm-up circle (when they spun the ball on their fingers) and begin the dunking parade. Despite such highlights, when Cardinals general manager Bing Devine offered him an additional $4,000 the following season to concentrate on baseball, Gibson quit the Globetrotters. “It was the best deal I ever made,” he told friends years later. “For the first time, I was headed in one and only one direction.”

Bob Gibson, like most athletes, often tried to insulate himself from the so-called real world. The goal was to keep the focus on the next game, the next pitch. But in 1968 that soon proved to be impossible. Early that year, a few weeks before spring training, Gibson passed the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in the Atlanta airport. “He’d looked at me as though he recognized me,” Gibson wrote in his memoir, “but wasn’t sure who I was.”

That’s unlikely. At that moment, Gibson was one of the most famous pitchers in the game, the staff ace whom the Cardinals turned to to win the deciding games of the 1964 and 1967 World Series. King, of course, had many other focuses and priorities, but sports, its makeup and impact, played a part in his concerns, as well.

“Many of us in the movement were sports fans,” recalled Rev. Samuel “Billy” Kyles. “Martin enjoyed sports and he really championed Jackie Robinson after his playing career was over. But remember this was ’68 and we couldn’t help but watch how things played out with what I would call an historical eye. For example, what teams had a person of color as their top pitcher, their quarterback? That’s what the question was more often than not in our world at that time.”

Gibson later confirmed that he and King did nod at each other. Years later, he declined to elaborate on what he would have told the civil rights leader if a conversation, no matter how fleeting, had taken place.

Kyles, who was a part of King’s inner leadership circle, along with Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson, has no doubt that the civil rights leader recognized the Cardinals’ pitching star. Decades later, he and I discuss this forgotten moment in Kyles’s office at the Monumental Baptist Church in south Memphis, where he has been the pastor since 1959. Unlike some who were irreparably hurt by how the year 1968 played out, Kyles somehow rose above it all. The walls of his offices remain a testament to his faith and his conviction in bringing King’s message to the world. Photographs of the Dalai Lama, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Nelson Mandela, most personally addressed to the pastor, adorn the walls.

“I was there when Dr. King was killed. I was one of the last to see him alive,” Kyles said. “And I was deeply saddened by what happened. But soon afterward I realized that I had a new role, a job to do.

“Some are destined to be our leaders. Others are meant to be witnesses, to make sure that the message is still carried out. After what happened in April 1968, I saw I was put upon this earth to be a witness—to tell people about Dr. King and what he stood for.”

With that in mind, Reverend Kyles ponders my question: What would King have told Gibson, if they had stopped and exchanged words.

“I have no doubt that Martin would have known of Mr. Gibson, would have recognized him,” Kyles said. “Knowing Martin as well as I did, he would have probably told him to ‘keep going.’ And certainly congratulations for what [Gibson] had already accomplished in 1967 and before. Martin was more of a sports fan than me. He would have known what to say. I have no doubt about that.”

In his memoir, Gibson wrote that while he “greatly admired” Dr. Martin Luther King, he simply “couldn’t do as he said.... The Gibson clan, as nearly as I can figure, has consisted over the years of two basic types—those who practice passive resistance and those who don’t.”

Although King hadn’t been much of an athlete growing up (billiards was his game), he certainly understood the power of sports. Early on, King realized what a crucial role it played in America. As a teenager in 1947, he too watched Jackie Robinson break the color barrier in baseball. In the early 1960s, King supported the baseball legend’s right to speak out about civil rights, comparing Robinson to “a pilgrim that walked the lonesome byways toward the high road of freedom.”

Throughout the sixties, King was a supporter of boxer Cassius Clay, aka Muhammad Ali. In 1968, soon after he crossed paths with Gibson, King met with Tommie Smith, Lee Evans, and John Carlos. The track athletes’ grievances included Ali being stripped of his heavyweight title due to his protest of the Vietnam War, as well as South Africa, then an apartheid nation, being allowed to compete in the upcoming Mexico City Games. In 1968, activist Harry Edwards advocated an Olympic boycott, especially by the top American sprinters. While talk of an outright boycott eventually dissipated, a strong belief remained that something needed to be done, like public demonstration of some kind at the Mexico City Games in October, once the World Series was over.

“I can’t really say what I’d do if I were in their shoes, but I admire the guys who are involved in the Olympic boycott,” Bob Gibson told Dwight Chapin of the
Los Angeles Times
in 1968. “They ’re taking a terrific chance—risking an awful lot. I don’t know what their goals are. But if they feel that the country has been kicking them in the rears for fifty years, then I agree with them.”

As the meeting at the Americana Hotel in New York drew to a close, Carlos asked King why he was intent upon returning to Memphis later that spring. After all, the civil rights leader had received death threats if he set foot back in the city. “I’ve got to stand up for those who won’t stand,” King replied, “and I’ve got to stand up for those who can’t.”

The comment left the normally loquacious Carlos speechless.

While the baseball players prepared for the new 1968 season in sunny Florida, King and his movement were embroiled in a bitter dispute involving the sanitation workers in Memphis. At issue was King’s message and whether he could effectively deliver it anymore. For King believed that nothing was gained if such demonstrations turned violent. But that’s exactly what had happened earlier in Memphis. A march led by King had been essentially taken over by local vigilantes, the so-called Invaders gangs. After briefly going home to Atlanta, where he asked himself serious questions about his movement and his approach, King decided to return to Memphis, determined to lead an orderly, nonviolent march.