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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