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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