In a league of his own

Interview, April, 1996 by Mark Ribowsky

Josh Gibson may have been one of baseball's all-time greatest catchers, but as a slugger he was as formidable off the field as on. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, this tortured star of the Negro baseball leagues was known for his heavy drinking, hard living, and hot temper, and he wasn't about to let the news of a brain tumor change his ways. Nor would he let it affect a career that would ultimately lead to his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame (1972) and help lay the groundwork for the integration of the game. Tragically, however, it did stop him from witnessing that historic event. Gibson died, at age thirty-five, just before the start of the '47 season, when Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play in the majors.

A portrait of Gibson in his final years can be seen in the HBO drama Soul of the Game, premiering April 20. And in the following excerpt from Mark Ribowsky's upcoming biography, The Power and the Darkness: The Life of Josh Gibson (Simon & Schuster), the extremes of Gibson's paradoxical persona are revealed.

. . . It is possible Josh knew exactly what the parasitic effects of alcohol were doing to his mind and his body, but that being numbed from head to toe was as important as hitting a home run now. If tomorrow might not come, what did it matter anyway?

Buck Leonard, one of the very few Grays [Gibson's longtime team] who have spoken on the record about this side of Gibson, recalled an incident during a Gray road trip to Norfolk, Virginia, when Josh again had trouble keeping his clothes on. "He got started drinking and there were six of us staying at my wife's sister's house there. And he was walking around the house naked. We were on the second floor, but women were in the house, too, and the only bathroom was upstairs. And we told him, 'Don't be walking around naked. What's the matter with you?'"

But no one really did know what was wrong with him, certainly not the root cause of such dementia. Without an answer, the Grays could try only one solution. When Josh's drinking reached a point where he could not play without embarrassing or even hurting himself, Buck and a few other Grays would put him in a cab and take him to St. Francis Hospital, in order, as the ballplayers called it, to "boil him out."

This presumably meant sleeping it off under doctor's orders but in time entailed more serious treatment as his stays lengthened from one or two days to one or two weeks, depending on how sick he was. Although no one on the team knew the nature of the treatments or of other possible maladies, it was clear Josh was being kept under sedation. When he came back to the ballpark after the layoff, there would be needle prickings in the crook of his arm where the IV tubes had been run.

[Team owner] Cum Posey, of course, made certain no newspaper reports of these hospital visits saw the light of day. Gibson's absences were always explained as days of rest and sometimes weren't even noticed since Posey would send Josh to boil out when the Grays had barnstorming, nonleague games in the countryside; for the Saturday or Sunday league games, he would sometimes bring Josh directly from the hospital bed to the park, accompanied by attendants in white coats, then send him right back afterward.

Buck Leonard winced at this shamefaced practice, in which Josh, he said, looked as if he were being "led around like a drunken monkey." What it did to Gibson's pride must have hurt as much as the pain inside his head. And yet, as though he could squeeze every ounce of strength from his weary body into his bat, Josh would wobble up to the plate and hit one out of sight. And when he was relatively clean and sober and could watch those drives soar, Buck would swear it did more for Josh than anything the doctors tried.

"When he was batting," Leonard said, "he became a kid again, just like that, right before your eyes." . . .