Sixty Feet, Six Inches

by Bob Gibson

  When you’re going along in your career, trying to make your mark, trying to win ballgames and take care of business, you don’t think a lot about what it is that drives you. You don’t do a lot of self-analysis. At least I didn’t. But when I look back at times like that, I can see that the pride was there from the beginning. I’m sure that that pride had a lot to do with the makeup I took to the big leagues. Inside, I was the same person at a hundred and ninety-five pounds in St. Louis that I was at ninety-five in Omaha.

  Reggie Jackson

  A reporter once asked me what sets apart the great player, the Hall of Famer, from everybody else. I said it was pride. Pride is what makes a man believe that he’s the best at what he does. It’s what makes him confident, makes him intense; what makes him great.

  Pride is the will to succeed. That’s what sets the great player apart.

  Bob Gibson

  Well, you can have all the pride in the world, but if you don’t have the talent to go with it, it doesn’t matter much. Just the pride itself is not going to make you successful.

  Reggie Jackson

  But it’s what you start with. You can be a great ballplayer without a rifle arm or blazing speed, but you can’t be a great player without a tremendous amount of will.

  Think about Robinson, Aaron, Gibson, Palmer, Seaver, Mays, Banks, Rose, Munson, Ripken, Brett, Gwynn, Clemens, Maddux, Jeter, A-Rod, Pujols, Bonds … Those guys are the embodiments of determination, which grows out of pride. You can sense the greatness when they walk onto the field. You can see the pride. The will to succeed oozes out of them.

  Think about Jackie Robinson. About the legacy of pride that he left behind.

  Bob Gibson

  In our day, if you succeeded as a black player there was a certain pride that went along with it, because, first off, you needed it just to endure; but also because you knew you had to be better to get there. Sometimes even that wasn’t good enough.

  When I was a senior at Omaha Tech High School, our coach started five black players in the state semifinal basketball game. The other team was small and scrappy and had to stall to keep the game close. Somehow, four of our starters fouled out in the first half, and I followed them a few minutes into the second half. And this was in a slowdown game! We lost by a point, and afterwards I cried. It affected me. It taught me something about our society. It hardened me.

  When I got to college, it became clear to me that I could not get where I wanted to go by being average. I was the first black player on Creighton’s baseball and basketball teams, and I understood that, if I wanted to win a position and be treated as an equal, I had to be better than the other guys.

  All the black players from my generation came to feel the same way, no matter where they were from.

  Reggie Jackson

  I was told by my father that I needed to clearly outdistance the field. Don’t let it be a photo finish. You’re black, so you’re not going to have the same opportunities. You must clearly be better than whites. Let there be no dispute on that point.

  My dad also told me, “If you don’t make the first team, son, you can’t sit on the bench; you’ve got to come home and work. You’ve got to help around the house. There’ll be no sitting on the bench. There’s nothing going on there. You need to be on the first team.” That wasn’t pressure; that was life. My father, whose heritage was Latin American, white, black, and who knows what else—and I’m proud of all of it!—ran his own tailoring and laundry business. He worked all day and bought groceries on the way home. There was nothing in the refrigerator. I’d go over to my white friends’ houses and they’d have milk waiting for them on the porch in the morning, delivered right to the front step. You’d go in the garage and they’d have a case of Coke sitting out there in a wooden box with “Coca-Cola” written on the side. Man, that was living!

  The part that made me angry was that my father worked so much harder than my friends’ fathers and had so much less to show for it. It made me hungry to reap the rewards of my labors. My dad propelled me toward doing something with my life, trying to excel, making something of myself. He’d been a ballplayer—he played some with the Newark Eagles of the old Negro Leagues—and he saw sports, either football or baseball, as my opportunity.

  If I had to play ball better than the white boys, I accepted that part of it. I could handle that. There was plenty of other stuff to be angry about.

  Bob Gibson

  I wasn’t on a mission to prove anything on behalf of the black player. I was on a mission for me. I had to prove that I was better.

  In some ways—if you could get through the doors—the realities worked to the benefit of the black players. It wasn’t hard to motivate yourself for what you had to do. I was at Creighton because Indiana University told me they’d already met their quota. They had to have one black guy on the team. I watched them play and just shook my head. I knew they had the wrong one, and I had some interest in proving that.

  Reggie Jackson

  Out of high school, I had more football offers than baseball. I might have been one of the few black players at Oklahoma, but the deal was that I had to be in by ten o’clock at night. If you were black, they wanted you off the streets for the sake of safety. I could have gone to Duke or a few other Southern schools, but I was afraid to take that step.

  In 1967, before I came up with the A’s, I was playing in Birmingham, and Bear Bryant’s son was the general manager there. Bear was a close friend of Charlie Finley, and he came to a lot of our games. One night he walked into the clubhouse and was talking to his son and a writer named Alf Van Hoose and a few other people. I had my shirt off. I weighed about 205 pounds and could run like a deer in those days. Bear Bryant put his arm around me and said, “You know, this is just the kind of nigger boy we need down here. If not, we’re not going to be able to continue to compete, because Southern California and the teams out west are going to go by us.” When he said “nigger boy,” it somehow sounded like a compliment. Understanding where I was, I really wasn’t offended. It was awkward, but what was I to do? I was barely twenty-one years old. I was in Birmingham, Alabama. Bear Bryant, in his own way, was complimenting me.

  Bob Gibson

  That wouldn’t have worked with me.

  Reggie Jackson

  It hurt when I heard it, but I knew he didn’t mean it as a slight. It was just the way it was in 1967. Sad!

  Even in baseball, even back east, blacks weren’t yet on equal footing. In 1965, after my freshman year at Arizona State, I tried out for Walter Youse’s famous amateur team in Baltimore. Walter was a legend in amateur baseball. He also scouted for the Orioles, and ultimately rated me higher than any other prospect he ever looked at. But when I tried out for Leone’s, he’d never had a black player on the team. A long time after that, Walter told me, kiddingly, that the more he saw of me that day of the tryout, the whiter I got.

  When I was eligible for the draft in 1966, there was a lot of talk that I would be the first player chosen in the country. Then, when the draft was close, our coach at ASU, Bobby Winkles, called me into his office to tell me that it wasn’t going to happen that way, even though it should. I didn’t understand. He said it was because the Mets, who had the first pick, found out I was dating a white girl—actually, she was Mexican—and thought it might cause problems in baseball and society. So they drafted Steve Chilcott with the first pick. Charlie Finley’s A’s took me next and sent me to Lewiston, Idaho.

  While I was in Lewiston, I got beaned. The local hospital refused to admit me. The next day I was in Modesto, California, and the next year it was Birmingham, where I slept on couches. Dave Duncan, Joe Rudi, and Rollie Fingers were all married, and I rotated between their apartments. Those guys really stuck up for me.

  You deal with those things, and you get over them, but you don’t forget them. It all becomes part of your makeup. I’ll remember Duncan, Rudi, and Fingers for the rest of my life, and not just as ballplayers.

  Bob Gibson

>   Over the years, a lot of black athletes have been characterized as playing with a chip on their shoulder. Well, a chip is usually put there by somebody else. It’s put there by the way you’re treated.

  Reggie Jackson

  My chip on the shoulder, which some people might have viewed as being terse or having an attitude, came from how you approached me, or my interpretation of how society was treating me. When I was young, it came out as anger. I was from a broken home. My father was a man I greatly admired, and he was incarcerated when I was a junior in high school for driving on a suspended license. My mother was living in Baltimore. I was at home with my brother, James. My upbringing was odd.

  I missed my father and I was angry that he couldn’t be with us, couldn’t provide for us. I got suspended twice from school. I was mean. It made me a tough and nasty football player, but it didn’t help me in anything else. I once threw a guy up against a wall and threatened to kill him for eating a couple of my pretzels. I had a ’55 Chevy and would sit in a church parking lot with my buddies, who also had ’55 Chevies, and we’d drink a beer, then go crash a party, strong-arm the rich kids, and take their coats. Then wear the coats to school. The rich kids didn’t say anything, because we’d beat them up if they did. My girlfriend was white, and they used to tease her about how crazy I was. Her father didn’t like me because I was black, so I’d send a friend over to pick her up.

  Bob Gibson

  And people say I was mean. Damn.

  Reggie Jackson

  Everybody’s a product of their experience. I was bitter about mine. When I was little, I was playing ball one day with some friends in a place called Glenside. It was about two miles from our house in Wyncote, and I needed to be home on time for dinner, so my buddy loaned me his bicycle. His mother had married a fireman who was a big fat guy, and as I was riding home he drove up in his ’57 yellow Chevrolet convertible with a Continental spare and twin antennas. I was about halfway home at the time. He stopped, made me get off the bicycle and walk it back to his house. He said, “I don’t want you riding my son’s bicycle.” Things like that stick with you.

  When I was in Little League, maybe eleven years old, I was on an all-star team from Pennsylvania and we were playing a series against an all-star team from Florida, which was kind of a big deal. I was the youngest kid on the team and the best player, but the only black player. I could not play in that series. The reasoning was, if I slid hard into second base or whatever, there might be a fight. So I sat on the bench for the whole five-game series except to pinch-hit at the very end. I never moved the bat off my shoulder. Afterwards, I walked home in my number eighteen Glenside jersey and my shower shoes, with my spikes hanging over my shoulder, crying all the way. I’d go from telephone pole to telephone pole, walking to one and then running to the next one. I don’t know why I did that, but I remember it, and I vividly remember what I was saying to myself the whole time. I just repeated, over and over, “I’m gonna be a big-leaguer, I’m gonna be a big-leaguer,” for as long as it took me to get home.

  Bob Gibson

  We all have these stories about things that happened when we were kids, and when we were in school, and when we were in the minor leagues, but it didn’t stop there. Reggie makes a good point about pride, because if you didn’t have it as a black player, you wouldn’t get to the big leagues in the first place; and if somehow you did, you wouldn’t last. You’d be run off by guys like Solly Hemus.

  When I came up with the Cardinals in 1959, Hemus let me know, right away, that I wasn’t smart enough to be much of a pitcher. In meetings, he’d tell me I didn’t have to worry about the scouting reports, that I should just throw the ball over the plate. At one point, he recommended that I quit and go play basketball. Of course, he was also the guy who had Stan Musial playing hit-and-run.

  Reggie Jackson

  Solly Hemus couldn’t play, could he?

  Bob Gibson

  No. Couldn’t manage, couldn’t play. And he was a racist.

  Reggie Jackson

  That’s probably what it was.

  Bob Gibson

  I know that’s what it was. I was in the dugout, almost standing next to him, when we were playing the Pirates and he was calling their pitcher, Bennie Daniels, a black bastard. It was all I could do to restrain myself. But what can you do? You hit him, and you’re out of baseball. So I had to take it. I had to swallow it. I was twenty-three years old. If he’d called me that, I probably would have been out of baseball. I see Hemus from time to time, and after fifty years he has never told me he was sorry about that incident or any other.

  Reggie Jackson

  When I got to New York in 1977, Billy Martin would not hit me cleanup. For the record, I ultimately batted fourth for nine different division champions; but it didn’t happen in New York until Munson and Lou Piniella went to Billy in August of 1977 and said, “You need to put that man at cleanup.”

  Bob Gibson

  What was his reason for that?

  Reggie Jackson

  I can only say what I believe it to be. He came from the days of Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra, and he didn’t want to give me the honor of hitting cleanup for the New York Yankees. The Yankees were Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and his friends Mickey and Whitey Ford.

  After Munson and Piniella went to him in August, when we were struggling, I started hitting cleanup and we won thirty-nine of the next forty-nine games. Within two weeks, we had overtaken the Orioles and Red Sox and were on our way to winning the American League East. And ultimately, the World Series.

  Bob Gibson

  When you start putting money in their pockets like that, people tend to change their opinions of you.

  Reggie Jackson

  That was the hardest year of my life, and it wasn’t just Billy Martin’s doing. For a long period, I had a tough time fitting in with my teammates. I had signed for a lot of money, had called a lot of attention to myself, and they considered me an uppity you-know-what. I was an outsider on my own team, and it sent me into a horrible funk. I was miserable. I wasn’t the kind of guy who could not care what anybody thought. I cared a lot.

  In the end, it was pride and support from friends and family that pulled me out of it—along with my prayerful thoughts of God.

  Bob Gibson

  That’s all well and good, but if you’d have put that pride inside of Mickey Rivers, the result would not have been four straight home runs in the World Series.

  Bob Gibson

  Ted Simmons, who was one of my catchers, said once that the best thing I had going for me as a pitcher was the force of my personality—the will to win, I guess—and that you can’t separate the physical from the emotional. That’s probably right.

  To get to the top in baseball, and most other things, you’ve got to have that tenacity, that win-at-all-costs mentality, to go along with the ability. They go hand in hand. In my case, I think that was just my makeup. Tell me I can’t do it, I’m gonna do it.

  Reggie would call it pride. Yeah, there’s a lot of that. But for me, it all comes back to confidence. Confidence gives you courage, and courage gives you encouragement.

  I had the courage to work a corner because I was confident I wouldn’t miss it by too much in the wrong direction. I was encouraged to challenge a good hitter with a high fastball because I was confident that my fastball was better than his bat.

  To be a fierce competitor, you need to be fiercely confident.

  Reggie Jackson

  A lot of people thought I was too confident. Another word for that is cocky.

  I came up alongside a lot of the players on the A’s, and they just shrugged it off when I’d go into a hot-dog mode. They knew they could count on me as a teammate. They knew I was harmless and respectful of them. But I was also respectful of myself.

  I wrote an autobiography when I was still with the A’s. The first line was “My name is Reggie Jackson and I am the best in baseball.” I used to tell my teammates that if I played in New York they
’d name a candy bar after me—which they did. (When the Reggie bar came out, Catfish Hunter said that when you unwrap it, it tells you how good it is. I’ve got to admit—that’s a great line.)

  In Oakland, we were all free spirits and strong individuals. Maybe more than any other team in baseball history, our A’s teams of the seventies proved that players can have their differences socially—they can all express their own personal styles—as long as they have a collective pride in their jobs and are willing to come together every night for nine innings. The A’s weren’t bothered by my razzmatazz. At the least, they appreciated the fact that I got the reporters out of their faces.

  When I arrived in New York, though, the Yankees were already established as the American League champions. It didn’t go over so well when I was quoted in Sport magazine—rather, misquoted—calling myself “the straw that stirs the drink.” I didn’t say that. But on the other hand, I didn’t hesitate to tell anybody who asked, or anybody who didn’t, that I was a star before I got there.