Bob Gibson 80 today. Any memories???

[Exhibitman]

Originally Posted by timn1

Have to say I get a little weary of the inevitable "he was mean to me" anecdotes that appear in threads like this one, in reference to ALMOST any and every player. Yeah, a few players are saints who are nice to everybody. And probably only a few are really incapable of being nice to anyone. Overall, athletes are no more or less "nice" than any other group of people. Why should we expect them to be?

But unlike most of us, athletes have to constantly encounter strangers who feel that they know them and who expect to be treated like instant friends. I know that as problems go, this is a far cry from being ill or homeless, but I think (if I were a celebrity) I would find it an unbearable drain on my time and energy, especially as I got older.

You could say, well then former players who feel that way all the time should avoid doing signing shows, and that's reasonable. Probably a lot of the least sociable ones do (or don't get asked).

My guess is that a lot of the ones in between, especially the older guys who played before the huge salaries and could use the money, convince themselves that it won't be so bad and try to have fun at the shows they do. But on a bad day something gets under their skin (like a pushy or obnoxious fan) and things go downhill from there. That is why with most of them (like Gibson, Mays, Mantle, Seaver, etc etc) you will get person A saying "he was mean to me" and person B saying "he was nice to me." A lot depends on the demeanor of the specific fans meeting them too. (I'm not calling anybody out here- more likely it was not how you acted as much as how the people just ahead of you in line acted.)

I guess too that since I have never been interested in talking to players, even ones I really like, I really don't care that much whether they are nice in these brief encounters with individual fans. I think it's more interesting to think about their larger impact on the game and the culture. (Another way to put this: can you see Jackie Robinson being "sweet" and "nice" to every fan he met at a signing show? Neither can I. To some but not all.)

To me Gibson belongs in that pioneering group w/ Jackie. We tend to forget he was only the 2nd black Cy Young winner (1968), and the first black pitcher in the HOF who was fully MLB (after Satchel).

Also, he wasn't the first black Cardinals player, but St Louis was probably the toughest city in MLB for blacks to play at the time. (Check out the autobios of Gibson, Flood, etc. etc. for accounts of this.) He put up with a lot.

IOW, I say honor the man even if he wasn't necessarily "nice" to everybody or to you-

Well, yes and no.

Yes, Gibson and many others went through some unfair BS, and yes they were all financially exploited, but this is decades later and they are very well paid to be public personalities at events and shows. They don't have to be buddy-buddy with fans on the street if that's not in their natures, but in the context of an event where the players are providing a fee for service, they need to be professionals about it. If not being rude to kids and being polite to the customers and reasonable about their requests as to how you perform that service for which they are paying is just too taxing a way to earn several thousand dollars a day, stay home. Don't deign to work at something that most people would love to work at.