TBO.com Sports

BASEBALL SPECIAL ELECTION COLUMN

Discriminating Talent

JOE HENDERSON

Published: Feb 27, 2006

hey were chased out of towns by the Klan.

People spat at them from the stands.

When they traveled, they slept two to a bed in boarding houses because the local hotels often wouldn't let them stay there. They had rocks thrown at their buses. They weren't welcome at many restaurants, and they never were sure whether one of the strangers watching their games didn't have a gun filled with bullets just for them.

It was life in the Negro Leagues - America: circa 1940.

"It was segregation," Walter "Dirk" Gibbons said. "That's just the way it was."

Gibbons was a pitcher for the Indianapolis Clowns, the team that eventually gave us Hank Aaron. Gibbons wound up there after growing up in Tampa, and what he endured on his journey there - indeed, what they all went through - is too fantastic for many today to fathom.

Gibbons, now 77, still works full time in maintenance at the University of Tampa. To most of the students there, he is the man with keys to most of the buildings on campus. They would never guess he was a right-handed pitcher who once won 19 games and struck out 229 hitters in a season, or that he likely would have pitched in the major leagues if he hadn't been drafted and sent to Korea.

Although the university has acknowledged Gibbons' place in sports and cultural history on more than one occasion, Athletic Director Larry Marfise said, "I do have the sense that our kids don't know who Walter was. I would sense that a vast majority of our students - and I'm not trying to be sarcastic here - aren't even aware that segregation ever existed."

Without that basic knowledge, it would be difficult to fully understand the importance of an event today in Tampa. A 12-member committee will announce the outcome of a special election to choose Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues-era candidates for enshrinement into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

"People don't get it," Gibbons said. "Nobody wants to believe we were as good as they say we were, but I can vouch for it - I was there. I know these guys were really that good. All we wanted was a chance to prove we could play the game. I knew sooner or later it would happen, but we had to go through so much before it really did happen."

Couldn't Come Inside

Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947 when he became the first black player to compete in the big leagues in the modern era, and a year later he came to Tampa with players such as Satchel Paige and Larry Doby as part of a barnstorming tour. Gibbons was a member of the Clowns by then, but joined up with a local team to play against the travelers at old Plant Field on the UT campus.

Gibbons grew up in Ybor City, one of eight brothers. Like so many others, he learned to love baseball and eventually joined top-notch local teams such as the Pepsi-Cola Giants and the Tampa Rockets. Take his word for it: "We could have beaten some of the big-league teams with the players we had."

He was playing for the Rockets the day Robinson came to town. After the game, Gibbons caught up with Robinson and told him about an elegant building on campus - the old Tampa Bay Hotel, which is now the Henry B. Plant Museum. They walked over to take a look inside, but were stopped at the door by security and turned away.

"There's a lot of stuff you had to take. You either took it, or I wouldn't be here talking to you today," Gibbons said. "There wasn't no such thing as the government helping you out. The people did whatever they wanted to do. We had to accept all the dirty work and different stuff."

The different stuff.

In the segregated South, that could mean a lot of things. Take the day the Clowns were playing a game in Greensboro, Miss. The team employed clowns on the sides to entertain the fans, and after one inning three shots were fired - Bam! Bam! Bam! - and a guy came running out from behind the stands wearing prison stripes. "You know, like he had just escaped from a chain gang," Gibbons said.

Gibbons was on the field at the time and the clown was running toward him. But there was something else. Many fans watching didn't know it was an act, and many of them quickly pulled guns and pointed them at the black man running.

"The P.A. guy had to come on real fast and tell them it was part of the show," Gibbons said. "But I'll tell you, it scared me. If they pulled their guns out, we just had to accept it or we didn't know what would happen when we got back on the bus. They might catch us and burn the bus up."

How Many More?

The fact that such stories seem absurd today is proof enough that society has made some strides, but those who played in the Negro Leagues ask only that we never forget them. That's not too much to ask for a group of men who helped change professional sports in this nation and, through that, helped hasten the move toward equality.

"I tell everybody that Jackie Robinson wasn't the best in the Negro Leagues, but he was the man - know what I mean?" Gibbons said.

"The stuff he went through, I don't think there was another guy who could have stood the heat. He turned out to be one of the better ballplayers, but they had infielders who were much better than him."

We will never know for sure how many more of them could have been in the majors if the doors had opened sooner, but once the pioneers took the first steps through, there was no going back to the way it was. The change has been so vast, it's hard to conceive there was a time when the color of your skin dictated where you could go and what you could do. But that, of course, was the point of the change.

Walter Gibbons' days in the Negro Leagues ended when he was sent to Korea in 1950, where he was nearly killed by a grenade. Only an alert fellow soldier saved him, pushing Gibbons out of the way and down a hill before the grenade exploded. Gibbons got a dislocated kneecap out of it.

"If I hadn't been in the war, I would have been in the majors," he said. "I was in my prime when I got drafted. My ability was speaking for me."

He wound up playing in the Man-Dak League - a mix of teams from Manitoba, Canada, and the Dakotas - before retiring in 1957. In June he will be enshrined in the Manitoba Hall of Fame. But then he'll be back on the job. That's the way he wants it.

"You want to know what's funny?" he said. "Remember back when they wouldn't let me and Jackie go into that hotel? Well, now I've got keys to every building on campus. I can go wherever I want."