Bob Gibson on race, baseball and what is next

Bob Gibson was my childhood hero, I read his ghosted autobiography From Ghetto to Glory at about age 12, which I think inspired me to pick up The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Big early influences.

Bob Gibson is 84 now. He has been fighting pancreatic cancer exactly as you would expect he would -- without complaint -- since he was diagnosed with it during the summer of 2019. The only thing for which he occasionally apologized during our phone conversation on Wednesday was when he would get a year or a detail wrong in the story he was telling. He would blame it on what he called “chemo brain.”

But the truth is, Gibson sounded like himself, which means tough, principled, decent and fiercely intelligent. He remains, even now, an essential baseball voice -- not just about his game, but about his country and what he sees from it these days.

“What I’m seeing now,” Gibson said, “is that nothing has changed. Period.”

(continues: https://www.mlb.com/news/bob-gibson-on-race-baseball)