Home >  A & E

Two theater pieces aim for accurate portrayal of the Negro Leagues slugger

Thursday, July 19, 2001

By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

If you were black in the city of Pittsburgh, you couldn't sleep in Oakland, eat Downtown, sit anywhere other than the balcony in theaters or try on clothes in department stores. Major league and most college sports fields were a white man's land. "Civil rights" was a distant, subcontinental social experiment. And don't even ask about the availability of good bus seats.

	Playwright Gregory Gibson Kenney, left, and Sean Gibson are each doing his part to preserve the memory of Josh Gibson, legendary Negro League baseball player and Sean Gibson's great-grandfather. (Peter Diana/Post-Gazette)

Despite the discrimination of the day, one North Sider was big and tough enough to overpower every baseball player in the Negro Leagues and steal headlines from Major League stars. Josh Gibson is the only man ever to smack a homer over the wall at Yankee Stadium, and he may have done it twice. A franchise player for the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Homestead Grays and the Caribbean winter leagues during the 1930s and '40s, Gibson sired a legend that has grown wildly and unreliably over the decades: He was anywhere from 5 feet 10 1/2 inches and 194 pounds to 6-2, 230, depending on whose stats you believe; built like a rock; the strongest man to ever swing a bat; had a cannon for an arm; ran like a cheetah; drank like a fish; died of a broken heart.

Pittsburgh playwright Gregory Gibson Kenney (no relation) hopes to get the real Josh Gibson on record in separate but related projects -- a 20-minute monologue that he performs in schools and a full-length drama commissioned by Prime Stage.

The monologue is an outreach program of his Educate Us Productions, which stages original one-man shows about black historical figures in Pittsburgh-area schools. Kenney has written and performed programs about Jackie Robinson, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and Roberto Clemente. His Gibson and Clemente shows are to be performed at 10 a.m. today at South Park Theater. (Call 412-831-8552 for details.)

Several years ago, Kenney's research on "the great one" led to a consulting job for Prime Stage when the youth-theater company was producing its "Clemente: The Measure of a Man."

	"The Josh Gibson Story" WHERE: Prime Stage at Hazlett Theater, Allegheny Square, North Side. WHEN: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays. Performances begin tomorrow and run through July 29. TICKETS: $8-$12; 412-394-3353.

"I was writing my one-man show on Josh Gibson at the time," says Kenney, "and [Prime Stage's Wayne Brinda] said I could write a play about him. [The monologue and play] are very similar -- they cover the same things, but the play is expanded."

Kenney worries that Gibson has not been treated fairly or accurately in recent biographies, particularly in HBO's movie about the Negro Leagues, "The Soul of the Game."

For the record:

Gibson was born in Buena Vista, Ga., and moved with his father to Pittsburgh's North Side when he was 12.

As a teen, he worked for Westinghouse Air Brake and later ran the elevator at Gimbel's, Downtown, and had a steel job at the Carnegie-Illinois plant. He left the mill in 1930 to catch for the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays. He spent many winters playing ball in the Caribbean.

Gibson was a big guy, but spotty record-keeping by the Crawfords and Grays makes his actual size difficult to verify.

Gibson hit more than 800 home runs.

Newspaper accounts of the day verify that he hit the longest home runs ever out of Cleveland Stadium and Washington's Griffith Stadium. In 1934, the New York Times chronicled a Gibson homer over the third tier next to the left-field bullpen at Yankee Stadium. Witnesses claim that three years later, in another game against the Black Yankees, he smacked one over the left-field roof. No one else has ever hit a ball out of that stadium.

Gibson often played stickball with North Side kids and bought them vanilla ice cream.

In the early 1940s, he suffered from frequent headaches, experienced behavioral problems and started drinking heavily.

In 1943, he was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Gibson died in his sleep from a stroke, most likely caused by the tumor, shortly after midnight on Jan. 20, 1947.

Less than a month later, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier by entering the Brooklyn Dodgers' spring training camp.

"In my program [and in the Prime Stage play]," says Kenney, "I tell the kids that even though you do things you shouldn't be doing, you work through them and you're sorry about it. [Gibson] has been depicted as a drug addict and alcoholic. It was painkillers at first, then, taken from what I understand, he got involved with heroin. I don't think he'd want to be remembered that way. It becomes a lesson for the kids."

Sean Gibson of McKees Rocks never knew his famous great-grandfather, but he's dedicated his life to preserving the memory and setting the record straight. His Josh Gibson Foundation teaches urban kids the history of the Negro Leagues and bankrolls a Little League team that plays at the Hill's Ammon's Recreation Center, the former home field of the Crawfords.

"When Wayne Brinda came to us about the play," says Gibson, "we said we'd get involved only if we had some input in the story. We read the whole play, so everything was right, or we corrected it. It was very good."

In a pre-TV era when ballplayers were often rough, tough guys with visible vices, Gibson was no more notorious than some of his famous white colleagues. While the negative aspects of his life remain slightly embarrassing to his family, Sean Gibson says his great-grandfather can still be a role model to modern kids.

"All I know about is the drinking part," he says. "What can I do about it? It's something that happened. We teach our kids morals, but [knowing about his vices] doesn't mean they're going to go out and do it.

"We tell minority kids that Josh Gibson was a part of black history. I explain to them that things were very hard then, harder than they are now for African-Americans. You can go anywhere that you want now because of people like Josh Gibson. I hope kids see this play and see that he was more than just a great baseball player."