The Power and the Darkness:
The Life of Josh Gibson in the Shadows of the Game
by Mark Ribowsky
Simon and Schuster
Reviewed by Patrick Quinn
The Power and the Darkness:
The Life of Josh Gibson in the Shadows of the Game
by Mark Ribowsky
Simon and Schuster
Reviewed by Patrick Quinn
egends grow up around great ballplayers. Among serious baseball fans Josh Gibson is generally regarded as the greatest hitter ever to play in the famous Negro Leagues. Part of his particular legend was the three-run homer he hit as a member of the Homestead Grays on September 20, 1930, in the nightcap of a doubleheader against the Lincoln Giants in Yankee Stadium.
Eyewitness accounts collected at the time are vague and wispy, but the legend had it -- and has it still -- that Gibson drove the ball literally out of the park, that he hit the ball clean out of The House that Ruth Built. It was a feat never accomplished before or since, not even by Ruth himself, and with the modern renaissance of fan interest in the Negro Leagues it enters into the lore of the larger game.
But Mark Ribowsky, author of four previous books including The Complete History of the Negro Leagues 1884-1955, tells us in The Power and the Darkness that it never happened at all, and notes that Gibson himself never claimed that it did. Gibson told a 1938 interviewer that he "hit the ball on a line into the bullpen in deep left field," still a blow of staggering proportions but not quite supernatural. The powerhouse catcher hit many such home runs in a career that spanned more than 15 years. Gibson played on the Grays teams of the early '30s that are generally considered the greatest in Negro Leagues history.
The Power and the Darkness focuses primarily on Gibson's playing career, and is written with the baseball fan in mind, but Ribowsky does not fail to address his subject's complex emotional life. With Josh Gibson Jr. among the primary sources for this book, Ribowsky tracks the early tragedy that marked the ballplayer's life. In 1930 Gibson's wife of less than a year died giving birth to twins. Helen Gibson was eighteen years old when she died and her husband only a year older. The event shattered the remaining years of Josh Gibson's life. He died in January 1947 in Pittsburgh at the age of only 35. His last years were dogged by drug abuse, alcoholism and health problems that may have included a brain disorder. These difficulties notwithstanding, he continued to hit tape-measure home runs until nearly the very end.
Three months after his funeral Jackie Robinson took the field for the first time as a Brooklyn Dodger, and the world in which Gibson had loomed so large began its rapid and irreversible decline. In 1971 Satchel Paige, Gibson's frequent nemesis and occasional teammate, became the first Negro Leaguer to enter baseball's Hall of Fame, and the following year Gibson became the second. The Power and the Darkness describes a career that mirrored the trajectory of black baseball in America.
© Copyright 1996 Urban Desires
