Just a Joke? It Doesn’t Work Here

In a way, watching Kirk Gibson in baseball is like watching a rare Siberian tiger in a cage. It’s like John Wayne playing a butler. An eagle in a bird bath. A mustang locked in a corral. A shark in a bathtub.

You get the feeling it’s too confining for him. He wants to bust loose. You want to untie him, uncage him, set him free. It’s too cramped for him. Like Caruso forced to sing Irving Berlin, Heifetz doing “Turkey in the Straw.”

He’s full of this restless energy. He looks as if he’s just itching to bust something. Or someone. He seems to get irritable just standing there.

Look at him as he knocks a home run in the World Series with men on. Some guys tip their hats. Some guys give their teammates high- fives. Gibson almost breaks their wrists. A Gibson high-five is easier to take than Jack Dempsey’s left was.

Gibson’s problem is intensity. Calling Kirk Gibson intense is like calling the Johnstown Flood wet. He is to intensity what Katharine Hepburn is to independence. He didn’t invent it, he just took it 10 steps further.

Kirk Gibson never does anything by halves. He gulps his food. He walks fast. He runs fast. He talks fast. Gibson’s motor is always running. He always seems to be on the move like the great white shark. No one ever caught him lying down. He admits he can’t sit through a movie, unless there’s nonstop action. Gibson wants to run someplace. His motto should be, “Let’s go!”

He’s a superb specimen as athlete. Michelangelo would have drooled. At 6 feet 3 inches and 215 pounds, he’s as lean as a 1-iron, as supple as a fly rod. Fat can’t keep up with him.

He’s as untamed as a timber wolf. Or a big cat. You look at a Kirk Gibson and you don’t know whether to play with it or hunt it from the back of an elephant. The last time something this sleek and reckless came along, it had stripes. And claws. Gibson almost looks as if he just escaped a circus.

The eyes are the tawny yellow of the hunting--or hunted--animal. If you saw them staring out of the high brush, you’d swear they had a tail.

He probably should have played football. Or ridden horseback with a sword and a fur hat. You figure this kind of raw energy should be running into people, knocking things around, making fur fly.

He was an outstanding football player. His biggest decision was whether to play for the Detroit Lions or Detroit Tigers. Actually, the football Cardinals wanted to sign him. He ran the 40-yard dash under 4.3 seconds, he loved the contact and the Michigan State Spartans won the Big Ten football championship when he was there, but probation kept them out of the Rose Bowl. A wide receiver with good moves, he caught 112 passes for 24 touchdowns and 2,347 yards.

He chose baseball for the most unusual of reasons: He considered it more of a challenge. It wasn’t the injury factor.

“With football, you can play with pain and hurt,” he says. “You break a finger, you tape it to the next one, get a shot and you play. With baseball, you can’t. You can’t swing a bat with a broken anything.”

Still, Gibson admits: “I had a football mentality. I still do. I’m an emotional person. I get the adrenaline going and I want to charge.”

Baseball was a challenge because it inhibited this instinct.

“Baseball, you have to learn to channel your emotion,” he says. “You have to learn to settle yourself down. You have to accept failure. In football, I can catch 10 out of 10 passes. In baseball, you succeed one out of three times, you’re a Hall of Famer.”

Accepting failure was never in Kirk Gibson’s game plan. As if hitting the curveball were not hard enough--”Hitting the fastball is no day at the beach either,” he warns--his original manager, Sparky Anderson, suggested he go directly to the Hall of Fame when he showed up. Other people thought he should go to the Chicago Bears.

But Gibson persevered and became one of the most dangerous hitters in baseball. His bat obliterated the San Diego Padres in the 1984 World Series. He played the game lustily, usually with a two-day growth of beard and the hard-running style of a fullback on a 2-yard line or a bull in a rodeo.

You would think he would be the last man in the world to pull a practical joke on. It would be better to give a hotfoot to a hungry leopard.

But sports camps are the citadels of schoolboy pranks. Cayenne pepper in the coffee is a sure-fire boredom easer. Sending rookies out for left-handed bats is a way to while away even the dullest of afternoons.

But teasing Gibson is like pulling the ears of a pit bull, or scaling a volcano.

When he found that someone had loaded his outfield cap with lampblack, the air turned purple and, the next thing anybody knew, the Dodgers’ million-dollar clean-up hitter was out of uniform and almost out of town.

Relief pitcher Jesse Orosco, the prankster, apologized to Gibson. Gibson never apologized to anybody. Muttering darkly, something about how if he wanted to dress with a bunch of clowns, he would have joined the circus, Gibson returned to the club.

No one dared ask, “Can’t you take a joke?” Gibson might eat him.