It's been some 50 years since Dirk Gibbons threw off a Manitoba mound.
He'll get another chance tomorrow night.
Gibbons and Armando Vazquez, two former members of the Brandon Greys baseball club, are scheduled to throw out the first pitch at CanWest Global Park, prior to the start of the Winnipeg Goldeyes-Lincoln Saltdogs game.
"The stories of these players coming up here in the 1940s after the Negro Leagues started to fold and them ending up in Manitoba, I found it really fascinating," said producer Robert Huculak, the man who is bringing the two players up to Canada as subjects for a documentary on black baseball players in Manitoba back in the late '40s and early '50s.
It wasn't until Jackie Robinson broke in with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 that Major League teams began scouring the ranks of the Negro Leagues for talent.
They snatched up all the younger, better black players for their organizations, hurting the Negro Leagues to the point where they had to fold -- leaving those who couldn't make the jump to the next level (or were getting toward the twilight of their careers) no place to play.
"Word had gotten out that Manitoba was looking for ball players, so they started coming up here," Huculak said.
Bringing us to Gibbons and Vazquez.
While the Cuban-born Vazquez spent all of five seasons (1948-52) with the Greys in the Man Dak League, Gibbons played only three seasons in the Wheat City, joining the team as a 20-year-old after stints with the Detroit Stars, the New York Black Yankees, and the Indianapolis Clowns.
DURING SEGREGATION
"We couldn't play with white people in the States," Gibbons said from his home in Tampa yesterday. "That was during segregation time, so you could just imagine how hard it was. And I'm talking about hard.
"We had to leave town after a ball game."
Gibbons said coming to small town Manitoba was a shock, but because he had to deal with so much racism throughout his life up to that point, he made the most of it.
"There's not too much of an impression you can get from Brandon during that time, but it was nice," he said. "See, everywhere that I went it was going to be nice, because I let it be that way. I don't put myself in a negative position. Everybody told me it was God's Country, but you still found some people that don't see it the way they should see it.
"I didn't let that worry me."
Walter Lee 'Dirk' (Bubble Gum) Gibbons -- the many names he went by back then -- went 19-5 with 229 strikeouts and two one-hitters in his first year in Brandon (1949) and following a successful second year, he went overseas to fight in the Korean War.
Injured in combat, he returned to play another year with the Greys, a year with the Winnipeg Royals, and then finished up his Man Dak career with three seasons for the Minot Mallards.
Now 76 years old, Gibbons remembers his time in Manitoba fondly -- despite being one of the few African-Americans in the predominately vanilla prairies.
"We had a weekend off and we went up to Clear Lake," Gibbons recalls. "This young kid kept walking around me, you know, circling me. I asked him why he kept walking around me for and he said that he wanted to know where my tail was.
Gibbons must have been furious.
"I didn't get mad, I just knew that he wasn't taught the right things," he said. "His mother probably took him to the Tarzan movies or what have you and he sees the monkeys ... he probably never saw a black man before, so I just laughed at him.
"It was funny to me."
