Adversity made them respected

Those people who dial a phone to a sports talk radio station, ready to cough up an ill-conceived rebuke or defense of a prominent sports figure along with the rest of their phlegm, make this world great.\nAfter all, we often need somebody to make us look more sane after we high-fived somebody we barely know at the sports bar after Kerry Wood's two-run double Tuesday night.\nBut when the opposite happens, when things go horribly awry and we want to throw our shoe through the television set showing a sporting event in which we have great interest but no control, can we pause for just one moment and realize for what George Plimpton and Althea Gibson stood?\nPlimpton, who passed away last Thursday at age 76, had the countenance of an aristocrat. He was from New York City, but one needed to look it up to make sure he wasn't British.\nBelying that countenance, he was also a huge sports fan. In fact, he wrote the famous book "Paper Lion," a book about playing quarterback with the Detroit Lions in 1963. He even made a brief appearance in a Lions preseason game.\nHe also faced several baseball All-Stars prior to the 1959 All-Star Game, boxed legendary fighters Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson and stepped into the net to play goalie for the Boston Bruins.\nThat he had an aristocratic countenance might not have served as his front, but it did help keep him above the fray and other sports talk whiners. In actuality, he was busy making a point to the regular guys. \nPoint being: Sports are hard, especially when one desires to compete at a sport's highest levels. Our admiration for athletes runs directly proportional to two things: how hard we think the sport is to play and how violent the sport is. That's why people have trouble acknowledging the athleticism of race car drivers or golfers -- because it doesn't seem like they are very hard and because it seems like the equipment has just as great a role in the player's success. Plimpton was there to remind us that it's not as easy as it looks to pick apart a defense or pitch to Willie Mays. \n"The outsider did not belong, and there was comfort in that being proved," Plimpton wrote in "Paper Lion."\nAuthor Jonathan Ames tried a Plimpton-like stunt in 1999 where he boxed another man in a four-round bout. After losing by decision and suffering a broken nose, Ames ran into Plimpton after the fight. \n"George approved, I think, of the fact that I lost," Ames said. "Losing, he knew, always makes a better story than winning. And being good at losing was one of George's many gifts."\nAlthea Gibson was nothing like a loser, and the courage she showed was of a different type. Gibson, who passed away Sunday at age 76, was the first great black tennis player of either gender. She won the 1956 French Open and Wimbledon and the U.S. Championships (now called the U.S. Open) in 1957 and 1958.\nThankfully, tennis is too polite a game for her to have to go through the nastiness that baseball's Jackie Robinson had to go through about a decade before. But unfortunately, just because tennis is a polite game doesn't mean that it had a pure heart.\nTennis clubs were segregated during Gibson's prime, and it kept her from associating with the elite. Even worse, there was no such thing as a professional women's tour -- that didn't come along until the early 1970s when Billie Jean King came along -- so while Gibson certainly enjoyed the ticker-tape parade she received when coming back from England after winning Wimbledon in 1958, she refocused her attention.\nShe played exhibition tennis matches at halftime of Harlem Globetrotters games and got a small cut of the gate. When that still wasn't enough, she became the first African-American on the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour.\nNot nearly as good a golfer as she was a tennis player, she faded into seclusion. Embarrassed at living in poverty in the '90s, she considered suicide. According to The Guardian, when Angela Buxton, Gibson's former doubles partner, called in the mid-90s to check up on her, she found Gibson unable to pay for her rent or medication.\nBuxton began a letter-writing campaign to current players to help raise money. Gibson started receiving dozens of money-filled letters daily and thankfully passed away in peace. Like Plimpton, Gibson had shown that dealing with adversity had earned her immense respect.