Rochester Hills — Cam Gibson had just arrived back on the campus of Michigan State University early on the morning of April 27, 2015. He was feeling pretty good. The Spartans had just won a doubleheader at Indiana, and he had hit 3 for 4 in the second game, including a home run.
Then his brother told him news that would shock and change him. Gibson’s father, Tigers legend Kirk, had just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
A day later, Kirk Gibson publicly announced the diagnosis and vowed to fight it with all the energy he had put into playing football at MSU and baseball in the major leagues for 17 years.
“I didn’t really know anything about the disease, except that I knew Michael J. Fox from ‘Back to the Future’ had it,” Cam Gibson said recently. “When I talked to my dad, I was pretty depressed because I didn’t know what the future held. But he assured me that he would fight it, like he fights everything else. This won’t get him down. It may be different, but it won’t get him down.”
“And when a guy like him tells you that, you kind of have to believe him because he’s handled everything else in his life so well.”
Kirk Gibson, 67, has kept his word and has battled Parkinson’s disease since the day he was diagnosed. In addition to his work as a Tigers television presenter and as an advisor to the Tigers’ management, he continues to lead a very active lifestyle.
He has also made a commitment to help others living with the disease through the Kirk Gibson Foundation, which has raised more than $3 million in the fight against Parkinson’s. The foundation raised more than $400,000 at its eighth annual charity golf outing, held this month at the Wyndgate. Several of his celebrity friends, including members of the 1984 World Series-winning team, now celebrating its 40th anniversary, donated to the cause.
During the golf outing, Kirk Gibson revealed his larger plans for the foundation, including the opening of the Kirk Gibson Center, with a target date of sometime in 2025.
The center will serve not only patients with Parkinson’s disease – a disease of the central nervous system that affects motor and non-motor systems and for which there is no cure – but also family members of Parkinson’s patients and caregivers of Parkinson’s patients. The center will be located in Metro Detroit, but a location has not yet been announced.
“We have big plans for 2025,” Kirk Gibson told The News, saying an announcement is expected around Oct. 1. “We are determined. We will persevere. It’s a crap job. You can’t feel sorry for yourself. If someone hits you, you have to hit back.”
“We say movement is important. You have to keep moving. You have to maintain coordination, and that’s what we do. You have to be more determined.”
“I’m here to tell you that it is not a death sentence.”
Kirk Gibson said there are more than 8,000 people living with Parkinson’s in the Detroit metropolitan area and the goal is for the future wellness center to be accessible to them without having to drive an hour.
He said he has met or spoken with many of them, whether by calling someone who emailed him through the foundation’s website or simply having random people approach him as he was out and about in the community, such as at Home Depot.
That community was evident at his golf outing, which sold out for the eighth year in a row. Golf has become a key part of Gibson’s plan to keep going. The other day, he shot a 40 on the first nine holes. He doesn’t know what he shot on the second nine, he said, laughing. It wasn’t good. The old Gibson, known for his extreme competitiveness, might have been upset. Not this Gibson. He knows it’s the golf that matters, not the score.
“Parkinson’s is an ugly word in itself, isn’t it?” says Kirk Gibson, who now calls his illness Parky. “You have to deal with it and learn what you can.”
“And if you find something useful, share it.”
Gibson shares it with the community and his family, including his wife JoAnn, daughter Colleen and sons Cam, Kirk and Kevin. (“They’re money,” he said of his family.)
Cam Gibson recently took on a larger role, joining Chris Chadwick to support the Foundation’s marketing, communications and brand development efforts.
Cam Gibson was selected by the Tigers in the fifth round of the 2015 draft and retired in 2021.
“It’s great,” said Kirk Gibson, whose foundation has provided more than 300 Parkinson’s patients with access to exercise programs and helped 164 families receive more than 12,625 hours of respite care in 2023. “He’s learning so much about it.”
“It’s totally different from what he did.”
Cam Gibson said he is unsure what the future holds for him after retiring from baseball and making it to the Double-A level in the Tigers’ system.
That’s when his father sat him down and laid out the bigger vision for the Kirk Gibson Foundation – which was founded in 1996, a year after Gibson’s retirement, and was originally intended to provide college scholarships to athletes and non-athletes at Waterford Kettering and Clarkston high schools – and asked his son to take on a bigger role.
Cam Gibson, like Kirk and the dozens of others heavily involved in the foundation – including more than 50 volunteers – is excited about the prospects of the stand-alone wellness center, which he said will include movement-based activities such as yoga, dance and meditation, as well as language classes and classes for families and friends of Parkinson’s patients and their caregivers. The foundation also focuses on nutrition, emotional well-being and medication options.
Above all, Kirk Gibson wants members of the Parkinson’s community, his community – his new team, as he calls it – to not be afraid to leave the house and to continue living a normal life, even if life is different and more difficult. In the United States, more than a million people live with Parkinson’s.
“That really intrigued me and helped me understand what he was getting at,” said Cam Gibson, 30, a spitting image of his father from his early baseball days with his scraggly beard and long hair. “It’s not just the people with the disease who have to go through this. Their family members and their loved ones have to go through this too.”
“Everyone has worked really hard on this over the last year or so. There’s a lot of dedication involved. … Everyone is giving it everything they’ve got.”
“We know it’s a great desire and a great need for Michigan.”
@tonypaul1984
