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Farewell Gibbo, a most humble media icon

Roar Guru
24th September, 2015
4

Like most sports mad kids of my generation I was first introduced to Mike Gibson via the television in his role as host of Wide World of Sports on Channel Nine.

It wasn’t until years later that I came face to face with the man I thought I already knew. It’s a strange relationship we have with people we welcome into our lounge rooms on TV, and our perception of their personality quite often doesn’t mirror reality.

It was the same with Mike, but in a different way.

There’s no way he could ever be described as a showbiz wanker or up himself in any way. In fact, the exact opposite was true.

For years I’d loved ‘Gibbo’ as the gregarious host of WWOS, admired his newspaper articles in The Telegraph Mirror, as it was back then, and enjoyed his radio program on 2GB.

Nobody was better at capturing the mood in Sydney like Mike. His words danced off the pages of the paper and his speech was the sound of everyday Australians. He was a master of what has become a dying art in the media game.

I met him when I first started working at 2GB in the mid-to-late 1990s.

I was working in the newsroom – mainly on the weekends at that stage and Mike was the morning show host during the week, so our paths rarely crossed.

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I do remember when I was filling in for someone on the breakfast shift during the week one time and being completely starstruck as I walked the corridor and spied him coming towards me.

I clearly remember saying to myself “Holy crap, that’s Mike Gibson” and all I could manage was a nod in his direction. On day two, I eeked out “nice column today Mike” and by the end of the week we eventually got around to discussing who we were going to back in the races at Randwick on Saturday.

Here’s me thinking he would be this larger than life, larrikin personality and he was this humble, bordering on shy, gracious man, and totally unaffected by or unaware of how famous he actually was.

He’d rock up to work in jeans and a t-shirt after driving in his dinged-out bomb of a car which you’d swear he’d borrowed from one of his kids. Quite remarkable.

He was your old school journalist type who refused to get up to speed with the computer age and you’d walk past his office to the click, clack, clickety, clack of his type writer.

Fast forward 15 or so years and I managed to work with Mike back at 2GB again.

This time he was co-hosting a summer sports show with Doug Walters and Andrew Moore. I was a fill-in producer and he remembered who I was and asked me if I had any good tips.

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He had just left as host of the Back Page on Foxtel and I asked him what he was going to do in retirement.

“Most blokes buy boats or play golf, bugger that, I love punting so I’m going to punt every day,” he said.

That was the Mike Gibson I knew to a tee. A knockabout bloke who enjoyed the simple things in life. I’m sure he’s having a beer and a bet at the great TAB in the sky right now.

Thanks for the memories, Gibbo.

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