Bundesliga
The man with the Bayern eye
Bayern Munich superfan Ryan Gibson beat a rare form of cancer and turned his prosthetic glass eye into a one of a kind tribute to his favourite club. His passion for Bayern is legendary and has seen him through the toughest challenges life could throw at him.
It’s well known that Bundesliga stadiums are routinely packed to the rafters with thousands of passionate fans decked out in their clubs’ shirts, hats, and scarves.
However, love for the league’s clubs cannot be contained by Germany’s borders. Around the world, Bundesliga fans proudly display their love for their teams in a variety of creative ways, with some of them taking fandom to new heights.
Bayern Munich mega-fan Ryan Gibson is one of them. The navy vet from York, South Carolina, has hats, shirts, and scarves, but he also has something truly unique: a glass eye with the club crest in place of the iris and pupil.
Gibson lost his right eye to a rare form of cancer known as ocular melanoma but his love for Bayern helped him through that trying time. He has now turned the need for a prosthetic into an opportunity to advance two causes dear to his heart: raising awareness of the disease and promoting Bayern.
“If you get a regular eye you fall back into normality and don't get any benefit. This helps me talk about Bayern and ocular melanoma,” Gibson told Goal.com. The cancer is extremely rare, affecting fewer than 1 in 250,000 people in the United States. As Gibson puts in, a diagnosis is “even less likely than Leicester City winning the Premier League.”
The prosthetic eye is a work of art and a rarity; made specially by a local ocularist, it is potentially the only glass eye hand-painted with a football club’s logo. “I had to get permission from Bayern to use the logo as Bayern own the international copyright for medical equipment,” said Gibson, “but they were really helpful.”
The Bavarians have been a source of support for Gibson for some time now. “Every stage of this ocular melanoma process, something with Bayern kept me focused,” he explained. “Now I can kind of live with that and take my mind away from the cancer.”
Such is his love for the reigning Bundesliga Champions that Gibson’s Bayern eye is not just a matchday accessory: “I could have got a natural eye and just worn this for gamedays, but I'm not that kind of person: I'll wear this every day of the year!”
Two years after he got his famous eye, misfortune found Gibson again, this time in the form of a car accident that nearly cost him his leg and kept him in hospital for a year. Once again, Bayern gave him the will and motivation to keep fighting through his recovery. “It was just constant Bayern… Everything I did during those 365 days,” Gibson told bundesliga.com about his rehabilitation. “I watched every video online of Bayern or of the Bayern Munich players.”
When he began his physiotherapy, Ryan Gibson set himself a goal: Get well enough to go to the Allianz Arena without crutches to watch his favourite player, Franck Ribery, play his last Bundesliga match in the famous red shirt. His hard work and perseverance paid off. Before Bayern’s match against Frankfurt, Bayern Ryan walked out onto the pitch and shared an emotional moment with his idol.
As if to make the day even more special and seal a wonderful comeback from adversity, Ribery scored Bayern’s fourth in a comprehensive 5-1 victory to seal their seventh consecutive Bundesliga title.