Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  The Yankees’ player rep, pitcher Steve Hamilton, told Miller that “the most interesting conversation he had was with Mickey Mantle, who, although never hostile to the Players Association [which had been established in 1967], had always seemed somewhat aloof. Steve thought of this when he called. Mickey’s response was that it really didn’t affect him because he had finally made his decision not to play in 1969.” Had Mickey, Hamilton asked, told anyone of his decision to retire? Mantle said he had not. Hamilton made a request: would Mickey delay announcing his retirement and give the union permission to include his name with all the players not to sign contracts? “Mantle had only one question: ‘Would it help the players?’ ‘Yes,’ Steve replied, ‘it would.’ ‘Then hell yes,’ Mick replied. ‘Use my name.’ ”21

  For one bright shining moment at least, just before it was all over, Mantle supported his fellow players and the union. Willie Mays would never have such a moment.

  The year 1968 was a bad one for hitters, as indicated by Bob Gibson’s microscopic 1.12 ERA. The National League’s ERA was just 2.99, and the American League’s was a fraction lower at 2.98. Just two seasons earlier, the NL had posted a 3.61 mark to the AL’s 3.44. But in 1968 the strike zone, the height of pitching mounds, and the tolerance of the umpires on inside pitching took a toll on hitters. Considering that environment—and his thirty-seven years—Willie didn’t do badly with 23 home runs, 79 RBIs, a .289 batting average, and 12 stolen bases. But it could no longer be denied: he wasn’t the best center fielder in baseball anymore. It became official on August 19 when the cover of Sports Illustrated featured the Cardinals’ Curt Flood making a circus catch against Wrigley Field’s ivy-covered wall and proclaimed him baseball’s best center fielder.

  The announcement affected at least one reader in Alabama so much that, the day after the issue hit the stands, he went to high school football practice early, smarted off to the coach, and got kicked off the team. So much for my football career.

  Near the end of the season, Roger Kahn saw Mantle at Yankee Stadium during a game in which Mickey did not play. Two days later, Kahn saw Willie at Shea in a series against the Mets in which “I wish Willie hadn’t played.” Willie struck out three times against Tom Seaver and misplayed a fly ball in center field. “I thought of the second part of the line from the Dylan Thomas poem, which I had not used for my book about the Jackie Robinson Dodgers: ‘I have seen the boys of summer in their ruin.’ ”

  * In 1971 Downing made a comeback with the Dodgers, winning 20 games; he pitched through six more seasons and is unfairly remembered mostly as the man who gave up Hank Aaron’s record-breaking 715th home run.

  † Willie’s memory on this, as on many incidents during his career, was faulty. Charles Einstein recalled dozens of guests and “a mountain of presents” on this Willie Mays Day. A photo of the occasion shows Willie surrounded by ballpark beauties, one holding a banner calling him THE BIRMINGHAM BELTER.

  ‡ In a 1998 letter to me, Charlie Einstein told me, “Willie was always very bitter about the fact that the San Francisco Giants were so reluctant to give him a day. He brought up the Stu Miller thing over and over—he would remind me of it years later, long after most people remembered who Stu Miller was. Stu Miller was a pretty good relief pitcher for a couple of years with the Giants, but the thing he was best known for was getting caught in a stiff wind on the mound in Candlestick Park and getting blown off. That was one of Stu Miller’s two great distinctions. The other was being the answer to the question ‘What San Francisco Giant who was not Willie Mays got a day in his honor in the 1960s?’ ”

  § Or the “Lowlanders,” as some wag in a New York paper called them in 1966; I’ll never know who because I clipped only the headline and taped it to my bedroom door.

  ‖ Legend has it that Yogi did not know that the voice of the cat was his longtime battery mate, Whitey Ford. When told that it was “the Chairman of the Board,” Berra supposedly asked, “That was Frank Sinatra?”

  a In 1982, working on a story for Inside Sports, I interviewed Mantle at the Echelon Mall in Voorhees, New Jersey. One question I asked him was: “Why didn’t you consider batting right-handed all the time? It would have been less painful, and I’ll bet it would have added several points to your batting average.”

  b Willie had by this time moved up to second place on the home run list, second only to Babe Ruth.

  “I just don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “We just didn’t think that way back then, though oddly enough, I did a couple of times when batting against Hoyt Wilhelm and that damned knuckleball of his. I don’t know why, but I could just see the break on that pitch better from the right side.” He also said “If I’da played for the Boston Red Sox at that point in my career, with that wall in Fenway, I think I woulda batted right-handed all the time.”

  c In 1985, just three years after Denny McLain Day at Tiger Stadium.

  17

  Say Good-bye to America

  On March 1, 1969, at a press conference at the Yankee Clipper Hotel, Mantle surprised teammates, front-office people, and reporters when he announced his retirement in a calm, composed statement. “I just can’t play anymore,” he said. “I don’t hit the ball when I need to. I can’t score from second when I need to. I can’t steal when I need to.”1 His teammates were shocked but not surprised. Mickey was numb; for him, the rest of the press conference passed in a blur. He would later tell Dick Young that he had no memory of what he did for the next few months.

  “Baseball was all I’d ever known,” he later recalled. “I wasn’t in much of a mood for a celebration.”2 For the first time since he was nineteen years old, he was no longer a professional baseball player. In fact, he wasn’t a professional anything. All his recent business interests, including a bowling alley in Dallas, had gone under. He now found himself thirty-seven years old, walking on bad legs, with no marketable skills. He had a wife and four children to support and a gaggle of relatives back in Oklahoma to help out.

  It had been eighteen spring trainings since he had made his first appearance with the Yankees. Reflecting back on his thoughts at that press conference, Mantle said, “It seemed like so much longer. It felt like it had been fifty years since I first played for the Yankees.”3

  The Yankees invited him back on June 8 for a “day.” It was the first sellout at Yankee Stadium since the World Series back in 1964. His uniform was folded and presented to him; his number 7 was retired. Yankees announcer Frank Messer told the crowd that Mickey had “worn it with pride his entire Yankee career.” (No one remembered that the first number he had worn as a Yankee was 6.) After the ceremony, he posed for pictures in the pressroom. Someone pushed a television camera in his face, and a reporter asked him, “Who do you think was the better ballplayer, you or Willie Mays?” Without even hesitating, Mickey replied, “Willie Mays is better. I don’t mind being second. If I’m second, I’m pretty good.”

  Willie Mays did mind being second. After Mays passed up Jimmie Foxx in 1966 for second place on the all-time home run list, the primary question among baseball fans was: Could Willie do it? Could he pass up the Babe? But 1967 through 1969 weren’t good slugging years for Mays or almost anyone else; in those three seasons combined, he hit just 58 home runs, six more than he had in 1965 alone. As the 1960s wound down, another challenger to Ruth’s record emerged, and Willie, for the first time in his career, had to take a backseat to another player in his own league.

  Henry Louis Aaron, three years younger than Mays, was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1934 and, as a shortstop for the Indianapolis Clowns, played in many of the old southern ballparks that Willie had played in. “Hank,” as he was identified on his Topps baseball cards and as he came to be known, had had none of the breaks that Willie had benefited from: he had no mentors like Piper Davis to guide him through professional black baseball, and instead of liberal New York, with its comparatively progressive front office (remember that the Giants roomed Willie with a black veteran, Monte Irvin), Aar
on broke into the majors in white-bread Milwaukee, a town with a relatively small black population. When Mays had the misfortune of leaving New York, his team went to San Francisco, which, as it turned out, was by no definition a bastion of racial understanding, but it was light-years from the city that Aaron’s team moved to in 1966—Atlanta.

  In 1967, as Mays’s home run production began to drop off, Aaron began to pick up speed. From 1967 to 1971, Willie hit 104 home runs, while Henry smashed 197. Aaron also, early in the 1972 season, surpassed Willie as the highest-paid player in baseball—in fact, Aaron’s three-year, $600,000 contract made him the highest-paid player of all time. Aaron never saw himself as a hero and gave little thought to catching Babe Ruth. By the end of the 1971 season, Aaron trailed Mays by just seven home runs, 639 to 646. But he still didn’t believe he would beat the Babe’s 714. “Hey, Wayne,” he asked Wayne Minshew of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “do you think I have a chance at it?”4

  Mays apparently resented Aaron for supplanting his supremacy in home runs and in salary. In fact, if the information in Howard Bryant’s 2010 biography of Aaron is correct, Mays had been harboring a strange resentment toward Aaron for many years. “For his generation, Mays exemplified the rare combination of physical, athletic genius, and a showman’s gift for timing. What went less reported and, as the years passed, became an uncomfortable, common lament was just how cruel and self-absorbed Mays could be.”5 In 1957 Reese Schonfeld, a young reporter for a Boston television station, was at the Polo Grounds for a charity game between the Giants and Braves; while his cameraman was changing film for an interview with Aaron, Mays trotted in from center field and started ragging on Aaron: “How much they paying you, Hank? They ain’t paying you at all, Hank? Don’t you know we all get paid for this? You ruin it for the rest of us, Hank! You just fall off the turnip truck?” Mays, who grew up in the big city of Birmingham, was fond of deriding Aaron as “country.”

  According to Bryant, Willie began to lay it on thicker, finally calling Aaron “one dumb nigger!” Aaron was so shaken that manager Fred Haney decided to take him out of the game. Willie, Bryant wrote, “committed one of the great offenses against a person as proud as Henry: he insulted him, embarrassed him in front of other people, and did not treat him with respect.” The closer Aaron got to the magic number 714, the more apparent it became that “Willie would never surrender the stage easily to the man who had always played in his shadow.” When the press began to treat Aaron’s breaking the record as inevitable, Willie told a reporter that “yes, Henry would break Ruth’s record,” but he added, “Maybe I will, too.”6 Even though Willie rebounded to hit 28 home runs in 1970, no one believed he could do it.

  Mays and Aaron “were not friends … there was something about Willie that wouldn’t allow a real friendship with Henry. Willie wouldn’t, or couldn’t, ever give Henry his due as a great player, and that inability on Mays’s part to acknowledge Henry as an equal was what really burned Henry.”7

  On April 8, 1974, Mickey’s old teammate Al Downing tried to slip a pitch by Henry Aaron, who slammed it over the fence for his 715th career home run. Mickey Mantle remembered, “I watched him on television that night and saw the ball go over the left centerfield fence in Atlanta Stadium. I can imagine how he felt circling the bases and listening to the gigantic roar. I know the pressure that built up before he hit it. I know what the feeling is. I wish everybody in America could have that feeling just once, to hear all those people cheering and knowing it was for them.”8

  One truly wonders what Mays’s feelings were at that moment. One also wonders what America’s reaction would have been if Willie Mays instead of Hank Aaron had broken Ruth’s record. Aaron received hate mail and death threats, and there were even reports of his children being harassed at school. There is no way of knowing how much of this was due to the most fabled record in American sports being shattered by a black man playing in the Deep South just a few years after the height of the civil rights movement. The accomplishment would likely have gone much more smoothly for Willie, whose home base was San Francisco and who had the kind of media support in New York that Aaron could only yearn for.

  As the sixties came to an end, New York had a new sports hero. Joe Namath, quarterback for the New York Jets, had put the American Football League on the map with a sensational upset of the old NFL establishment Baltimore Colts. In the flush of victory, Joe opened an Upper East Side bar called Bachelors III, and Mantle began to hang out there, often in the company of Whitey Ford and Billy Martin. Though there was a twelve-year age difference, he and Namath hit it off immediately. Dick Schaap, who knew both Mantle and Namath as well as any writer, quipped that if not for Mickey’s wife and family back in Dallas, “Joe might have thought about changing the name of the bar to Bachelors IV.”9 The two men became close, and Mantle confided in Namath. Joe told one beat writer, “Mick’s the only male in his family to make it past age forty-one. We talk about that now and then—jokingly, but with some seriousness—that if he had known he was going to live that long, he’da taken better care of himself.”10 Despite the warning, Namath did not take Mantle’s story to heart and began his own serious problem with alcohol.

  In the winter of 1969, it appeared as if Mantle had finally found a business interest outside baseball. The year before, advertising guru George Lois had put Mickey’s and Joe’s faces on a new business venture, an employment agency called Mantle Men & Namath Girls. The catchphrase was “Our people are pros, just like us.” The two seemed to be having a great deal of fun in their TV commercials for the company, one of which showed Joe typing away, and they made personal appearances together. The company seemed to be booming, but the spring and summer of 1969 brought the first big recession the United States had seen since the Korean War, and as Lois put it, “suddenly there were fewer jobs to fill, and our dream concept fell on rough days.”11 Mantle Men & Namath Girls was sold to another agency.

  The friendship between Mantle and Namath, though, continued on without missing a beat. In 1969, Joe hosted an hour-long program, The Joe Namath Show, rife with adolescent male horsing around. The December 22 episode featured Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and the Baltimore Colts’ Willie Richardson, whom Namath had played against earlier in the year in the Super Bowl. Bets were placed as each man tried to tap a golf ball into a cup placed at the end of a long strip of artificial turf. Mickey did well, but Willie’s putts spun inexplicably to the right and left within inches of their target. A baffled Mays asked in a high-pitched whine, “Hey, man, what’s the matter with this thing?” Mantle, sitting in a guest chair, broke up with laughter. The setup was rigged to keep Willie’s putts from going in. Mickey had bet Willie $100 a stroke before the show, but in his glee at Willie’s frustration broke down and admitted the fix. After the show, Mantle, a grin on his face, approached Mays and asked him to pay up. Willie told him they’d play for double or nothing at Horace Stoneham’s country club the next time Mickey was in the Bay Area.

  Even in the twilight of Willie’s career, most baseball fans—particularly this fan—knew virtually nothing of his character flaws. In fact, we knew nothing about the dark side of any of our sports heroes. In a way, the fans of my generation didn’t care to know. In 1969 our lives had moved on to more important subjects, to the Vietnam War and domestic antiwar demonstrations and bombings. Culturally, sports had been displaced by Woodstock and Altamont. Even within the world of sports, Willie Mays began to seem almost antiquated, a hero from an age whose ideals had already passed.

  I witnessed this for myself at the University of Alabama, which became integrated in the midsixties. By the end of the decade, I found myself surrounded by black kids my age whose interest in sports was as strong as my own. Even though Willie Mays had grown up and learned baseball just a few miles from where we were going to school, he was not one of their idols. Jim Brown, the most outspoken black football player of his era, and Bill Russell, who was playing the final season of a career that saw him win eleven champi
onships with the Boston Celtics, had both supplanted Willie among black youth—white youth too, for that matter. Muhammad Ali, of course, transcended sport in a way that did not seem possible in those safe and comfortable 1950s and early 1960s. Brown, Russell, and Ali were my heroes too. But increasingly I found that the esteem in which I had held Willie Mays was not shared by my black friends; on more than one occasion the term “Uncle Tom” even crept into our conversations.

  One terrible day in the early fall of 1969, my father and I stopped by Willie Mays Fried Chicken and Hamburgers, which was on Birmingham’s north side, close to where the Civil Rights Institute stands now. To our delight, Willie was seated a few tables away, talking to a man I recognized as Jesse Lewis, owner and publisher of Birmingham’s most successful black-owned newspaper, the Birmingham Times. (I had interviewed Lewis about the civil rights movement for my high school paper the year before.) I thought about walking over to their table and introducing my father to Lewis, and thus allowing my father to shake hands with Willie Mays for the first time in his life. Before I could make my move, we realized they were in the midst of an argument, one that could be heard throughout the restaurant. Mays was hotly defending his lack of participation in the civil rights struggles in Birmingham, a city he had once called “the most racist in America.”

  Lewis seemed calm and, as I saw it, nonconfrontational, but Mays was loud, aggressive, and clearly heated. We never discussed it, but I could tell that my father, who had been a staunch supporter of civil rights, had been shaken in his hero worship. For my part, I was surprised at how much overhearing the conversation between Lewis and Mays upset me, and I thought back to that moment in 1963 when Mays had conspicuously failed to join Jackie Robinson and Floyd Patterson in supporting Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birmingham rally.