by Allen Barra
When I became a man, I thought I had put away childish things, but it never occurred to me that my love for Willie Mays was one of those. Or at least it had not occurred to me that I had been foolish ever to see Willie Mays as a hero. I had been wrong to assume that Willie had been part of the civil rights struggle simply because he was black and from Birmingham. It was difficult to reconcile my admiration for Mays with the fact that he had done nothing off the field to merit my worship.
A couple of weeks after seeing Mays at his chicken restaurant, my father and I drove across town to have some fried chicken at Mickey Mantle’s Country Cookin’.* On that day in 1969, he had just turned thirty-eight and somehow managed to look both younger and older than his age. He smiled and autographed a Sport magazine that contained Dick Young’s story “Farewell to Mickey Mantle.” I told him that he had hit a home run the first time I saw him play at an exhibition at Yankee Stadium against the San Francisco Giants in 1961. He smiled and said, “Yeah, but that was Willie’s day.” (I remember Mickey’s chicken as being fully the equal of Willie’s. Mantle later told me, “You know, I never got a chance to tell Willie, but I was going to give him a slogan they wouldn’t let me use: ‘To get a better piece of chicken you’d have to be a rooster.’ ”)
As we left, my father turned to me and said, “My God, he looks tired.” A few days later, at the Birmingham News, where I was putting in time as a go-fer, I mentioned to Howell Raines, one of the editors, that I had been to the opening of Mantle’s restaurant and that he appeared bleary-eyed and looked as if he was in need of a good sleep. “Well,” Raines confided to me, “nobody at this paper is going to write it, but I have it on good authority that Mickey and Bear Bryant got together and went on a legendary binge the night before. It’s amazing he made it to the restaurant opening at all.”†
Early in January 1970, Curt Flood filed a $1 million lawsuit against Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and Major League Baseball. The previous October, Flood had been traded by the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies, a team Flood did not wish to play for in a city he did not wish to play in. What he wanted was nothing less than the overthrow of the long-standing “reserve clause,” a part of every player’s contract that bound him to his team, making him, in Flood’s phrase, “a well-paid slave [but] a slave nonetheless.”
Willie appeared on The Tonight Show and was asked by host Johnny Carson what he thought of Flood’s suit. Mays’s reply was vague; he told Carson that he hadn’t studied the case “too much. I don’t know all the arguments.… I’m not going to get involved.” Despite the urging of players’ union head Marvin Miller, no active major league player came out for Flood, even though overturning the reserve clause would have made all of them free agents and increased their salaries many times over. Most of the players later confessed to being afraid of retribution from management. Only Jackie Robinson, who had been retired for more than a decade, showed up to support Flood.
In his autobiography The Way It Is, which was published a few months after the suit was filed, Flood wrote: “All but a very few major leaguers share my view of baseball reality. Among those who do not, the most prominent is the great Willie Mays, who reports from the privileged isolation of his huge success that he has absolutely nothing to complain about.”12 Mays’s attitude toward free agency in baseball never really changed. James Hirsch argues that there was a consensus among his contemporaries in favor of free agency, but that “Mays believes something important was lost with free agency. Mays wants to see players make as much money as possible, and while he has always felt aligned with the owners, he’s never had any stake in their profits. Free agency, to Mays, was not simply about the dollars. It was about values. Mays prizes stability, order, and loyalty, and the reserve clause ensured that rosters were family stable and that teams could be kept together. Free agency, however, invited disruption for management while obliterating any pretense that the players were loyal to their teammates, their organizations, or to their cities.” Further, Hirsch writes, “Mays’ central point—that the demise of the reserve clause contributed to a free-wheeling money culture, which has diminished the players’ devotion to the game, fed their conceit about their self-worth, and raised self-aggrandizement to an art form—stands as a reasonable critique of the modern game.”13
Many sports fans would agree that the modern athlete’s “self-aggrandizement” occasionally reaches distasteful heights—although to what extent that is a result of free agency is anyone’s guess. Beyond that point, though, Willie’s position defies logic. Since when did being paid more money ever diminish a player’s devotion to the game? Did having economic control of the players diminish the owners’ devotion to the game? And where was Horace Stoneham’s and Walter O’Malley’s and other owners’ loyalty to their fans and cities when they packed up their teams and moved them to new cities that promised higher profits?
Where, in fact, was the concept of loyalty at all when players had no choice as to where they played? How can one truly say that any ballplayer, up to and including Willie Mays, was being loyal to his teammates, organization, or city when he had no choice as to where he played? And if Mays truly “wanted to see players make as much money as possible,” how exactly did he think that would happen when the players had no power to negotiate?
Of course, the irony—which must surely have occurred to Willie Mays over the years, and especially late in his career when he was plagued with financial difficulties—is that no player who ever stepped onto a baseball field would have been a more prized free agent than Willie Mays in his prime.
On July 18, 1970, in the second inning of a game against the Montreal Expos, Willie, in front of a hometown crowd, stroked an 0-2 pitch that one-hopped between shortstop and third base for his 3,000th major league hit. At the time, he was just the ninth player in baseball history to reach that milestone. In a cover story for Sports Illustrated, Roy Blount Jr. asked rhetorically, “Who else is still flashing a verve that dates back to the Korean War? ‘The only difference between the young Mays and the old Mays,’ says Montreal manager Gene Mauch, ‘is that it’s hard for a 39-year old man to feel up to playing like Willie Mays every day. But when he feels like it—when I see him up at the plate with the lineup card and he has that look, I say, Oh, bleep.’ ”
Blount’s profile was sprinkled with valentines: “He’s a beautiful person, says Giants outfielder Frank Johnson. ‘I don’t think anybody on the club dislikes him. If they do, they’re crazy.’ Bobby Bonds adds, ‘He’s the most nonchalant superstar you’ll ever see. He acts just like he draws the minimum.’ ” But there were some spiders on the valentine. Blount dared to comment on some facts that few writers had previously noted. “Mays,” he wrote, “would rather not have his significance probed and belabored in interviews with the press, with whom he is wary. The San Francisco writers give him his due as ‘incomparable,’ but many avoid him personally because ‘He never says anything.’ He is defensive towards writers he hasn’t known for a long time. He can also be curt, and what American boy—or sportswriter—wants Willie Mays to have been curt with him?
“In Houston, a long-faced fan kept yelling, ‘Hey, Willie!’ at Mays from the stands, following him around, tonelessly demanding an autograph while Mays was conferring with his peers during batting practice. Finally the man threw his program and a pen onto the field at Mays’s feet, without a word. Mays tossed them back at him without a word.”14
While Willie was making headlines for his present, Mickey was making them for his past. In the summer of 1970, the sports world was rocked by the publication of what has come to be called the best-telling and most influential sports book ever written, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four.
Other books, most notably Jim Brosnan’s The Long Season, had revealed the less glamorous side of the game. But Bouton’s book opened the public’s eyes to things the baseball press, through a gentleman’s agreement, simply didn’t write about: drinking parties, skirt chasing, the often irresponsible and childish
behavior of the players off the field, and even their cheating on it. (Bouton revealed how Yankee catcher Elston Howard scuffed baseballs for his pitcher Whitey Ford.)
More than forty years later, Ball Four remains a great read and one of the best insights into the life of a professional ballplayer ever written, but it’s hard for today’s fans to understand why it was so shocking at the time, and why Mantle, in particular, was deeply embarrassed, especially since his children had come of age and could read about their father’s antics. In the early 1970s, there had been no public discussion of Mantle’s many bad habits and often shameful personal life: his betting on horse races and golf matches (though Willie Mays might have had something to say on the latter) or the impact of his drinking and nightlife on his injury problems. Would he have healed more quickly, Bouton asked rhetorically, “if he’d been sleeping more and loosening up at the bar with the boys less?”15
Ball Four also eroded forever the vision of Mantle as a smiling, all-American model for youth: “There were times when he’d push little kids aside when they wanted his autograph, and the times when he was snotty to reporters, just about making them crawl and beg for a minute of his time. I’ve seen him close a bus window on kids trying to get his autograph. And I hated that look of his when he’d get angry at somebody and cut him down with a glare. Bill Gilbert of Sports Illustrated once described that look as flickering across his face ‘like the Nictitating membrane in the eye of a bird.’ And I don’t like the Mantle that refused to sign baseballs in the clubhouse before games. Everybody else had to sign, but [clubhouse man] Little Pete [Previte] forged Mantle’s signature.”16
The funny thing, though, on rereading Ball Four many years later, is that the book does not mock Mantle but humanizes him. The picture Bouton painted was of a flawed but complex human being, a man of generosity to his teammates and opponents alike. Bouton relates a story that Mickey loved to tell about Yankees manager Johnny Keane, the man who was hired from the St. Louis Cardinals after Yogi Berra was fired in 1964. Bouton wrote that Mantle’s story would invariably go like this:
How do your legs feel today, Mick?
Not too good.
Yes, but how do they feel?
It hurts when I run, the right one especially. I can’t stride on it or anything.
Well, do you think you can play?
I don’t know. I guess I can play. Yeah, hell, what the hell. Sure, I can play.
Good, great, we need you out there. Unless you’re hurt—unless it really hurts you. I don’t want you to play if you’re hurt.
No, it’s okay, I hurt, but it’s okay. I’ll watch it.
Good, good. We sure need you.
After a while, Bouton wrote, they had a routine in the outfield:
Mick, how does your leg feel?
Well, it’s severed at the knee.
Yes, but does it hurt?
No, I scotch-taped it back into place.
And how’s your back?
My back is broken in seven places.
Can you swing the bat?
Yeah, I can swing. If I can find some scotch-tape.
Great. Well, then get in there. We need you.‡17
Bouton represented a new generation of ballplayers who were college-educated, hip, and socially conscious. He loved Mickey, but he saw him without illusion and noted how immature and downright juvenile he could be at times. Fifteen years after the publication of Ball Four, Mickey was doing Bouton one better and telling outrageous stories about himself. In his 1985 memoir, he related incidents he never would have talked about years before—or at least not before the publication of Ball Four—like the night he and Billy Martin were drunk, crawled out onto a ledge outside their hotel room window, and had to circle the hotel on their hands and knees to get back into their rooms.
For the next fifteen or so years, Mickey would transform himself into a professional Mickey Mantle storyteller, grinning and telling self-deprecating tales to Dick Cavett, David Letterman, or any other talk show host who invited him to appear. A story spread that Mantle and Bouton were enemies; some even said that it was Mantle who asked the Yankees to ban Bouton from Yankees’ old-timers games. None of it was true. The Yankees had plenty of reason to be angry at Bouton without Mickey’s assistance, and the reason they never got together was that their paths never crossed. They lived in different worlds. Bouton went on to write more books, start a bubblegum brand and personalized trading cards company, and even act on TV and in films.
In 1996 I interviewed Bouton for a story that appeared in the Village Voice. Bouton told me that when Mickey’s son Billy died in 1994, he had written him a letter of condolence. One day when he arrived at his office in Teaneck, New Jersey, he found a message on his answering machine that began, “Hey, bud.”
“It was so great to hear his voice,” Bouton told me. “He thanked me for my letter and said he was ‘cool’ with Ball Four—‘Don’t let it bother you.’ He also wanted me to know he had nothing to do with the Yankees black-balling me from the old-timers games. I still have the tape.”
If there was a kicker to the story, it’s that as a boy Bouton was a Willie Mays, not a Mickey Mantle, fan. “I was always a Giants fan when I was a kid,” he wrote in Ball Four. “Whenever we played stick ball as kids, we’d take turns being the Giants and Dodgers. I pitched to Willie Mays hundreds of times, only it was my brother, batting righthanded even though he was lefthanded so he’d look as much like Willie as possible.”18
In spite of being a good baseball book, Ball Four depressed me when I read it in the summer of 1970. I felt as if something had been taken away. One day shortly after I finished the book I went to a newsstand and, for some reason, stopped to look at a comic-book rack. It occurred to me that I had not bought a comic book since 1962, the first year Bouton pitched for the Yankees and the last time Mantle and Mays played against each other in the World Series. My eye was drawn to the June issue of Action Comics, which showed Superman being struck out by a Little League pitcher. “Ha! Ha!” read a caption balloon. “He’s got muscles, but he’s no Super-Mantle!” Well, good, I thought. He’s been out of the game for two years, but they haven’t forgotten him.
Mickey’s post-baseball career was little more than one long series of regrets. By 1985, he was finally able to “admit to myself that I gave Merlyn everything she wanted except having me around enough. I was no better father than I was a husband. I’ve been to my kids just about like what I’ve been to Merlyn.” And here was the key admission: “I didn’t spend the time with them that my dad spent with me.”19
The Yankees gave him a job as a batting instructor. It was a disaster; Mickey had no idea how to instruct young players. What could he tell them? He had been playing baseball since he could walk and by the last few years of his career was playing on sheer willpower. He had long ago forgotten the details and fine points of baseball, and even if he hadn’t, he had no idea how to articulate them.
The year 1971 saw Willie’s last flash of greatness. At the relatively old age of forty, he learned some new tricks. He still hit with some power—18 home runs and 24 doubles, the most he had hit in five seasons—but the Giants thought he would be useful batting in the leadoff spot, and Willie responded with remarkable efficiency. Like Mickey in his later years, he proved adept at getting on base without a hit; he batted just .271 but actually led the NL in both walks and on-base percentage, the first time he had led in the first category and only the second time he’d led in the second. He also stole 23 bases. And like Mickey, he learned to play first base and played it well for 44 games. Willie’s season ended, though, in the playoffs. The Giants, winners of the NL’s Western Division, faced the Pittsburgh Pirates for the pennant; the Pirates won and went on to win the World Series over the Baltimore Orioles. Willie had to face facts: it wasn’t likely he would ever get into the World Series again.
Willie had always been one to keep his personal life private. In the 1950s and 1960s, this was easy, as the mainstream press, exclusively
white, paid little attention to what black athletes did off the field. Sportswriters who had known Willie since his rookie season, particularly Einstein and Hano, knew the particulars of his unfortunate first marriage to Marghuerite but wrote little or nothing about it. And so the baseball world was caught by surprise when, in November 1971, it was announced that he had married Mae Louise Allen. His friends thought that she was the best thing ever to happen to him.
Mae Allen had seen Willie play when she was a young girl and her father, a chauffeur, had taken her to see the Pirates at Forbes Field. Years later, Willie met her almost by accident. Wilt Chamberlain knew her, liked her, and told Willie she was a nice girl, “though kind of a square,” which happened to be exactly what Willie was looking for. He called her the next time he was in Pittsburgh; they went to dinner (Mays brought his teammate Willie McCovey along), and they liked each other. Allen, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh with a graduate degree in social work from Howard, soon moved to San Francisco, where she got a job as a child-welfare worker and saw Willie on a much more regular basis. James Hirsch quoted a friend: “She thought Willie was her soul mate from the first time they met. She never dated another person, and needless to say, she had tons of admirers.”20
In 1974, during an appearance on The Merv Griffin Show, Mays was asked what he thought a woman’s role should be. “Women,” Willie replied with a straight face, “should be in the kitchen.” The remark caused a commotion in the press. But as Hirsch points out, “the irony was that Willie loved a woman who did not stay in the kitchen but seemed to satisfy the feminist ideal—a financially independent professional who was not tethered to a man for her own happiness.”21
By 1972, National League managers were no longer saying, “Oh [bleep],” when Willie Mays came to bat. Watching Willie bat through the first nineteen games of the season was torture; his batting average was just .184, the worst beginning to a season he had had since his rookie year. Three years earlier, watching Mays on a hitless weekend against the Braves, the Atlanta Constitution’s Furman Bisher wrote, “Willie Mays wasn’t supposed to grow old. He was supposed to go on forever, his cap flying off as he broke the sound barrier on foot, face bright and two eyes twinkling like stars. Willie Mays was born for eternal youth. Age is acting in direct violation of that code.”