by Allen Barra
After the show, I waited to shake hands with Willie. For the first time in our face-to-face meetings, he was smiling. And this time I didn’t mention civil rights.
You can’t go home again, and Mickey and Willie seldom tried.
Commerce continued to shrink, slowly, until by Mickey’s death in 1995 the population was scarcely 2,500. The mines have been closed for decades, and the town no longer has a main industry. There are four sites of interest to outsiders. The first to greet visitors is a tall, handsome Route 66 sign that commemorates what was, until it was officially removed from the U.S. Highway System after fifty-nine years of service, the most famous road in America. There is a lovely restored Conoco gas station that has been turned into a museum of a bygone era before franchise gas stations and fast-food joints took over the highways. Then there is the Mantle home at 319 South Quincy Street, which probably doesn’t look a great deal better now than it did when Mutt Mantle moved his family there. (Of course, to the baseball fan/tourist, that is its charm.) Finally, there is a handsome statue of Mickey at a small baseball field right off Mickey Mantle Boulevard—formerly Highway 69.
The New York Daily News‘s Wayne Coffey visited Commerce in 1995, two months after Mickey’s death, and called the boulevard named after Mantle “a two-lane strip of gas stations and churches, a desultory stretch of Dust Bowl dreariness, a few miles from Kansas and not much further from Missouri. It takes you past long-dormant mines, and near a downtown dotted with abandoned storefronts and empty lots.”
There were once plans for a Mickey Mantle Museum, but never a plan for how to raise the revenue to build it. One idea that worked was to sell signs that read MICKEY MANTLE BOULEVARD for $20 apiece; the idea arose because it seemed as if everyone passing through town would steal the real sign. “We had 200 signs and sold out in the first week,” a captain of the fire department told Coffey. Another idea, which did not work, was to sell prints and replicas of the proposed statue; Mantle’s lawyer requested that they stop, saying Mickey “had a financial interest in another print.”
Much of the resentment that locals had toward Mick back in 1957 over coming back home so seldom is long gone; most current residents never knew Mickey. Police Chief Robert Bain told Coffey, “When Mickey went on TV [with Bob Costas] and said he wasn’t nobody’s hero, admitting that he had let people down and asking for their forgiveness, everyone here loved him over that.”
Picher, the town just a few miles away where Merlyn grew up, met an even sadder fate. It’s now a ghost town with plaques in front of a couple of buildings deemed “historical.” In 2006 the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a study that showed 86 percent of Picher’s buildings, including the only school, to be “badly undermined and subject to collapse at any time.”
Merlyn died in Plano, Texas, on August 10, 2009, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. She was seventy-seven. She was buried next to Mickey and their two sons, Mickey Jr. and Billy. In her New York Times obituary, she was quoted as saying, “I adored Mick. I thought I couldn’t live without him. In many ways, he was very good to me, very generous.”
The last remnant of Mickey’s presence in Manhattan disappeared over the summer of 2012 when the restaurant bearing his name was padlocked and the contents auctioned off.
On February 26, 2006, while Picher was on the verge of dying, a black limo with Willie Mays in the backseat drove through the area where Westfield used to be. “I went by there on the way over here,” Mays said a few hours later, seated in the grandstand at Rickwood Field wearing a fur cap and wrapped in a blanket. “There’s nothing left to look at.” (Westfield, in the late 1960s, suffered the same fate as many communities, black and white, as the steel industry began to shut down in the wake of diminished demand and competition from Japanese companies. Some homes in the old neighborhoods were boarded up; others were vandalized or even targeted by arsonists. Many of the old stores pulled up stakes and moved to more prosperous neighborhoods.)
I had the good fortune of running into Mays that February because I was back home in Birmingham for a signing of my biography of Bear Bryant, The Last Coach, and also to see an old friend and mentor, journalist Paul Hemphill, who was publicizing his biography of Hank Williams, Lovesick Blues. As we wrapped up, Paul said, “Hey, if we hurry, we can make it out to Rickwood in time to catch the end of the Classic, and maybe talk to Willie Mays.”‡
Willie’s appearance at the Classic caused no small stir in Birmingham, in part because he so seldom visited his hometown. In 1985 he had told Sports Illustrated, “I’d like to get involved with Alabama … this area is so open. Bear Bryant [who had died in 1983] was the king here for so long. Now there’s nobody left to carry on the tradition.”16 Exactly what “tradition” Willie was speaking of wasn’t clear; Bryant represented the rise of college football, which had become so popular since the late 1950s as to almost obliterate Birmingham’s rich baseball past. As with so many remarks Willie made to journalists in this period, there seemed to be no easy interpretation.
In any event, aside from visiting a few old friends such as Richard Arrington Jr., who became the city’s first black mayor in 1979, there was very little for Willie to do in his old town. The rich black culture that had been centered on the Fourth Avenue North area was long gone, and most of the old shops and restaurants were boarded up.§ (Bob’s Little Savoy Café, Willie’s favorite nightspot, did not survive the decline of the Negro Leagues and closed in 1954—the same year Mickey’s favorite joint in Commerce, the Black Cat Café, shut down.) The few friends Willie did have in Birmingham sometimes felt neglected. In his 1993 memoir Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son, Hemphill recalled dropping by to see Piper Davis to swap old baseball stories. “Tell me about Willie,” Hemphill asked. “Which one?” asked Davis, meaning either the kid or the man who became the biggest star in baseball. Hemphill wanted to know about both. When it came to talk of “Willie the Star,” Davis frowned. “He’s still got a place, you know, up on Red Mountain. One time a few years ago I got a call from him. Says he was having some folks over, come on up. So I go up there and we greet each other and I don’t see a single soul I know. Can’t even find Willie anymore, so after a while I just walk out. Willie doesn’t exactly stay in touch. He just left and got in with a different bunch of folks, I guess.”17
At Rickwood that chilly February afternoon, Paul was skeptical that Willie would even talk to us. Mays was distant, as if lost in thought as he gazed out on the field where he had first played professional ball fifty-eight years before. Paul, too, sat looking out to the hand-painted advertisements on the fences; by his own count, he had seen more than five hundred games at Rickwood back in the days when baseball ruled. When we got him talking, Mays recalled being too shy to talk to Jackie Robinson, but how encouraging Jackie was about Willie’s chances to make it in the big leagues. His own regret about playing with the Black Barons, he said, was that he had never gotten the chance to leave his “X” at the ballpark—long home runs hit by both Barons and Black Barons were customarily marked with a big white X at the spot where they landed or left the park. “I want to make a difference,” he told me. “We’re losing so many good athletes to football and basketball. I love football and basketball, but I want to try and get kids to stick with baseball. It’s the greatest game.”
Then, just as I had eighteen years earlier, I blew it. Was it possible, I wanted to know, that he had taken no public stance during the civil rights movement because his lack of formal education had left him feeling inadequate when it came to making speeches and giving interviews? Deadly silence followed. After what seemed like five minutes, a grim-faced Willie, his head turned toward the field, told me, “I don’t gotta say nothin’ to you about me and the civil rights.” Paul put his hand on my arm and said, “I think maybe the interview is over.”‖
Mickey and Willie were back in the news in 2010 when James Hirsch’s Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend and, later, Jane Leavy’s The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of Ame
rica’s Childhood were published. Leavy’s book, though it included little about Mantle’s childhood and early life, is the frankest and most honest account of his late-career dissolution. Hirsch’s book, at a whopping 628 pages, is the most detailed telling of Willie’s life and career ever. Yet, at the end of it, there was still something of a hole in the center—namely, Willie himself. Mays cooperated so completely with Hirsch that when I called Mays’s office in 2009, his personal assistant, Renee Anderson, informed me that “Willie regards this book as his memoir.” But despite Hirsch’s best efforts, Willie’s real personality never coalesced in the book. As Bill James put it in a 1999 Sports Century profile of Mays on ESPN, “We don’t really know Willie Mays. He’s as much a puzzle to us as, say, Lou Gehrig.”
Mickey’s life, at least over the last twenty-five to thirty years, was a sad, open book; his honesty in admitting to his own failures will always color our remembrance of him. In some ways, it would become even sadder after his death. In the first decade or so of Mantle’s career, he often seemed angry, usually at himself but often with fans and reporters; as he grew older he learned to relax, get past his shyness, and talk about the burden of being a flawed hero. He revealed his humanity. With Willie, it was the opposite; most of his early profiles in newspapers, magazines, and books were condescending, portraying him as an adolescent, or at least as a young man with an adolescent’s mentality. We never knew of his marital problems, his anxiety over money, the drive to succeed that so often resulted in fainting spells. As he grew older he grew away from us, though in the last few years he seemed to like us all a little more. But Willie has never really let us inside.
Nonetheless, Willie’s stature as a ballplayer has increased while Mickey’s has declined. To many young baseball fans who study the game, they are no longer locked together as they were when Mickey was alive. In May 2010, on the MSG Network’s series The Lineup, fans and a panel of sportswriters voted on New York’s greatest baseball players. Mays was voted the all-time greatest center fielder, easily passing DiMaggio, Mantle, and Duke Snider, in that order.
What happened to Mickey’s reputation? I suspect it has suffered because Mantle left no easily identifiable records or marks behind. Mays hit four home runs in a game; he hit 660 home runs, 54 behind Babe Ruth and second on the all-time list the year he retired. Aaron hit 755 career home runs, DiMaggio hit safely in 56 straight games, and Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941, the last hitter to reach the .400 mark. Every fan knows these numbers. But a generation of younger fans has to dig deeper to discover Mantle’s true greatness. Some look at the .298 career average (and how Mickey grieved over his career batting average falling below .300 in his final season), the RBI totals (just four seasons with more than 100 RBIs?), and the relatively low (compared to players in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s) stolen base totals and consider them outside the context of Mantle’s time and place. They wonder what the fuss was all about.a The only number associated with Mickey is 565, the distance of the famous home run in 1953, and no one knows whether that number is real.
Mickey was a miserable father whose sons all descended into alcoholism; nothing in Mantle’s career became him so much as his admission near the end that he had been a bad father. In 2000 his oldest son, Mickey Jr., died of cancer at the age of forty-seven, the second of Mickey’s sons to die tragically young. “If I could go back and do it over,” Mickey said in 1985, “I would never have named my first son after me.”
We know virtually nothing at all of Willie’s feelings about fatherhood. Michael Mays is barely a shadow in his adopted father’s story; Willie dedicated his 1966 memoir, My Life In and Out of Baseball, to him, but Michael is mentioned only a couple of times in the text. (He seems to disappear from Hirsch’s massive biography practically at the midpoint.) Like his father, Michael has no biological children; no picture of Willie and a grown Michael has ever surfaced.
Does the knowledge of their shortcomings as men diminish my love for them as heroes? Yes and no. I will never be able to think of Mickey or Willie with the same unbridled admiration I felt for them when I was a boy. And yet, and yet … a part of me will always agree with Mark Linn-Baker in My Favorite Year when he says to Peter O’Toole, “Something in you had to be that hero that I saw on the screen or you couldn’t have played him. You’re not that good an actor—no one is.” Yes. But now at a point when I look back and measure what I am against the person I wanted to be, I must forgive Mickey and Willie for not always being the heroes I wished them to be. No men—not even our heroes—should be expected to carry the burden of our dreams.
* In 2008, when my friend Jane Leavy was researching her biography of Mickey, The Last Boy, I hooked her up with Ms. Bolding. When she spoke to Leavy, Margie couldn’t pinpoint the exact year she had met Mickey, but my memory is precise on the point—in 1977 she told me it was 1956.
† Klores would go on to create several acclaimed documentaries, including the Peabody Award—winning Black Magic, which told the story of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HCBUs) and their basketball teams, and Crazy Love, which won the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary.
‡ Rickwood hosts an annual classic game. That year, it was called the ESPN Classic and televised nationally. The game featured the Bristol Barnstormers in vintage uniforms, coached by former Yankees pitcher and Ball Four author Jim Bouton.
§ Adjacent to Birmingham’s Civil Rights District, Fourth Avenue has gradually been rejuvenated. The historic Carver Theatre, the elite of the black movie houses, has been restored and is now the home of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame. In September 2011, Fourth Avenue hosted a jazz festival.
‖ But Willie did give me enough memories about the Negro Leagues to fill up two pages in my 2010 book on Rickwood Field.
a Leaving aside the seasons when injuries kept him from accumulating enough at-bats for a 100-RBI season—such as 1962, when he batted just 377 times and drove in 89 runs—it does seem remarkable that Mantle had just four seasons when he drove in at least 100. One explanation is that for most of his career he batted behind some truly terrible leadoff hitters. For instance, in 1961, for no reason anyone has ever been able to figure out except that baseball analysis wasn’t far enough along to understand such things, manager Ralph Houk had Bobby Richardson leading off for 162 games, and he responded with an OBP of .295. With Mantle batting two spaces behind him, and Roger Maris behind Mantle, Richardson had just 80 runs scored all season. Mickey finished with 128 RBIs. If he’d had a genuine leadoff hitter in front of him, he could have easily driven in 140 to 150 runs.
Willie’s stats, too, suffered from a relative lack of good leadoff hitters; it seems odd that a player lauded by so many as the greatest of all time never once, in twenty-two seasons, led his league in RBIs. In truth, even trivia experts are hard-pressed to remember most of the Giants’ leadoff hitters during Willie’s best seasons.
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the aid of a great many people, most of whom never knew one another and many who are no longer with us. There are so many people I want to thank for “planting seeds” that I scarcely know where to start.
In the mid-1990s, when I was a film critic for the Newark Star-Ledger, I met the late great Charlie Einstein, whose book Willie’s Time might be the best baseball book I’ve ever read. Charlie was then playing out the string of a long and distinguished newspaper career by writing about lounge acts in Atlantic City. His numerous letters and phone conversations filled me in on a world and a time that I would have never otherwise known about—the New York that Willie Mays knew in the 1950s and the West Coast as it received the two New York teams, the Giants and the Dodgers, in the late 1950s. Charlie knew Willie Mays as, I believe, no one else ever has; he loved him, became disillusioned with him, then learned to reconcile that disillusionment. In the end, he could pay Willie no greater compliment than to say “I knew him as he was, and I’m still a fan.”
The late George Plimpton
was wonderfully encouraging in the 1980s when I was writing for the Village Voice and, once at Elaine’s, told me the story of his attempt to pitch to the Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle All-Stars at Yankee stadium in 1958, the first indication I had that Mickey and Willie barnstormed together.
Dick Schaap, too, was always there for me when I was starting out, full of great stories about Mickey, some of which he would punctuate with “Please don’t use that until I’m gone.” A couple of them live in this book.
Piper Davis, the great player and manager of the Birmingham Black Barons, lavished me with hours of time talking about Willie, the Negro Leagues, and a bygone era in baseball. Nothing would make me happier than this book sparking a movement to get Piper into the Hall of Fame.
I wish I had known Frank Scott better. He died in Maplewood, New Jersey, a few blocks from where I write this, in 1998 and on more than one occasion I heard him speak at the Maplewood Library on his years of representing Mickey, Willie, and other players in commercial and endorsement deals. He never wrote a book and was full of wonderful anecdotes and stories; I’m happy I could include some of them in Mickey and Willie before they were lost to posterity.
Vic Ziegel, who died in 2010, always took a phone call, and each time I phoned him had two good stories on Mantle and Mays that I had never heard.
Rich Ashburn—that’s what he asked me to call him, not Richie—was one of the finest gentlemen I’ve ever met. I had the pleasure of interviewing him twice, and in the course of our conversation he touched on his experiences playing for the Willie Mays All-Stars in the Mickey-Willie barnstorming tours. His recollections were one of the seeds that took years to bear fruit in this book.
Hank Bauer, who passed away back in 2007, was a brave and cheerful man who was always happy to take my calls and talk to me about both Yogi and Mickey. Both Yogi Berra, Eternal Yankee and this book are dedicated to his memory.