“Against the wall, to my left, sitting by himself, about halfway back, against one of the windows with the light streaming in, there sits Stan Musial,” Costas recalled.
“In that split second, it became clear: Here’s what happened today. A man, what, seventy-four years old, who has had prostate cancer, got up this morning in St. Louis and said, ‘It’s the right thing to do.’ ”
For some reason, the sight of Musial—the church man, the family man, the disciplined man, the polar opposite of Mantle—distracted Costas, almost made him lose his composure.
“Think of all the people who were more directly associated with Mickey,” Costas continued. “Nobody would have marked Stan as absent. He didn’t stay overnight. He got on a plane. He showed up. Then he flew back to St. Louis. There is some old-school code in that, or maybe it’s the decency that not many people have in their nature, but Stan Musial does.”
Costas knew the respect Mantle had for the greatest players, for Williams and DiMaggio and Musial, and knew that Mantle was honest enough with himself to recognize they had marshaled their talents better than he had.
In their presence, Costas had seen Mantle restrain his surly side, his Rabelaisian excesses, out of respect for who they were.
Williams and DiMaggio, both getting on, were not present in this church in Dallas, and nobody expected them to be. But one of the lodge brothers from the forties had flown a long way to pay his respects.
“I don’t think Stan is overly sitting around ruminating about this stuff,” Costas said later, “but I think he understood what it would mean to Mickey’s family, to Mickey himself while he’s lying there in a casket, that it would have meant something for Stan to be there, that he hauled his ass out of bed and went to Dallas.”
Somebody as fundamentally Catholic as Musial would also see his journey as a way to bring a tangible blessing to the Mantle family. Prayers might mean more in person. Normally private and lighthearted, Musial made himself available to reporters who wanted to talk about Mantle.
“He was a lovable guy,” Musial told them. “Everybody loved Mickey.” He added, “He hit more long home runs than anybody I ever saw. He could really powder that ball, you know?”
Musial recalled how, after the Cardinals beat the Yankees in the 1964 World Series, Mantle had come to Musial’s restaurant to congratulate the winners, a classy thing to do.
Few people in the church knew that Musial had been Mantle’s favorite player back in Oklahoma, when he listened to Cardinal games on the radio like everybody else in the southwest.
When Mantle was fourteen his father drove them up to St. Louis to see a game. Mickey happened to spot Musial in a hotel, but Mutt would not allow his son to ask Musial for an autograph.
The two players had something else in common—zinc. Mutt Mantle had died of Hodgkin’s disease at thirty-nine after working in the mines. Lukasz Musial had ruined his body inhaling the poisonous air of Donora. It is not clear if the two players had ever discussed this bond, but there Musial was, an outpatient himself, in a church in Dallas.
They had seen each other for the last time in the spring of 1995. “He came to town and wanted me to have breakfast with him,” Musial said, “which we did. We had a real nice chat, a nice talk, just he and I. We talked a lot about baseball and a lot of other things.
“He told me that one of his sons just passed away shortly before. And he told me at that time he wasn’t drinking anymore, and that he went to the Betty Ford Center. And I told him how proud we are of him. And I told him one other thing. I said, ‘Mickey, we love you.’ You know, he was a great idol.”
Years later, Costas was still touched by Musial’s gesture.
Musial’s presence in his field of vision, Costas decided, was a gift from “one of the better angels of our nature.”
“We’re all messed up in one way or another,” Costas added, “but this was just a moment of grace, what a decent thing for a person to do.”
Costas thought about Musial for a moment, and added, “And he probably knew it at some level.”
45
STANLEY’S STATUES
ON LABOR Day 1998, giddy baseball pilgrims gathered in St. Louis to root for home runs by the two modern sluggers, the Cardinal and the Cub. How innocent it all seemed that summer.
Before the game, the fans clustered at the statue of Stan the Man, the one with the big beam, the one he hated. I was covering the McGwire-Sosa frolics, heard some commotion by the statue, and wandered over.
At the base of the statue, an elderly gent was wearing a tomato-can-red jacket, a garment only a highly secure individual could wear.
Above him were Ford Frick’s words: “Here stands baseball’s perfect warrior. Here stands baseball’s perfect knight.”
The perfect knight himself was noodling away on a harmonica, playing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
Unprotected, without phalanxes of security guards, Musial looked as comfortable as an old bluesman playing for his buddies in front of a Delta country store. There was a merry twinkle in those gimlet eyes that had once launched 3,630 hits.
Grandfathers smiled to themselves, entertaining memories of the lithe young man springing out of his corkscrew stance. Keepers of the flame, they nudged their grandchildren, as if to say, You should have seen him back then.
The bronze statue loomed over them, suggesting the brute power of the old Soviet Union, its oversized locomotives, its massive parades, as if honoring the People’s Hero of the Autumn Harvest, who wielded a bat instead of a scythe.
Musial had disliked the statue from the beginning. The legs were too thick, for one thing, making him look like one of those Clydesdales out at the Busch estate rather than the limber youth who had been labeled the “Donora Greyhound.”
The statue was originally supposed to have been based upon a painting by Amadee Wohlschlaeger, himself a St. Louis icon known by his first name. The original was titled “The Boy and the Man … Baseball’s Bond,” but the boy in the painting never made it to the statue, and the man became bunchy, inflexible. The mayor of St. Louis, Raymond Tucker, chose the sculptor, Carl Mose, a highly reputable artist based at Washington University in St. Louis, and the statue emerged from the artistic vision of Mose, which, come to think of it, is how art happens. But statues of hero-athletes fall into a different category. At least, people have been arguing about reality versus impression ever since. How bad is that?
Ten feet five inches tall, on a marble pedestal eight and a half feet high, the People’s Hero looked awkward, off balance, not coiled like a gymnast, which the perfect knight had been in his childhood. It was almost as if Mose did not believe anybody would really twist himself into a human corkscrew, so he had brought the body back toward middle ground, with thicker muscles, as if to justify all those home runs in Stan Musial’s resumé.
“I saw the sculptor when he was working on it,” Musial said in 1976. “I told him I never looked that broad. He said it had to be that broad because it was going to be against the backdrop of a big ballpark. He missed the stance, but what kind of man would I have been if I’d complained. The writers were generous to put it up. The sculptor did his best. Look, there’s a statue of me in St. Louis while I’m still alive.”
Thirty years after the statue was unveiled, Musial would call the statue “a great, great honor”—a message to young people.
“This is sort of an example,” he once said. “They can excel in school, in business, in anything. It can happen to them.”
However, Musial reserved the right to critique the statue. In the revised version of his autobiography, he addressed his youngest child, who had come along too late to remember seeing him play.
“I’ll say this, Jeannie. I didn’t hit the way that guy in the statue does,” Musial wrote.
Everybody in St. Louis used the statue as a meeting point; so did Musial, sometimes. He was the life of the party, the unpaid greeter, playing his harmonica for love, but on another level—never underestim
ate Stanley—he deftly understood it was to his advantage to put himself out in public, the man of the people.
His legs were going, but he would hobble out in front of the fans and say: “If I had known what it would do to my legs, I wouldn’t have hit so many triples.”
They loved to laugh at his old lines, the way listeners back in the days of radio loved to hear Jack Benny wheedle nickels from his friends, the way people laughed at Lucille Ball’s wide-mouthed terror when Ricky said she had some ’splainin’ to do. Musial fans knew all of Stanley’s lines, knew his batting stance, and wanted to hear them and see it all over again.
On this humid Labor Day in 1998, Musial had cared enough to come out and greet the fans, who were celebrating a new age, a new body type—the beefy boys. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa had muscles unimagined back in Stan the Man’s day, when men did not lift weights because, everybody knew, it might render them musclebound.
In old age, dwarfed by his statue, the man was still whippet-lean, with no trace of bulk under the tomato-can-red jacket, no bulge from the weight room, no muscles from some laboratory.
It was getting to be game time. Musial coiled his aging body into that iconic stance, peered over his right shoulder at a phantom pitcher, and unleashed a double into a mythical corner, inspecting his imaginary hit as the crowd responded with pitty-pat applause. He liked it so much he did it again, giggling, proud of himself. The fans parted lovingly.
STARTING IN 1998, there were two statues of Stanley at the Cardinals’ ballpark, as the Cardinals unveiled ten statues by Harry Weber, two-thirds human size, capturing the essence of ten great St. Louis ballplayers—George Sisler of the Browns; Cool Papa Bell, the old Negro League star; and eight Cardinals: Rogers Hornsby, Dizzy Dean, Ozzie Smith, Red Schoendienst, Bob Gibson, Enos Slaughter, Lou Brock, and Musial. (McGwire was in storage, indefinitely; Pujols was a statue waiting to be commissioned.)
On sweet summer nights, people congregated at Eighth and Clark, milling around these vital statues, which I likened to ancient Xian terracotta warriors, guarding the Chinese emperor forever. Smacking a double into the corner, pouncing from the batter’s box, Stanley was forever young, and heartland America had made his statues a gathering point.
46
MORE FUNERALS
OLD AGE is not a lot of laughs, particularly in public.
It is particularly difficult for athletes who are remembered—who remember themselves—as magical creatures who can run and jump and perform prodigious acts with their bodies.
For the fans, a random meeting with a favorite old athlete produces a mixture of joy and despair: Hey, didn’t you used to be …? says one. Daddy, why is he limping? murmurs another. The millions who loved Stan Musial now saw him need a subtle hand from friends, then a cane, eventually a wheelchair.
His first illness was a gastric ulcer in 1983. Then in 1989, after ignoring symptoms for a year, he needed surgery for prostate cancer. With the ensuing pain and inconvenience and weight loss, Musial became depressed and stayed away from the public for many months.
He had always seemed so effortless in swinging his way through life, but now he was working hard at being Stan the Man, as if aware he might not go on forever.
He had enjoyed better second and third and fourth acts than most great athletes ever do, but once in a while he could voice regret.
“I wish I could have gotten a college education,” Musial said in 1996. “There’s something about a college education that gives you a broad look at things, to kind of make you complete.”
Musial was beloved in his chosen hometown, but in his later years he probably shortchanged himself: Aside from the dueling Musial statues outside the ballpark, there was no secular place where one could worship Musial. He never got around to creating a Musial foundation, never established a Musial collection at a prestigious university or library. Asked where any possible Musial archives might be displayed, friends and associates would say, Well, Lil saved a lot of stuff in the house.
He did have a business, Stan the Man, Inc., which sold memorabilia and booked him for autograph shows. He was certainly civic-minded about showing up for good causes, was generous in many ways. But DiMaggio had his name on a children’s hospital in Florida, and Williams was identified with the Jimmy Fund in Boston. Yogi had an active museum in his name on a college campus in Montclair, New Jersey. Musial was mostly identified with the Cardinals, with his crouch, which was more than fine for fans of a certain age.
In his own whaddayasay manner, Musial presented his version of Stan the Man. This was the impression of Fay Vincent, the business executive who became an accidental commissioner when his friend Bart Giamatti died suddenly in 1989. Vincent had worked in Hollywood, understood the power of image, and sensed that Musial did, too. Vincent felt the man was more complicated than he appeared, had an agenda, a perfectly fine one, behind the smile and the harmonica.
“You have a feeling, he’s been a public figure for so long, there is a public figure that he wants you to see,” Vincent said, adding, “I saw a little glimpse of it.”
Vincent continued: “If you opened the door of the public Musial and went to the next level, there are a fair number of other dimensions to him. I think he works very hard, as DiMaggio did, to keep you and other people from ever getting to any of those other rooms or dimensions. DiMaggio was world-class at it.”
Each member of The Big Three had his own style in old age.
Musial was as close to a normal retired guy as a superstar can become, a frequent sight in the normal life of St. Louis. One friend of mine recalls Stan and Lil testing mattresses in a St. Louis department store by bouncing around on them.
Ted Williams mellowed, became accessible—goddam right he did—talked hitting endlessly.
Joe DiMaggio was more of a hermit, trusting himself with a few close friends, hoarding freebie golf bags he had cadged at celebrity outings.
For many years, the Clipper would visit the Super Bowl with Nick Nicolosi, a businessman from New Jersey, who organized the annual Super Bowl golf party. Nicolosi, who referred to himself as “The Ringmaster,” would rent a suite with two bedrooms connected by a parlor and install the Clipper in the other room.
DiMaggio had a few demands, including a supply of fresh bananas. When visitors came to the suite to pick up tickets or to schmooze, DiMaggio was not shy about letting them know the bananas were his and his alone.
In return for the bananas, DiMaggio would answer calls for his buddy.
One afternoon DiMaggio picked up the phone and said, “Yes, Nick is here, may I tell him who’s calling?”
“My name is Stan Musial,” the voice said.
“Musial, Musial, how do I know that name?” DiMaggio asked.
The voice at the other end said, well, he had played a little ball.
“I played a little ball too. My name is DiMaggio. Joe DiMaggio.”
At that, DiMaggio held out the phone for Nicolosi, who could hear Musial sputtering on the other end.
When Musial finally regained his speech, he said: “Boy, Nick, you must pay pretty good to have the great DiMaggio answering your phone.”
SOMEHOW, VINCENT felt, he did not get to know Musial as well as the other two sluggers.
“There were many, many sides for him,” Vincent said. “The kid from Donora. The prodigy, if you will. He never forgot that. The religious side of him, very, very Catholic,” said Vincent, who often saw Musial at Mass.
Musial sometimes sent Vincent an itinerary or folder or Michener memento from his trips to Poland—“something he wanted me to see,” Vincent said. But that was not so unusual, either, because Musial was a generous writer of notes, a spontaneous giver of gifts.
“He was very aggressive in making me see the celebratory side of him, a little like DiMaggio,” Vincent continued. “Here was this legend, this great figure. It was almost like he was making me see that he was a great man and a great ballplayer. He didn’t have to persuade me at all, but he worked pretty
hard at it.”
Well, don’t we all. Sportswriters spend decades speaking the patois of the locker room, as if that makes athletes out of us. Everybody wants street cred. It would be a shock if the greatest of ballplayers, the ultimate self-made men, did not privately ponder what civilians really thought of them.
Williams hid his complexities behind his bluster. DiMaggio held people off with a hauteur that could only have been intentional.
“There was a fundamental insecurity in him, as there was in DiMaggio,” Vincent said of Musial. “I don’t know if it was ethnic. There is in all of us, I guess,” mused Vincent, whose own nickname is a diminutive, among the Irish, of his given name of Francis.
Vincent loved his job, loved spending part of his life around such a man. He could totally understand that Musial might have “sort of a compulsion to convince you how good he was.”
There was little ambiguity to Musial. He had almost never been criticized in public, encountered no pressure to push up his draft call during the war. When Bob Burnes criticized him in a column for endorsing cigarettes in his smoking days, Musial gave up the few dollars of income long before he gave up the habit, and he always told children never to touch tobacco. He had never held himself up as a model of anything, just lived his life.
THE BIGGEST public blowup in Musial’s life came after the death of Biggie in 1967. Without his partner to rely on, Musial turned over more of the business to his oldest child, Richard.
From the start, Stan seemed to understand he could not take his son into that exalted level of the family business, that is to say, hitting. Stan also recognized that the road trips and the hours at the restaurant had taken him away from his oldest child during his formative years.
“I wasn’t able to give Dick the close relationship many fathers and sons enjoy, and, in an old-fashioned way, I expected more of him than I did his sisters. I guess girls do wrap their fathers around their little fingers,” Musial said in his autobiography.
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