Mickey and Willie Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Allen Barra

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barra, Allen.

  Mickey and Willie : Mantle and Mays, the parallel lives of baseball’s golden age / Allen Barra.

  p. cm.

  Summary: “Culturally, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were light-years apart. Yet they were nearly the same age and almost the same size, and they came to New York at the same time. They possessed virtually the same talents and played the same position. They were both products of generations of baseball-playing families, for whom the game was the only escape from a lifetime of brutal manual labor. Both were nearly crushed by the weight of the outsized expectations placed on them, first by their families and later by America. Both lived secret lives far different from those their fans knew. What their fans also didn’t know was that the two men shared a close personal friendship—and that each was the only man who could truly understand the other’s experience.”—Provided by publisher.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Mantle, Mickey, 1931–1995. 2. Mays, Willie, 1931– 3. Baseball players—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  GV865.A1B3239 2013

  796.3570922—dc23

  [B] 2012013345

  eISBN: 978-0-307-71650-7

  Jacket design by Nupoor Gordon

  Front jacket photography © Herb Scharfman/Sports Imagery/Getty Images

  v3.1

  To my father,

  ALFRED BARRA,

  who loved Mickey but worshipped Willie

  Whatever you do, don’t God-up these guys.

  —Red Smith’s advice to a young sportswriter

  I have seen the boys of summer in their ruin.

  —Dylan Thomas

  What’s the use of being a boy if you’re going to grow up to be a man?

  —Frank Merriwell

  I used to dream how good it would be to be Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle.

  —Reggie Jackson

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Introduction: My First Game Was Better Than Yours

  1 Fathers and Sons

  2 Bred to Play Ball

  3 No Other Enjoyment

  4 Pass-the-Hat

  5 A Dream Come True

  6 “This Is Your Chance”

  Photo Insert

  7 “You’re Going to Eat Steak”

  8 “Is That Mickey and Willie?”

  9 “Greetings”

  10 “Right Up There with the Babe”

  11 “In Here, It’s 1954”

  Photo Insert

  12 “A Whole Different Ball Game”

  13 “Exactly the Same Ballplayer”

  14 “Neither One of Us Was Joe DiMaggio”

  15 “Flash, Dash, and … a Nervous Rash”

  Photo Insert

  16 The Boys of Summer in Their Ruin

  17 Say Good-bye to America

  18 Burden of Dreams

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix A: Mickey vs. Willie—Who Was the Best?

  Appendix B: Total Player Rating and Win Shares

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Preface

  I didn’t cry when my father died, but I held back tears on August 13, 1995, when I heard that Mickey Mantle was gone. My father would have understood. He once told me he had not cried when his father died, but I recall him weeping uncontrollably when Joe Louis passed away in 1981. Several friends have told me they had similar reactions to the deaths of their fathers and their sports heroes.

  Many times over the years I’ve thought about this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that if we don’t weep over losing our fathers, it might be because we do not yet comprehend the magnitude of our loss. But when the favorite athletes of our youth are proven to be mortal, we experience a sudden jolt; we know then that not only is our youth gone, but our youthful dreams as well.

  Mantle’s death ended a dream I had nourished for years that I could sit Mickey and Willie down together for a long interview, a hope I’d had since I had seen them interview each other in 1968 in Esquire. I was scheduled to interview them both for Inside Sports in 1983 when they had been banished from baseball by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, but I couldn’t get them together. Mantle was polite but exceedingly hungover and, to my staggering disappointment, seemed to have no memory of or even interest in the things I wanted to discuss, like his 1958 barnstorming tour with Willie or his appearance in Birmingham to promote his Mickey Mantle’s Country Cookin’ restaurant in 1970, where he autographed a Sport magazine with his picture on the cover and gave me ten minutes of interview time for my school paper. Mays was distracted and in the same ill humor he was in every one of the five times I had attempted to interview him.

  The idea for this book—to try to trace their remarkably parallel lives—came later and must be credited largely to Charles Einstein. Charlie and I first met in 1996, when I was working with the Newark Star-Ledger and realized that a man named Charles Einstein was covering lounge acts in Atlantic City for the paper. I asked the sports editor if it could possibly be the same Charlie Einstein who had written Willie’s Time, published in 1979 and perhaps the finest book about a professional athlete that I had ever read. Indeed it was the legendary Charlie Einstein—sportswriter, novelist, screenwriter (I had seen his documentary A Man Called Mays only once but could repeat entire chunks of it verbatim), editor, son of the radio comic Harry Parke (better known as Parkyarkarkus, or “park your carcass”), and half brother to both the comic Super Dave Osborne and the comedian-actor-director Albert Brooks.*

  Over the next few years, in person, in long phone sessions, and through several letters, Charlie told me of a Willie Mays I not only had never known but had never dreamt of—a man with a huge capacity for kindness and generosity, but given to dark moods and desperation, a man who had never entirely come to terms with his own fame or his place in the world after baseball. He also told me how much Willie liked and admired Mickey and about their personal rivalries on the ball field, on the golf course, and even at the pool table.

  The more people I sought out who knew Mickey and Willie, such as the greatest of all baseball writers, Roger Kahn, and George Lois, the innovative advertising genius who befriended them both, the more I had a picture of two men who had never entirely grown up and who seemed just a bit bewildered that the world had passed them by while leaving them as famous as they had been in their playing days.

  I began retracing their lives to a past dimly remembered but still strongly felt by those of us who lived through it. To me, and I firmly believe to millions of other Americans, Mickey and Willie signify a simpler time. Not, as purveyors of nostalgia would have us believe, a more innocent time, but a simpler time. Their images, if not their personal lives, reflect an America to be found now only in old baseball cards, yellowing newspapers, and moldy sports magazines—and in the memories of fans like me. It’s an America I hope to revive in these pages before it passes altogether.

  * Charlie’s history fascinated me. After a successful career as a sportswriter, mostly covering the New York Giants and Willie Mays (with whom he had collaborated on several books), he moved to Arizona in the mid-1950s and then got a job covering the Giants when they moved to the Bay Area in 1958. In the late 1970s, after his wife died, he moved back east, to a small town in souther
n New Jersey called—swear to God—Mays Landing.

  Introduction

  My First Game Was Better Than Yours

  Every baseball fan has a “my first game” story, but mine is better than yours. My first ball game was at Yankee Stadium, and I saw Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays play.

  Until I saw that game, it had not occurred to me that Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays could actually play baseball on the same field. That they did in 1961 was an accident of scheduling. Both the Yankees and Giants had a break before road trips, and the team owners agreed to an exhibition game to replace the annual Mayor’s Trophy Classic that had been played for years between the Yankees and either the New York Giants or Brooklyn Dodgers, the proceeds going to city charities. (Since the Giants and Dodgers moved to the West Coast in 1958, there had been no game.)

  When the game was set, the New York press went wild. The theme was Willie Mays’s “return” to New York since the Giants had moved to San Francisco three years earlier. Actually, Willie had played in New York twice since then: in a 1958 postseason exhibition that pitted Willie Mays’s National League All-Stars against Mickey Mantle’s American League All-Stars at Yankee Stadium, and again at the second All-Star Game in 1960, when Willie demolished Whitey Ford in front of the home crowd in the Bronx.

  Nonetheless, Yankee Stadium was in a frenzy on that early summer day when we took our seats. I don’t recall if the game was a sellout; it certainly seemed that way to me. The crowd’s spirits were dampened a bit when the threat of rain canceled a pregame home run contest between Mays and Orlando Cepeda (who would go on to lead the NL in home runs that season) and Mantle and Roger Maris (who would, of course, break Babe Ruth’s record of sixty home runs that season). But the disappointment was forgotten when the game began.

  I had my first experience with goose bumps when the PA man—surely it was Bob Sheppard, the ghostly voice of the Yankees, though I did not know this at the time—announced, “Now batting … for the San Francisco Giants … number twenty-four … Wil-lie …” The roar of the crowd was like a wave hitting the shore, drowning out the rest of his name.

  Many years later, Charles Einstein sent me his account of the game. Describing the crowd as Mays came out of the dugout, he wrote, “An unbroken, throat-swelling peal of adulation sprang from the hearts of Giants-starved New Yorkers. It rolled and volleyed off the great tiering of this triple-decked palace and against the vague outline of the Bronx County Courthouse, looming in the gray-black mist out beyond the huge scoreboard in right-centerfield.

  “They rocked and tottered and shouted and stamped and sang. It was joy and love and welcome, and you never heard a cascade of sound quite like it.” And in the hundreds of games I’ve attended since, I’ve never heard it again.

  Mickey Mantle, some said, was a forgotten idol that night. He was not forgotten by me. He woke up Yankee fans with a towering two-run homer into the right-field seats, delivered from the left side of the plate. My father and I, sitting over the third-base dugout, had a perfect view. It was my first major league home run, and it was everything I had hoped it would be. I could hear the distinctive crack of the bat and could easily follow the trajectory of the ball as the thousands in the stands rose to watch its flight.

  I cannot tell you who was pitching—and anyway, the only pitcher I knew then was Whitey Ford. I think the pitchers were minor leaguers brought up for the game. Neither can I recall what anyone else on the Yankees did at bat. I do, though, have one sharp recollection of Mantle after his home run swing: he shot out of the batter’s box down to first base as if he did not know the ball was going over the wall. (And how could he not have?) After crossing first base, he slowed into a home run trot with his head down. I would later learn that this was typical of Mickey after a home run; he didn’t want anyone to think he was showing up the opposing pitcher—even a minor leaguer like the guy pitching for the Giants.

  Willie Mays walked his first time up, drawing boos from the crowd, which shocked me. How could anyone boo Willie Mays? My father explained that they were booing the Yankee pitcher who hadn’t given Willie anything good to hit. Mays, playing to the crowd, attempted to steal second; the Yankees catcher, who I later learned was Johnny Blanchard—both Elston Howard and Yogi Berra had the day off—muffed the pitch, allowing Willie to slide in uncontested. No matter that there wasn’t a close throw—Willie lost his cap about two-thirds of the way down the base path to second, and that’s what we had all come to see.

  The second time up—I’m sure it was the fourth inning and Willie’s second and last plate appearance—he lunged into a pitch and smashed a hard bouncer between second and third, scoring two runs that proved to be decisive.

  The fans bellowed their approval in the fifth when Willie made a basket catch of a medium-range fly ball and fired home in time to prevent a runner from scoring; he couldn’t have satisfied us more if he’d thrown out the runner at the plate.

  If there was a disappointing note to an otherwise perfect day, it was that both Mickey and Willie were out of the game after the fifth inning. There wasn’t anyone else on either the Yankees or Giants who I was remotely interested in, though I also had great affection for Yogi and Whitey. The Giants had Cepeda and Juan Marichal, but I knew nothing about them at the time. Nor did I yet understand who Roger Maris was and what significance he would bring to the 1961 season.

  I got to see Mickey and Willie, and nothing else mattered.

  I suppose the seed that would become this book was planted that afternoon, though it could have also been the year before, when my father brought home four packs of Topps baseball cards. Now, you’re either going to believe this or you aren’t—and I realize I’m testing my credibility and your credulity—but in either the first or second pack I opened, I got both Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays All-Star cards. I understand now that this was more than just a case of incredible luck; the way Topps packaged cards back then was supposed to guarantee that things like that didn’t happen. If it did, kids who were happy with what they got in a few packs might not buy more. (I know I was more than satisfied with what I got. Every card I possibly could have wanted was in that one pack. Who cared about Dick Groat or Brooks Robinson or Mike McCormick?)

  I admit that it’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that I did not get both cards in the same pack; I can only swear that that’s how I remember it. At any rate, I have the cards to this day, and if I’m wrong and they weren’t in the same pack, the odds of getting the Mantle and Mays cards in just four packs was still astronomical. But I got them.

  The smell of the stick of bubblegum under Mickey’s card lasted for years. Every time I picked the card up, it gave off such an evocative aroma that I understood how the taste of a cookie could inspire Proust to write seven volumes. On the day Mickey died in 1995, I was at the New York Giants training camp working on a story. Later that afternoon, when I returned home, I went upstairs and dug out the card and sniffed it. All traces of the scent of bubblegum had vanished.

  On the day in 1960 when my father gave me the four packs of cards, some neighbors came over for a beer. One or two of them suggested that Mays and Mantle would someday be regarded as the greatest two players of all time. Len O’Sullivan, our next-door neighbor, told me, “They might be the two greatest players ever!” Jim O’Kane, who lived around the corner, said, emphasizing the point with his finger, “They are the only two guys in the game who can do it all.” (I didn’t know what “all” meant back then; I had some vague idea that it meant they could also take a turn at pitching.)

  Listening to my father and his friends debate the relative merits of Mantle and Mays was my introduction to sports guy talk and my first experience with baseball analysis. I knew the names of other professional athletes; I knew that Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, and Sugar Ray Robinson had been champion boxers at some time in the recent past, and I knew that Johnny Unitas was a great football player. I knew that Wilt Chamberlain was a basketball player who had set some sort of scoring record
. But Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were the only two professional athletes whose names I heard mentioned in supermarket lines or in restaurants or in a New York subway. They were the only two I heard discussed at backyard barbecues. I wasn’t old enough to yet understand the hopes and dreams that post—World War II America had invested in them. It quickly became clear to me, though, that Mickey and Willie were symbols of something much more important than just baseball, and that in the America I was growing up in baseball was much more than just a game.

  In our house, much of this feeling was tied to Mays. I remember my father talking about Willie Mays as if there were something very important at stake in his success, something I vaguely understood as a hope for integration and equality—though no one I knew had any real notion that blacks could achieve equality with whites in society. (My father, like all children of immigrants, was raised to believe in the New Deal; by the 1950s, he had become a moderate Republican—pretty much like Willie himself, I came to understand.)

  The first picture I ever tacked to my bedroom wall was of the two smiling young sluggers at their first meeting in the 1951 World Series. (You can see it in the first photo section of this book.) Willie was twenty, and Mickey would be twenty in another sixteen days. How splendid they were—I would have sold my soul to be either one of them. Though I never articulated it, the thought in the back of my mind was always, What a great country we are to have heroes like Mickey and Willie!

  In 1961 Sport magazine held a contest, “Who’s the Greatest, Mickey or Willie?” With my mother’s help, I addressed and stamped the envelopes and stuffed the ballot box with ten votes for each of them. The first baseball magazine I remember owning was a special edition put together by the editors of Sport devoted entirely to Mickey and Willie. I can still feel the rush of pure joy when I spotted it at the newsstand. I bought three copies, carefully preserved two, which I own to this day, and cut up the third to lovingly paste the photos in a scrapbook.