October 1964

by David Halberstam

  The question of Mantle’s health cast a shadow over the Yankee camp that spring. The 1963 season had been a disaster for him: he had missed almost one hundred games because of injuries. The cartilage was wearing thinner and thinner on his right knee, and, indeed, he was perilously close to having no cartilage there. That meant bone was grinding against bone, guaranteeing that he would limp in some manner for the rest of his life, and that the limp would be accompanied by pain. He had torn up his right knee in his first World Series in 1951, when he caught his leg in a drainage ditch in the Yankee outfield while trying to stop at the last minute to avoid a collision with Joe DiMaggio. A series of injuries followed. In 1963, in a game in Baltimore, he ran into a wire fence in the outfield, broke his left foot, and tore the cartilage in his left knee. When the season was over, he immediately underwent surgery to remove cartilage from it.

  Mantle’s teammates and the sportswriters now wondered whether center field was the right position for him, with all the running that was demanded of a center fielder. Perhaps, some of his teammates thought, left field or right field might be better. But Ralph Houk thought center was better—that he was less likely to run into a fence as a center fielder, and that there was less stopping and starting. Playing first base was also a possibility, for many other outfielders had moved there once their speed had begun to go, but in Mantle’s case it was not an easy solution. Playing first might involve too much starting and stopping and quick lateral movement, all of which would be hard on his right knee.

  In the first days of spring training all eyes were on Mantle, and the reporting on the Yankees seemed more like the work of medical writers than sportswriters. Mantle, ever stoic, said he felt well, and for the first few days he even tried to play without bandaging his legs. But then, in an early spring-training game, his left knee began to hurt, and he was forced to sit the game out. When the Yankees played the Mets in an early-spring game, several of the Met players noticed that Mantle did not seem like the Mantle of the past. His swing, they thought, was more hesitant and not as powerful. Worse, when he was in the outfield, he could not make diagonal cuts going back on a ball. He tended instead to go straight back and then move either to his left or to his right as the path of the ball mandated. The main problem, he was discovering as the team played through its spring-training games, was not the left knee, but once again the right one, which had plagued him on and off for thirteen years now.

  Yet there was never any doubt that this was Mantle’s team. In the locker room early that spring, Johnny Blanchard, the backup catcher and pinch hitter, lathered up Mantle’s body in a coat of thick suds, as if he were protecting this most precious resource. “We’ve got to take damn good care of Mickey,” Blanchard said. “He’s The Man.” That spring training was more an ordeal than ever for Mantle. He was only thirty-two, a relatively young age for outfielders, but his body was an old thirty-two. Convinced by his family history that Mantle men died before they were forty, he had never taken care of himself. He had played hard and caroused hard during the season, and he had both caroused and loafed when each season was finished, letting his body slip out of condition by not doing even minimal exercise.

  When Mantle was a rookie he roomed for a time with Jerry Coleman. Coleman, who was on the pension committee, had tried to talk to Mantle about what the pension meant. But Mantle was never interested. “I’ll never get one,” he said. “I’ll never live that long.” His father had died at thirty-nine of Hodgkin’s disease, and his grandfather and two uncles had died at roughly the same age of the same thing. No amount of persuasion on the part of his teammates could convince Mantle he would not die young as well. Whitey Ford would argue with him that the other Mantles had worked all their lives in mines and that he enjoyed far better medical care than those who had gone before him, with an annual examination at the Mayo Clinic. But dying young remained an obsession of his. Many of his friends thought that the driving force behind his reckless behavior and his increasingly heavy drinking was the belief that he might as well have as much fun as he could while he could. Later, as he lived first into his fifties, and then into his sixties, he would say with a certain sadness that if he had known he was going to live so long, he would have taken better care of himself.

  It was only three years since the memorable summer of 1961, when he and his teammate Roger Maris had chased Babe Ruth’s record of sixty home runs in an exuberant display of youth, power, and audacity. Maris had won the chase, beaten the record, but only after Mantle succumbed to illness in the final two weeks after visiting a quack to get rid of a bronchial illness. He had been injected so crudely and incompetently that his lower body became badly infected. He had attempted to play in that year’s World Series with blood running out of the abscessed wound, which was, in the words of Clete Boyer, the size of a golf ball. Nonetheless, he ended up with fifty-four home runs: it was to be his last great season of statistical glory. If there was an official asterisk alongside Maris’s name in the record books, then there was, in the minds of many fans, an imaginary asterisk alongside Mantle’s, signifying first what he might have done had he been healthy during the last few weeks of the season, and second what might have happened had he batted in front of Maris, instead of the other way around. Still, that season there had been a sense of immortality to both young men, as if they were invulnerable to the fates and would perform like this again and again. That, of course, had not been true. The following year, Mantle was voted Most Valuable Player just ahead of his teammate Bobby Richardson, but he had come to bat only 377 times, and in 1963, he came to bat only 172 times. The futility of his participation in that year’s World Series—two hits in fifteen at bats in the four-game sweep by the Dodgers—emphasized the larger frustrations of the Yankees. Great pitching had been decisive, not great hitting.

  His decline, the deterioration of his body and skills, was something noted but not talked about very much by teammates or even opponents. In 1963, Hector Lopez, the Yankee left fielder, noticed that sometimes when Mantle came to bat against right-handed pitchers who were not power pitchers, he did not bat left-handed, as he had always done in his prime. Jim Bouton watched when he came up to bat that same season and saw the pain on his face when he swung lefty and tried to check his swing. He would watch Mantle virtually stagger out of the batter’s box. No one knew what was going on in his head as this deterioration took place, but Al Downing, the young Yankee pitcher, noticed something that seemed to reflect Mantle’s growing mental exhaustion: just before the team went on the field for the start of a game, Mantle would pause as he reached the top dugout step, as if for one brief second he were pulling himself together and summoning all his strength and willpower in order to play one more day.

  Mantle’s buddy with whom he toured the cities of the American League after hours was Whitey Ford, each calling the other, in a name they had picked up from Casey Stengel, “Slick.” Stengel, to be sure, had not used the phrase admiringly and had referred to them as being “Whiskey Slick,” to imply that the whiskey they drank made them feel smarter and more audacious than they really were. “I got these players,” Stengel once said of Mantle and Ford, partly in exasperation and partly in admiration, “who got the bad watches, that they can’t tell midnight from noon.” The dynasty years were the Mantle and Ford years; of the previous thirteen, the Yankees had gone to the World Series eleven times, and much of the reason had been the extraordinary abilities of the two friends.

  Uncomfortable and ill at ease with the demands of stardom, innately shy for much of the early part of his career, Mantle had taken refuge in the locker room, where he was always comfortable, and where he was the undisputed king. His predecessor as the star Yankee player, Joe DiMaggio, had been distant and suspicious to almost everyone, and had remained aloof even from his teammates. The Yankees of that era had been proud to play on the same team with him, but they did not know him and they did not cross that invisible line he drew between himself and the rest of them. Each year DiMaggio summ
oned one minor player, usually younger, to be his confidant, so that he would not have to eat by himself at night and so that strangers would be less likely to approach his table.

  Mantle was the opposite. Warm, funny, and gregarious, he was beloved by his teammates. His humor was raucous, sometimes crude, but joyous and without malice. (After he retired from baseball, Mantle went into a number of businesses, including a fried-chicken enterprise for which he thought up his own advertising line: “To get a better piece of chicken, you have to be a rooster.”) He was remarkably generous to Yankee rookies (some thought in direct response to the studied coolness DiMaggio had shown him as a rookie), and when a rookie pitcher won his first game he was likely to find that, when he got to the locker room, the great Mickey Mantle was laying a row of towels from his locker to the shower, a baseball red carpet of sorts.

  He quickly picked out the rising stars among the rookies. He once told Clete Boyer, against whose older brothers he had played as a boy in the Ban Johnson League back in the Ozarks, to take the number 6 because it was Stan Musial’s number and he knew how much that meant in the Boyer family—even if Clete had strayed east to New York. “No, Mickey, I can’t, that’s Musial’s number,” Boyer said, for to wear it seemed almost a sacrilege. “Clete, on this team it’s okay,” Mantle replied. When Tony Kubek was coming up, Pete Sheehy, the clubhouse man, was about to give him a relatively high number. “No, Pete, give Tony a lower one. He’s going to be around here for a long time,” Mantle said. In every sense it was his clubhouse.

  His teammates thought he excelled in all things that mattered. Once, whiling away time in the bullpen, Jim Bouton, Ralph Terry, and several of the other pitchers rated the different players in terms of their success with women, and they did it as if they were scouts rating baseball players in terms of talent. Joe Pepitone, the first baseman, got good scouting reports, more on commitment and attitude than on God-given ability—a kid, they decided, who really came to play, and who had a good attitude. He had great potential. Bouton himself got average marks: he was relatively good-looking, he was ready and eager to carouse, but he was young and unsure of himself with women. But Mantle was the scout’s delight, clearly number one on the team, for his reputation preceded him, which helped, he was very good-looking, and he had a natural, unaffected country-boy charm. If he only had a line to use with women, they decided, he would have been sure Hall of Fame material.

  If Mantle was born to rule the locker room, it was also where he was happiest. There he was among men who did the same thing he did, who understood the hardships that had been imposed on him physically and psychologically, and who never expected anything more of him than to be who he was. With his teammates he was in no danger of failing or letting them down, or of being in over his head. Even if he had been a marginal player, some of his teammates thought, he would still have been popular with his teammates because of his looks and his manner. The things he wanted to talk about were the things other ballplayers wanted to talk about. He also had the good sense to know where he was comfortable and where he was not. When invitations came in through the mail, it was the job of his mail assistant to select the most important ones and go over them with him. If an invitation did not interest him, if it seemed designed to lure him to a place where he would not be at ease, he would simply crumple it and drop it to the floor.

  Mantle was not political, but his innate shrewdness and sense of fairness allowed him, when the other players were just beginning to form a strong union, to play it right, and not take the owners’ side, the way some other highly paid players of the era did (Carl Yastrzemski, for instance). Rather, he watched the coming of the union with an essentially benign attitude. When he was about to retire after the 1968 season, and the issue of free agency was just coming up, Steve Hamilton, the team’s player representative, asked him to keep the news of his retirement to himself for a bit longer. That would permit the union to benefit from his stature in its final negotiations with the owners before the 1969 season: the union could argue that the great Mickey Mantle was for the same things that ordinary players were for. He did what Hamilton asked, and Hamilton thought it was immensely helpful, though there was nothing in it for Mantle. (In fact, though he eventually drew what were for those years exceptionally large salaries, he was oddly indifferent to money. He made money and he spent it. Once, after spring training, when the Yankees returned to New York to start a new season, the players went into the inner part of the clubhouse, where a safe-deposit box was located for their valuables. There, to his amazement, Mantle found a check for ten thousand dollars from the previous fall. He had put it there and simply forgotten about it over the ensuing six months. “I’m not going to tell Merlyn about this one,” he laughed as he found it.)

  Somehow, even the goofiest things he did with his teammates always seemed funny; if he raffled off tickets for ten dollars each on a ham, and in the end there was no ham for the winner, no one got angry. “Well, I said you guys were taking a chance and you took a chance,” he would explain. If the team returned to La Guardia at three A.M. after a long road trip and he and Whitey Ford offered to lead the other players to the bus but instead mischievously took them on an endless tour of the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the airport, it was considered by all to be some marvelous experience: Mickey and Whitey being Mickey and Whitey, and everyone else being allowed in as their pals. He loved inviting Joe Pepitone, who longed to be his buddy, to meet him at restaurants that were not only hard to get to, but which, on occasion, did not exist. If a young television reporter came to interview him before a game, Mantle might give a long, seemingly serious discourse on how, when the wind was blowing in, he would try to swing with topspin so that the ball would not hang up there for the outfielders to get, while if the wind was behind him, he would hit with backspin so that the wind would carry it farther, over the distant fence. It was all done for the benefit of his teammates, who he knew were watching in the clubhouse and were breaking up. If a young black rookie joined the team and he was in the shower for the first time, Mantle might give him a quick scan to see whether the reports of black sexual endowment were true, and he would yell to Ford, “Hey, Whitey, take a look. It’s okay—he’s just like us. No bigger.”

  Mantle’s jokes were never mean or humiliating, for he had an instinct to include, rather than to exclude. When Jake Gibbs, the rookie catcher from Ole Miss, showed up wearing loud argyle black-and-orange socks, Mantle asked him if there were a lot of rattlesnakes in Mississippi. When Gibbs said yes, Mantle told him that it was okay to change socks now, there were no rattlesnakes in New York and he didn’t need to wear those socks to scare them off—which at once had everyone laughing and at the same time managed to make Gibbs feel more a part of the team. Mantle ‘s great gift, Phil Linz said years later, was to tell the worst jokes in the world but somehow make them seem enormously funny.

  Only when he wasn’t hitting well did he brood, and then the entire team would feel his darkness. His bad moods, in fact, could be very black. He was ever aware of the burden placed upon him as the greatest player on a team that historically was expected to win, and he took failure, even momentary failure, very hard. If he failed in a key situation, he would often smash at least one bat against the bat rack. During slumps he would go deep inside himself and become unreachable—a massive man filled with rage at himself and the world around him, a man very much to be left alone. To the beat writers, these moods were particularly ominous, because they were supposed to deal with him whether or not he was in a good mood. Their editors, who, after all, had their own bad moods, cared nothing about Mantle’s. He was never at ease with sportswriters in those years anyway, for they represented something alien: they spoke in ways that made him uneasy, and he had suffered in the early days when some of them had mocked him as a hick in contrast to the seeming sophistication of DiMaggio. When he was hitting badly, he was cold to writers in a way that few ballplayers of that era were, and he could, on occasion, be quite abusive: Get the hell
away from me, he would say, what the fuck are you bothering me for? His anger, his ability to look right through men he dealt with every day, men whose reporting had in general helped build the myth of Mantle as the greatest ballplayer of his era, could be shattering. Once when Maury Allen, the beat writer on the Post, was standing near the batting cage and Mantle was taking batting practice, Mantle turned to him and said, “You piss me off just standing there.” That became something of a motto in the Allen household when one member of the Allen family was irritated with another.