October 1964

by David Halberstam

  Once some of the other sportswriters on the Yankee beat were amused when a young city-side reporter from Newsday came out to do a piece about Mantle, the man. The young reporter was talented, had a reputation on the paper as a rising star, and was a huge Mantle fan to boot. He was quite sure that the assignment would go well, because he was a walking encyclopedia of Mantle trivia. Unfortunately for him, he arrived at a moment when Mantle was not hitting well. He was warned in advance by his peers that this was not the most opportune moment to approach Mantle, but he proceeded onto the field anyway to talk to his hero. He made his introductory statement about how much he admired Mantle and outlined the purpose of the proposed article. While the beat reporters watched, half amused and half sad, Mantle fixed the young man with The Look—totally cold, totally withering—and for a terrible moment the young man ceased to exist: the story, which was to be so admiring of Mickey Mantle, was never written.

  Yet he was a true baseball hero of that era, the athlete as mythic figure. In some way he was a prisoner of his own myth. The more he did and the better he played, the more others expected of him. American boys (at least white ones) who grew up in the fifties and early sixties and who loved baseball idolized him more than any other player. Everything about Mantle seemed to come from a storybook about the classic American athlete; he was the modest country boy with a shock of blond hair that turned the color of corn silk every summer, who became a superstar in the big city.

  In those years, thought Marty Appel, who had been a boy growing up in Spring Valley, a suburb of New York City, at the time, there was a virtual cult of Mantle, and Mantle fans not only knew everything about him, all the trivia of his life, but because of television they could mimic his every move. They knew that if Mantle took his batting helmet off he always took it off from behind, never from the front, perhaps because in front there were two bills—and so they removed their batting helmets in the same way. If Mantle ran out his home runs always looking down while he ran, then a generation of young American boys ran out their home runs with their heads down. They ran out to their positions, too, Mantle-style, heads turned down, elbows behind them but slightly up, and they moved in that same curious half-run, half-jog—in truth, a kind of fast limp designed to conceal the limits imposed by his bad knees. They knew he had a size 18 neck, and that it took him 3.1 seconds to go from home to first, which was said by experts to be the fastest time ever. The fans, Appel noted, even took pleasure from his number—7—which seemed right for him, standing out as it did on that broad back, and being a lucky number as well, whereas 6, his original number, seemed wrong, too circular.

  Once, Life magazine ran a cover photo of Mantle and his teammate Roger Maris, both unshaven, and it was jarring to Appel and his friends at the time, for no one had ever seen either of them unshaven and it violated the sense, in Mantle’s case, that he was the all-American boy, which meant, at the very least, that he was somehow always clean-shaven. The fans knew everything about his life, Appel remembered, that he had been born in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, that his father was named Mutt, and because Mutt Mantle had wanted his son to be a professional ballplayer, he had named him after his favorite player, Mickey Cochrane. Mutt taught his son to be a switch-hitter early on. There had also been twin brothers, but they had not made the majors, even though Mickey thought they were as good as he was or better.

  A highlight of the myth was, of course, the way in which he had been signed. The story sealed the image of Mantle as a country boy plucked out of the heartland to come east and perform legendary feats in the nation’s largest city. He had been scouted and signed by Tom Greenwade, the greatest of contemporary Yankee scouts, and quite possibly the best scout in the country at that time. It was a classic scene, straight out of Norman Rockwell. Greenwade, a country man himself, spotted Mantle while on his way to Broken Bow, Oklahoma, to scout another player. Stopping by chance to watch a game along the roadside, he saw Mantle drive the ball with such amazing power that he decided this might be the greatest prospect he had ever seen, the one superstar player that every scout dreams of discovering. When Greenwade eventually returned to sign the boy, he negotiated with Mickey and his father in the backseat of his own car for a tiny bonus of about a thousand dollars. The signing took place on the night of Mickey’s high school graduation. Here the myth of Tom Greenwade, the greatest scout of his age, blended with Mantle’s myth to create a classic illustration of the American Dream: for every American of talent, no matter how poor or how simple his or her background, there is always a Tom Greenwade out there searching to discover that person and help him or her to find a rightful place among the stars.

  The truth of the signing was very close to the myth: Greenwade had been scouting Mantle for more than two years, ever since he had set out to look at another player, but had seen instead a skinny young shortstop for Baxter Springs who had exceptional speed and, for someone so slight, unusual power. In addition, the boy had a good, if erratic, arm. That was what Tom Greenwade always looked for: power, speed, and a good arm. After that first game, he asked Mantle how old he was, and Mantle said he was seventeen and a junior in high school. (At fifteen, he had been so good that a coach for a nearby junior college had taken him off to play for his team, warning Mantle that if anyone came over to ask his name, he was merely to walk away from him as quietly as he could.) Greenwade said that he could not legally begin to talk to Mantle about signing a professional baseball contract, but he would be back to see him the moment he graduated from high school. Greenwade made a careful note of his graduation date. He was scared to death of losing him to another scout, and he also wanted to watch him play one more time. By chance, on Mantle’s graduation night, the Whiz Kids were playing, and Greenwade called the high school principal to see if Mantle could be excused from the graduation ceremony so that he could play that night. The principal said yes, for everyone in the area knew about Tom Greenwade of the Yankees, who was an important man in the region. That night Greenwade watched Mantle play, although the game was called after a few innings because of heavy rain. Then the Mantles, father and son, and Greenwade raced to Greenwade’s Cadillac, where the scout tried to sign the boy to a Class D contract with the Independence, Kansas, team.

  Greenwade began his pitch by telling the Mantles about the advantages of signing with the Yankees—that they represented the best in baseball, and that the best players always wanted to play for them. He spoke of the World Series checks that came in every year. Greenwade and Mutt Mantle were in the front seat and Mickey was in the back. Greenwade turned around and asked, “How would you like to be a Yankee, Mickey?” “That’s what I’ve always wanted to be,” the boy answered. Then there was the question of money. Mutt Mantle asked how much the contract would pay and Greenwade said $140 a month. The boy, Mutt Mantle answered, could make more playing Sunday games at Spavinaw and working around the mines during the week. So Greenwade took out a pencil and a large manila envelope and figured out how much Mickey could make playing Sunday ball and working in the mines, and how much he could make on the Class D contract. The difference was $1,150 (Mantle later said that the bonus was $1,500, but Greenwade always insisted it was $1,150), and that became his bonus. It was paid by the Independence club, and until the club folded years later, the canceled check hung in a frame in that team’s headquarters.

  Tom Greenwade was an old-fashioned scout, a man of the Ozarks. He was a quarter Cherokee, a descendant of Chief Middle Rider, a legendary Cherokee who had led his people during the tragic Trail of Tears, when the Cherokee people were forcibly relocated from their homeland in the Southeast to the harsher land of Oklahoma. For most of his career, Greenwade never wore glasses. He was proud of his heritage and thought it might have given him his unusually sharp eyes and an ability to pick up quickly on things that other people did not notice. Though he was not a boastful man, he liked to say that he could look at a player walking up to bat and tell just from his build and the way he moved whether or not he was fast. Unlike other
scouts, he did not keep any notes on the players; what he needed to know he filed away mentally. “Half the time the scouts have their heads down making notes and don’t even see which way the ball is hit,” he would say.

  Greenwade was a frugal man. He had grown up poor in Willard, Kansas, and even later in life, when he became rather wealthy, he thought of himself as someone who grew up poor, in a poor era, in a poor part of the country. Life was a difficult and harsh experience, he believed. Everything was to be saved, and nothing was to be wasted. He started earning a living at ten, and he left school at thirteen. As a boy he had a good arm and great eyesight, and he could kill rabbits with one throw of a rock. Some people there paid him twenty-five cents for each rabbit, which they would salt down and ship up north in those days before refrigeration. Eventually he tried professional baseball, and he had one great year in the old Northern League; according to legend, he won twenty-two games and lost only two when he hurt his arm pitching during an unusually cold game in Montana. With that, his career was over. He returned to Willard, made a run for sheriff and came close to winning, and then drifted back into baseball, first managing a minor-league club for the St. Louis Browns, eventually scouting for them, and then scouting for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  His life had taught him to be careful. Every penny mattered, even when he was quite successful. The Greenwade women canned their own food and raised their own animals for pork and beef. He had an almost pathological fear of being poor again. Late in life, he would go to a neighboring farm where the men did not have time to pick all the corn and where it lay going to waste; he would pick up the loose ears to feed his own pigs and cattle. The dollars saved didn’t matter, said one neighbor. It was the waste that mattered. In the Greenwade home every purchase was to be accounted for. If Tom Greenwade’s wife and daughter saw a dress they liked in a store window, they were to study it carefully, then sketch it and make it themselves. There was to be no debt in the household. Everything was to be paid for in cash, including his car. The Yankees used to send him some of their old uniforms, presumably to hand down to likely prospects, but the Greenwade women took those uniforms, cut them up, braided them, and made rugs out of them. Years later Angie Greenwade McCroskey, his daughter, thought of those old uniforms and, knowing the astronomical prices fetched by baseball memorabilia, decided that they had quite possibly cut up millions of dollars’ worth of old uniforms. Tom Greenwade’s only indulgence was a new Cadillac, always black, which he bought every other year because he put thousands and thousands of miles on a car annually. In that vast territory, he knew every back road, every local coach, every player, and every bird-dog scout (that is, a local part-time scout). He dressed simply, always wearing the same outfit during baseball season—khaki pants, a long-sleeved white shirt, and a straw hat.

  He was absolutely without pretense, so when he came to a prospect’s home to talk with the parents, he seemed more a member of the family than the famous visitor he was. At the Boyer home in Alba, Missouri, he was well known, for he had scouted several of the Boyer boys, three of whom went on to play major-league baseball. He hunted and fished, and when it was October and World Series time, he would go to New York and stay at the Waldorf—both literally and figuratively a long way from Willard, Kansas—but he always brought with him a bunch of quail he had just shot. The Waldorf’s chefs would cook some of them for him there, and there would be extras for the cooks to take home for their families.

  He played an important role in the clandestine scouting that had taken place when Branch Rickey sought out baseball’s first black major-league ballplayer. In 1944, Rickey told Greenwade to meet him at the Biltmore Hotel in Kansas City for an important but highly secret mission. Greenwade hurried over only to find that the hotel did not have a room for him. He insisted that a reservation had been made for him by his boss in New York. “You know that’s odd—we already have a Mr. Greenwade registered here,” the desk clerk said. The impostor turned out to be Rickey himself. What’s going on? Greenwade wondered. But then Rickey explained his grand scheme. He was planning to sign the first black player in major-league baseball, and he wanted Greenwade to look at a black shortstop then playing in Mexico named Silvo Garcia. “They say DiMaggio can’t carry his glove,” Rickey said. Greenwade was not even to tell Mrs. Greenwade where he was going and what he was doing. Greenwade said he could not do that. So Rickey, whose alternative calling clearly would have been as a CIA agent, said that Tom could take Mrs. Greenwade with him—they could be two American tourists traveling in Mexico. A bank account was set up for him in Mexico City. All his telegrams back to the home office were to be in code. Greenwade found Garcia impressive physically, “a huge fellow who ran well, and had a great arm,” he later said. But he was already at least twenty-eight or twenty-nine, which was not ideal for someone who would, in effect, be a big-league rookie. Worse, Garcia, a right-handed hitter, could not pull the ball. “Everything he hit went to right field,” Greenwade said of him. If he could not pull the ball in this league, what would happen to him in the major leagues? Greenwade reported back to a very disappointed Rickey that Garcia was not his man. However, he had, he reported, seen a catcher on the Monterrey, Mexico, team that he liked named Roy Campanella. But working in his own territory, which included Missouri and Kansas, he soon stumbled on a player he thought a much better prospect, a young army veteran playing for the Kansas City Monarchs named Jackie Robinson. Greenwade had heard from a number of his bird dogs that Robinson was special, and he set out to follow him. Almost from the start he was sure that Robinson was his man. For a month, he later said, he did nothing but track Robinson. Though Clyde Sukeforth was often given credit for doing the early scouting on Robinson, it was Greenwade who actually did it, which was not easy since the Monarchs traveled by bus, and Greenwade was told to remain as inconspicuous as possible. He saw him play about twenty times, yet the two men never met or spoke (they met years later when Robinson was already a star with the Dodgers and Greenwade was scouting for the Yankees).

  Greenwade was immensely impressed by Robinson. He had great speed, exceptional power for an infielder, and the rarest kind of competitive fire. He was mature, a college man, but still, at twenty-six, young enough to be coming into his prime, unlike most of the better known Negro league players who were now considered a little old. The one weakness was his arm. He was playing shortstop for the Monarchs because their regular shortstop, Jesse Williams, had hurt his arm. To make the throw from short, Robinson had to take a step and a half. He would make the major leagues, but he would play as a second baseman or a first baseman, Greenwade reported, not as a shortstop.

  The Mantle legend, which began with his signing, grew during a special rookie camp the Yankees had held at Casey Stengel’s behest in 1950. There, some of the old-timers in the organization got a sense that they were seeing something rare, a true diamond in the rough. Mantle’s potential, his raw ability, his speed, his power from both sides of the plate, were almost eerie. If his talent were honed properly, they thought they were quite possibly looking at someone who might become the greatest player in the history of the game. There were some fast players in that camp, and one day someone decided that all the faster players should get together and have a race. Mantle, whose true speed had not yet been comprehended, simply ran away from the others. What had made some of the stories coming out of the camp so extraordinary was the messenger himself, Bill Dickey—the former Yankee catcher, a Hall of Fame player, and a tough, unsentimental old-timer who had played much of his career with Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Henrich. He was not lightly given to hyperbole. Dickey started talking about Mantle to Jerry Coleman, the veteran second baseman, with superlatives that were unknown for him: “Jerry, he can hit with power righty, he can hit with power lefty, and he can outrun everyone here.” “What position does he play?” Coleman asked. “Shortstop,” Dickey answered, which made Coleman nervous, because that meant they were both infielders. “He’s going to be the greatest player I’ve ever s
een,” Dickey added. A few days later Dickey grabbed his old teammate Tommy Henrich. “Tom, you should see this kid Mantle that played at Joplin. I’ve never seen power like that. He hits the ball and it stays hit. He’s really going to be something.” Even the sound of his home runs, Dickey said, were different, mirroring something Ted Williams would say years later: the crack of the bat against the ball when Mantle connected was like an explosion. Henrich simply shook his head—it was one thing to hear about a coming star from an excited journalist, but quite another to hear it from someone like Bill Dickey.

  So that had piqued everyone’s interest, but the myth of Mantle as the superplayer really began the following spring, in 1951, when the Yankees brought him up to train with the big club. That spring the Yankees, as a favor to Del Webb, who had a contracting business in the Southwest, exchanged camps with the Giants, and trained in Arizona. Years later, Mantle believed that this change of venue helped him considerably, and added to the excitement he generated. For when he began to hit his home runs there, he was doing it where the air was lighter, so the ball carried farther, and the visibility was greater—all of which seemed to make each home run not only longer but more memorable. Rarely had a rookie been showcased as Mantle was that spring. The Yankees were a big draw on the West Coast as they might not have been on the East Coast. DiMaggio was near retirement (it was in fact his last season), so everyone was eager to see this new rookie about whom so many stories were already beginning to be told.

  That spring Mantle had been awesome. No one on the team or in the league was stronger. His body was deceptive: he was not that tall. He was listed at five feet eleven inches, or indeed at five eleven and a half, but others thought he was closer to five nine. It was the width of the body that stunned such veteran baseball men as Henrich, who now were scrutinizing him carefully. Henrich, who had been assigned to work with Mantle on his defensive play in the outfield and on his throwing, believed he had never seen the kind of strength that Mantle possessed in the body of a baseball player. Normally, to be that strong, to hit a ball that hard, a man had to be bigger than normal; one envisioned an immense man—lean, wide shoulders, muscular, and perhaps six feet six inches tall for that kind of power. But in baseball, as a man’s height increased, he was also made vulnerable, for the size of his strike zone expanded as well, giving pitchers too big a target. (The first time Whitey Ford looked at Frank Howard, the six-feet-seven-inch Dodger outfielder, all he could think of was what a wonderful strike zone Howard presented.) In baseball it was too easy for a smart pitcher to come inside and tie that kind of hitter up, and keep him from extending his arms. But with Mantle, Henrich thought, it was as if God had taken the ideal body necessary for a great hitter, and then simply made it wider and stronger, extending the power package, but not the strike zone. Mantle was stronger than everyone else, but just as compact. It was almost, Henrich thought, unfair. Mantle was powerful, but he was not a prisoner of his power; he was surprisingly lithe, with a quick bat and a good eye.