by Allen Barra
The Mantles were said to have come to Oklahoma from Missouri. Spavinaw, where Mickey was born, was just a few miles from the Missouri state line in the heart of Cherokee country. Elvin Mantle—the name was spelled “Elvan” on his driver’s license and “Elven” on his birth certificate and, finally, on his tombstoneb—was called “Mutt” as long as anyone could remember, and he was. There was English, Dutch, German, and perhaps some other blood in the Mantle veins. We do know, thanks to the family historian, Harold Mantle, that Mutt’s English ancestors worked mines around Brierley Hill and iron smelters near Birmingham, England, in the early 1800s, some 130 years before Willie Mays’s father worked in the iron smelters of Birmingham, Alabama, a city named for its English progenitor.
Mickey also proudly claimed some Cherokee blood from his mother’s side, though that has never been substantiated and might have been wishful thinking on his part. “As a small boy living in Commerce,” he said in The Mick, “I heard many stories about the Cherokees, the Chickasaws, the Creeks, and the other Oklahoma tribes, stories told mostly by my dad’s friends.” As an adult, Mickey loved to tell stories about his encounters with the Oklahoma Indian tribes, and when he came to the Yankees he was delighted to find that his teammate Allie Reynolds had Oklahoma Muscogee (Creek) Indian blood. The history of the Oklahoma Indians, particularly the Cherokee, was one of the few subjects about which Mantle displayed any social awareness. “Years later,” he told Herb Gluck, meaning after he graduated from high school, “reading up on Indian history, I began to understand more. Until then it never occurred to me that the Indians made a forced march from southern prison camps, that hundreds died of starvation during the journey into Oklahoma. Their Trail of Tears. They didn’t teach that in school.”c14
Cat Mays was nineteen when Willie was born; Mutt was nineteen when he became a father. Willie’s mother, though, was just sixteen, while Lovell Richardson, Mutt’s wife, was twenty-seven. Like Willie, Mickey had a grandfather, Charlie (from whom his middle name came), who was a left-handed pitcher. Like Cat, Mutt was a pretty good ballplayer on industrial teams who also picked up some extra money playing semipro ball.
Like Willie, Mickey thought his dad was good enough to have played professional ball if he had had the chance. Mickey would watch him play on weekends, driving from Commerce to see Mutt and his pals play for Spavinaw and other groups that were little more than pickup teams in and around Mayes County. “I sat in the stands, thinking he was Pepper Martin, Mickey Cochrane and Dizzy Dean all rolled into a single package. I mean, he ran, pitched, fielded most any position, batted both ways, hit for distance, had a shotgun arm, and threw strikes. I thought he was the best damn ballplayer in the territory. Only the professional scouts never saw him play.”15 Mickey’s evaluation might not have been objective; his friend Nick Ferguson thought that Mutt was only an average player, and so did Mickey’s younger cousin, Jim Richardson. But they did not see Mutt play till he was over thirty, well past his physical prime and after years of backbreaking hard labor. A pitcher from the Tri-State League, Harry Daniels, told John G. Hall, “The reason guys like Mutt never had a chance to develop their game was there was very little equipment and very few organized teams where the youth of his generation could learn to play the game.”16 The black mill workers in Birmingham’s industrial areas were better equipped to play baseball than the white miners of northeastern Oklahoma.
In Willie’s memory, his father deserved to be placed on the same kind of pedestal. Mays recalled to Charles Einstein the praise he received from Piper Davis: “ ‘You got the greatest instinctive jump on a ball I ever saw, except for maybe Joe D. [DiMaggio] or his brother Vince.’ ‘Sounds like I’m pretty good,’ Willie cracked. ‘Only one better,’ Davis said. ‘Your old man. Know the difference, Buck?d You don’t pounce. You’re a grabber. The old man though—that’s why we called him Kitty-Kat—now he knew how to pounce! I’ve seen you on the bases. Passed ball, no more than three feet away, and you explode. Explode, that’s the word for it. Better than Jackie [Robinson], better than anybody. But, Buck, you don’t pounce. You just never learned how.’ ”e17
Whatever the two fathers’ real skill levels, it’s certainly true that circumstances gave neither of them a chance to test themselves in the big leagues—Cat because of segregation, Mutt because he had a family to support before his eighteenth birthday and never got out of the Oklahoma mines. But both knew the game from top to bottom, thanks to the tough and spirited competition of the industrial leagues, and they taught their sons to play the same way.
In about half a century, baseball would evolve into a sport in which parents would groom their kids from grade school to perfect a single skill or play a single position. Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were all-around players because that was how their fathers played the game.
* This was because the shotgun houses were usually three to five rooms in a row with no hallways and sometimes no doors between them.
† “Oh, the boss man high with TCI,” ran the lyric from a popular song of the 1930s.
‡ The town was first named Corey, after the president of U.S. Steel, William E. Corey; the name was quickly dropped when Corey was caught in a New York hotel with a showgirl from the Copacabana, an incident that made headlines from New York down to Birmingham. Asked to rename the town, the company’s new president thought that his hometown of Fairfield, Connecticut, deserved a namesake.
§ In 1931, the year Willie was born, Rickwood was the site of Game 1 of the Dixie World Series between the Southern Association’s Birmingham Barons and the Texas League’s Houston Buffaloes, in which Ray Caldwell, a forty-Shree-year veteran, outpitched Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean 1–0, in a duel that many called “the greatest game ever played.” The radio announcer was Eugene “Bull” Connor, later to become infamous as Birmingham’s public safety commissioner during the civil rights years. Also at the game—or so he said—was Charles “Charlie O” Finley, future owner of the Birmingham A’s and the major league Oakland A’s, against whom Willie would end his major league career. Finley claimed he was the Barons’ batboy at the Caldwell-Dean duel.
‖ The famous train and the city had a long love affair that began in 1871 with the establishment of Birmingham at the crossing of the Alabama & Chattanooga and South and North Atlantic Railroads. The first version of the song about the train, “The Great Rock Island Route,” was written by a man named J. A. Roff in 1882. The song then was published with its famous name, “Wabash Cannon Ball,” in 1904, with the author listed as William Kindt. Over the decades, there were several popular versions, one by the grandparents of country music, the Carter Family, in 1932, and of course the most famous one, recorded in 1936 by Roy Acuff. In Chuck Berry’s up-Sempo rock-and-roll version, “Promised Land,” a broken-down Greyhound bus leaves him stranded in downtown Birmingham; he then takes the Midnight Flier, another famous train, to New Orleans.
a One wonders where Mickey would have gotten so many tennis balls. What he probably meant were the cheap, tough rubber Spaldeens that were popular all over the country and a particular favorite of inner-city kids playing stickball in the street.
b To further confuse matters, the middle name of Mickey’s youngest brother, Larry, was Elven.
c However, a St. Louis native, Robert Mantle, researched the genealogical history of the family and offers at least one possible piece of evidence for Indian blood in the family: while many white settlers moving down into Oklahoma Territory were attacked by Indians, the Mantles were spared because riding in their wagons were two Indian women who had married Mantle men. Or so he claimed from the record left by a wagonmaster.
d “Buck” was the short version of Willie’s nickname, “Buck-Duck.” Willie claimed never to know the origin of the term, which Arnold Hano referred to as “unfortunate and derogatory.” Buck was a common nickname for young African American males. Some players who knew Willie thought the “Duck” part might have had something to do with the shape of his posterior. Willie once offere
d a different explanation to a sportswriter: “It’s ‘cause I used to dodge back and forth, duck so quick when I was running” (Hano, Willie Mays, p. 37). Willie thought that the first to call him Buck was his boyhood friend Charley Willis, whom he called “Cool.”
e Arnold Hano, echoing Piper Davis, wrote, “No ballplayer is as likely to explode at any given moment in any of a half-dozen ways as is Willie Mays.” He also wrote, “Mays does not glide; he scampers. When he runs the bases, he runs with head over his shoulder, looking behind him for the ball” (Hano, Willie Mays, p. 15).
2
Bred to Play Ball
To call Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle “natural” ballplayers would be an insult to their years of practice and preparation.
To New York sportswriters in 1951, Willie Mays seemed to have been born to play center field, but it wasn’t until his early teens that he began to understand that his talents were best suited to the position. “By the time you get to high school varsity play,” he recalled in his first memoir, “you should be stationed where you play best. If you’re not, it’s not the end of the world, but if you go on in baseball from there, somebody is going to have to come along and make you over. Sometimes this ‘making over’ doesn’t even take place till the player actually reaches the big leagues. You all can think of players who came up at one position—Mickey Mantle was one—only to be shifted to another.”1
Cat Mays allowed Willie the freedom to find his position, while Mutt Mantle, probably assuming that a switch-hitting slugger who could play a key infield position would be much sought after, tried to mold Mickey into a shortstop. Cat instinctively understood about his son what Mutt did not about his: even when possessed of great speed and a terrific throwing arm, a heavily muscled young man might be better suited to outfield rather than infield play.*
Cat’s more relaxed attitude about his son’s position was representative of the two fathers’ attitudes about their sons’ skills. Cat played baseball with Willie to encourage him; Mutt drove Mickey to play with a purpose that bordered on obsession, though Mickey’s childhood pals insisted that Mutt was a patient teacher and not a slave driver.
There was a yawning chasm between the two fathers’ baseball dreams for their sons. For blacks living in the Birmingham area, a solid job in a steel mill (or perhaps as a railroad porter) was nearly as attractive as the life of a professional Negro League baseball player—that is, viewed over a lifetime. In the 1930s, thanks to the Roosevelt administration, which pumped millions of dollars in stimulus money into the devastated Birmingham steel industry, a black man stood a very good chance of having a job that could support a family for all his working life and, if he could play baseball, an opportunity to pick up some side money. For Mickey, professional baseball, even at the minor league level, offered prospects for a far better life than the dirty, backbreaking, and dangerous zinc mines, where, it was said, “miners breathed death.”
Mays entered the world of organized baseball through a side door. When he was only nine, just before World War II began, he accompanied Cat on road trips with the United Steelworkers’ CIO semipro team; Cat was the leadoff hitter and center fielder. After one game, Willie was amazed to find that his father actually got paid for playing baseball. “That seemed to me just about the nicest idea anyone ever thought up.”2 By the time Mays found this out, Mantle knew that his father’s intention for him was to remove the “semi” in front of the “pro.” Willie played ball for fun and pocket money; Mickey played because he wanted to be a big league ballplayer.
When Willie was a boy, integration of the major leagues was just a dream. A black player could make some decent money playing ball, but only a handful of superstars, Satchel Paige most prominent among them, had any leverage when it came to making his own deals or jumping to another team. For most, Negro League ball was an extremely dubious proposition that promised nothing beyond a few years of high life. To Oscar Charleston, Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, or even Birmingham’s own Piper Davis, baseball was a mean, tough living that took a man away from home for long periods of time (and often took away his home life altogether). Life in the Negro Leagues meant hours of travel in brutal summer heat on buses with no air conditioning and being denied service in most restaurants and hotels.
Willie, noticing that his father had done well for himself at TCI, indicated that he didn’t think that life was so bad; Cat, with a wary eye, advised him, “Once you get into the mill, you never get out.”3 This hadn’t occurred to Willie. While the steel mills paid a better wage than most black men in the South could expect, a job there didn’t offer the opportunity for prosperity, which was what some young black men were beginning to think about in a changing America. Cat encouraged Willie to play baseball for fun with the hope that it might, just might, offer him a way out of life in the mills.
For Mickey, it was also fun to play baseball, at least the kind of baseball played at picnics with mining people and their families and with his friends. But as he would recall to Herb Gluck, “All through my early childhood Dad kept drumming it in: ‘Practice, practice, practice.’ Which I did, attacking each pitch, whether it was thrown underhand, sideways, or over the top.… Dad worked with me every day. I was hitting them pretty good from the right side. But Dad also wanted me to bat lefty, which I hated. When it got dark and supper was ready, Dad would turn me around, from righty to lefty. ‘Your belly can wait,’ he’d say. Then he’d start pitching again.”4
Hank Bauer, who was Mantle’s teammate for years and saw Mays play many times, nailed down the biggest difference in their playing styles. “Yeah, Willie made some plays that Mickey wouldn’t have made. And Mickey, who I think was maybe a step faster than Willie, caught a fly ball now and then that even Willie wouldn’t have gotten to. The big difference was in the way they were perceived. Willie made all the hard plays look easy, and Mickey made all the hard plays look hard.”5 For Willie baseball was mostly play, while for Mickey baseball was mostly practice.
Both were daddy’s boys. Willie spent little time with his mother, though he was fond of telling sportswriters stories he had heard about her. “My mother was a wonderful athlete,” he told Charlie Einstein, “a star runner who held a couple of women’s track records in that part of the country.”†6
Mickey loved Lovell, and by holding the family together and keeping everyone clothed and fed, she was as big a factor in his baseball development as Mutt. She knew the game too. Like millions of American housewives in the 1930s and 1940s, she learned it from listening to the radio. She understood baseball terms and was familiar with the players’ strengths and weaknesses. Sitting in the stands, she yelled louder for her boys than Mutt did. According to Mickey’s childhood friend Nick Ferguson, when he stayed for supper at the Mantles’ house the topic of conversation at the table was that afternoon’s St. Louis Cardinals game. (Most of the Cardinals and Browns games then were still played in daylight.) Mrs. Mantle, he said, while doing her housework, listened to the Cardinals radio broadcast and then recapped the game for the family over their evening meal.
By no surviving account, though, was she a demonstrative mother. Some of Mickey’s children would recall her as mean; Merlyn Mantle’s recollection of her mother-in-law was that she was “not a warm or openly affectionate woman, but she was a tireless and protective mother. She had seven children, two by a first marriage, and I never saw anyone do as much laundry.” Merlyn’s folks were town people; the Mantles, she noted, “lived in the country and didn’t yet have electricity.”7
Curiously for a southern family living in a small town, the Mantles were not a religious family. There were four churches in Commerce, all Protestant, but the family did not belong to any of them, though Mickey said that he had been inside all of them for the weddings of friends and family. None of the Mantles, he said, “took religion seriously. I suppose it was my dad’s influence. He used to say, ‘Religion doesn’t necessarily make you good. As long as your heart is in the right place and you don’t hurt anyone,
I think you’ll go to heaven—if there is one.’ ”8
If Mutt doubted the existence of God, at least a benevolent God, it was certainly understandable. When Mickey was thirteen, Mutt sold the much-loved house on South Quincy Street and bought a farm, thinking that moving away from the mines might improve his own father’s health. But Charlie, who had contracted Hodgkin’s disease (which probably had little or nothing to do with conditions in the mines, though Mutt did not know this), deteriorated quickly, and the first left-handed pitcher Mickey ever faced soon died. The disease overtook Charlie so quickly that it shocked Mutt and Mickey. “He died shortly after we moved,” Mickey later recalled. “I never forgot that moment, standing beside the casket with my little twin brothers, Ray and Roy, the three of us looking down on him and my father whispering, ‘Say good-bye to Grandpa.’ I was just a kid then. I didn’t understand death and sickness very well. Even now I don’t remember the order of events from that time in my life. It just seemed that all my relatives were dying around me.”9 A little less than three years later, his uncle Tunney died of stomach cancer at age thirty-four, and shortly after, Uncle Emmett died of what appeared to be Hodgkin’s. Mickey’s fatalistic attitude toward life was set at an early age.
For at least a while, though, life on the farm seemed idyllic. Mickey got to pretend he was a cowboy when he rode a horse to school‡—which was closer than Willie ever came to being a cowboy.
