by Allen Barra
At the same time, Mickey Mantle watched newsreels of DiMaggio at the local movie house, always shown before his beloved Westerns. “We didn’t know what the word ‘cool’ meant back then,” Mickey recalled, “but I knew what it looked like. Without actually saying ‘cool,’ I thought to myself, ‘That guy’s the coolest ballplayer I’ve ever seen.’ ”26
DiMaggio was also hailed as baseball’s first “complete” player—someone who excelled at all facets of the game: hitting consistently and with power, running the bases, covering ground in the field, and throwing. In fact, there had been a few such players before him, among them Honus Wagner, who had played from 1897 to 1917. Wagner was a fantastic fielder, mostly at shortstop, won eight batting crowns, and led the National League in stolen bases five times and in slugging percentage six times—but no one knew what slugging percentage was in Wagner’s day, so he wasn’t perceived as a great power hitter. In DiMaggio’s time, stolen bases weren’t as big a part of the game—at least not in the all-white big leagues—and only people who watched DiMaggio play on a regular basis realized what a swift and daring base runner he was. Nonetheless, anyone who followed baseball in newspapers or on the radio knew him as the guy who could do it all.
Mickey tried to copy DiMaggio’s batting style. “It just didn’t work for me,” Mantle told Dick Young. “I struck out too much trying to use that kind of open stance. So I finally changed—crouched lower in the box, leaned back, tried to offer less of a target to the pitcher, and still struck out a lot. It just amazed me when I reached the big leagues to find out that Joe, standing in the batter’s box with his legs far apart, standing straight up, hardly ever struck out.”27
According to Charley Willis, when he and Willie played catch, Willie would “play DiMaggio.” Charley would lob the ball far over Willie’s head, and Willie, playing shallower each time in DiMaggio’s fashion, would race back to pull the ball down. The 1954 World Series was won on the playing fields of Fairfield, Alabama.
Like Mickey, Willie had been mesmerized by pictures of DiMaggio in the newspapers and by watching him on sports newsreels, and he carefully copied DiMaggio’s wide-open, legs-apart batting stance—a stance that Mays, who when fully grown was three inches shorter than DiMaggio, would seem to have been ill suited for. But Willie made it work for him, as he did playing outfield like Joe. Occasionally someone might hit one over your head, he knew, but you gave up more runs by routinely letting singles drop in front of you. Anyway, if you couldn’t play shallow and run down a ball hit over your head, you weren’t a center fielder.
* Perhaps it was because Mickey didn’t pack on the layers of muscle until his later high school years that Mutt thought he would develop into a slender, wiry man, much like Mutt himself.
† In 1961, Mays went for a complete physical at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, where a doctor attempted to attach a suction cup to his back for a vector cardiograph. The suction cup wouldn’t hold. “What’s the problem?” Willie asked. The problem, the doctor told him, was that Mays had no fat on his back to create the suction: “All you got for a back is one continuous muscle.” Willie’s father must have been an athlete, the doctor commented. “My mother too,” Willie informed him. “Well,” said the doctor, “I guess that explains that” (Mays, My Life In and Out of Baseball, p. 41).
‡ The name of Mickey’s horse was Tony. Though history has not recorded who it was named after, in all likelihood it was an homage to the hugely popular Western film star Tom Mix’s champion horse Tony. Mix was Mickey’s first big cowboy movie idol. Born in Pennsylvania, he found fame in Oklahoma working for the Wild West shows and then appearing in early silent Westerns produced by the Miller brothers of Oklahoma’s enormous 101 Ranch.
§ In 1970, Mickey appeared on The Dick Cavett Show and admitted, in front of millions and in particular fellow guest Paul Simon, that he had a bed-wetting problem through his high school years. Simon, who grew up idolizing Mickey, was stunned. Mickey was equally stunned to learn that the “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” line from “Mrs. Robinson” was originally “Where have you gone, Mickey Mantle?” but Simon couldn’t work it into enough syllables to fill out the line.
‖ As an adult, Willie confessed to having slipped into several white Barons games. “I’d sneak into the games of the Birmingham club of the Southern Association, and the thing that thrilled me most was that they were the only team in the league that was allowed to wear white uniforms. Everybody else had to wear gray.” Young Willie didn’t realize that the visiting teams all wore gray and that the Barons’ home uniforms, which were the only ones he saw them play in, were white (Mays, My Life In and Out of Baseball, p. 60).
a “Willie Mays is Negro,” wrote Arnold Hano in 1965, “a southern Negro on top of that, and a product of an early broken home—all of which shows why social workers gray easily. Mays ought to have ended up in a novel about a zip-gun toting heroin-hipped no goodnik. He is instead a non-drink, non-smoke, reasonably well-acclimated young man whose major neurosis is that he is overly aggressive to a pitched baseball” (Hano, Willie Mays, p. 36).
b Around 1960, Mays recalled, he saw the same model radio in the window of a secondhand furniture store in Cincinnati and went inside to stare at it.
c When Willie was five or six, his father would pull an old joke on him at the ballpark, “announcing he was a magician, and when he said, ‘Stand up,’ everybody in the place would stand up, and when he said, ‘Sit down,’ everybody would sit down. I didn’t learn about the seventh inning stretch till long after that” (Mays, My Life In and Out of Baseball, p. 60).
3
No Other Enjoyment
In later years it was common for baseball writers to say that it was Mays who kept Mantle from being the greatest player ever, in reference to the fly ball Willie hit in the 1951 World Series that caused Mickey to tear up his knee. But Mickey’s injury problems began in high school, many years before his encounter with Willie Mays, and they started with football.
In retrospect, it seems as if baseball had no rival for the love of either Mantle or Mays, that there was no other possible career in sports for either to pursue. That was true, at least, in the 1930s and 1940s, when they were boys. At around five-foot-eleven, they were both too short to seriously think about professional basketball, no matter how dazzling they were on the hardwoods, and the National Football League didn’t emerge as a competitor to Major League Baseball until the late 1950s. Besides, the odds were hugely against Willie Mays from Westfield, Alabama, getting a football scholarship at a major college power in the late 1940s. But both loved football, and in the recollections of those who saw them, if conditions had been right in the late 1940s, football might well have been the first sport for both.
Willie’s coach at Fairfield Industrial, Jim McWilliams, called him “the greatest forward passer I ever saw,” and one of the local black papers compared him to Harry Gilmer, the fabled University of Alabama quarterback who starred for the Crimson Tide from 1944 to 1947.
When Willie was thirteen, Sarah asked Cat what his plans were for his son. “What’s he going to do? Work in the mill like you?” “No,” said Cat, “he’s going to college.” How, Sarah wondered, was Willie going to get into college? “Play football,” Cat replied. “He’ll go to Pittsburgh.” “They don’t take ’em up there,” Sarah replied. “Sure they do. What’s the matter? You don’t read the papers?” “They take ’em,” Sarah said, “from around Pittsburgh. Ain’t nobody in Pittsburgh heard of Alabama.” “You crazy?” Cat shot back. “Pittsburgh plays Alabama.”1
Almost every sports fan in Alabama, black and white, had been football-conscious, if not -crazy, since the mid-1920s, when the University of Alabama started sending teams to the Rose Bowl. Even black kids would, when playing pickup football games, pretend to be Crimson Tide heroes—Johnny Mack Brown, Dixie Walker, or the great Don Hutson (who played on the opposite end of the line from his friend Paul “Bear” Bryant). Black high school football players dreamed
of a time when they would get their chance to play for the Tide, but no one had any realistic idea of when that would be.
Black communities all through the South were excited by the news in 1939 that UCLA had four black players on their football team, including an All-American named Jackie Robinson. How long, they wondered, could it possibly be before the Alabama team would have black players? A few years later, there was some excitement in Westfield and Fairfield in the spring of 1943, when it was announced that Alabama had scheduled a game with the University of Pittsburgh on the Panthers’ home field. Because of the steel-industry connections, several black steelworkers had found good jobs in the Pittsburgh area, and some had sons who were playing baseball and football for the University of Pittsburgh. To everyone’s disappointment, Alabama, like many colleges, didn’t field a team that year because of the war. But the thought stayed in Cat Mays’s head that Willie might be good enough to get a football scholarship somewhere.
Football was a different game in the 1940s from what it would become in the 1960s, when substitution rules were eliminated. In the high school football world of young Willie and Mickey, you weren’t just a quarterback or a running back or a linebacker—you played on offense and defense, you blocked and tackled, and you often had to placekick or punt as well.
And Mays, of course, could do it all. On offense he played quarterback and sometimes fullback, passing the ball out of both positions. The play calling wasn’t particularly sophisticated, but it seems there was much more passing than in the average white high school or even college game today. Willie once described his play calling as “You run here and you run there, and don’t stop, because I’ll get the ball to you.” Mays’s hands seemed to have been designed to grip and spiral a football. His arm was so strong, he could throw without winding up—“Quick release, they’d call it now.”2
Like Alabama’s Harry Gilmer, Mays was famous for his “jump pass,” where he’d head into the line, stop a couple of yards short of scrimmage, leap, and fire. On one memorable day in his senior year, he threw five touchdowns in a 55–0 Fairfield win over Parker High School, Birmingham’s largest black high school. In another dazzling performance, he threw a 70-yard touchdown pass against Booker T. Washington High School in Pensacola, Florida, and then, according to a school history, ran for the extra point that tied the game.*
Willie often punted, producing 60-yarders, and, on kickoffs, sent the ball out of the end zone. How much Willie loved football was demonstrated by a story he liked to tell. When he was thirteen, probably a year before he started high school, he climbed a tree to watch a Fairfield game because he couldn’t afford a ticket. When Fairfield scored a touchdown, he started clapping, fell out of the tree, and broke his leg. In another version of the story, it was his arm that he broke, and it was watching a Miles College game to see one of his first sports idols, a man named Cat Brown, with whom he would later share the infield in semi-pro ball.
Football allowed Willie to showcase his skills. But he quickly discovered its drawbacks when Charley Willis, blocking for Willie on an end run, was knocked down and got his hand stepped on, breaking two fingers. Charley missed the rest of the season. “So I started going more for basketball.”3
“I had my baseball,” Mickey said, “and I loved football, too.”4
Oklahoma was almost as much of a hotbed of football fanaticism as Alabama, and every high school boy who played the game dreamed of going to the University of Oklahoma and leading the Sooners to victory over Texas in their annual clash. Mickey caught the football bug in his freshman year, though Mutt Mantle refused to let him play. By his sophomore year, his dad finally gave in to his pleading. Mutt was a big football fan himself, but he had seen too many young men sustain knee, head, and arm injuries that ruined them for other sports. His worst fear was that something would happen on the football field to derail the glorious future Mickey was certain to have in baseball.
Like Willie, Mickey’s high school coaches recalled him with nothing but praise. “In my opinion,” said John Lungo, one of the first coaches in the state to install the new T-formation, “baseball was Mickey’s second-best sport. He was the best high school football player I ever saw.”5 Alan Woolard, Mickey’s first football coach, was just as impressed.†
Mickey’s speed dazzled his coaches, and though he was only about 150 pounds, he was tough and determined, a natural running back. In addition to his speed and power, the combination of which was often too much for Commerce’s opponents to contain, he had terrific hands. Like Willie, he was an outstanding kicker; his teammates recall that he was equally adept at placekicking with or without shoes. One friend, Joe Barker, reflected that as good a runner as Mickey was, “I think the greatest asset that he had … was his punting ability. He could easily have been a punter in professional football.”6
Football wasn’t a terribly sophisticated game in white high schools in the 1940s. There weren’t many passes thrown, but Mantle created huge excitement just by taking a short pass in the backfield. He seemed capable of breaking for a long touchdown every time he laid hands on the ball. Researcher John G. Hall located some microfilm from the 1947 Miami News-Record in which the highlights of one game read: “Mickey Mantle broke loose and ran 65 yards to the 1-yard line before he was tackled. Mantle then plunged over to score. Mantle plunged off-tackle for six yards to score after recovering a Fairland Owl fumble.” (Mickey, like Willie, played linebacker on defense.) In Mickey’s senior year, 1948, the Commerce High Tigers lost their first three games, but the “Commerce Comet,” as he was known, scored ten touchdowns.
Mickey’s reputation as a football player was such that after the Oklahoma Sooners won the national championship, the Sooners’ assistant coach—and former star quarterback—Darrell Royal was dispatched to Commerce to court Mickey as one of the state’s brightest football prospects. Mickey made a trip to Norman for a guided tour of the campus. Long after he was a New York Yankee star, he liked to tell a story that came out of the trip. At a golf tournament years later, Mickey was again introduced to Royal, by then head coach at the University of Texas. “You don’t remember me, do you?” asked Mickey. Royal said he did not. Mickey told him about his recruiting trip in 1948. Royal admitted he didn’t remember but explained, “You weren’t Mickey Mantle then.”
An extra point to the story: In 1970, after winning the national title as head coach of the Texas Longhorns, Royal traveled to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to teach Bear Bryant and the Crimson Tide coaching staff the intricacies of the new wishbone offense. Mantle was in Alabama to promote his Mickey Mantle’s Country Cookin’ restaurant in Birmingham and drove over to Tuscaloosa to visit his old football pals Bryant and Royal. He reminded the Texas coach of their second meeting; this time Royal remembered the story, “Yeah, “he laughed. “I said you weren’t Mickey Mantle then.” “Well,” Mickey said with a sigh, “I guess I’m not Mickey Mantle anymore.”7
For Mutt and Mickey, the possibility of a football scholarship was merely a backup in case Mickey wasn’t offered a baseball contract. But in the pre-Jackie Robinson era, Cat and Willie couldn’t possibly think that a lucrative major league baseball contract was in Willie’s future. Had a football scholarship at a good school been a realistic possibility, it’s likely that the Mayses would have jumped at it before Willie committed to a Negro League team.
“It would appear,” wrote an early Mays biographer, that around the age of thirteen “football was the boy’s greatest love.” But the injury sustained by his friend Charley opened Willie’s eyes to the danger of football. “I’ve never minded physical contact,” he told Charles Einstein, “in the sense of being afraid of it—except with a catcher named Foiles, who used to play for Pittsburgh, and man, don’t go sliding into him. He was built like a brick wall. But I’m not one of those people who gets some special kick out of [contact] either.”‡
After witnessing Charlie’s injury, Willie quickly shifted his focus from football to round ball. As a sophomore forward in 1946, h
e led all-black high school players in Jefferson County in scoring and took Fairfield Industrial to a state championship. Had Mays been a couple of years older, he could have done what his future Black Barons manager Piper Davis and several other baseball players from the industrial teams did: played semi-pro basketball. Davis played with the Harlem Globetrotters for four years, alternating basketball with Black Barons baseball.§ Davis was very grateful for the $50 a game he could make playing for the Globetrotters.
Cat, though, saw from the start there was no future for his son in basketball. Aside from the Globetrotters, there were no professional opportunities for black men in the game, especially if they had trouble topping out a little under six feet. In his own way, Cat Mays was as single-minded as Mutt Mantle. If his son had a future as a professional in any sport, it was going to be baseball.
As it was played by white kids in Mantle’s Oklahoma, basketball was a more static and conservative game than the one played by black kids in Birmingham high schools. At the time, the white game was accurately described by one sports historian as “very much station-to-station, played below the rim. A player who scored in double figures, 10 to 12 points, was often a team’s.”8 The strategy was to constantly pass the ball around and around from player to player until someone was open for a shot—always a two-handed shot.
If you had the right players, though, the game could be played much differently. Commerce had one such player.
Mickey’s coach, Frank Bruce, was the first in his area to implement the fast-break game. Mickey’s pal Bill Moseley was the team’s center, and Mantle, a hot-shot guard—a point guard, actually, years before anyone used that phrase—didn’t hesitate to drive straight for the hoop if a defender challenged him. In one game, Moseley recalled, Mickey scored more than 30 points, a remarkable total for that era. It might have been interesting to see what would have happened if, in 1945 or 1946, Commerce High and Fairfield Industrial had gotten together for a game.
