by Allen Barra
Mickey’s younger brother, Ray, recalled an incident when he, his twin brother, Roy; Mickey; and Mutt were in the car, and his father and older brother began some good-natured needling about who was the fastest. Mutt pulled over to the side of the road and took off his shoes to race his son. Mickey left Mutt in his dust. (Ray didn’t mention whether Mickey removed his shoes too.)
For Cat Mays, the moment came when Willie was around sixteen, and playing in a game between TCI and another factory team whose name Willie could not remember—though he did remember what happened in the second inning of the game. Cat was in center, Willie in left. An opposing batter hit a sinking line drive between left and centerfield. Father and son both went for the ball; Cat yelled, “All right, all right, let me take it!” But Willie saw that the ball was sinking and cut in front of his dad to make a shoestring catch. “I knew,” he told Charles Einstein nearly twenty years later, “that I’d shown him up. And he knew it. I never apologized to him for making the play. He never apologized to me for trying to call me off. We both wanted the same thing—to get away from the situation where I had to play side by side in the same outfield with my own father.
“Because even the great Kitty-Kat was beginning to slow down, the same as his own son will slow down, and the only things worse than being shown up by youth is being shown up by your own flesh and blood.
“Because then you got to pretend you like it.”
It was the last time the Mays men would ever play together.
“All I had to do was let him have that baseball for himself, out there that twilight in left-centerfield. I could have said: ‘Take it, it’s yours!’
“But I didn’t, and I can’t buy it back.”24
* Somebody must have gotten the story wrong; if Mays ran for a conversion, it would have been worth two points.
† Woolard, regarded by some Commerce football watchers as “too good for the school,” turned out in fact to be just that. He went on to coach in bigger schools in Oklahoma and in his hometown, Lawrence, Kansas, where he became a mentor to quarterback John Hadl. Hadl played seventeen years for four teams in the American and National Football Leagues, eleven of them with San Diego, and threw a career 244 touchdown passes.
‡ Hank Foiles played eleven seasons, from 1953 to 1964, four of them with the Pirates, and appeared in 608 games. He is unremembered today except as the man Willie Mays didn’t want to run into.
§ A man named Bob Welch, who did promotion for the white Barons of the Southern Association, knew Abe Saperstein, the founder and owner of the Globetrotters, and made the connection for Piper.
‖ Surprisingly for someone who read little besides comic books, Mickey was one of the editors of his school newspaper, Tiger Chat, probably because “I knew so much about sports.” The teacher, a Mrs. Aldene Campbell, had enough confidence to send him to a competition for high school journalism students in Miami (Oklahoma). To both their surprise, Mickey came in second. At graduation, Mrs. Campbell gushed, “I always knew you could do it if you tried.” Mickey never found out whether she meant “trying to be a ballplayer or journalist.”
a He once told me in an interview, “One of the few things I really wanted to do as a big-leaguer that I never got the chance to do was throw a few pitches in a real game. I always thought that someday, when we had clinched the pennant early and were ahead in a game, say 9–0, that I’d have the guts to ask Casey to let me pitch. But I never did. Man, I’d a loved to have gotten two strikes on somebody and then come in with a knuckleball.”
b Oklahoman John G. Hall told me, “The only incident of note that happened in Commerce was when the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde stopped there in April, 1934, after killing two highway patrolmen in Texas.”
c Willie Patterson also recalled that Cab Calloway and Lionel Hampton also played at Bob’s, sometimes to white audiences. “See,” he told Birmingham historian Chris Fullerton, “what they did then, they would play that evening, they’d play for the whites. At night the whites that sat there had to go upstairs … the Negroes came downstairs.”23
4
Pass-the-Hat
On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson made his major league debut at Ebbets Field, Brooklyn, against the Boston Braves. The landmark event scarcely caused a ripple in Commerce, Oklahoma.
“You have to remember, growing up in Oklahoma I scarcely saw a black man,” Mickey said. “I knew I wanted to play major league baseball, but it didn’t seem at the time that what Jackie Robinson had done was going to make much difference in my life.”1 At age fifteen, it was just beginning to dawn on Mickey that he would get a shot at the big leagues, but in his wildest dreams he would not have believed that in little more than five years’ time he would be playing against Jackie Robinson in the World Series, and that Jackie would walk over to the Yankees’ locker room to congratulate him on a great game.
In Birmingham, at least in black Birmingham, the news was electric. Willie said in reflection, “It was the first time most baseball fans had heard of Robinson”—which was probably not true considering how much publicity Robinson had been receiving since Branch Rickey had signed him for the Dodgers organization more than a year before. “But we all knew who Jackie was. In fact, to us black ball players it seemed like a bigger breakthrough when, in 1946, he signed to play the Dodgers farm team in Montreal. That was organized ball. I mean, forget about the majors. No Negroes … had ever been in the minor leagues, had ever played any organized ball.”
If there had been any doubt, Willie decided at that moment that cleaning and pressing would not be his life’s work: “I didn’t have any heroes who folded underwear in a laundry.”2
To twenty-nine-year-old Lorenzo “Piper” Davis, one of the best all-around players in the Negro Leagues, the news of Robinson’s signing was bittersweet. His instincts told him that major league owners were not going to be offering jobs to dozens of black veterans like himself. They would be looking for young phenoms—perhaps like the son of his friend Cat Mays.
Piper Davis would soon become a key figure in Willie’s early development as a ballplayer. He was also the major force in black baseball in Alabama, and probably in all of the South. Davis was a great player, manager, talent scout, leader, and, after his playing days were over, oral historian of the game in Birmingham from the earliest days of the industrial leagues to the sad fading of the Negro Leagues in the late 1940s.
The son of a coal miner, Davis, as a boy, was obsessed with baseball. Like many young black fans in the 1920s and 1930s, he simply accepted segregation as an ugly fact and followed the fortunes of both white and black teams. He kept up with the white Barons by listening to the popular radio broadcasts of Eugene “Bull” Connor, who, by the time Piper was managing the Black Barons, would be the key figure in enforcing segregation in Birmingham. In a 1987 interview, Davis told me that his greatest thrill as a boy was seeing the 1931 Dixie Series duel between the Houston Buffaloes’ Dizzy Dean and the Barons’ Ray Caldwell at Rickwood Field. “I got my name,” he explained, “from the town where I was born, in 1917, Piper, Alabama … I don’t think you would find it on a map even today. It was a little coal-mining town. There weren’t but a couple hundred people there after World War I, and I bet there aren’t many more than that now.”*3 Piper attended Alabama State University for a year on what he called a “partial” scholarship, playing baseball and basketball, and thanks to the Harlem Globetrotters’ Abe Saperstein, he made some money playing semipro basketball. In 1947, at age thirty-one, he was both player and manager for the Birmingham Black Barons.
Davis played so much baseball as a boy that by the time he was in grade school he was already looking at the game as a profession. “I remember that in the heart of the Depression, about 1935, we were living in Fairfield—that’s real close to where Willie grew up—I played with an industrial team, TCI, a pipe and valve company and the same team Cat Mays played for.… There weren’t any Little League or Babe Ruth teams back then, and most of us—not just the black boy
s but most of the white boys, too—learned to play organized ball on company teams. Willie did, and when I met Mickey Mantle in Birmingham in 1967 when the Yankees came down for an exhibition game, he told me he learned his ball on a company team, too, for a mining company.” The most important connection Piper made in industrial baseball was Cat Mays.
In the summer of 1947, Willie was making good pocket money playing semipro ball. Mickey, at the same time, was on the cusp of organized baseball playing second base for the nearby town of Miami, a semipro amateur team. The difference between Mays’s and Mantle’s teams was that Mickey’s was organized: under an arrangement in which the players were not paid salaries—so that they officially remained “amateurs”—they were guaranteed a portion of the ticket money to cover expenses. With Willie’s team, it was strictly pass-the-hat, so the players got to take home a little cash.
The Miami team was the first organized ball Mickey had played since the Gabby Street Pee Wee League in 1942, and it gave him the opportunity to play the first really challenging baseball of his life.† It was also the first time that he wasn’t playing with his boyhood pals, and the first time he had faced players more experienced than he was. Some of Mantle’s teammates and many of his opponents in semipro were good enough to play for the Miami Owls, a team in the KOM League, so named because they were the first team in the area to play night ball. For the first time in his life, Mickey had to put up with arrogant, more experienced jocks. Some of the older Miami players, or so the story goes, would grab Mickey’s glove and toss it over the outfield fence. Mickey trained his dog (again, so the story goes) to crawl under the fence and fetch his glove—surely as Tom Sawyer’s dog would have done.
While playing for Miami, Mickey met Barney Barnett, manager of the Baxter Springs Whiz Kids, a semipro team. Mantle would recall Barnett as “a big old Irishman with a bald head, shiny red nose, and perpetual grin on his face. He loved kids, loved the game.” He had an endearing habit of calling everyone “honey” or “hon.” A friend of Mantle’s remarked years later, “Can you imagine him calling Mickey ‘honey’?”4
During a game against Baxter, Barney watched Mickey smash line-drive doubles from both the right and left side of the plate and, after taking a relay throw from right field, gun down a runner at home. Barnett, who had put in several years in mines as a ground boss, had seen Mutt and Mickey’s Uncle Tunney play for the Whitebird Mining team and knew the boy came from good baseball stock. Knowing something special when he saw it, he asked Mickey to join his Whiz Kids for the next season. Mickey didn’t hesitate to say yes.
The 1945 Commerce High School yearbook had Mantle listed among the baseball players for that season, but no accounts have been found of Mickey having played for the team that year. He probably tried out for the team and then changed his mind.
The league Barnett’s team played in (and which he’d helped start) was a cut above the baseball Mantle had been playing. Everyone knew that, through Barney’s connections, the Whiz Kids of Baxter Springs attracted scouts from professional baseball. There had been much talk when a player Barney had coached, Sherman Lollar, was signed by the Cleveland Indians back in 1943, and by 1946 Lollar had made his debut with the Indians.‡ Mickey knew the team was an important stepping-stone for him. As Dave Newkirk, a local boy, told John G. Hall, “The Whiz Kids were a way of life during those years. More of us wanted to play baseball for Baxter Springs than play football for Notre Dame.”5
On July 20, 1947, Mickey took his first at-bat in a Whiz Kids uniform. (If he had played for Barnett the previous year, when Barney outfitted his boys in uniforms purchased from the New York Yankees, he’d have been wearing Yankee pinstripes.) Barnett’s plan for Mickey was to turn him into a shortstop, but Mantle was not yet ready to play the position for the Whiz Kids—he would in fact never be ready—so Barney put him in left field. It was an inauspicious debut; he had just one single in five at-bats. Mantle played just three more games with the Whiz Kids that season and went hitless in his last nine at-bats, giving him an .056 batting average his first year. However, largely because of his reputation, he was asked to play in the Cardinal Junior League’s all-star game on August 1. He didn’t start, but he got into the game in the late innings, batted twice, and had a single, a hard shot between the shortstop and third baseman. The third baseman, from Liberty, Missouri, was future St. Louis Cardinal Ken Boyer.§
Mickey was discouraged; Barnett was not. The big leagues, Barney told Mickey, “may seem a million miles from here and out of reach for everyone, but if you work real hard, they won’t be out of reach for you.”6
In late August, when the season was over, Barney invited Mickey to join the Whiz Kids on their annual outing to see the Cardinals play in St. Louis, even though he had played only four games with them. Mickey drove there with Harry Wells, a man he had worked for, digging graves and erecting tombstones in a cemetery—backbreaking work, though some say that’s where Mickey developed his powerful back and shoulder muscles. Wells bought a red Mercury convertible and drove Mantle and three other Whiz Kids—Billy Johnson, Buddy Ball, and Jim Canega—to St. Louis for the game. Mickey vividly recalled “persuading Harry to put the top down. It was colder than Siberia, and Harry’s shivering at the wheel while the three of us are in the back seat, laughing our heads off. At the same time other cars are darting to avoid us because we’re chewing these big wads of bubble gum, then taking them out of our mouths and throwing them at the windshields of cars coming from the opposite direction on the old narrow highway going into St. Louis.”7
When they arrived at Sportsman’s Park, they saw something they had never seen outside any professional baseball stadium: lines of black fans waiting for tickets. The Cardinals would be playing the Brooklyn Dodgers that afternoon, and black fans had come to see Jackie Robinson. Just as they were in Rickwood Field in Birmingham, blacks were segregated at Sportsman’s Park, made to sit in the left-field bleachers. The only difference was that in St. Louis there was no chicken wire to separate black and white. Integration was moving along in baby steps.
The visiting Oklahomans were impressed by Jackie Robinson’s hustle and speed, particularly on a foul pop that Robinson, playing first base, nearly crashed into the dugout to grab. But afterward, when they rehashed the game, there was nothing said about the fact that, for the first time, they had seen an integrated baseball game. Mickey, not quite seventeen, would mumble to his friends that he was opposed to integration; the prejudice would fade away in less than a year.
In 1948 the Commerce Comet took off. In one game—no one remembers the exact date—Mickey slammed a ball to right field in Baxter Springs’ Kiwanis Park that landed in the Spring River, a blow of around 480 feet—or at any rate, that’s the story everyone told. One can practically trace the birth of the Mickey Mantle legend from that titanic home run. The only problem is that no one has ever been found who actually claims to have been there. A batboy named Guy Crow, who was later tracked down by researchers, said that Mantle did hit a ball that far in batting practice one day, “but it went in the river on one bounce.”8 Rex Heavin, another former Whiz Kid, later claimed that while he was pitching for the Baxter Springs Cubs, a sort of minor league farm team for the Whiz Kids, Mantle hit a ball off him during a night game that reached the river on one bounce. Whatever ball Mickey hit in that period, whether it reached the river on a fly or a bounce, it must have been prodigious.
Mickey most certainly did not do what he said he did in his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1974: “I hit three home runs that day—a couple of them went into the river, one right-handed and one left-handed.”9 As the man says in the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” John G. Hall, after examining all of the accounts, concludes, “At least one of the ageing witnesses claimed the ball bounced into Spring River into the mouth of a giant catfish, which then swam down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico and deposited the ball into the silt, where it produced hundreds of simila
r stories.”‖10 And all those stories, at one time or another, found their way into magazines and newspapers.
There is something Tom Sawyer–ish about hitting a baseball into a river, which is probably why Mantle remembered that accomplishment rather than the better-documented feat of June 13 when he hit three colossal home runs against the Columbus (Kansas) Lions in their home park. Perhaps, too, Mantle chose to forget that game because the Whiz Kids ended up losing in the tenth inning. Those who were there, however, remember not only Mickey’s performance but what happened after. After the final home run, a Baxter fan, according to local legend, pulled off his hat and started passing it around the crowd, and by the time it came back around it contained nearly $75. To put that in perspective, that was almost what Mutt Mantle earned in a month of hard work in the mines. Some of those who were there later told historians that the amount was $54—still nothing to sneeze at. When they gave it to him, Mickey later said, it was more money than he’d ever seen at one time in his life.
As would later happen with Willie Mays, the combination of money and baseball got Mickey into hot water with high school authorities. Word spread quickly of Mickey’s windfall, and the Oklahoma High School Activities Association notified Mutt that his son had, by accepting the cash, forfeited his amateur status and would be barred from playing high school sports. Mutt was forced to go to the state capital, Oklahoma City, to straighten matters out. The association relented, on the condition that the money be returned—an absurd request considering how difficult it would have been to round up all the spectators and ask them how much they had each chipped in. Mutt agreed, and Barney Barnett started a campaign and raised enough money to make restitution—or at least said that he did. Nick Ferguson later said, “Mickey got to keep the money, but Barney made it look good on paper.”11
