by Allen Barra
“Mays simply slowed down to avoid running into the wall, put his hands up in cup-like fashion over his left shoulder and caught the ball much like a football player catching leading passes into the end zone.”3
The Catch transcended baseball. Over the years it has lived on. In football, whenever a receiver makes a long, over-the-shoulder catch, you hear the commentator say, “That was a Willie Mays catch,” possibly to many young fans who aren’t entirely sure what that means. Let me make one point. There is an enormous difference between any football catch of that sort, no matter how sensational, and the one Willie made in the 1954 World Series, and it is this: in football, the receiver always knows where the ball is supposed to be going.
Which makes so much of what has been written and said about this play over the years, much of it by Willie Mays himself, a lie. Somehow it has become acceptable for old-timer sportswriters and ballplayers to pop up every few years with a story about a play they saw Willie make that was somehow better than the Vic Wertz catch. This is a lie if they’re talking about the entire play—Willie’s astonishing stop, whirl, and throw, which kept Al Rosen, who was on first, from advancing to second and Doby, who was on second, from going to third and then home. (Against a center fielder with just an average good arm, Doby could have scored standing up, as shortstop Alvin Dark’s throw would have been as far as the average center fielder’s throw on a normal fly ball.)
But it is also a lie even if they’re just talking about The Catch. I’ve seen a couple of these other great catches on tape, and they are indeed incredible. You can go online and listen to the great Ernie Harwell talk about a game at Pittsburgh when Rocky Nelson hit a screaming line drive between left and center and Willie, diving, knew he couldn’t make the play with his glove and caught it with his bare hand. But I can’t imagine where the ball could have been hit that Mays could not have backhanded it with his glove. The whole story sounds like one of those tales of Davy Crockett killing both a bear and a panther by shooting a lead ball into a rock between them, splitting the bullet—something like that. (Whatever really happened, the Rocky Nelson story has a great kicker. In the dugout, an excited Willie found his teammates giving him a cold shoulder, pretending not to have noticed his amazing play. Hurt, Willie walked over to Leo, who was standing at the end of the dugout, and said, “Here, Mr. Leo. Didn’t you see? I just made a great play!” Durocher, in perfect deadpan, replied, “Sorry, Willie, I was in the can. I missed it. Could you do it again next inning?”)
Then there was the spectacular catch on Cincinnati’s Bobby Tolan in 1971, where Willie leapt several feet against a wire fence, crashing into teammate Bobby Bonds, to steal a home run from Tolan. You can see this one online too, and it will take your breath away. You can also see the marker on the fence behind Mays and Bonds that says 380 feet.
The difference between The Catch and those—excluding the obvious fact that it was made in the World Series under tremendous pressure—is that Mays may have been 450 feet or more from home plate, and most important, he had his back to home plate. For the last twenty feet or so of his run, he did not so much as glance back to see where the ball was.
The Giants went on to sweep the Series in four games, and afterward, of course, some said they were the better team all along (if only because they had Willie Mays). The Giants, however, were not a better team than the Indians and had no business beating them. But then, the Indians, despite having won 111 games, were probably not better than the Yankee team they’d beaten for the AL pennant.
Willie won the National League’s MVP Award, though his final statistics weren’t that much better than Duke Snider’s. Snider batted .341 with 40 home runs. Mays batted .345 (to lead the league) with 41 homers. Snider had an on-base percentage of .427 and a slugging percentage of .647; Willie’s were, respectively, .415 and .667, the latter the best in the NL. But it was recognized that Snider played his home games in Ebbets Field, a much better hitter’s park than the Polo Grounds, and besides, the Giants won the pennant. The next spring, according to Arnold Hano, to get one Willie Mays card “cost two Duke Sniders and three Mickey Mantles.”4 It would take nearly forty years for that ratio to reverse itself.
From the first game of 1954 through the final game of the World Series, New York had been on fire with Willie Mays love—though perhaps some parts of New York more than others. Expressions like “Safe as a Willie Mays triple”—Willie led the league that year in triples with 13—were common. In the off-season and over the winter, fans continued to bask in the glow. Over the winter, a black vocal group, The Treniers, released a song they had recorded late in 1954, “Say Hey: The Willie Mays Song.”
The Treniers’ song was produced by a young arranger named Quincy Jones, who made the unmusical but commercially shrewd decision to use Willie himself as a backup vocalist. The lyrics, by Jane Douglass and Dick Kleiner, happily reviewed Willie’s recent history:
When Willie served his Uncle Sam,
He left the Giants in an awful jam;
But now he’s back, he’s Leo’s joy,
And Willie’s still a growing boy.
The song was practically unheard by white listeners until it was used by Ken Burns in his 1994 documentary Baseball.
In the off-season, at his famous bar-restaurant, Toots Shor would tell anyone who listened, “I gotta start learnin’ how to be a Giants fan.”5 But Toots was a Yankees fan at heart. Before Mickey and Merlyn went back to Oklahoma for the holiday, they stopped by Toot’s for dinner. “Ya crumb bum,” said a beaming Toots, patting a grinning Mickey on the cheek. “Ya lettin’ that Giants kid steal all the thunder in this town. The Yankees gonna win the pennant next year? Ya gonna lead the league in home runs?”6 The answer to the first question was yes, and the answer to the second question was yes—and also in triples, walks, and on-base and slugging percentage.
Bernard “Toots” Shor had come to New York in 1930 from the mean streets of South Philadelphia. The only one who called him Bernard was his mother, and only for a few years; she was killed when he was fifteen when a car jumped the curb and struck her as she sat on the stoop in front of their Wharton Street brownstone. His father never recovered and committed suicide a few years later. The nickname “Toots” was a present from his aunt—short for “Tootsie.” Perhaps, like the father in the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue,” she knew that with a name like that, Bernard would have to get tough or die.
He got tough. In the waning years of Prohibition, he hooked up with a well-known New York bootlegger named Billy LaHiff, who gave him his first job in New York as a bouncer. He was soon promoted to manager. If Shor seemed like a character out of a Damon Runyon story, he missed being one by only a few years. The middle-aged Runyon spent quite a bit of time in LaHiff’s and introduced Toots to the stars of the New York demimonde, including such luminaries of the Italian, Jewish, and Irish underworld as, respectively, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Owney Madden.
In 1949 he opened his own place, Toots Shor—that was the club’s name, just plain Toots Shor—at 51 West Fifty-First Street. For the next ten years, Toots Shor was New York. In 1957, when the greatest of all New York noir films, Sweet Smell of Success, was filmed, Tony Curtis’s parasitic publicist, Sidney Falco, goes searching for Burt Lancaster’s ruthless gossip columnist, J. J. Hunsecker, and finds him at Toots’s saloon. That’s what Toots preferred to call it—not a “restaurant” but a “saloon.”
To paraphrase Claude Rains in Casablanca, everyone came to Toots Shor. Joe DiMaggio, of course, was a regular. So were Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason, both Shor cronies.† All were treated with rough good humor, but none were shown deference. When Louis B. Mayer flew in from Hollywood, he was miffed about having to wait for a table. “I trust the food will be worth all the waiting,” he said indignantly to Shor. “It’ll be better,” Shor replied, “than some of your crummy pictures I stood in line to see.” Mayer laughed, and the two became pals.
One remarkable evening Supreme Court justice Ea
rl Warren, the country’s highest-ranking judge, glanced across the room and saw Frank Costello, the most powerful figure of the New York mob, smiling and tipping his glass to him. Warren nodded and smiled back. On another memorable occasion, at least according to legend, two of America’s greatest prose stylists were introduced when Toots said to Yogi Berra, “I want you to meet Ernest Hemingway, an important writer.” Yogi, so the story goes, replied, “What paper you with, Ernie?”
Naturally, the New York Yankees, particularly Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Billy Martin, were among the “crumb bums”—Shor’s term of endearment for his pals—who showed up almost nightly when the team was in town. Sometimes wives would be in attendance; a doelike Merlyn often smiled and gazed silently with amazement and admiration as America’s greatest celebrities lionized her young husband. Sometimes the unholy trio would show up stag—though never, never with women not their wives, an indiscretion Shor frowned upon.
In one of the first episodes of The Sopranos, Tony’s daughter, Meadow, chides him at the dinner table for being out of date. “Daddy,” she says, “it’s 1999.” He tells her: “Out there, it’s 1999. In here, it’s 1954.” In Toots’s saloon, it was always 1954. In everyone’s memory, the air was ripe with a complacent, confident America living the good life in the early Eisenhower era. Most of the clientele were men, everyone was well dressed, no one took himself too seriously, and no one would think of being crass enough to ask Mickey Mantle for an autograph.
In October 1954, Willie Mays, Monte Irvin, and several members of New York’s first integrated championship sports team came to Toots Shor. Toots greeted them with enthusiasm. Though the saloon had few black customers, Toots Shor was one of the few nightspots in New York where there was no color line. Former heavyweight champion Joe Louis, the most famous black man in America, was a frequent guest, as was welter- and middleweight champion Sugar Ray Robinson. It was there that Mickey saw Willie for the first time since their meeting at the 1951 World Series. “I was happy for him,” Mantle recalled for me in 1982. “He seemed just like a kid. He looked as happy as I felt in 1952 when we won. But I also felt a little strange. I couldn’t get out of my head that, ‘Damn, we won 103 games, they won, I think 95 or 96. [It was 96.] Maybe it should have been us playing them in the World Series that year. Anyway, it was the first year that we didn’t win, and it just didn’t feel right. It was really strange to be congratulating someone else.”
Mickey remembered something else about Willie. “It seemed to me that he felt a little strange too. He didn’t drink, which Toots had a lot of fun kidding him about. He stood around with a big glass of Coke and ice, smiling but not saying a whole lot.” In fact, only a few days before, Willie had gotten sick in the visitors’ clubhouse in Cleveland when the Giants had won the fourth game of the World Series. He had drunk just one glass of champagne, the first alcohol he had consumed since Cat had forced him to drink hard liquor back in Fairfield. In that one night at Shor’s saloon, Mickey consumed more alcohol than Willie had up to that point in his life—possibly throughout his entire life.
During the 1950s and for at least a while into the next decade, black sports heroes relaxed in a world that Mickey and his Yankees teammates could not know. Birdland, at Broadway and Fifty-Second Street, a nightclub where Willie and his friends often went to hear musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell, was open to whites, but country boys from Oklahoma whose musical interests ranged from Bob Wills to Hank Williams didn’t go there.
A spot more frequented by black celebrities was Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, located on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st Streets. Nearly a block long, the club was noted for its red-carpeted lounges and mirrored wall panels, and in the early fifties it became one of the first racially integrated clubs in New York. It called itself “The World’s Finest Ballroom.” Its nickname was “The Home of Happy Feet”; the dance floor took such a pounding from the hundreds of patrons every week that the club’s owner, Mo Gale, who was Jewish, and manager, Charles Buchanan, who was black, liked to tell first-time visitors that it had to be replaced at least every three years.
The Savoy Ballroom was the inspiration for numerous black clubs around the country, including one in Birmingham that Willie knew very well, the Little Savoy Café on Seventeenth Street in the Fourth Avenue district, the undisputed center of black cultural life in the city. Harlem’s Savoy was probably the most popular nightspot for black luminaries of the sports and entertainment worlds, featuring not only great solo artists but entire big bands. On May 11, 1937, the famed Chick Webb vs. Benny Goodman Battle of the Bands—the first major performance by black and white bands—took place there before a crowd of four thousand.
It was a natural meeting place for black Alabamians when they came to the big city. Monte Irvin recalled that Willie’s New York friends, most of them black players on the Giants and Dodgers, gave a party for him there after his return from the Army in 1954. Later that year, Irvin gave another party for Willie in one of the Savoy’s private rooms, where he was presented with one of his many postseason awards. Guests included Frank Forbes, Sugar Ray Robinson, and singer Billy Eckstine.‡ All were eager to shake Willie’s hand. It simply wasn’t possible in 1954 America for a young black man to have climbed any higher on the social ladder than Willie Mays had.
The Giants’ paternalistic attitude toward Mays intruded itself into every aspect of his life. Horace Stoneham thought that the postseason banquet circuit was one of the worst things for a player’s waistline as well as his ego; someone suggested that to keep Willie sharp—he had, after all, played just two seasons of professional ball after losing nearly two seasons to the Army—they should have him play winter ball.
The Santurce, Puerto Rico, team Mays played for was managed by Herman Franks, who would someday manage Willie in San Francisco, and it was stocked with enough first-line talent to beat most major league squads. Prominent among them were a young outfielder from the Pirates organization named Roberto Clemente, who would make an inauspicious debut that season, batting just .255 in 154 games, and an overweight youngster named Orlando Cepeda, whose father had been a great Puerto Rican star. Also on the roster was a teammate of Willie’s from the Giants, Ruben Gomez, who had won thirty games over the previous two seasons.
Mays dominated the league, hitting nearly .400, and was named the circuit’s MVP. But a silly incident in January rubbed just a little gloss off Willie’s halo. On January 11, Clemente, taking a break in batting practice, left the cage to get a new bat. Gomez, a fair hitting pitcher, jumped in and yelled to Milton Ralat, the batting practice pitcher, to toss him a few until Clemente got back. Willie was scheduled to hit next. Ralat, apparently not wanting to offend either Clemente or Mays, told Gomez that he wouldn’t throw to him, and Ruben, either sulking or feigning offense, sat down on home plate. Mays stepped into the cage, moved over to the right side, and yelled for Ralat to pitch to him; Willie responded to his pitch with a hard one-hopper that struck Ralat in the shoulder. (Why there wasn’t a screen to protect the BP pitchers wasn’t explained.)
What happened next had to be pieced together from several accounts. Ralat apparently cursed Mays—why isn’t clear, as Willie was simply doing what he was supposed to do when Ralat pitched to him—and Mays, reacting immaturely, made a move toward the mound. Ralat, who also should have known better, moved toward Mays. Meanwhile, Gomez, still holding his bat, jumped up from home plate and moved toward the team’s star player. Gomez later said that he wanted to prevent a confrontation between Mays and Ralat and simply forgot to drop his bat. When Willie saw Gomez approaching, bat in hand, he turned and faced off, dropped his bat, and threw a punch, a short right-handed shot, at Gomez. If Willie had used his bat, or Gomez had used his, the story might have been tragic instead of farcical. When Herman Franks jumped in to separate them, Willie is supposed to have said, “Are you on the Puerto Ricans’ side too?”
More than likely it was Gomez who passed Willie’s remark on t
o the local reporters. The fans did not appreciate his comment, and the next day the man who had been the most popular visitor to Puerto Rican baseball since “the Great DiMaggio” was booed loudly when he came up to the plate. Three days later, Willie, telling reporters he had bruised his knee, went back to the States.
The participants played down the skirmish, and the pro-Mays New York press, anxious to preserve Mays’s golden reputation, played along. Whatever really happened, Gomez pitched seven more seasons in the big leagues, and he and Mays got along just fine.
“I should have guessed that the 1955 season would have a tricky ending for us,” Mickey Mantle told Mickey Herskowitz in All My Octobers. “It was the year Damn Yankees become one of the big hit musicals on Broadway.”7 The Yankees had come to look upon the World Series as their birthright; during salary negotiations, management practically argued that their World Series check was not a bonus the players earned but a part of their salary. Oddly enough, just about the only Yankee to see through this bit of sham was the squat catcher with the clownish public image, Yogi Berra, who proved to be a tough negotiator with general manager George Weiss. Early in his career, when Weiss argued that Yogi’s $5,000-plus World Series share should be considered part of his compensation, Berra shrewdly replied, “I had something to do with that.” (Yogi got most of the raise he asked for.)
It seems absurd in retrospect, but Mickey, by 1955, had not yet reached the level of the top salaried players. His salary for that year was just $17,000; Willie signed for $25,000 that year. With Patterson handling his deals, however, Mickey brought in a steady stream of cash endorsements. There’s no way of knowing the total precisely, but his endorsement deals surely exceeded his salary, and because he was white, they were worth several times what Mays could get. Nevertheless, money was still tight for Mickey. Back in Commerce, he built a fine house for his young family at the cost of nearly $16,000 and also bought a brand-new Lincoln, but he might not have been able to afford both purchases if Merlyn’s father hadn’t owned a lumberyard and given him a break on building materials.
