Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  The sports press was pretty much split down the middle on the issue. Murray Chass of the New York Times boldly pointed out that Warner Communications had recently invested in the Pittsburgh Pirates and that three of the company’s executives had been either convicted of or pleaded guilty to stock-purchasing fraud, yet Kuhn had done nothing to block Warner’s purchase of a piece of the Pirates. Chass was suggesting that Kuhn’s actions banning Mays and Mantle indicated a double standard. At the Daily News, Phil Pepe, who was a good friend of Mantle’s and friendly with Willie, also took their side: “The real pity is that there are no jobs in baseball for Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays that can pay them the amount of money they are getting from the casinos.”5 Pepe, though, wasn’t being entirely honest. The truth was that Mays might have been able to handle several different jobs in Major League Baseball, but realistically, a job like the one at the casino—which involved mostly shaking hands, playing golf, and telling an occasional joke at a luncheon—was probably the only one Mantle was capable of doing at this point in his life.

  Predictably, the eternally crabby Dick Young, then of the New York Post, sided with Kuhn: “Mantle is not a baseball leper. He can visit his buddies here or anywhere in baseball. He can play in old timers games, same as Willie Mays.”6 Nonetheless, Mickey told friends that the banishment chafed him; off the record, he told people that he felt like a leper. And there was another issue that went unmentioned in the press: unlike Mays, whose gambling was confined to a game of pool or a round of golf, Mantle was a heavy gambler, particularly on college football.

  Early in March 1983, I was dispatched to Atlantic City for Inside Sports magazine to try to get Mickey and Willie together for a dual interview. This, not scoring a touchdown in the Super Bowl or hitting a home run to win a World Series game, was my ultimate sports fantasy. I touched base with Mickey at the Echelon Mall in southern New Jersey, where he was signing autographs. “Yeah, sure, day after tomorrow, right? Yeah, I’m on.” He was in a good mood and handed me a button from his previous Echelon Mall appearance. (I still have the button.)

  I saw Mays briefly at Bally’s; he was brusque and seemed distracted, but he was game: “Yeah, sure, I’ll get with Mickey. Will give me a chance to win back some of the money I lost to him on the golf course a couple of weeks ago.” (I hadn’t thought of that; maybe I could ask questions and record their answers while the two of them went head-to-head on the golf course. What a story that would make.)

  I was so close. But I couldn’t get Mickey and Willie together—for one reason or another—through 1983. The next year, I was promised by both that we’d get together for sure in the fall. It never came off.

  It wasn’t until eight years later, working with Marvin Miller on his autobiography, A Whole Different Ballgame, that I found out the details of what sabotaged my plan. Soon after Peter Ueberroth became commissioner in October 1984, he called the new head of the Players Association, Donald Fehr, and asked to set up a meeting with Miller, who, after all, had started the union. According to Marvin, “he asked to get together to become acquainted and to discuss ways to head off future problems.” At their first meeting, over lunch, Ueberroth raised the idea of lifting Bowie Kuhn’s ban on Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. Miller told him that he was enthusiastic about the idea and that it would be a huge hit with baseball fans everywhere.

  I found out about Ueberroth’s decision the day before I was scheduled to meet Mickey and Willie in Atlantic City, and when they canceled their trip to New York for a photo shoot, I knew I’d probably never be able to get them together in the same spot again. A few days later, I passed a newsstand and saw three smiling faces gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated: Peter Ueberroth, Willie Mays, and Mickey Mantle.

  The New York Mets had not given Willie a gift on the day he retired, and it took the Giants a long, long time to finally give him their own tribute. Their tardiness was an ongoing source of bafflement and irritation to Mays over the years. To be fair to the Giants, they had scheduled a Willie Mays Day a few years earlier, in 1979, but Willie had balked, asking to receive compensation for the extra seats he would fill that day. To be fair to Mays, his point was perfectly valid. The Giants weren’t selling out home games that year, and a Willie Mays Day could certainly have been counted on to fill Candlestick Park. To be even fairer, by one account Willie wanted the money, or at least part of it, for his Say Hey Foundation. In any event, for reasons that remain a mystery to this day, Willie Mays had to wait more than twenty-five years to have a day with the San Francisco Giants.

  The Mick, published in the spring of 1985, hit bookstores at precisely the right moment. Mickey had been almost completely out of the public eye for much of the 1970s, but the bad publicity—and then the good publicity—over his Atlantic City stint at the Claridge had put him back in the minds of fans who were now prepared to view him through the haze of nostalgia. Mantle had finally found a post-career job: being Mickey Mantle.

  In later years, sportswriters often quipped, with some degree of truth, that Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays “invented nostalgia”—which is to say, they were the biggest draws on the autograph circuit. The truth was that Mantle was far more in demand than Mays; no one could say exactly why, but by the mid-1980s Mickey’s rookie card was worth at least $30,000, while Willie’s sold at about $5,000. Still, there was no prospect more exciting on the autograph circuit than Mantle and Mays appearing at the same show. I saw them together in 1985 in Atlantic City, right after their reinstatement; it took me more than an hour in line to reach them, but I had no thought of not staying the course. When my turn came, I asked them to sign the full-page color photo of them that had appeared in the 1968 Esquire in which they interviewed each other. They laughed and giggled like schoolboys. “Man, who took that picture?” Willie asked. “I sure look better than you.” “Hell, you do,” Mickey told him. “I look great in that suit. Yours looks off the rack.” The photo now adorns the wall of the office where I wrote this book.

  Mantle’s new enterprise might not have been possible if he had not met Greer Johnson at the Claridge in 1983. A former elementary school teacher from Georgia, Johnson organized Mickey’s business affairs and fielded offers. After a short time, both proclaimed that they were in love. After managing Mickey’s business for a while, Johnson developed a good enough reputation to attract other clients, including Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Hank Bauer, and Bill Skowron. It didn’t take her long to see “a real big need to protect Mickey.… He was like a little boy to me, he was very naive and totally inexperienced when it came to business.” She was also more honest with him than anyone else had ever been: “When he’d screw up, and he did, I’d tell him. You know, if he’d been drinking and used foul language, I’d tell him. I wouldn’t pull any punches, and I think that’s what he respected and trusted.… Whenever he got out of line, whenever he did something, the person who felt worse was him.”7

  But even the money and freedom from financial pressure couldn’t relieve Mickey’s anxieties. At a 1986 card show at the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the great 1961 Yankees World Series champions, thirty-three of Mantle’s teammates agreed to appear. There was a ceremony the night before the signing, and by dinnertime Mickey still hadn’t shown. Allen Rosen (no relation to the Indians slugger and Claridge executive), who had put the event together, called him in his hotel room. According to Rosen, Mantle had a fit: “Fuck your mother,” he screamed into the phone. “Fuck your show, and fuck Donald Trump!” (Trump was among the guests waiting for Mickey to appear.) When he finally did show up, someone approached him, pushing a crippled child in a wheelchair. The boy wanted Mickey to sign a bat. Astonishingly, Mantle refused. He had a long-established rule that he wouldn’t sign bats. Sometime later, Bill Skowron brought him a bat that the other thirty-three Yankees from the 1961 team had signed. Mantle again refused to sign. Skowron, who had been buddies with Mickey since they broke into the Yankees’ farm system in 1950, was flabbergasted.<
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  Around this time, there was simply no anticipating Mantle’s mood and behavior at a given moment. He was visibly irritated when people came up to him, particularly when he was getting on and off a plane, to ask for an autograph. He had Greer Johnson carry a stack of autographed photos to pass out in these circumstances.

  There was another side of Mickey that no one wrote about and precious few were able to see. Bob Costas tells this story. “One night, in the late eighties—I don’t remember exactly what year—it was January and very cold. We had gone out to eat and were walking back to the Regency, where we were both staying. It was windy, and we had our collars up, but I noticed Mickey had a paper bag jammed in his pocket. He asked me if I’d walk a couple of blocks out of the way with him; it wasn’t the kind of night where you wanted to take a long walk, but Mickey seemed a little wobbly and I thought it best to stay with him. We got to Madison Avenue, and Mickey walked up to this cardboard box and rapped on it. This guy with a scraggly beard and a wool ski cap pulled low popped his head out, looking terrified. Then he noticed that it was Mickey, and he beamed, ‘Hi, Mick.’ Mickey grinned and handed the man his dinner. The homeless guy knew him. As we walked away, I thought that what was so amazing about this is that it could have happened only an hour after Mickey had told a stranger to go fuck himself for asking for an autograph.”8

  In August 1985, advertising genius George Lois recruited his old friends Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays for a USA Today campaign. Mickey and Willie, along with financial broker Charles Schwab, former Chicago mayor Jane Byrne, and TV weatherman Willard Scott, were filmed for a series of commercials celebrating the paper’s third birthday. All contributed their time for free. (“I told Mickey and Willie it would be great national exposure,” Lois told me.) In the TV spots, a grinning Mickey, his arm draped around a smiling Willie’s shoulder, droned, “I read it every day, just like my pal Say Hey!” After the shoot, Lois, Mantle, and Mays grabbed a cab to go out to dinner. When they pulled up in front of the restaurant, Lois hopped out and then, noticing that Mantle was having a hard time getting out of the backseat, extended his hand for support. To his surprise, Willie seemed to be having nearly as much trouble as Mickey, groaning in pain as he struggled to get out. Damn, thought Lois, who worked out regularly, I’m in better shape than my idols.

  In his $ellebrity book, Lois chose Mickey as his second favorite celebrity of all time, after Muhammad Ali. “I’m in awe of any man who can keep producing under the eyes of the world year after year. When he becomes a legend, like Mickey Mantle, there’s a truth to the legend and usually a decency in the man. The Mick was no braggart. He once told me, ‘George, when I was sixteen I was the best ballplayer who ever lived, and it scared me.’ Then he stopped for a moment and drawled softly, ‘But you take a guy like Hank Aaron—he’s twice as good as I ever was.’ ” Curious that Mantle would say that about Aaron instead of Mays.

  Lois saw Mickey at his best and worst, sometimes in the same day. One evening in the mid-1980s, Lois recalled, “I got a frantic call from his teammate, Billy Martin, begging me to collect Mickey at the bar at the nearby Pierre Hotel and ‘Get his ass to JFK’ where his concerned wife had booked a flight to Dallas so her philandering husband could be home for the holidays. I ran over to the Pierre, and sure enough, there was the great Yankee legend surrounded by adoring fans, charmingly unloading his repertoire of baseball stories—getting loaded. I pulled the tipsy Mickey off his stool and guided him to the checkroom to retrieve his suitcase. He peeled off a $100 bill to tip an attractive hatcheck lady. But she gave him back the hundred and handed him a blank sheet of paper and a pen. ‘Please, Mr. Mantle,’ she said, ‘I don’t want the money, but if I could have your autograph for my eight-year-old son that would be wonderful. His name is Mickey, and he idolizes you!’ Mantle would much sooner part with the hundred than sign an autograph, and he reached out … and fondled her! I reprimanded him, he wrote a lovely note to her son, and the bewildered young mom gave America’s superstar a kiss on the cheek. I was really pissed at his behavior as I grabbed his suitcase and pushed into the revolving door. I shoved it hard, following with his baggage. When I got outside, he was gone. Then I saw him. He was lying in the Fifth Avenue gutter, his cheek on the edge of the sidewalk, by the curb, with slush from a recent snowstorm on his face. I had pushed the revolving door too hard—he tripped on the way out and went into a dive, landing on his handsome puss. ‘Holy shit, Mickey,’ I said, leaning over him, ‘are you hurt?’ He sheepishly looked up at me and sweetly said, ‘F-i-ine place to be for America’s heeero.’ ” Mantle made it back to Dallas with a big Band-Aid on his cheek.9

  I once asked Lois who he liked better, Mickey or Willie. “That’s a tough one,” he replied. “I spent a lot of time with both of them, and I got to know Mickey very well. But it was easy to know Mickey. For better or worse, and often for worse, what you saw was what he was. He was transparent. Willie? I have enormous respect for Willie, but I can’t say that I ever really knew him. I don’t know anyone who really did. If Mickey was transparent, Willie was opaque.”

  Roger Maris died on December 14, 1985. How close Mickey and Maris were has never really been established. Mickey Herskowitz—who worked with Mantle on All My Octobers and with Merlyn on her 1996 memoir, A Hero All His Life—thought that Mickey “was closer to Billy and Whitey, but I don’t think Mickey had any teammate that he respected as much as Roger.”10 Mantle braved minus-eighteen-degree weather to go to Fargo, North Dakota, for Maris’s funeral. Afterward, Ed Hinton, a baseball writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, sat with Mickey and other members of the 1961 Yankees, including Ford, Clete Boyer, and Bobby Richardson. Hinton heard Mickey say, as if to himself, “I want to go back to Commerce, Oklahoma.”

  The Mick was a huge success and catapulted Mantle back into the public eye. He had been retired for more than seventeen years when the book hit the stores (aided, in large part, by a feature story and generous review in the same USA Today he had plugged for free on television).

  What, though, of Willie? Mickey evoked nostalgia in this period, but it was difficult to say what feeling Willie evoked. For black and white fans alike, a generation of more vocal, forceful, and militant black athletes made Willie’s story seem to be something from an earlier century. A friend of mine who worked as a publicist for Simon & Schuster told me that the sales figures on Mantle’s memoirs were what inspired Willie to get his story out and rekindle the love affair he once had with his fans. But Say Hey: The Autobiography of Willie Mays, cowritten with Lou Sahadi, quickly fizzled after it appeared in the spring of 1988. By the following year, stacks of copies had been remaindered. Part of the problem, no doubt, was that Willie couldn’t offer titillating details on his personal life like Mickey could. After all, there was no dirt to be had on Willie’s private life, or if there was, no journalist had ever said so or written about it. There were no rumors to dispel, no confessions to make, no forgiveness to ask for.

  Another reason, though, was the writing. Sahadi did a dutiful job and even got Willie to talk about some things from his childhood that he had never before revealed. But Sahadi did not know Willie like Arnold Hano and Charlie Einstein, the two men most responsible for creating Willie’s legend in print. Willie had long since alienated both men. (Years later, when we were both working for the Newark Star-Ledger, I asked Einstein why he hadn’t worked on the project with Mays. “Very simple,” he replied. “When I write I have to get paid something. I got more money writing My Life In and Out of Baseball with Willie back in 1972 than he offered me to do the new book seventeen years later.”)

  Beyond the flatness of the prose and the lack of genuine excitement in the recollection of the great baseball moments, there were some real problems with Say Hey that Willie never addressed. The book was dedicated “To my father, who was there at the start; to Leo, who was there when it counted; and to Mae, who was there when it mattered most.” On the following page, in the acknowledgments, Mae Mays was thanked again; so
was Carl Kiesler, a businessman who had helped Willie with numerous investments but with whom he would have a bitter falling-out just a short time later; and Piper Davis, without whom he might not have had a baseball career at all. Missing from the ranks were Sarah and Ernestine, who had raised him; any of the other old Black Barons who had sheltered the teenage Willie in the crucial years before he was signed by the Giants; Horace Stoneham, against whom Willie was perhaps still harboring a grudge over the 1973 trade; and surprisingly, Monte Irvin, who had practically been Willie’s big brother with the Giants.

  But what was really missing from Say Hey was Mays himself. Unlike The Mick, which plunged right into heartfelt stories of Mantle’s boyhood and his relationship with Mutt, frank admissions of his carousing with Billy Martin and others, and an honest account of his failures as a husband and father, Willie’s book had a remote, secondhand feel, as if he were describing someone else’s life—a life less interesting than his own.

  Also missing was an explanation of Willie’s position on the civil rights movement and why he had never made public statements in support of it. As a lifelong fan and a good liberal, I decided to give Willie a forum to explain his views. I asked my editor at the Village Voice about doing an interview; also an impassioned Mays fan, he said, go for it. Allen Peacock, the book’s editor, promised to get me some time with Willie after a signing at a Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side. When I finally sat down with Willie, he seemed exhausted and distracted. My heart pounding, I opened my copy of Say Hey for his signature. (I asked him to sign it for my father.) Then, determined to let him know I was on his side, I asked my first question: “Some people over the years have criticized you for lack of involvement in the civil rights movement. Could you set them straight on this issue?”

  Mays pulled his chair back from the desk and glared at me: “I don’t gotta tell you fuck about the civil rights movement.” He got up and walked away. End of interview. Stunned, shocked, I staggered out of the store. Other employees who had overheard Mays were all silent. As I stumbled down the street toward the subway, it came to me what the feeling I had reminded me of: it was exactly like the time, boxing in the Police Athletic League, when I was caught by a short left hook and knocked down for the first time. Once again, it seemed I had caught Willie Mays on a bad day.