by Allen Barra
In 1988 filmmaker Dan Klores was shooting a video for the Paul Simon hit “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” which was to be included on Simon’s album Negotiations and Love Songs.† A major sports fan, Klores wanted to use a prominent athlete from each of the three major sports in the video; he finally settled on basketball player Spud Webb, football coach-turned-TV-commentator John Madden, and Willie Mays. He contacted Mays through the San Francisco Giants’ front office, and much to his delight, Willie said yes. Willie asked for $1,500, cash, to be given to him in a brown paper bag.
Klores met with Willie beforehand and was enthralled by Mays’s gossipy stories. “ ‘There was only three guys I ever saw who were faster than me going from second to home or first to home,’ he told me. ‘One was Willie Davis =of the Dodgers, the second was Vada Pinson of the Reds.’ Who was the other, I asked. ‘Mickey,’ he told me. ‘Man, when he was young he was faster than me. He was the fastest I’ve ever seen.’
“I was happy to hear him say nice things about Mickey. ‘Oh yeah, we’re pals,’ he said. ‘He’s always been great to me.’ ”
On the Friday before Labor Day weekend, as the film crew assembled for a Monday shoot at a schoolyard in Hell’s Kitchen, Klores was dismayed when Mays called to say he couldn’t make it. He offered no explanation.
Stuck for a replacement, Klores took a friend’s suggestion that he contact Mickey Mantle through a friend of his, Bill Liederman, at Mantle’s restaurant. The idea of using Mickey greatly appealed to Simon, a former high school baseball player and a lifelong Yankees fan. Mickey agreed to appear in the video but had the following stipulations. First, he wanted to be put up in a suite, which he was—at the Plaza. He wanted a stretch limo to and from the shoot, and he didn’t want to sign any autographs. Oh yes, and “he wanted $1,500 cash, in a brown paper bag.”
“I picked him up,” Klores recalled. “He was with Greer Johnson, who was handling most of his affairs by that time. And was he hungover. He was also in kind of a bad mood. It was the first week of the pro football season, and he apparently had dropped a bundle.”
The script called for Paul, a lefty, to pitch a Spaldeen to Mickey, who would be batting right-handed. Mickey probably hadn’t swung a stick-ball bat since his rookie year thirty-seven years earlier, when he’d played with some kids in the street in front of his hotel in the Bronx. He couldn’t quite get the hang of it. “He hit a high pop-up,” said Klores. “We edited it into a 565-foot Spaldeen home run.”
Klores remembered that “Mickey and Paul had a really good afternoon together.” He also recalled, though, that “Mickey wouldn’t sign any autographs for the kids who asked him.”
“These guys were my idols,” Klores told me, “especially Willie. After I met them, they weren’t my idols anymore. But, you know, I still love them.” I know exactly how he felt.
By the end of the 1980s, Mantle was tormented by blinding headaches often accompanied by anxiety attacks and hyperventilation. Though he admitted to a severe drinking problem in his autobiography, it’s clear he was not ready to admit he needed help. “In the last few years,” The Mick reads, “my drinking has been confined to social occasions. Merlyn has been highly successful in reminding me if I forget. As a matter of fact, if it wasn’t for her I probably would have wound up an alcoholic like so many other ballplayers who did come to a tragic end that way.”11 Actually, Mickey saw little of Merlyn by this time in their lives, and there was no question that he had been an alcoholic for years.
Some of his old friends were not so close as they had once been. He had cowritten a book with Whitey Ford, and the two were involved with a fantasy baseball camp for a while, but Ford was increasingly annoyed at Mickey’s irresponsible attitude—even when a friend was depending on him. John Lowy, a business partner in Mickey Mantle’s, his Fifty-Ninth Street restaurant at Central Park South, thought that Whitey “wasn’t a hanging-out buddy the way Billy Martin was, not in the years that I knew Mickey.”12
More devastating for Mickey was his falling-out with Billy Martin. The details are unclear, but Greer Johnson felt that Billy’s new wife, Jill Lowery, was trying to help Billy by screening out his old drinking buddies, which is ironic, as so many people close to Mantle felt for decades that Billy was the bad influence on him. Martin died on Christmas Day 1989 when he drove his pickup truck into a ditch. (Or perhaps he was a passenger—the details are still not clear.) Shortly before the accident, Jill Martin had arranged for Mickey to appear and speak at a roast for Billy. (It was understood that Mantle was to be paid for this appearance, but he agreed to do it for Billy at a reduced fee.) The two men had not spoken for nearly a year, but they hugged and chatted as if they had never been apart.
In March 1995, Lovell died, and Mickey went back to Commerce for the last time for her funeral. Mickey, the twins Ray and Roy, and Lovell’s other living children, Larry, Ted, and Barbara, laid her to rest on March 19 next to Mutt—the cemetery lot had been awaiting her for nearly forty-three years. After the service, Lovell and Mutt’s children posed for a final picture together, and Mickey told them, “Well, guys, I guess I’ll see you at the next funeral.” They probably all knew whose funeral Mickey was thinking about.
Mickey and Lovell were never particularly close. For years she had lived with her daughter Barbara in Oklahoma City. Mickey sent gifts and called her on her birthday, Mother’s Day, and, of course, Christmas. Aside from that, they had little to say to each other. She was a hard woman and lived a hard life, but whether or not Mickey was capable of appreciating the fact, she had been every bit as responsible for his success as his father.
Mickey spent most of his last years living in Georgia with Greer Johnson—there was no formal divorce from Merlyn. A few days after New Year’s in January 1994, Mickey finally admitted what everyone around him had known for years—that he was an alcoholic. He checked into the Betty Ford Clinic.
Throughout his treatment and recovery, he astonished friends and family with his cheerfulness, courage, and newfound compassion for others. After the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Mickey and fellow Oklahoman Bobby Murcer made appearances and signed autographs to raise money for the families of victims.
I saw Mickey and Willie together one last time in May 1995 when the two of them plus Duke Snider were presented with the “Mickey—Willie—The Duke” award by New York sportswriters. They were photographed for the last time with Snider, the three grinning with hands on top of one another’s. The sports historian Bert Randolph Sugar whispered to me, “Who do you think looks the worst in that trio?” I whispered back, “Mickey.” Sugar nodded. When I saw Willie in Birmingham eleven years later, his memory seemed to be slipping on a number of topics, but he remembered seeing Mickey that day. “It was the last time I saw him,” he told me. “He was still smiling and as nice to me as ever, but he looked bad.”
I remember exactly when I heard that Mickey Mantle had died. On August 13, 1995, I had gotten up early and driven from my home in South Orange, New Jersey, to the New York Giants training camp on the campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison. I was working on a profile of Herschel Walker for the New York Times Magazine and was about to knock on the door of head coach Dan Reeves. Walker cautioned me, “I don’t think you want to talk to Coach right now. He’s feelin’ poorly. He and Mickey Mantle were good friends.” I was dumbstruck. I had been listening to music on the way over instead of the radio. A couple of days later, I sat in front of the television all day, watching the funeral as Bob Costas gave his lovely eulogy and country singer Roy Clark sang his rendition of Charles Aznavour’s “Yesterday When I Was Young,” one of Mickey’s favorite songs. At the end of the service, I was surprised to find tears streaming down my cheeks.
Jane Leavy quotes a friend, Tom Molito, that “Mickey Mantle was not destroyed by alcohol. He was destroyed by celebrity.”13 Maybe, but alcohol got there first. Mickey was already practicing his drinking before he became famous. And Willie Mays, whose fame paralleled Mickey’s and of
ten equaled it, wasn’t destroyed by the spotlight.
After Mickey’s death—or at least after Joe DiMaggio died in 1999—Willie Mays finally became, without doubt, “the greatest living ballplayer,” as DiMaggio had once demanded that he be introduced at all public events. Willie also, finally, became the undisputed king of the autograph circuit.
Still, though, Willie was not content. “There was always something ill-tempered about Willie,” T. S. O’Connell, a collector and columnist (“Infield Dirt”) for Sports Collectors Digest, told me. “In 1995, maybe a month after Mickey died, I saw Willie at a signing event in the ballroom of the Statler Hotel across the street from Madison Square Garden. He started telling me how much he missed Mickey and how much Mickey had meant to him throughout the years. Then, maybe half an hour later, he looked at the price Mickey’s cards were selling for and blew up. ‘Damn! Why does his stuff sell for more than mine? I was better than him.’ I was kind of embarrassed. I wanted to tell him that maybe the price had shot way up since Mickey’s death, but I didn’t say anything.”
Arnold Hano, who had written the Sport magazine bio of Willie that thrilled me so much when I was a kid and who wrote A Day in the Bleachers, the second-best book about Willie (after Charles Einstein’s Willie’s Time), told me in 2011 that “it was sad to see Willie’s gleeful quality fade away as he got older. By the time he was thirty, he was an embittered young man, jealous of the endorsement money Mickey Mantle was getting, bitter that society still discriminated against him as a black man, and, I suspect, secretly bitter at himself for not having made solidarity with other blacks who were discriminated against. Now he’s an embittered old man. What else can I say?” Hano paused and said, “He was the greatest player I ever saw.”
Perhaps some of Willie’s longtime friends observing his bitterness failed to take into account that as the 1990s wore on, Mays had grown more and more isolated by the loss of friends and family. In 1997 he was dealt a double blow. In May, Piper Davis, the man who did more than anyone else to mold the teenage Willie into a big leaguer, died in Birmingham, just short of his eightieth birthday. According to Paul Hemphill, who was there, Willie did not attend the funeral but sent flowers. Mays was preoccupied by a tragedy closer to home. Mae, who was closer to him than any other woman in his adult life, was diagnosed with a form of dementia that was soon confirmed to be Alzheimer’s. She was not yet sixty. According to friends in the Bay Area, Willie devoted himself to caring for Mae and for his father in a way he had never done before. Cat died in 1999; he was eighty-eight. A couple of Cat’s old teammates from the industrial leagues flew out for the ceremony. Willie insisted on writing his father’s eulogy himself. With the passing of Cat, Willie was now alone, most of his ties to Birmingham gone.
It’s been said that baseball is the only thread that ties America together over three centuries. If so, as artist Thom Ross has discovered, it is a slender and fragile thread.
Ross is a Seattle-based artist whose passions are the frontier West and baseball. He re-creates events from both in installation art—life-sized re-creations of historical scenes.
In September 2004, Ross and his crew hauled a five-piece work to the site of the old Polo Grounds near West 155th Street and Eighth Avenue in upper Manhattan. Here they found a plaque marking the spot where the stadium’s home plate was. What they didn’t find was anything to commemorate the most famous event that happened there. They proceeded to step off about 460 feet toward the Hudson River, finding the approximate place where Willie Mays pulled down Vic Wertz’s drive deep into the Polo Grounds’ center field. In an empty lot behind an apartment building, the crew set up five painted plywood figures of Willie Mays depicting the five major stages of the play, from Willie’s pursuit of the ball to his stopping, whirling around, and throwing it back to the infield.
Ross was two years old when Willie made that catch. He heard it described by his father in a reverential tone when he was five and grew up in awe of a play he had never seen. At age twelve, he read Arnold Hano’s classic book on that game, A Day in the Bleachers, and became inflamed with the thought of capturing the moment in a work of art.
To Ross’s disappointment, although a few older men stopped, pointed, and smiled at the five Willies, none of the teenagers—most of them in NBA shirts—recognized the man immortalized in the artwork. The next day Ross and his assistants moved the exhibit to Central Park, where he had a permit to display it. The reaction was a little better, but still mixed. Some young boys in baseball shirts who knew the name Willie Mays were surprised to learn that he had played in New York. Then Ross staged a “guerrilla raid” to set up the figures in Times Square. “Most people’s response was appreciative but a bit puzzled,” Ross recalled. “I thought almost everyone in New York would remember Willie and The Catch, but it was more like one person in twenty. I thought I’d light a fire, but it was more like a candle in the wind.”
Ross spent more than $7,000 out of his own pocket to bring the installation across the country from his studio in Seattle to Coogan’s Bluff. Before he left New York, he contacted Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s office asking for permission to erect a permanent steel installation in the lot at 155th Street. He got no response.
Today Ross’s “The Catch” resides at the home of a friend, Rich Tarrant, in Vermont. Tarrant sets up the installation on his lawn every September, “in tribute to the great Willie Mays.” Tarrant said, “Reactions have been as varied as a honk of the horn as they drive past, to passersby stopping and ringing my doorbell to chat about Willie Mays, to a woman breaking down in tears on my lawn as she thanked me for installing it. When she saw the pieces, the memories of sitting on her mother’s lap watching Mays play came flooding back to her. Mays was her mother’s favorite baseball player.”
T.S. O’Connell saw a Willie Mays a great deal different from the one known to most sportswriters—one, perhaps, that many of us did not want to see. “Willie Mays the ballplayer,” he wrote in a 2008 column in Sports Collectors Digest, “doesn’t reconcile well with Willie Mays the grumpy old man. For several generations of fans, the image of the Hall of Fame center fielder is wrapped in a shroud of misty-eyed recollections of stick ball games in the streets of Harlem, his cap flying off wildly as he flashes along the base paths, or simply the grainy black-and-white footage of the greatest catch (and throw) in World Series history.
“For those same generations of fans, Willie Mays will always be the player who seemed born to play the game, the man for whom baseball seemed to be part of his nature. His instinctive abilities were legendary, perhaps even to the point of fostering the notion that everything came easy for him. His knowledge and dedication to the game he loved was similarly other-worldly; he would often in the early sixties suffer from exhaustion as he led his ball club through extraordinary battles with downstate archrival Los Angeles.
“Matching up all that with his 35 years of retirement can be difficult for modern fans who may only know him from a card show autograph signing. If the vast center field expanse of the Polo Grounds was the perfect showcase for the ‘Say Hey Kid,’ the autograph table in a hotel ballroom or convention center is seemingly the natural habitat for the Hall of Famer in his retirement years.”
But, wrote O’Connell, “it is widely thought within the hobby that once the baseball card boom took off in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mays was dismayed at what he thought was the disproportionate value collectors held for Mantle.”
Mickey’s signature went for a higher price than Willie’s, and when the two did an occasional show together, lines for Mickey were longer. “Mickey was very embarrassed about this,” said O’Connell. “I heard him ask a promoter at an Atlantic City show if he could make it into a joint Mantle-Mays event with a fixed price that guaranteed both of them would sign. This took some frantic last minute renegotiation, but that’s the way it was finally done. And Mickey lost some money on the deal because a lot of people there only wanted him.”
To be fair, O’Connell told me, �
��there were a lot of people there from the New York area after Willie and the Giants moved to the West Coast. They grew up with stories of Mickey and didn’t have the allegiance for Willie.”14
O’Connell sent an interview Mantle had done with Sports Collectors Digest columnist Rich Marazzi. “I never felt a personal rivalry while it was going on. Mays had some great statistics.… As for me, Willie and the Duke, Willie was the greatest. But there were four or five years though when I was better than he was.”15
I would see Willie again in 2008 when Bob Costas invited me to a taping of his HBO show, which, as it turned out, featured a special hour-long interview with baseball’s two greatest living players, Willie Mays and Henry Aaron. Something about Willie seemed different that night; he was jovial and outgoing, talking almost incessantly—much to the amusement of both Aaron and Costas. He emphatically denied that there had ever been any hostility between himself and Aaron, and with Henry smiling and nodding in agreement, who was there to say otherwise? And so history was rewritten that night.
Mays showed a touch of irritation when Costas talked about Aaron besting Willie over their respective careers by 95 home runs. “But he had much better ballparks to hit ’em in,” insisted a suddenly indignant Willie. “I must have lost a hundred home runs to my ballparks, especially that wind at Candlestick.” Again Aaron chuckled and made no reply.
