At the age of five in 1957, I discovered the game of baseball. How I came by this discovery I’m not quite sure. I was an only child so no older brother introduced me. My father (I learned years later after his death), described himself as the last kid chosen when sides were chosen and was the kid everyone argued the other team had to take. As a result, he had no interest in the game. I’m guessing it had to do with the presence of baseball on TV and maybe the influence of my friends. Living right outside of New York City, it came as no surprise that my affections should settle onto the New York Yankees. The Yankees of that period were in the middle of the greatest run of any baseball team in history. Between 1949 and 1964, they appeared in the World Series fourteen times, winning ten of them. It was very easy to root for them.
Having become a Yankees fan, my fondest affections settled on their best player, Mickey Mantle. There was something so right about Mickey from the number 7 on his back to the monstrous home runs that he hit from both sides of the plate. Whenever I would catch a game or part of a game on TV, all I lived for was Mickey’s at bats. If he got a hit I was thrilled but if he made an out, especially if it was a strike out, I was crushed. The outcome of the game was almost secondary to what Mickey did at the plate.
I’m not sure when I read the first biography of him but I’m quite sure it was a children’s book about him that I got out of the library. I gobbled up everything I could find about him. I learned about his hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma, his osteomyelitis in high school, his knee injury in the 1951 World Series and all the other details of his life and career. I studied his batting style and could imitate it. I began swinging imaginary bats both right and left-handed so I could be like my hero.
At the time, my friends and I did not understand why he batted left-handed so often (more right-handed pitchers) because he was obviously a better hitter right-handed. We would rail at him when he failed to live up to our expectations, especially batting left-handed. But at the end of the day, we forgave him and loved him with the idol-worship that only young boys have for the sports heroes.
I bought my first pack of baseball cards in 1960. (Don’t get me started on what became of them. That’s still a very sore subject.) I remember the ecstasy when I opened the pack and found a Mickey Mantle card! Talk about a card I would NEVER have endangered in a card-flipping competition. It was also the first year I ever went to a baseball game. My father and I went to Yankee Stadium and saw the Detroit Tigers and Yankees go into extra-innings with Johnny Blanchard winning the game with a single in the bottom of the fourteenth. But it all paled by comparison to seeing Mickey Mantle in the flesh. Sure, he was a distant figure from where we were sitting but it was still HIM! I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember what he did that day.
The next year, 1961, the Yankees were the greatest team I have ever seen play baseball. More important, it was the year of the epic battle between Mickey and his teammate Roger Maris for who would surpass Babe Ruth’s single-season home run total of 60. That summer at camp, my best friend and I made believe we were Mickey and Roger (guess who I was) when we played our whiffle-ball version of Home Run Derby (if it’s not a home run it’s an out). I knew all about Mickey’s many career injuries and I was devastated when in September, he had to drop out of the race because of a wound on his hip. The Yankees winning the World Series in five games was almost an after-thought after that season.
As the years passed, I knew I was getting older but somehow I could never believe that my hero was aging, too. Oh, sure, there were more injuries and more home runs and I realized that he couldn’t run as fast or throw as hard. But, hey, it was still The Mick, my hero! How could he be slowing down? Even when the Yankees had to move him to first base because he could barely run, he was still Superman…at least to me.
I’m not sure when I first learned that my hero might have had a drinking problem. I can’t actually remember ah ah-ha moment when all of a sudden the blinders fell from my eyes. It was more of a gradual process. But what did that matter? He still gave it 100% on the field. It was only later that I would learn about the days showing up so hung over that he could barely play. But he was STILL my hero.
After Mickey retired, my parents bought tickets for my dad and me to go to Mickey Mantle Day in 1969. Every time I see pictures or films of that day I swell a little with pride that I was one of those fans in the ballpark honoring MY hero. And for years afterwards I’d go to Old Timer’s Day just to be able to see Mickey on the field again.
It was in the 1980s when baseball and I had moved on from our innocence when I realized just how much of a problem Mickey had with alcohol. It was after Mickey Mantle’s restaurant opened in New York. Don Imus, who had the morning radio show on WNBC-AM, repeatedly referred to Mickey’s table where Mickey was drunk under it. (As it turns out Imus was no one to talk, being an alcoholic and drug user himself.) But I could no longer deny the truth that the man I idolized suffered from alcoholism and probably had throughout his career.
And when Mickey finally sobered up but had to receive a liver transplant after having destroyed his own from drinking, I had a crisis of conscience. How could I continue to love this man who had proven so fallible? How could I have defended him to friends and acquaintances as being the best player in baseball? Was there something wrong with me that I rooted for such a flawed individual? And when Mickey, in the last few weeks of his life, came clean and warned kids to use him as an example of what not to be, I had my answer. He was and would always be my idol, clay feet and all.
What prompted me to write this is that I just finished reading Jane Leavy’s biography of Mickey, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood. I have read as many biographies of Mickey Mantle as I could find. This one was very tough to read. Not only is it the most honest about Mickey’s failings as a player and a person but it traces his life through its end. While it conveys the many successes of his career, it shows him to be the flawed genius that he was. When I finished reading it I had tears in my eyes.
I have come to accept the fact that the man I have idolized from early childhood and who will always be at the apex of my pantheon of heroes was a very flawed individual. That doesn’t alter how I felt and still feel about him. If anything, his humanness makes him even more endearing to me. If I can grieve that had he taken better care of himself he might have had even greater successes and achieved even greater heights, I can rejoice in what he accomplished despite his flaws. In his poem, The Art of Catching Trains, Rod McKuen has says “Small boys need encouragement. The freight trains in their minds will only take them just so far. Be kind, for small boys need to grow.” This small boy did grow. But there will always be a special place in my heart for number 7. He will always be the golden-boy centerfielder who could do no wrong and will always be young and strong in my mind’s eye.
