A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (20 page)

What The Catch and The Throw did was take all the air
out of the 111-43 Cleveland Indians, one of the greatest baseball
teams ever to take the field. Not only did the Giants beat
Cleveland, they beat them in four straight. It was nuts. Between
1955 and 1960, Mays led the league in stolen bases every year.
While Mantle could have done it had his team let him and his body
had not denied him, Mays
actually
did it. He also led the
league in triples three of four years between 1954 and 1956,
including the 1955 campaign when he hit 51 homers, drove in 127 and
batted .319, an even better year than his MVP-winning 1954
campaign.

There was a list of Mays’s attributes, and nobody
else ever had a list like it. Only Ruth, who was not close to Mays
as a complete everyday player but had been a superstar pitcher,
offered a similar dimension that nobody else ever offered. Mays
played every day, all out, to the point of exhaustion (causing
periodic fatigue, dizziness and even pass-out spells requiring
hospitalization). Defensively, Mays was better than the previous
“title-holders,” center fielders Tris Speaker, Harry Hooper and Joe
DiMaggio. He was faster, played shallower, went deeper, had a
stronger and more accurate arm than anyone before or since. Only
Pittsburgh right fielder Roberto Clemente possessed an arm of
Maysian quality.

There was the combination of home run power combined
with the excitement of triples, hard-charging doubles,
league-leading slugging percentages and a consistently high batting
average (.345 in 1954, .333 in 1957, .347 in 1958). He beat out
infield hits, stole bases, took extra bases, and scored runs as if
he was a leadoff man. He played baseball with an infectious “Say
Hey,” cap-flying enthusiasm that has never been equaled.

Then, the Giants moved to San Francisco and it all
changed. Not statistically. Not on the field, although adjustments
had to be made. He continued to be a marvel, but The City did not
take to Mays. In New York, Mays was a kid who played stickball in
the Harlem neighborhood he lived in. The pictures of the nattily
attired Mays playing with local black kids is richly nostalgic. A
millionaire athlete of any color who exposed himself on the mean
streets of Harlem or the south Bronx today would be robbed and
maybe beaten, too, probably by local drug gangs.

But it was the “golden age.” The comparisons with
Mantle and Snider were endless and wonderful. The Giants were the
third wheel in New York. The Yankees, of course, were kings of the
sports world. It was the best of times in Brooklyn. The Giants had
their struggles, albeit with two World Series appearances and one
title. During the New York years, despite loyalty to the Duke, true
baseball experts knew that the real question was whether Mays or
Mantle was better. At that time, there was no margin to
differentiate them. For all of Mays’s tools, Mantle’s supporters
had a legitimate answer. Yankees World Championships could not be
argued against, either. Obviously, one player can only do so much.
Mick’s team was better, so he had more to work with, but those
rings mean everything.

As to why San Francisco was slow to accept Mays, this
is a hard question to answer. There are several possibilities. Mays
might have felt that racism was a part of it. As a black man from
Alabama, he knew racism up close and personal, yet in a strange way
it was clear and made life simpler. After his retirement, Mays was
employed by a Nevada gambling casino as their spokesmen, which
caused Commissioner Bowie Kuhn to declare him temporarily
unemployable by organized baseball.

Crowds would gather to hear his addresses. College
teams, Rotary clubs, conventions, groups of all kinds. It was a
disaster. Mays was filled with bitterness, possibly because of his
exile status at that time (the idea that a player of his stature
could be banned from baseball was abhorrent to his pride). The
audiences, invariably white and usually of a certain age, were
appalled at being lectured to by Mays. They wanted to hear about
The Catch, about “Mista Leo,” the duels with Don Drysdale and Sandy
Koufax, the Dodgers-Giants rivalry. Instead, they got a birds-eye
view of being black in the Alabama of 1948, filled with invective
and bile. There was none of the “Negro wisdom,” to coin a Hunter S.
Thompson phrase, that came from the wily gentleman Buck O’Neil, who
saw the same things but had the power of discernment and
understanding tempering his descriptions. Mays and the casino
thankfully parted company.

The rural South is small, life there relatively
uniform. Despite everything, there was a sense of familiarity that
people of all colors had with the region. San Francisco is a large,
cosmopolitan city, a glamour destination for tourists and
businessmen from all over the world. It was a place that prided
itself on its openness, its progressivism. Despite that, there was
racism different in form from Southern Jim Crow. It came with a
smile attached. Lew Alcindor (later named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) saw
this at UCLA in the late 1960s.

“In New York, where I was from, you knew where you
stood,” he said in
Sports Illustrated.
“If you ventured into
the Italian or Irish neighborhoods they’d attack you. They hated
your guts, but you knew it. In California these blonde guys would
flash me the Pepsodent beach boy smile then call me a n----r behind
my back.”

If Mays had high expectations that the West Coast
was a racial paradise, he quickly discovered it was not. He started
to be become bitter, but it was not just because of fan reaction.
He entered into a bad marriage to a woman named
Marghuerite Wendelle Kenny Chapman
.
Accor
ding to reports, Mays married her without fanfare,
announcing it after the fact when he entered the clubhouse one day.
His declaration was met by stony, uncomfortable silence. Rumors as
to why this was so vary. She was seen as a “gold digger,” a typical
breed of woman found in all professional sports circles. There were
other "circumstances" apparently involved that made many of the
Giants’ players, who now had to co-habitate with her new hubby,
uncomfortable.

The dynamic between women, players, their teammates
and even opponents can be a dicey one. Years later another
superstar baseball player decided to marry a girl who had worked at
a strip club, apparently sleeping with most of the National
League’s leading sluggers. The superstar reportedly got on the
phone, urging various big leaguers, “Say, dude, I’m gonna marry
this girl, so, uh, you know, as a favor to me dude, uh, would’ja,
ya know, please stop sleepin' with her?!”

This led to a foreseeable flurry of cell phone calls
to all National League cities, highlighted by variations on the
following: “Man, you wouldn’t believe who just called me, and what
he asked me to do . . . or not to do.” That marriage failed.

Former baseball player Jimmy Piersall once called
baseball wives, “A bunch of horny broads.” With time on
their
hands and their spouses on the road for a week to 10
days at a time, these oft-attractive young women can play around as
much as the men. One wife of a New York baseball player found love
in the arms of other New York baseball players when her man’s team
was traveling. The player loved her, requested a trade to a
one-team city in the hopes of salvaging the marriage, but she found
what she needed in the arms of “civilians.”

When Mays got to San Francisco,
his
marriage
was disintegrating. His son, like Jackie Robinson’s son, like
Mickey Mantle’s kids, was growing up in a pressure cooker of
expectations. None of these offspring would amount to a great deal,
at least by the definition of success of the day, or their parent’s
fans, and in some cases according to their own fathers. Mays had
ridden a smooth path of success and pagan adoration in New York
City, where his status among that rare breed known as the true New
York Sports Icon had been joyously attained. Now, he seemingly had
to start over; to
prove himself
to this minor league
village.

In their first four years in San Francisco, the
Giants usually contended. They never won. Their “close but no
cigar” status rubbed San Franciscans the wrong way, especially when
Los Angeles reached the Promised Land in year two (1959). Mays had
all the stats, the reputation, the records. In 1958 he batted .347
and led the league in stolen bases. The locals wondered why he only
hit 29 homers and drove in 96. He was actually booed. Cepeda was
voted the club's MVP in a vote of the fans.

When he got his power numbers up (40 homers in 1961,
100-plus runs batted in consistently beginning in 1959), they
complained that he did not league the league in hitting.
Fundamentalists complained about his “basket catch,” which taught
youngsters bad technique. With the team faltering under different
managers in pennant chases with the Braves, Dodgers, Pirates and
Reds, fans blamed Mays, who always seemed to reserve his best work
– Alex Rodriguez-style – for non-clutch situations. In the ninth
inning with the game on the line, they called him “pop up Mays.”
The team’s revolving door of managers was seen as Willie’s fault.
Southern-bred Alvin Dark, a teammate of May’s on the 1954 World
Champions, openly questioned his minority teammates.

Mays's assertion that racial animosity explained his
up-and-down relationship with San Francisco were bolstered when he
attempted to buy a home in exclusive Miraloma. No white neighbors
welcomed Mays and his family. In 1959 a bottle was thrown through
the window with a racist note inside. Mays sold the property.

In 1962, Mays recorded a single called "My Sad
Heart." The divorce had killed him financially. The press made the
most of reports of Marghuerite's . . . activities. He owed the
Giants over $65,000 in salary advances and was $9,000 in arrears to
the Federal government in back taxes. Mays had many "foolish
investments," including the proverbial "big car" that was the
stereotypical first act of blacks when they made money. Clothes,
vacations, fancy dinners, pool tables, drapes, carpets, wallpaper,
marriage . . . it all added up.

There was alimony, a second home in New York,
lawyers' fees, private detectives, income tax on salaries that
disappeared into the payment of debts. On April 17, 1962, his
estranged wife's attorney's hauled Mays into San Francisco Superior
Court. He stood with his attorney, Bergen van Brunt, while
Marghuerite's attorney levied a laundry list of expenses against
him. He already had lost custody of his son, Michael, then three
years old. Now he was hung out to dry by a greedy viper and her
snake-lawyer. It was all recorded in brutal detail by the papers,
adding to his humiliation.

It went on and on and on. The Giants played Los
Angeles that afternoon at Candlestick Park. At game time Mays was
still absorbing his punishment. Finally it ended. Mays left the
court facing possible bankruptcy and maybe worse. He drove to the
stadium, fighting tears, dressed in the empty clubhouse, and moped
into the dugout. Dark and his teammates knew what he was going
through and did not press him about arriving late. Mays sat with a
warm-up jacket on until Dark called on him to pinch-hit in the
seventh with two runners on base. He struck out. In the ninth he
came up with the tying run on, but popped out. The crowd booed him
vehemently. "Pop up Mays."

Mays lived a rock star existence. The people who
booed him begged for his autograph. He usually took room service.
Never a big partier or drinker, he avoided those scenes. He also
had to deal with the women who threw themselves at him. He had been
burned so terribly by the awful Marghuerite that he was totally gun
shy about ever finding love. One night on the road he got the
shakes and called Dark. Dark invited Mays to sleep in the extra bed
in his hotel room. That night he lay in the dark talking about
life. Sedatives and Dark's friendship helped him finally find
sleep.

Dark was big on treating everybody the same, but
Mays was an exception; his friend, ex-teammate, star, but most
importantly, he was going through extraordinary difficulties. Dark
allowed Willie to always travel first class. Nobody resented it. He
was quiet and did not let his teammates know the extent of his
troubles, but the papers and too many obvious events made it
impossible to keep under wraps. Fans, however, did not know the
full extent of it - or, if they did, they cared less and demanded
only greatness - treating him harshly.

"Once he got to know you, he was a terrific guy,"
said Billy Pierce. "Baseball was fun for him, the game was his
release. He just blocked everything else out."

When Mays felt like he could handle it, he would
invite friends over to his house for cards. He was color-blind
about his associations. Stu Miller, Harvey Keunn, and Jim Davenport
played pinochle with him. Mays kept the liquor cabinet stocked for
others, but he abstained himself. He did not drink or smoke.

But socializing was fairly rare. Mostly he lived his
life alone. It was "more than loneliness" wrote biographer Arnold
Hano. "It is withdrawal. Mays slipping out of the group and into
his own cocoon-like environment, where he is by himself, with
himself, and the rest of the world is nearly shut out."

Mays simply was a loner and always had been. His
parents had split when he was a child. His mother was dead and his
beloved Aunt Sarah too. When he visited Birmingham he lived in a
hotel instead of with family. Marriage was a money pit he was
trying to crawl out of.

Expectations for Mays went beyond mere spectacular
baseball exploits. In 1962 Mays was approached by a man named
Eldrewey Stevens in Houston. Stevens said he was the president of
something called the Progressive Youth Association, a local rights
organization.

Stevens observed Mays, Willie McCovey and Orlando
Cepeda approaching a segregated movie house. Stevens asked Willie
not to patronize it out of principle. Willie politely declined.
Cepeda and McCovey were willing to follow Mays's lead either way,
so they went in. Black civil rights leaders wanted Mays to speak
out as Boston Celtics' basketball star Bill Russell did, much to
the detriment of his popularity. Mays had enough troubles without
bearing that cross.