The Last Boy (20 page)

He meant Martin, of course, whose managerial afterlife required kicking a lot of sand at home plate and in sand traps. Mickey played a lot of golf, too, chiefly at the swank Preston Trail Golf Club in Dallas. Now he was getting paid to do what he did every day. Every morning he checked the box score the way he always did and waited for a game the way he always did. “Get up at six
A.M.,
get the paper, check the score, see if Billy got fired. Call the office to see what’s going on. Go to the office ’til noon to see what’s going on. Go to Preston Trail, have lunch, play golf, go home.”

There was no shortage of playing partners. But he cleared his schedule when Martin came to town. “Billy called in Texas to play golf. This was Friday, just before he went to the ballpark and got kicked out and suspended. He said, ‘Let’s play golf tomorrow.’ So I go to Preston Trail at nine
A.M.
Everybody tees off. I’m sitting up there reading the paper, watching the TV. Twelve o’clock, he never has shown up. I never have heard from him since. I finally went out and hit some balls.”

“Sounds like Billy,” somebody said.

Mickey’s third shot hit the green and his mood lightened. “Hey, did ya hear
Steinbrenner gave Yogi a new million-dollar contract?” He waited, lining up his putt and the punch line. “Dollar a year for a million years.”

The tongue-tied boy from Commerce, Oklahoma, had perfected the patter. It is an acquired skill, a kind of celebrity ventriloquism. Mickey had learned to crack wise in measured morsels of sound for the amusement of unctuous strangers. But it was hard to maintain good-ol’-boy bonhomie in the face of an Arctic spring gale.

“You know Bob Cousy?” one of the high rollers asked on the fourth tee. “Well, I’ve played golf with him. And Hawk, Hawk Harrelson. I’ve played with him, too.”

“Oh,” Mickey said, shivering. After nine numbing holes, he hung a right and detoured off the course. The caravan came to a halt at the clubhouse door and Mickey made a quick getaway. When he returned some ten minutes later, he seemed disappointed that we were all still there. “I was hopin’ somebody would call it off while I was inside.”

There was no reason he had to play the entire round, except that the press release promised he would. The cameramen had all the footage they needed after the first hole. But to quit would have been to admit that the whole thing had been orchestrated for the benefit of thirty seconds of airtime. The solipsistic logic of Media Day dictated that he play on. The thermometer on the clubhouse wall read 37 degrees.

My teeth were chattering. Mickey noticed. “Can’t we get this girl a
fuckin’
sweater?” he said. “She’s gonna
fuckin’
freeze.”

A sweater materialized. It reached my knees and warmed my heart. He asked if I wanted to ride shotgun on the back nine.

Turning the cart into the wind, he floored it, zooming over a wooden bridge at the eleventh hole, heading straight for a water hazard, with a parade of hard-charging media types following in his wake. Just shy of the water, he made a hard left, looking back over his shoulder with glee as the press detail scrambled to stay out of the drink.

Recklessness was always part of his charm, his cheerful, who-gives-a-fuck élan. But with each increasingly precarious turn threatening to upend the cart, with every vicious twist of his lower body as he swung through the ball, his limp became more pronounced and the consequences of his wildness more patent. He never did learn to cut down on his swing.

“Here, feel this.”

He took my hand and placed it on the most famous knee in baseball history. It felt like jelly. “There’s a ball rolling around in it, a calcium deposit. When it gets caught…” He shrugged. “I’ve got no cartilage. So when I swing…”

He moved his hands through an imaginary plane. “They get stiff when it’s cold and damp, stiff and sore. It’s like a real dull toothache. That’s the way it is all the time when I play golf.”

“When was the last time they didn’t hurt?” I asked.

“When I was eighteen.”

The doctors were recommending knee replacement. “I’ve been dreadin’ to do it. I didn’t want to have any more operations. I thought I’d be dead by now.”

By the seventeenth hole, he was playing polo with his golf ball, swooping down on the green with all the horsepower the battery-powered cart could muster, and using his putter as a mallet. As he and Dougall approached the eighteenth tee, a well-nourished seagull unloaded on the hotel executive. “That’s par for this whole day,” Mickey said.

He limped off the course with a low score of 79.

His chest hair defrosting in the limousine, high roller Bill offered an encomium to Mutt Mantle. “Coming from a fan’s opinion, the opinion of people about you and your relationship with your dad, which was very, very strong…” He paused, trying to regain a grammatical foothold, and took another sip of vodka. “You can name one thousand other ballplayers, and the association does not prevail which it does here, father and son.”

“That’s all he lived for, was to see me make the major leagues.”

“How old were you when he started you?”

“From the time I was four or five years old. He named me after Mickey Cochrane before I was ever born.”

“Is it true he took twenty-two dollars out of his paycheck to buy you a Marty Marion glove?” I asked.

“Yeah, and he only made thirty-five dollars, too.”

“You must miss him,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. He died my second year with the Yankees. He never did get to see me get that good, but I think he knew I was going to.”

Mickey dedicated
The Quality of Courage
, a collection of athletic encomiums
fashioned on John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
Profiles in Courage
, to Mutt: “the bravest man I ever knew.”

I bought it when it came out in 1963. “I read it over and over.”

“It was kind of about my dad, people he admired and people I learned to admire later on.”

The people his dad admired—posthumously selected by Mickey’s ghostwriter, Robert Creamer—included Jimmy Piersall, Ted Williams, Red Schoendienst, Jackie Robinson, Nellie Fox, and Roger Maris, who played his first game in the majors five years after Mutt’s death. In deference to Mutt and the willing suspension of disbelief, Billy Martin didn’t make the list. The putative author expressed enthusiasm for the cash advance and exerted editorial control over only chapter 1, the one about his father.

I asked what kind of ballplayer Mutt had been.

“My dad was pretty good, but there was no way to judge because he never did play pro ball. But everybody tells me he was the best semi-pro player in Oklahoma.”

“Good enough to play in the majors? As good as you?”

“Shit, no. I could outrun him. Had a better arm. Nobody was better ’n me.”

He briefly considered the rhythm of his given name, the syllables as smooth as river rocks, the best baseball name ever. “My dad named me Mickey Mantle. It sounds like a made-up name.”

A stage name, and Mickey had gotten good at acting the part. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “It’s amazing my name’s been as good as it has been. When people think of Mickey Mantle, they think of Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. That shit.”

On opening day in the nation’s capital, Mantle relocated two Camilo Pascual fastballs beyond the center field fence in Griffith Stadium—past the flagpole, over the thirty-one-foot wall and into the boughs of the beloved backyard tree that caused the ballpark to be built around it. The first of the two gargantuan left-handed efforts sailed over the tree and landed on the roof of a house beyond the 408-foot sign and bounced across Fifth Street. The second disturbed birds nesting in the bower. Most papers said it was an oak left over from virgin forest; others called it a maple. Pascual called it “Mickey’s tree.”

Pedro Ramos, his voluble countryman and teammate—generously characterized by Mantle as “one fucking bright Cuban”—waved a white towel at Pascual as Mantle rounded the bases again. “He hit one
into
the tree and the next one went
over
the tree,” Ramos said, the force of the two 500-footers having conflated his recollections. “They are still looking for those balls. That tree
remembers
Mickey.”

“
Tree
-mendous,” Casey Stengel declared. “They tell me that the only other feller which hit that tree was Ruth. He shook some kids outta the tree when the ball landed. But the tree’s gotten bigger in twenty-five years, and so I guess have the kids The Babe shook outta it.”

In the sixth spring of his major league career, Mantle had arrived at the tipping point. The 1955 season had been a good one. He led the American League in triples (11), home runs (37), walks (113), runs (129), slugging (.611), and on-base percentage (.433). That May he had the only three-home-run game of his career, hitting two left-handed, one right-handed. But on September 16, he pulled his right hamstring trying to beat out a bunt and made only two more regular-season appearances, both as a pinch-hitter. He was limited to ten at-bats in the World Series remembered in Brooklyn for sweet redemption and in the Bronx for Mantle’s absence from the lineup. When the Yankees gathered in St. Petersburg the next spring, sports columnist Dan Daniel posed the question everyone in baseball had been mulling all winter: “Which way will his career turn?”

The exhibition season offered tantalizing clues and cautionary omens. Mantle’s hamstring was still weak, and he quickly reinjured it. But he struck out only once (not until the twelfth game) and hit six home runs, two of which found their way into Tampa Bay beyond Al Lang Field. A third prompted Stan Musial to say, “No home run has ever cleared my head by so much as long as I can remember.”

The new Mantle announced himself in the first game of the regular season. “Mickey attained maturity on opening day,” Jerry Coleman said. “It was—boom! boom!—and he had two home runs without even trying.”

Mantle said he had quit trying to hit homers. “I’m beginning to learn that easy does it,” he told
Times
columnist Arthur Daley.

Within a month, this new, laid-back slugger had churned up a tide of dread in opposing pitchers.

May 5 vs. Kansas City: 3 for 4, 3 RBI, 2 home runs, one of which threatened to leave Yankee Stadium.

May 18 at Chicago: 4 for 4, 2 RBI, 2 home runs (one left-handed, one right-handed), a double, and a walk. His ninth-inning home run tied the game, which the Yankees won in the tenth inning.

May 24 at Detroit: 5 for 5, 1 home run, 1 RBI.

Five days later, little Billy Crystal of Long Beach, Long Island, attended his first game at Yankee Stadium. At age eight, he was young enough to believe that Miller Huggins, Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig were buried beneath their monuments in center field.

Rain dampened the uniforms of the Marine color guard as the flag was raised in center field before the first game of the Memorial Day doubleheader. The soggy forecast also diminished the expected holiday crowd. There were not quite 30,000 fans in the ballpark when the players assembled along the baselines for a moment of silence. A mist shrouded the copper filigree of the Stadium’s frieze and hovered over the bullpens where the starting pitchers, Pedro Ramos and Johnny Kucks, were trying to get warm. A bugler played taps.

Jack Crystal owned the Commodore Record Shop in Times Square,
the
jazz emporium in New York. Louis Armstrong had given him his tickets. A priest was seated in the row before them along the third base line. So when Mantle came to the plate in the fifth inning and Ramos came in with a waist-high fastball on a 2-2 pitch, Billy didn’t see the sweet left-handed swing or the collision between ash and cowhide. Nor could he see the trajectory that carried the ball where no other had gone before. “The priest stood up and blocked my view of the ball hitting the facade,” he said. “Though I do remember standing up on my chair, ’cause everybody else just went ‘Aaaaaaaah.’ It was just huge. It just went up and up and up, and it just settled down at the last second. And the priest actually said, ‘Holy fucking shit!’”

In the Yankee bullpen, Tommy Byrne gazed at the heavens. “You just keep lookin’ and you keep wonderin’, ‘Well, how far is the damn thing goin’ to go?’”

As Mantle rounded third base, Pascual stood on the dugout steps, waving a white towel at his compatriot on the mound. “Look what he did to you! He rocket up in right field!”

Between games, team officials consulted the archives and the blueprints and determined that the rocket had traveled 370 feet, hitting the facade 118 feet above field level, 18 inches from oblivion. Ramos thought the ball had left New York. Indeed, it ended up in Eddie Robinson’s Baltimore restaurant, a gift from The Mick to the Yankee first baseman.

Much to Pascual’s regret, Mantle declined Stengel’s offer to rest his
aching hamstring and take the rest of the afternoon off. In the fifth inning of the second game, he hit his third home run of the year off Pascual, the 141st of his career. It was a modest effort that landed only halfway up the right field bleachers. At the end of the day he was leading the majors in six offensive categories: runs (45), hits (65), total bases (135), home runs (20), RBI (50), and batting average (.425). He had struck out only twenty-one times. Even the usually imperturbable Harold Rosenthal of the
Herald Tribune
was moved to excess: The “Merry Mortician” was burying the rest of the league.

By the time the Detroit Tigers arrived two days later, the facade home run had been memorialized in front-page photographs adorned with soaring arrows. Outfielder Harvey Kuenn eyed the distance and demanded corroboration from a young sportscaster named Howard Cosell who had witnessed the clout. “Did he really hit it up there?
Really?
His strength isn’t human.”

Whitey Herzog, the future Hall of Fame manager who played left field for the Senators that day, had been traded to Washington on Easter Sunday. Summoned to the manager’s office after church services, Herzog learned his fate. “You’re pretty good but you’re not as good as the guy I got,” Stengel said.

“Shit, I know that,” Herzog replied.

How good was Casey’s guy?

“Nobody could play baseball better than Mickey Mantle played it in 1956,” Herzog said.

For once he wasn’t sabotaged by physiology. He was batting .371 with 29 home runs—ahead of Babe Ruth’s 1927 pace—against the Red Sox on the Fourth of July. The Yankees held their collective breath after he charged a ball hit his way in the eleventh inning of the first game of a doubleheader. He thought he could prevent the winning run from scoring. Then he felt a familiar twinge in his right knee. “Sprained ligament on the outer aspect,” said team physician Sidney Gaynor. Mantle missed the next four games.

The pain went “all around the leg” but it did not derail him for long. He won the Triple Crown, leading the American League in home runs (52), RBIs (130), and batting average (.353). He was the
Sporting News
Major League Player of the Year and the Associated Press Male Athlete
of the Year. He received the Hickok Belt, awarded to the top professional athlete of the year, as well as the first-ever Babe Ruth Sultan of Swat crown as the major leagues’ top slugger.

Tangible evidence of Mantle’s strength was ample and astonishing. A spring training baseball bag shredded by the force of repeated collisions. Tony Kubek said you could see the sawdust fly. Tin soda cans crushed between his thumb and index finger. No one in his family knew how he he had gotten so strong. His twin brothers, Roy and Ray, whom he called Rose and Rachel, were taller, but neither had his forearms. “Seemed to me like they was this wide,” Larry Mantle said, cupping his hands to make a circle eight inches in diameter. His shoulders seemed “like fifty-three inches wide” to his son David.

It was the muscle running down the
back
of his 17½-inch neck that intimidated and distracted Cleveland pitcher Mike Garcia. When that thing got to twitching, Garcia said, that’s all he could see. “Built like a concrete wall,” said the totemic slugger Frank “Hondo” Howard.

Hondo and his contemporary Boog Powell are two of the only people on the planet who know what it feels like to hit a ball as hard as Mickey Mantle. It feels like nothing else and it feels like nothing at all, Howard says. It is the answer to baseball’s own Zen riddle: How do you feel the absence of tension?

“Everything is in unison,” said Powell. “Your whole body, your whole swing, everything is right together. Everything he had in his body was coming out of that bat.”

Clark Griffith, the grandson and namesake of the patron of Washington, D.C., baseball, saw Mantle up close throughout his childhood. “He had magnificent rotation, the way his back spun around, the leverage in his shoulders. I loved his stance. I loved the way he finished when the bat was wrapping around his body. To take a vertical bat and to get it moving, you have to have very strong hands to move it into the plane of the pitch just before contact.”

Mantle’s might inflicted damage on bats, balls, and egos. After watching Mantle hit a blistering home run off “Sudden” Sam McDowell in 1968, Yankee pitcher Stan Bahnsen asked the batboy if he could inspect the wood for bruises. “There were three or four seam marks in the barrel a quarter of an inch deep,” he said. “Those seam marks were
buried.
”

Billy Pierce, then pitching for the White Sox, recalled a July night at Yankee Stadium in 1959 when Mantle KOed a rookie outfielder with a line drive. “The right fielder went to catch the ball, and it hit him right in the chest,” Pierce said.

“Just to the right of the breastbone,” said Jim McAnany, who survived the bullet that came half an inch from occasioning his obituary. “I just went down like I was shot. It knocked me off my feet.”

McAnany was prominently featured in the next morning’s
New York Times
, photographed sitting on the outfield grass surrounded by concerned and incredulous teammates. According to the caption, the ball had glanced off his glove. In fact, it glanced off him. He never saw it coming. It was the first inning of his first game at Yankee Stadium, and he lost the ball in the big-city lights. He was charged with a two-base error, adding insult to potentially lethal injury. “When I came into the dugout, I said, ‘I think I got a hole in my chest.’”

The next day, Mantle inquired after his health. “Sore,” McAnany said, which was to say the least. The X-rays were negative for breaks—no internal injuries, but The Mick had left his mark. The seams of the ball were imprinted on his chest. “The American League too,” he said.

Mickey Lolich, who grew up in Oregon idolizing Mantle from afar, had a near-death experience pitching to him in Tiger Stadium. “I threw him a sinking fast ball down and away, and he swung at it. All I heard was a buzzing sound, which means the ball was hit tremendously hard. I’ve heard the sound a few times in my life. It’s actually the seams grabbing the air as it goes by. I turned and saw the ball going into center field on a low bounce. All of a sudden, I felt a pain. He had hit me on the inside of my right leg, high up on the thigh, just below the very important family jewels. I had faced a moment of death and never even seen it!! My legs went to total jelly. My stomach went up into my throat. My catcher comes out—it was Bill Freehan—he says, ‘Did that ball hit you?’

“I says, ‘Yes, it did.’

“He says, ‘Holy shit! Are you okay?’

“I says, ‘No, I’m not!’

“The umpire comes out and says, ‘What’s goin’ on out here?’ And Freehan says, ‘That ball hit Mick!’

“The umpire says, ‘My God. You okay?’

“And I says, ‘No!’

“He says, ‘Well, you take just as long as you want.’”

No wonder Bob Turley welcomed his trade to the Yankees: “He shocked the shit out of pitchers.” If they were lucky.

Jim Kaat of the Minnesota Twins sought divine intervention when he fell behind on The Mick. “Two-and-oh on Mantle, Earl Battey would wave his arms and make the sign of the cross.”

Catchers were in a uniquely vulnerable position. “He could make a bat hum over your head
, hoooee,”
said Ed Bailey.

Infielders laughed when managers tried to wave them in on the grass. “Especially with nobody on,” Powell said. “You do your best imitation of a Mexican bullfighter, you just olé everything.”

One time Mantle squared to bunt, Clete Boyer remembered, “and he hits a fucking line drive to right field.” Another time, a ground ball knocked the glove off shortstop Joe DeMaestri’s hand in Philadelphia. “It spun my hand so hard that it turned my hand around,” DeMaestri said. “The glove went right through my legs and into the outfield. The ball rolled out, and my glove did too. It was like a normal ground ball but hit like 180 miles per hour.”

A thud often signals contact with what Ted Williams called “the joy spot” of the bat. “The guys that hit the balls the farthest, there’s a click that goes along with it,” former catcher Tim McCarver said.

The sound of the ball coming off Mantle’s bat was distinctive. “With your back turned, you knew it was him,” Powell said. “It was a ring. It was more like a musical note.”

Three weeks after Mantle failed to hit the ball out of Yankee Stadium, he hit one out of Briggs Stadium in Detroit. The score was tied in the eighth inning when manager Bucky Harris paid a visit to his pitcher Paul Foytack. “All he’d ever say was ‘Steady in the boat, now,’” said Virgil Trucks, who was on the Tigers bench. “Bucky had just sat down, and he hears this crack of the bat. He looks up, and that ball went out of Briggs Stadium, landed in Trumbull Avenue at the back of the stadium and bounced, and they found it on the roof of a cabstand. That ball had to travel 600 feet.”