The Last Boy Read online

  The Last Boy

  Mickey Mantle

  and the End of America’s Childhood

  Jane Leavy

  For Nick, with love and hope

  In memory of my father, who taught me not to throw like a girl

  Played hard, died hard.

  —Don Larson

  Ya gotta be honest.

  —Tony Kubek

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Preface: My Weekend with The Mick

  Part One INNOCENCE LOST

  1 March 26, 1951 The Whole World Opened Up

  2 October 5, 1951 When Fates Converge

  3 October 23, 1951 Undermined

  4 May 27, 1949 Patrimony

  5 May 20, 1952 In the Ground

  6 April 17, 1953 One Big Day

  7 November 2, 1953 Fish Bait

  8 September 26, 1954 No Other Time

  Part Two A ROUND WITH THE MICH

  9 May 30, 1956 A Body Remembers

  10 May 16, 1957 Returns of the Day

  11 August 14, 1960 Season Under Siege

  Part Three NIGHTCAP

  12 September 25, 1961 Dr. Feelgood*

  13 May 18, 1962 His Best Self

  14 June 5, 1963 The Breaking Point

  15 September 26, 1968 Last Licks

  Part Four DREAM ON

  16 June 8, 1969 Half-life of a Star

  17 December 19, 1985 18 Below in Fargo

  18 February 5, 1988 Top of the Heap

  19 February 4, 1994 Getaway Day

  Part Five RIDING WITH THE MICH

  20 August 13, 1995 The Last Boy

  Epilogue

  Appendix 1: Interview List

  Appendix 2: The Kinetic Mick

  Appendix 3: Who’s Better?

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  Also By Jane Leavy

  Copyright

  Preface: My Weekend with The Mick

  MICKEY MANTLE’S SWEATER HANGS on the door to my office. I put it there the day I decided to write this book. It is the first thing I see when I sit down at my desk in the morning and the last thing I see when I shut down the computer at night. It has followed me from closet to closet and house to house since he gave it to me twenty-seven years ago. I packed it away in an old garment bag right after I said goodbye to him. I thought I was done with The Mick.

  The sweater is as gray as the day we met—Yankee colors, road-trip gray and pinstripe blue. There is a baseball embroidered over the left breast with raised seams and the words MICKEY MANTLE INVITATIONAL GOLF TOURNAMENT stitched around the circumference. On the sweet spot it says, THE CLARIDGE, the hotel where Mantle had accepted a job as Director of Sports Promotions. I went there to interview him for The Washington Post in the spring of 1983.

  Forty-eight absurdly tumultuous hours later I headed home flaunting his sweater. How many times have I told this story? How he saw me shivering outside the clubhouse that raw day after nine holes of promotional golf and offered me his sweater. Everybody always said he’d give you the shirt off his back; I had the sweater to prove it. V-necked in the Fifties style that remains a fashion statement chiefly at exclusive American country clubs, Mickey’s sweater evokes a time when Mantle was at the top of his game and his game was the only one that mattered.

  His gesture was warm, spontaneous, and authentic; the fabric felt like cashmere against my skin. But, like so many of the imperial vestments draped about the shoulders of heroes, this was the product of human engineering: 100 PERCENT VIRGIN ORLON ACRYLIC.

  Turned out I had never read the fine print on the manufacturer’s label. The warranty got me thinking: Which Mantle would I discover? An authentic human being or a synthetic construct of memory and imagination?

  It took five years, far longer than I wished or imagined, to find an answer. Every time I heard a story of baseness and excess, I checked out the sweater in my office. Every time I heard an anecdote infused with kindness, humor, self-deprecation, or irony, I heard his laconic drawl: “Can’t we get this girl a fuckin’ sweater? She’s gonna fuckin’ freeze.”

  Then, deep into my research, there came in the mail a videotape of Robert Lipsyte’s Media Day interview at the Claridge for CBS Sunday Morning. There’s Mick kicking at the damp sand, his ball buried in a trap and the wind playing havoc with his hair. He seizes his wedge, mutters imprecations at his ball and…he’s wearing my sweater! There I am in the background, hair freshly poodle-permed, all decked out in a brown suede suit, Loehmann’s circa 1983. I had gotten all dressed up for The Mick, the way I did when I wore Mary Janes on opening day of the baseball season.

  I remembered being underdressed for the occasion. That’s why I needed his sweater. I remembered wearing cotton, not suede. Confronted with this disconcerting shard of videographic truth, the story I had told so often began to unravel like the yarn wound around the hard center of an official Major League baseball. I rushed to have another look at the sweater in my office. Somehow I had never noticed the “L” stitched into the collar. Shouldn’t Mickey’s sweater have been at least an XL or an XXL? If my memories didn’t match the evidence, what else might have gotten blurred by the hero worship of childhood? Did he give me the shirt off his back? Or did I invent a kinder, warmer, bigger Mick, the Mick I wanted him to be?

  I believe in memory, not memorabilia. Mickey’s sweater is the only artifact I kept from my tenure as a sportswriter. Memorabilia is a goal, a get, an end in itself leading nowhere except to the next acquisition. Memory is a process, albeit a faulty one. Mantle began burrowing into American memory the moment he stepped onto the public stage in 1951. Blond and blue-eyed, with a coast-to-coast smile, he was an unwitting antidote to the darkness and danger embodied by that other Fifties icon, Elvis Presley.

  Mickey Charles Mantle was born on October 20, 1931. But like the sweater hanging in my office, Mickey Mantle is a blend of memory and distortion, fact and fiction, repetition and exaggeration. However far Mantle’s home runs traveled, his acolytes remembered them going farther; however great his pain, they remembered it as more disabling. In a life so publicly led, the accretion and reiteration of fable and detail are as thick as fifty years of paint jamming an old windowsill. My challenge was to strip away the layers and let in the air.

  As much as anyone, the photographer Ozzie Sweet was responsible for how Mantle is remembered. Sweet first photographed him in the spring of 1952, when his boyish blemishes still required retouching. With his tripod and his old-fashioned view camera—the same equipment Mathew Brady used in the Civil War—Sweet produced portraits for 1,700 magazine covers but was known best for the confections he created for SPORT magazine. His specialty was what he called “simulated action,” set pieces choreographed to evoke heroes and hero worship. Every spring, he and Mantle would get together and decide how to expand the Sweet trove of Mantle iconography. “What do you think, Mick?” Sweet would ask. “Can we stage this and make it look real?”

  He always shot from below, the angle of icons, rendering his subjects larger than life. Clouds and foliage were banished from the frame; nothing was allowed to clutter the image. His photos look as if they could have been taken anywhere, anytime. The context is timelessness.

  In 1968, the last spring of his career, Mantle posed before a lavender sky with a Louisville Slugger resting lightly on his shoulder. Only the “Slugger” in the redoubtable trademark is visible beneath his grip on the unsullied wood. Hand on hip in a posture of feigned informality, he gazes over his shoulder into a purple distance with just the barest hint of cumulous cloud on the horizon. Tufts of blond hair on his chiseled forearms shimmer in the glow from an unseen source of light. Beneath the smudged bill of his cap Mantle’s brow is puckered with age. The grain of his black leather belt is worn and punctured with asymmetrical holes added to accommodate the passage of time. Sweet says it was one of Mantle’s favorite pictures. It was also a template for a “no-dirt-under-the-fingernails” hero whose image would continue to be airbrushed long after his death.

  The Mantle postage stamp issued by the U. S. Postal Service in July 2007 was an idealized collage, the head cloned from one photograph and the body from another. Phil Jordan, the art director, rejected the initial design because it didn’t look enough like “the image people had of him.” He wanted “the soft, baby-faced character, the blondness of him.”

  He sent the artist back to the drawing board. Lonnie Busch, who outgrew his boyhood fondness for baseball long before he took up his palette, screened Billy Crystal’s Mantlecentric HBO movie ’61* for inspiration. He painted an effulgent young slugger who fills the batter’s box with promise. The sky is an odd orange hue, as if the day could go either way. The green copper frieze of the House that Ruth Built rests squarely on his shoulders. His arms extend beyond the frame, too big to be contained in a miniaturist’s portrait. A better rendering of a person who felt bigger and smaller than life cannot be found. I asked Busch what he was trying to capture inside the sticky 1-by-1½-inch rectangle. “The light within the darkness,” he replied.

  Who else—besides maybe Elvis—is lodged so firmly in pop iconography? They were two country boys fated for unimaginable fame and infamy. Look at their smiles: Elvis with a dark, brooding forelock dangling over his brow like an apostrophe and a curled upper lip. And Mick, with that slight overbite, those buckteeth (for which he had been sufficiently teased) pushing the corner of his mouth upward, into an irrepressible grin. “Mantle-esque,” the catcher-cum-broadc
aster Tim McCarver called it. “Quite unlike any other that I remember. It was almost a measure of a man in his smile.”

  Elvis served notice: the blatant sexual braggadocio was a come-on that came with a caution. Mantle’s darkness was concealed by a sunny, coltish smile and a euphonious name that makes product branders grin. Linguistically, “Mickey Mantle” is mmm mmm good.

  “He had a way of putting a smile on your face,” his compatriot, Duke Snider, said.

  Even in Joe Torre’s Brooklyn neighborhood, where Snider ruled, you had to wear your hat like Mickey Mantle. A half century later, the Yankee manager demonstrated how the look was achieved: wetting the NY on his cap with spit, he wrapped the brim around a ball and stuck it in a coffee cup in the manager’s office just as he had as a boy in his mother’s kitchen. It was called the “Mantle Roll,” and it was as popular in the cornfields of Illinois as it was on the sidewalks of Bensonhurst. As Mantle’s teammate Jerry Coleman once said, “Everything he was is what everyone wanted to be and couldn’t.”

  With his aura of limitless potential, Mantle was America incarnate. His raw talent, the unprecedented alloy of speed and power, spoke directly to our postwar optimism. His father mined Oklahoma’s depths for the lead and zinc that supported the country’s infrastructure and spurred its industrial growth. Mutt’s boy had honest muscles. His ham-hock forearms were wrought by actual work, not weight machines and steroid injections.

  He was proof of America’s promise: anyone could grow up to be president or Mickey Mantle—even Mickey Mantle. And he recognized it. “I could have ended up buried in a hole in the ground, and I ended up being Mickey Mantle,” he mused. “There must be a god somewhere.” And, more succinctly, “I guess you could say I’m what this country is all about.”

  He was numerologically charmed—lucky number 7, The Mick, synonymous with the number of planets, wonders, days, sins. “What does seven mean?” asked teammate Clete Boyer. “It means Mickey Mantle.”

  “His aura had an aura,” his teammate Eli Grba said. “The way he walked, the way he ran, and the way he presented himself once he put on the uniform—he was a symphony. Ever hear Beethoven’s Ninth? The Ode to Joy? You see him hit and then you see him run, and it’s like going into the chorale.”

  He was, in the author Nick Pileggi’s felicitous phrase, “a touched guy,” and he connected with something in teammates and opponents, men and (lots of) women, baseball fans and baseball illiterates that all of us struggle to explain.

  Listen to Randall Swearingen, a software entrepreneur from Houston, who met Mantle at the last fantasy camp he hosted in 1994. Filling his plate on the buffet line, he heard a familiar drawl: “Umm-hmmm, those meatballs sure look good.” When Mantle reached over his shoulder and helped himself to a meatball, it was like God was eating off his plate. Swearingen devoted much of the next fifteen years and a considerable amount of money to preserving, protecting, and defending The Mick. He developed the official Web site for Mantle’s family, authored a Mick encomium, “A Great Teammate,” and assembled in his Houston office one of the largest collections of Mantle memorabilia in the country. An attempt, he says, to re-create “not Mickey Mantle the person but Mickey Mantle the image, the feeling,” to “reconstitute what he stood for.”

  Imagine Swearingen’s anguish as a Category 5 hurricane bore down on the office building. The order to evacuate had been issued. But Swearingen was still at his desk, trying to decide which parts of The Mick to preserve and which to leave behind—he finally picked 1962 and 1965 road jerseys, a 1961 warm-up jacket, the 1955 American League Championship ring, and the 1956 Player of the Year award. Then Hurricane Rita made a sharp left. Houston saw barely a drop of rain.

  Listen to Cathy McCammon, who recalls, at age ten, returning to her grandstand seat in the Stadium with a tray full of ketchup-saturated hot dogs when she was hit in the head by a Mantle home run, which left a dent in her scalp 1/16 inch deep. “The food went everywhere, but I caught the ball,” she said. “The security guard came to see if I was okay. I said I’d be okay if I could get Mickey to sign the ball. They took me down to the dugout, and Mickey said, ‘Are you okay?’

  “ I said, ‘I will be when you sign the ball.’”

  She gave the prize to her son. She has The Mick’s mark to remember him by.

  I hated to point out that her story didn’t quite add up. No one signs autographs by the dugout in the middle of a game. She consulted her brother and called back with an update. Okay, she was sixteen. They were sitting in a field box. She was beaned by an errant fungo during batting practice. But neither the impact of the moment nor the ridge in her skull was diminished. “If I put pressure on it, I can feel that sensation of being hit,” she said. “It takes me right back to the ballpark.”

  Listen to Frank Martin, a welder from Pennsylvania, who took a day off from work in order to watch Mantle’s funeral live on TV and tape it for posterity. Eight years later, he was at Madison Square Garden for the preview of the Mantle family auction, which he attended knowing he couldn’t afford to bid on even the least expensive item. But he had his picture taken with Mantle’s second son, David, who looks so much like his father that people stop him on the street and ask, “Aren’t you dead?” Martin pressed his memories on his hero’s son. “One time my teacher asked, ‘Who was the father of our country?’ I said, ‘Mickey Mantle. He’s more famous than Washington—and his card’s worth more.’”

  Listen to Thad Mumford, the son of an African-American dentist from Washington, D.C., who cut his hair like The Mick and wore his baseball stirrups like The Mick and spent boyhood afternoons sketching Mantle’s legs for fun. Sure, black was beautiful. But Mantle was “modest, graceful. The way he practiced, the way he just stood—it was noble.”

  One day in the violent summer of 1967, Mumford bought a round-trip ticket on the Eastern Air Lines shuttle ($9.18 with a student discount, he recalls) and flew to New York to interview for a job as a Yankee ball boy. He had just enough cash for a subway token and a hot dog. But he took the wrong train and ended up in Newark, New Jersey, where race riots that summer caused 26 deaths, 700 injuries, and 1,500 arrests. “And I’m trying to find a way to wear the uniform of The Man, the plutocrat Yankees,” Mumford said.

  He got the job, moving in with Brooklyn relatives in time for the beginning of the 1968 season. “When Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was worried about how many days they were going to postpone opening day by.”

  One.

  Mere statistics do not explain the devotion of Mantle’s fans. True, he played in more games than any other Yankee at a time when the Yankees were the most televised franchise in the country. He played in twelve World Series in his first fourteen seasons and still holds World Series records for home runs (18), RBIs (40), runs (42), walks (43), extra-base hits (26), and total bases (123). He became synonymous with Yankee inevitability and hegemony, an institutional entitlement symbolized by the interlocking NY on their caps, designed by Tiffany & Co. The logo was appropriated from a medal presented to a New York City cop shot in the line of duty in the Tenderloin District—while shaking down the owner of a local saloon.

  When he retired, Mantle’s 536 career home runs placed him third in major league history. Thirteen of them were game-ending homers. His 1964 World Series home run off Barney Schultz, a “walk-off” home run in the current vernacular, broke Babe Ruth’s series record. Ten times, he collected more than 100 walks; nine straight seasons, he scored 100 or more runs; four times, he won the American League home run and slugging titles. He collected 2,415 hits, batted .300 or better ten times, won three MVP Awards, and appeared in twenty All-Star Games. He scored more runs than he drove in (1,677 to 1,509).

  Those career totals, now regarded as meaningless expressions of longevity, have been supplanted by a dazzling array of new metrics that measure rates of productivity. “By those standards Mantle is actually underrated,” said Dave Smith, founder of Retrosheet, the online database that compiles career statistics for every major leaguer and collects box scores for every game ever played. (Retrosheet supplied and verified all the statistics in this book.)