The Last Boy (16 page)

“Watch this,” he’d say to his boys as they headed out the door before school. “The whole top part just went like this,” said Mantle’s son David, demonstrating how his father had twisted his knee as if opening a pickle jar. “It was like it could come apart,” Danny Mantle said.

Mantle never talked to Seger about his knee. The trainer concentrated on those gleaming, problematic muscles. “I massaged his thighs and legs frequently and for long periods. A lot of things you couldn’t do with his knees. He inflamed so badly when you put him on a weight program or something of that nature. He would become so inflamed he just couldn’t walk.”

Mantle disdained the bulky, double-hinged brace the Yankees provided for increased stability. Had he used the brace, Seger says, it would have compounded the deterioration in his knee. “To attempt to put a knee brace on him, it would grind those articulating surfaces,” Seger explained. “It compressed them so together. That would set up an inflammatory reaction.”

O’Donoghue, long considered “the father of orthopedic sports medicine,” reported that 25 percent of acute athletic knee injuries resulted in the unhappy triad. The numbers have escalated with the increased speed and size of athletes, amateur and professional, under competitive duress. It happens when wide receivers “plant and cut” on turf. It happens when basketball players land awkwardly on a straightened leg after making a shot, or blocking one. It happens when base runners slide into second base with a hyperextended knee. It happens without warning and often without contact. According to a 2009 report by Dallas Mavericks’ team physician Tarek Souryal published by WebMD in emedicine.com, 200,000 Americans sustain an ACL injury every year.

Of the four ligaments charged with the responsibility of holding a human leg together, the anterior cruciate is the most crucial and the most central, winding its way north to south through the middle of the joint. Its job is to make sure the knee doesn’t come through the front of the leg, which is exactly how Mantle described his injury. When an ACL ruptures, it does so with a bang. In a gym, it can cause an echo, like a stack of books landing on a hardwood floor. When Mantle went down, Phil Rizzuto said he could hear the pop at shortstop.

And when an ACL goes, it usually takes the medial meniscus with
it, leaving loose fragments of cartilage in the joint, irritating and corroding the surface of the knee and getting stuck in all the wrong places. When they get stuck, the knee locks up with stabbing ice-pick pain.

Unlike the medial collateral ligament, the ACL does not repair itself and cannot be stitched back together. It must be reconstructed, surgery that was rarely attempted in 1953 because the procedure was so invasive and the outcome so uncertain. “He never had a reconstruction, only removal of torn cartilage and scar tissue,” Haas said. “He would have been out at least a year if he had a reconstruction, probably longer based on the techniques done in that era.”

How did Mantle play with a torn ACL? It can be done, Haas says. “Mickey Mantle can be classified as a ‘neuromuscular genius,’ one of a select few who are so well wired that they are able to compensate for severe injuries like this and still perform at the highest levels, overcoming a particular impairment at a given moment. It is a phenomenon comprised of motivation, high pain threshold, strength, reflexes, and luck.”

In 1968, the last spring of Mantle’s career, Soares observed: “Mickey has a greater capacity to withstand pain than any man I’ve ever seen. Some doctors have seen X-rays of his legs and won’t believe they are the legs of an athlete still active.”

The world may have gasped at the way he outran balls in Yankee Stadium’s capacious outfield, how he flew from first to third on a single to right field, how he beat out routine infield ground balls. But at field level, those who had seen him run before the injury saw subtle changes in his gait—a slight glitch when he tried to accelerate out of the left-handed batter’s box, compromised lateral movement and a loss of speed that was hard for most observers to fathom, considering how fast he could still run. “He lost a lot of speed,” Ralph Houk said. “I would say going from home to first, he lost a full step.”

When Houk became Yankee manager, he followed Stengel’s example and refused to allow Mantle to steal, hoping to protect Mantle’s “delicate,
almost feminine” knees. Trainers taped him together with long sheaves of Conco athletic tape that wound from ankle to thigh. The thick foam bandages were wrapped so tightly they cut off circulation and mummified his flesh, turning it white and puffy. When the bandages came off, Charlie Silvera said, the skin was creased with “bulges where the tape had maybe come loose a little bit.”

Sometimes it was worse than that. “There would be blood oozing out,” said Virgil Trucks, who joined the Yankees in 1958. “Not like you’ve stabbed somebody, but it was ample.”

In the clubhouse Mantle never complained. But Merlyn confided his private agonies to some of the other wives. “After a ball game, he would just stretch out on the sofa and moan in pain for hours,” Lucille McDougald said. “She said, ‘You have no idea how much pain he was in.’”

Stoicism could mask only so much. A grimace became a feature of each left-handed at-bat. “You could see the pain in his face every time he swung, even at age twenty-three or twenty-five,” Bunny Mick said. “He couldn’t let his body rotate because of the knee. He couldn’t follow through on the swing for the rest of his career.”

Silvera said, “After a doubleheader he couldn’t get out of the car. He’d have to take one leg at a time and swing it over.”

With Merlyn back home awaiting the birth of Mickey Jr. in the spring of 1953, Mantle shared a room in the Edison Hotel with Irv Noren, who observed his pain close-up in their less than sumptuous accommodations. Even at age twenty-two, Mantle took mornings slow. “I had bad knees,” Noren said. “His legs were worse than mine. In the morning, he’d say, ‘Irv, you awake?’

“I said, ‘I can’t get out of bed.’

“He said, ‘Me, neither.’

“We’d both be hobbling around the room ’til we could get our legs straightened out.”

Sometimes even then, Noren said, Mantle returned to the dugout with tears in his eyes. It would never get any better. Over the course of his career, Mantle missed 255 games due to injuries—more than a season and a half of baseball.

Each successive knee injury predisposed him to the next, in what Haas called “cascading episodes of instability.” The compromised ligament
made him prone to more cartilage tears. Thorns of cartilage eroded the protective coating around the joint, causing severe premature arthritis. The hamstring muscles, acting as a secondary line of restraint, had to work harder to compensate for the lack of stability, which led to recurrent muscle pulls. The vehemence of his left-handed swing, with his right knee locked and extended and his foot rolling over on the ankle on the follow-through, put enormous stress on the already unstable joint.

The result of this degeneration is visible even in a grainy reproduction of an X-ray that appeared in a 1988 sports medicine trade magazine announcing Mantle’s endorsement of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug Voltaren (diclofenac sodium). Dr. George Ehrlich, then head of medical affairs for Ciba-Geigy, the manufacturer of Voltaren, interviewed Mantle when he and Whitey Ford enrolled in the clinical trial in 1987. Looking at that 1988 X-ray twenty years later, Ehrlich came to the same conclusion that he reached then: “When you take an X-ray of a healthy knee, you can see the space between the femur and tibia—that’s where the cartilage is. In this X-ray, there is no space. The femur is directly on top of the tibia. It’s bone on bone.”

That night over dinner, Ehrlich chatted with his seemingly enthusiastic patient about the benefits of the drug. “My suspicions were raised at the time,” Ehrlich said. “Later, the people in the medical department told me he never followed the instructions. I thought he did. He told me he was better. He didn’t follow the directions. I don’t think he followed anyone’s directions. He was a great athlete, a very poor patient.”

But a very obliging pitchman. He even got into a New Jersey swimming pool to demonstrate the wondrous properties of the anti-inflammatory medicine. “We’d like to pay you to watch Mickey,” the public relations man told a young lifeguard, Rahmin Rabenou.

“I’m on duty,” the conscientious teenager replied.

“No, we
really
want you to watch Mickey.”

An offer of $30 backed up the urgency of the request. “He can’t swim.”

After watching Mantle affect a kind of dog paddle, Rabenou, who became a physician, thought, “Maybe he
should
have the lifeguard with him.”

Voltaren couldn’t make Mantle float, but it might have alleviated
much of his pain. Viewed in the context of his other health issues, he had good reason not to take it, having already been diagnosed with liver disease, which is incompatible with such a medicine. In fact, Ehrlich said, “A damaged liver would have precluded his being in any drug study.”

Dave Ringer was Mantle’s personal physician in Georgia in the last years of his life. One day, a drug rep for Ciba-Geigy visited his office, brandishing miniature Mickey Mantle bats and golf balls along with the usual medical samples. “He said, ‘Mickey Mantle uses Voltaren and it’s excellent for the osteoarthritis of his knees and he loves it.’

“I said, ‘No, he doesn’t.’

“And the drug rep, young guy, looks at me and he said, ‘Yeah, he does. He uses it regularly. He advertises for us. He said it works very well.’”

Ringer sent his nurse to get Mantle’s chart. “See, I told you he doesn’t take Voltaren,” Ringer told the man from Ciba-Geigy. “ ‘He’s got liver problems.’ That drug rep just about fell on the floor.”

At Mantle’s next appointment, Ringer told him about the visit. “He said, ‘Oh, my God, don’t tell anybody. I’m getting $200,000 a year for that. I don’t take it. I can’t take that drug, but I don’t want them to know that.’”

Wife, mother, in-laws, and infant son were waiting for Mantle when he came out of knee surgery in November 1953. He remained in the hospital for eleven days, the first of which he spent in groggy sedation due to severe pain. He wasn’t allowed out of bed for five days (at which point he was permitted to swing his leg while seated on the edge of the bed) and did not leave his room until he was discharged.

Today, professional athletes who have arthroscopic knee surgery—using the thin tool that requires only tiny incisions—routinely return to the playing field in a matter of weeks. Mantle’s recuperation was expected to take a minimum of three months.

Greenwade did everything possible to ensure a swift recovery. T-bone steaks were delivered to Mantle’s room every evening. Special nurses were brought in; Mantle admired them greatly. Other than sanctioned visitors—minor league teammate Al Billingsley was admitted after first
being summarily turned away—he healed in splendid isolation while get-well cards piled up in the hospital mail room.

He talked his doctors into releasing him eighteen hours early so he could attend his twin brothers’ football game between undefeated Commerce High and their rivals from Grove, Oklahoma. He was ordered to return to Springfield for office visits two or three times a week for the next three weeks. He left the hospital on crutches after spending thirty minutes signing autographs in the Polio Cottage with strict instructions to be “judicious with his activities.”

This was a prescription Mantle was unable or unwilling to follow. Two days before Mantle left Burge Hospital, Billy Martin returned to California from an All-Star exhibition tour of Japan with $4,000 in his pocket and a haul of loot—cameras, binoculars, silk robes, and samurai swords. He was flush but lonely. His wife had left him, taking their infant daughter with her. Mantle invited him to winter in Commerce. “I knew he had nothing left in Berkeley.”

They had torn up American League cities all that season. Mantle was still mourning his father; Martin was mourning his marriage. Merlyn was back home nursing a fussy baby. Martin’s divorce dashed her hope for conventional off-season domesticity.

Martin loaded up his new Cadillac convertible and headed east. By the time the visit ended, he had totaled the car while drag-racing against Mantle in his Lincoln Continental. They were en route to a Commerce High School basketball game. Martin had Ray and Roy, the team’s star players, in the backseat. Mantle and his Lincoln were unharmed.

Their exploits that winter and in Martin’s future off-season visits were well known and not particularly well received around town. Old-timers in Commerce can still point out the spot where Mantle turned his car over on the road later renamed in his honor. He pointed out a hole in the “Home of Mickey Mantle” sign at the edge of town to Irv Noren one off-season. “There was a rock thrown through it,” Noren said. “Mickey said, ‘This is what they think of me in my own damn hometown.’”

Mantle’s patron Harold Youngman, the prosperous owner of a Missouri road-building company, handled his investments and indulged his taste for hunting, fishing, and basketball. He procured cushy off-season jobs for Mantle and Martin. Their responsibilities consisted mostly of
flying around the countryside in his twin-engine Beechcraft, chatting up town commissioners who awarded the contracts for new construction.

Youngman also sponsored Mickey Mantle’s Southwest Chat All-Stars, a basketball team that took on all comers including the Harlem Globetrotters. Mantle was the coach and occasional point guard. The Yankees were none too pleased about his minutes on the court and sent a telegraph telling him to cease and desist. “He just kind of shrugged it off,” recalled Paul Churchill, a member of the team.

After Mantle played in the championship game two nights later, Churchill said, he got another telegram:
REPORT TO NEW YORK CITY.

This was Martin’s first but not his last sojourn in Commerce. He got fat on Merlyn’s forbearance and Lovell’s biscuits and gravy. “Eating them beans and shit,” Mantle told me. “Merlyn didn’t like him,” Max Mantle said. “Didn’t have a reason to.”