The Last Boy (2 page)

“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.)

These prodigious numbers belie the pain and suffering it took to accumulate them. Far more than his contemporaries in center field, Willie and The Duke, Mantle fit the classical definition of a tragic hero—he was so gifted, so flawed, so damaged, so beautiful. The traumatic and defining knee injury he suffered catching a spike in an outfield drain during the 1951 World Series attenuated his breathtaking potential after just seven months in the major leagues. His death from alcohol-related cancer in 1995 attenuated eighteen months of belated, hard-earned sobriety. He had so little time to be his best self.

Today, his memory survives in a kind of protective custody, fiercely guarded against the slings and arrows of a tell-all culture by a cohort of aging fanboys. Call it Mantleology—a cultlike following of Baby
Boomers unprecedented in modern sports. Al Taxerman, an otherwise rational New York attorney, calls Mantle “my Achilles, part man, part God, giving the divine fits,” but he turned down the chance to meet him lest he be confronted with his hero’s flaws.

They will invest almost any sum in order to own a piece of him. Billy Crystal paid $239,000 on a game-used glove—with broken webbing. He intended to quit bidding at $120,000 but his wife persisted, finally outlasting the rival bidder, former Yankee pitcher David Wells. Crystal says the glove is more valuable to him than the Picasso hanging in his home. That’s a big number on anyone’s ledger but far less impressive than the amount spent by an unemployed limo driver on three Mayo Clinic appointment cards ($649) and a 1951 bankbook from the First State Bank of Commerce ($1,888). That’s more than Mantle ever had in the account.

The day before I left for the Heroes in Pinstripes fantasy camp run by his comrades Hank Bauer and Bill Skowron, I got a call from the director wanting to make sure I wasn’t planning to ask anything that might upset his campers. These are middle-aged men who paid $5,000 for the privilege of pulling their hamstrings on the fields where Mickey once roamed. They prefer the lavender scrim of Ozzie Sweet’s staged portraits.

Upon my arrival at ground zero for Mantleologists, Bauer, the stalwart ex-Marine then dying of lung cancer, poked a gnarly forefinger in my chest and croaked, “Nothing negative. Nothing
negative
! Nothing
NEGATIVE
!” His partner, “Moose” Skowron, once refused to participate in a Mantle roast at the Claridge Hotel, asking with incredulity, “You want me to make fun of Mickey Mantle?” After Mantle’s death he expressed disappointment with his family’s forthright comments about his alcoholism. “He didn’t drink that much,” Skowron told me. “He didn’t hurt nobody.”

When Peter Golenbock’s novel
7
, a so-called fictional biography of Mantle so prurient that this publisher dropped it from its 2007 list, was published, Johnny Blanchard called the Yankees former PR man Marty Appel to ask: “Would it help if me and Moose went down and beat the shit out of him?”

Such is the force field that surrounds Mantle’s memory.

I have a photograph of Mantle and his cohorts Billy Martin and Whitey Ford, part of a series by the photographer Fredrich Cantor, a
candid shot taken in the dugout at Shea Stadium on Old Timers’ Day, 1975. Graying muttonchops spread like crabgrass across Mantle’s cheeks, polyester pinstripes gaping at the formerly taut midriff. He’s got a goofy, cross-eyed Jerry Lewis look on his face, chapped lips inverting the famous smile. His thick slugger hands pound his chest as if to say, “Look at me!” Whitey, the slick New York kid, looks away. Billy, the hard case sidekick, laughs, egging him on as usual.

The photo is a touchstone of another era: when boys were allowed to be boys and it was okay to laugh at them for being themselves, when it was okay not to know and to forgive what you did know. Cantor caught the essence of Mantle’s appeal. He was the Last Boy in the last decade ruled by boys. He was Li’l Abner in a posse of dreamy reprobates: James Dean, Buddy Holly, Frankie Avalon, Dean Martin, Elvis. Women wanted to have them or mother them. Young men aped them, while behind the scenes, elders and handlers tried to tame them. “And the rest of us got bigger and harder under the testosterone shower,” Bob Lipsyte said.

Mickey Mantle was the Last Boy venerated by the last generation of Baby Boomer boys, whose unshakable bond with their hero is the obdurate refusal to grow up. Maintaining the fond illusions of adolescence is the ultimate Boomer entitlement. He inspired awe without envy—except perhaps for what he got away with. Pain inoculated him against jealousy and judgment.

If at the beginning Mantle was the incarnation of the strong, silent Fifties—“surly,” sportswriters called him—he evolved into a psychobabble raconteur, laying himself on the public couch to recount the particulars of his recurring nightmares. Mantle himself punctured the protective he-man bubble in an April 1969 guest appearance on
The Dick Cavett Show
shortly after he retired, genially describing his boyhood bed-wetting to the inquisitive host and his disconcerted guest, Paul Simon. Off camera, Mantle asked why Simon hadn’t used “Where have you gone, Mickey Mantle?” in his latest hit song—the only time in memory his name wasn’t a good fit. Besides, he hadn’t been gone long enough for “lonely eyes” to miss.

In the last years of his life, Mantle morphed into an avatar of the confessional Nineties. He became a 12-step prophet pushing the gospel of recovery in the pages of
Sports Illustrated
after he got out of rehab. Less
than eighteen months later, in his last public appearance before his death, he was a desiccated figment of the apple-cheeked youth in Ozzie Sweet’s oeuvre.

The packaging and repackaging, construction and deconstruction of his memory continues unabated. SABRmetricians such as Bill James, the guru of baseball’s new math, reprocess his statistics. Writers recalibrate his memory and recycle recollections, creating what Richard Sandomir of
The New York Times
calls MickLit (biography, retrospective, novel, novella, koan, list, stat).

He led one of twentieth-century America’s most reiterated lives, leaving a paper trail long enough to pave the way from Commerce, Oklahoma, to the Bronx. The army of scriveners had lots of help from friends happy to exaggerate their relationship with greatness and from Mantle himself. He became an enthusiastic contributor to his own legend but was neither a “good custodian of it,” as Thad Mumford put it, nor a reliable one. Over time, alcohol corroded his memory. He misremembered a lot—the year he got married, for example. Factual errors were compounded by repetition and by the raconteur’s instinct for a good yarn. His life became a solipsistic loop of video clips and sound bites. Much of what he knew about himself was what reporters told him he had once said.

During his lifetime, Mantle wrote or collaborated on at least six different biographies, in addition to inspirational and instructional tomes. They include
All My Octobers
,
My Favorite Summer 1956
,
Whitey and Mickey
, and
The Mick.
Since his death, at least twenty new volumes have been added to the canon, including thoughtful posthumous biographies by Tony Castro, David Falkner, and John Hall. His family has authored or authorized three books, including a collection of condolence notes from his fans and a searingly brave confessional,
A Hero All His Life
, detailing their collective descent into alcoholism and drug abuse. Mantle contributed a chapter written from his deathbed. I relied heavily on this account, supplementing it with my own interviews with Mantle and his family.

The aim here is neither voyeuristic nor encyclopedic—don’t look for every home run, clutch base hit, disabling injury, or pub crawl. The narrative landmarks of his life are well known and well documented: Mutt, the dying miner father; the osteomyelitis that almost cost him a leg; the crippling encounter with the drain in right center field at Yankee Stadium.
Instead, I picked twenty days from his life and career for closer inspection, each pivotal or defining. They represent highs, lows, flash points, and turning points.