The Last Boy (32 page)

A mean May chill dampened attendance for the Friday-evening game at the Stadium against the Minnesota Twins, the first of a long home stand. A forgotten tributary of the Harlem River, on whose banks the ballpark was built, ran on a diagonal from left field through the hole at short. The ancient waterway, Cromwell’s Creek, buried deep beneath layers of Manhattan schist and the sedimentary rock of urbanization, deepened the chill. A mist enveloped the scalloped copper frieze that ringed the upper deck of the Stadium.

There were not quite 21,000 hardy souls in attendance, every one of them thinking the same damn thing: if he hits one out tonight, nobody will ever see the ball again. That was the thing about Mantle. You never knew what might happen when he stepped to the plate—or what might happen to him.

It was supposed to be his year. God owed him, didn’t He? Mantle had
greeted the spring with rookie enthusiasm, as if granted a reprieve. He seemed different, more patient. Cornered at batting practice one day by an unctuous Texas disk jockey, who insisted upon reciting Mantle’s yearly home run totals and poking him in the shoulder for emphasis, Mantle let him yammer away, rolling his eyes heavenward when the soliloquy ended. “I care much more about other people’s feelings now,” he told the jabbering deejay. “I used to think what the hell and not waste any time with them. Now I realize they have feelings too.”

That winter the M & M boys, new members of the Screen Actors Guild, made a cameo appearance with Rock Hudson and Doris Day in
That Touch of Mink
and starred in a comic caper called
Safe at Home!
, for which they each earned $25,000. Whitey Ford, Ralph Houk, and Big Julie had bit parts. The day they inked the deal, Mantle admired himself in the mirror, and offered a disarming bit of quotable hubris: “I can’t understand how it could have taken them so long to discover me.”

Mantle got standing ovations wherever he went, including the men’s room; Maris got mugged in the press. Rogers Hornsby called him “a punk baseball player.” Jimmy Cannon called him “a whiner.”

Mantle understood that the terrible onus Maris carried to the finish line conferred on him—the loser—a certain grace. “I became an American hero in 1961 because he beat me,” he told me. “He was an ass, and I was a nice guy. He beat Babe Ruth and he beat me, so they hated him. Everywhere we’d go, I got a standing ovation. All I had to do was walk out of the dugout.”

Maris wasn’t in the lineup on May 18, having injured his groin two days earlier; nor was Yogi Berra, who was making his last trip around the bases as an everyday player. Mantle was the Yankees offense.

He was batting .326 with 7 home runs and 17 RBIs when the evening began. In his first three visits to the plate, he walked and scored twice. But in the top of the seventh, Harmon Killebrew hit a two-run home run off Ford and the Twins took a 4–3 lead, which they nurtured into the bottom of the ninth inning. Mantle was due up fourth.

The murmuring began when Berra pinch-hit to lead off the ninth—Mantle was at the bat rack. Berra popped out but Tom Tresh singled. It was a measly infield hit, to be sure, but enough to get Mantle another at-bat.

The buzz turned into a thrum when he emerged from the dugout, swinging a bat with that graceful torque of possibility.
Mickey’s on deck!

Joe Pepitone—
Pepi! Pepi!
—lifted a fly ball to deep center field, where it died a predictable death, but not before moving Tresh into scoring position. Mantle walked to the plate, and Minnesota manager Sam Mele marched to the mound, summoning lefty Dick Stigman from the bullpen. Amid the frenzied crescendo—
Mickey! Mickey!
—Mele ordered Stigman to throw only curveballs, low curveballs. “I won’t be mad if you walk him,” Mele promised.

The first curve hung high, a tantalizing offering, and Mantle mauled it, sending a ferocious one-hopper at Minnesota shortstop Zoilo Versalles. It looked like a sure out, an easy out. But the ball was hit so hard, as Jack Reed noted on the Yankee bench, “it almost knocked him into left field.”

Twins second baseman Bernie Allen remembered, “The ball came up on Zoilo and hit him in his shoulder and popped up in the air.”

Mantle saw the momentary glitch and reached for a remembered burst of speed.

He was tired. The week had been grueling: a doubleheader in Cleveland, followed by a three-hour bus ride to Pittsburgh for an exhibition game; an abortive flight to Boston that returned the Yankees to New York at 5
A.M.
because Logan Airport was fogged in; then, after three, maybe four hours of sleep, they flew back to Boston, played two night games, a day game, and flew back to the Bronx to face the Twins.

With two outs, Tresh was running with the pitch. “I’m on second,” he said, slipping into the present tense, as ballplayers do when recalling the past. “By the time he makes contact, I should be between third and home. He’s behind me. I can’t see him. I see Versalles bobble the ball.”

Just steps from the bag—some observers said five, others ten, maybe twelve—Mantle’s body betrayed him. “The legs wouldn’t go as fast as his mind made him go,” Houk said.

Mantle wasn’t surprised. He could always tell when something bad was going to happen. He collapsed in midstride, his legs extended beyond reach or reason. He hung there for an instant, or so it seemed, before the force of gravity sucked him to the ground, splayed in the base path, his cheek pressed to the dirt. His feet churned, his hand reached for the bag.

The Twins’ first baseman, Vic Power, heard him moan. “It’s my legs. It’s my legs.”

Allen heard the muscle pop from second base. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God.’”

From where Houk sat on the bench, it looked just like October 1951, when the world went out from under Mantle’s feet. Watching him writhe in the dirt, Houk thought of the rabbits he had hunted as a boy. They rolled like that when they were shot.

The big Longines clock in right center field read: 10:23
P.M.
Mantle lay in a fetal position, inert with pain. Everyone else in the ballpark was standing. “I’ve never heard a place that big get that quiet,” Mantle told me, reflexively massaging his left leg. “I thought I broke this leg then. It wouldn’t come back down. It just stuck up, and when I fell, I tore this knee up.”

Tresh never quit running. He cut across the infield and reached Mantle before the trainers arrived. Don Seger, the assistant trainer, was one of those attending to him. “He really, really hurt himself,” he said. “He tore his groin. It didn’t detach but it was strained enough that he lost function in the groin complex. I think he came out with a little meniscus on that one, too.”

Mantle refused the stretcher and was helped from the field, arms draped over supportive shoulders. Bob Cerv cleared a path to the dugout, murmuring, “It’s bad.”

The Yankees stayed away from the trainer’s room out of fear and respect. “All we could think about was ‘Wow, there goes the pennant,’” said relief pitcher Roland Sheldon. “ ‘How are we going to go on without Mickey?’”

Houk briefed the press with wishful thinking: “Maybe a charley horse.”

The team doctor was on the telephone making arrangements for Mantle’s admission to Lenox Hill Hospital.

He showered on crutches, telling himself, “I’ll be out a week.” He was gone for five. He hobbled up the steps to the players’ gate, where seventy-five mournful fans, a phalanx of news photographers, and Dan Topping’s chauffeur waited. His smile was tight. The buttons on his snazzy cardigan strained beneath his crutches. “See y’all,” he said.

Houk stayed up until 3 or 4
A.M.,
waiting for word from the hospital.
Mantle had torn the adductor muscle in his right hip. Landing hard on his left knee—the good knee—he had strained the ligaments behind it. Gaynor called the injury “reasonably severe.”

Houk already knew what no X-ray could detect: it was the beginning of the end. “Start of it, anyway,” he said.

A locker room is as much an idea as it is a place, a state of mind requiring no fixed address. In major league lexicon, “locker” is also a verb, as in:
I lockered next to Mickey Mantle.

The Yankee locker room circa 1962 wasn’t plush. Amenities were minimal: wire hangers, cubicles separated by chain link, four-legged wooden stools. The concrete floor was painted a deep terra-cotta red and paved with corrugated rubber mats that stamped serrated edges into bare feet. Pepitone was lucky to find an electrical outlet when he showed up with his much-scorned hair dryer.

But for Mantle, the Yankee locker room was a sanctuary, a safe haven where he was understood, accepted, and, when necessary, exonerated. “I think the happiest time in his life was probably when he was in the locker room with the guys that he cared for,” said Tresh, the American League Rookie of the Year in 1962.

The locker room was ruled by the Petes: Big Pete (Sheehy) and his assistant, Little Pete (Previte), who autographed a thousand baseballs with a convincing facsimile of Mantle’s signature and kept his locker tiptop. “He looked out for Mickey better than a mother would look out for their little kid,” said batboy Frank Prudenti. “If Mickey Mantle went around the corner into the trainer’s room wantin’ to get a Coke or went into the lounge, he would run over to that locker, straighten out the stool, straighten out his clothes, his shoes. Mickey walked by one day, he grabbed a shoe brush and says, ‘Come here, Mickey, your shoes are dusty.’ Right there, he took the dust off him. Once he was shining his street shoes. He didn’t like how they were shined.”

Mantle didn’t want to stick out, but he did; he didn’t want to be treated as special, but he was. He didn’t want to be the center of attention, but
he was the center fielder for the most visible sports franchise in the world. In this, he was quite unlike the arrogant, demanding star he replaced. DiMaggio demanded: “Attention must be paid.” Mantle deflected it. “Go talk to Moose. Go talk to Hank.”

“He didn’t want to be exempted as one of the great ballplayers,” said Tony Kubek. “He just wanted to be with his boys.”

In 1962, Sheehy stationed Mantle between two rookie infielders, Tresh and Phil Linz. Tresh was the son of a major league catcher, “Iron Mike,” who had taught him to switch-hit like The Mick. For as long as he could handle a glove, Tresh aped everything Mantle did. As a boy in Detroit, he stationed himself in the upper deck of center field in Tiger Stadium when the Yankees came to town “just to watch him run out to the field.” When they became teammates, Tresh said, “I actually called him ‘Idol.’”

The first time he saw Mantle up close, Tresh was in an elevator during a rookie camp in St. Pete—the doors opened and there
he
was. Though they stood eye to eye, Mantle seemed a thousand steps higher—a feeling Tresh never got over. “I never could see him as just one step higher than I was.”

He didn’t expect sweetness from the icon. Mantle gave him four pairs of spikes, and the shirt off his back, and when the Yankees moved Tresh to the outfield, he gave him the glove he was breaking in to replace his gamer. Mantle had made the same transition from shortstop to outfield his rookie year.

When Tresh’s wife got pregnant, he told Mantle, “I’m naming my son after you.” He wasn’t the only teammate to do so. Mantle dismissed such tributes with laconic profanities.
What the fuck did you do that for?
“He was always embarrassed about anybody paying him a compliment,” Tresh said. “I think he felt very honored but he couldn’t show it.”

The baby was indeed a boy. And Tresh named him Mickey. “When he was born, he weighed seven pounds, seven ounces. He’s blond-haired, blue-eyed. I told Mickey, ‘Did you miss a road trip? If that kid has a limp, you’re in trouble.’”

Linz took a more distanced approach. He watched how people talked to Mantle and was careful how he spoke to him. “I wanted to be able to say the right thing. I was always in awe, but I never let him know it. The first sign that he would think he was special, he would want to be away from that guy.”

Mantle’s “aw, shucks” modesty was genuine. “
I’m
in the encyclopedia?” he’d say, and gasp—“Damn!”—when shown the entry under his name. He stared with incredulity when Tim McCarver introduced him to his insurance man, an old University of Oklahoma running back named Buddy Leake. “
You’re
Buddy Leake? I can’t believe I’m meeting Buddy Leake!”

He was a great storyteller and the fall guy of his best tales. A favorite was set during a game in Detroit. “I make this really good catch with the bases loaded,” he told me. “I used to be bashful. Head up, I’m not. In front of a lot of people, I am. Everyone’s applauding and I think it’s the last out. I got my head ducked. I’m running back in, and I got the ball in my glove. All of a sudden Billy Martin is going, ‘Give me the fuckin’ ball.’

“I’m going, ‘What the fuck?’

“He says, ‘Goddamn, there’s one out.’

“I looked up, and there’s fucking people sliding all over Yogi. Two guys scored on a fly ball.”

That was the thing other players, teammates and opponents, admired most about him.

“No ego,” said Gil McDougald.

“Great control of his ego,” said Reggie Jackson.

“Wasn’t no individual,” said Jim Coates.

In the locker room, where everything is exposed, he was seen as “the best teammate ever.” They saw how hard he worked at it. Kubek saw how “he didn’t phony up anything.” Ford was chairman of the board, who “commanded the respect of all the guys” said Eli Grba, and “held meetings without the training staff if we were playing terrible.”

But Mantle was the official greeter. When Bob Turley reported to the Yankees in the spring of 1955 after an infamous nineteen-player off-season trade, he found a “Greenie” (lime soda) and a flower waiting at his locker. “What the hell is this?” he said.

“Welcome,” Mantle replied.

What was most surprising was his empathy. “If a person had a problem, he could just feel that person’s problem,” said Gene Michael, the utility infielder who later became Yankee manager and general manager.

His people skills—emotional intelligence in modern parlance—made a lasting impression on Mark Freeman during the brief time they played together in 1959. “I think he’s basically one of the most decent guys I’ve
ever met,” he told Leonard Schecter of the
Post
. “He’s learned to swap places with rookies, so he understands them, sympathizes with their aspirations. He has a way of making you feel he’s really interested in what you’re saying. Every day, Mickey would go by DiMaggio’s locker, just aching for some word of encouragement from this great man, this hero of his. But DiMaggio never said a word. It crushed Mickey. He told me he vowed right then that if he ever got to be a star, this never would be said of him.”