The Last Boy (33 page)

Michael and Kubek insist he would have been that way no matter what.

When Big Pete assigned Kubek a uniform number commensurate with a quick trip back to the bush leagues his rookie year, Mantle intervened and got him the one he would wear throughout his career. “You know he’s going to make it.”

It was Mantle’s calming voice Kubek heard that season calling from the dugout during a tough at-bat. And it was Mantle’s voice he heard on the other end of the line expressing condolences when Kubek’s father died. He was the only teammate who called.

Few outsiders ever saw that Mantle. Imagine the surprise when he showed up at a Chicago hospital to visit Marjorie Bolding’s mother with a raft of teammates in tow and a suitable bouquet of flowers. “People don’t know what kind of man he was,” said Steve Kraly, his teammate in major and minor league baseball. “If you sat down and talked with him at the breakfast table, he came across as pleasant and gentle, but sportswriters wrote the opposite.”

Beat writers suspected there was another Mantle, one who didn’t begin every conversation with “Fuck you” or “Go fuck yourself” or, when he was pressed for time, just plain “Fuck.” But Mantle turned on his stool when they pried and probed. “For me, the frustration when I was covering him was, you knew he was a nice guy and you knew he was terrific with his teammates,” said Stan Isaacs, who covered the Yankees for
Newsday.
“You’d try to talk to him, and he’d look right through you. This was his defense.”

Writers were relieved when he was in a good mood and didn’t mind being twitted for their bad haircuts and shiny suits. “When he was happy, as a young reporter, I was happy because he wasn’t tormented at that moment,” said George Vecsey, who began traveling with the team in 1962. “Nobody should be that miserable.”

He was a guy’s guy who called everyone “bud” or “pard.” But he cried
easily. He wept at mournful country-western tunes, and at the morning headlines. “Somebody got killed or something, he’d get tears in his eyes,” Irv Noren said.

He cried when a dying child was placed in his arms outside the clubhouse at Griffith Stadium in Washington and he cried when he failed. “One day he strikes out four times and goes back to the clubhouse, and he’s crying,” Hank Bauer said. “Moose says, ‘Mick, what’s wrong?’

“He says, ‘I let down my teammates and my fans.’

“Moose says, ‘You know, there is tomorrow.’”

Locker room newcomers learned fast—“If he went up and struck out, nobody said a word until he broke the silence,” said Stan Williams, who arrived in 1963. “He was a hero in the clubhouse because of the respect the other players had for the way he played the game—not just his ability but the intensity he played it with.”

One day Coates made the mistake of welcoming him back to the bench with a consoling spank after a poor at-bat. “He smacked my arm off of his butt so fast I didn’t know what hit me,” Coates said. “You don’t say nothin’ to him. He wants to do it so bad and so good.”

“Was he nasty sometimes?” Kubek said. “Oh, yeah. Could he lose his temper sometimes? Oh, yeah. Did he snap his bats sometimes? Oh, yeah. But he just wanted to be among his people.”

No one was spared The Mick’s unrepentant teenage humor. He was the guy who froze a plastic snake and stuck it down Marshall Bridges’ pants—the relief pitcher had a serious case of ophidiophobia. He left a dead fish in the whirlpool for Johnny Blanchard one spring training morning because he knew Blanch would be needing to sweat off a hard night. He put the talcum powder in Pepitone’s hair dryer. Pepitone retaliated by putting Joy dishwashing liquid into Mantle’s whirlpool. Nothing remarkable about that, except that he was a rookie.

One day after Al Downing, the Yankees’ first African American pitcher, joined the club, Mantle and Ford joined him in the shower room. Taking the measure of their new teammate, Mantle told Ford, “Hey, Slick, he’s one of us.”

Downing wasn’t amused hearing the story for the first time fifty years after the fact. “
Who
gave you that information?” he demanded. Upon learning that the source was Mantle, he laughed.

“He was an equal-opportunity offender,” Jim Bouton said.

In the clubhouse, Mantle shed the residue of bias he had brought with him from Commerce. He laid a carpet of white towels at Elston Howard’s locker after he hit his first major league home run, easing the path for the Yankees’ first African American player. Traveling secretary Frank Scott told reporters that Mantle had refused to attend a cocktail party hosted by Cardinals’ owner Augie Busch when Howard was excluded.

He may have left prejudice behind, but Kubek says he remained a good old boy from Oklahoma. When Bobby Cox arrived in 1968 and Mantle learned that he was born an Okie (albeit one raised in California), he gave the rookie his first-class seat on the first plane flight of the year.

Cox was what Stengel used to call “one of them milk shake drinkers.” Mantle knew the best soda fountain in every American League town. “He’d ask us to go out and have milk shakes because he knew what kind of guys we were,” said Cox’s roommate Andy Kosco. “He’d say, C’mon, there’s a great place across the street.’ One of his favorites was having Coke and milk together. After a while it really didn’t taste too bad. He loved that drink. He’d have it even on airplanes. It’s like a root beer float.”

There was some self-interest involved—nobody went looking for The Mick at a soda fountain counter. “He knew if he went with us he wouldn’t be bothered,” Kosco said.

Rookies or veterans, slumping teammates got invitations to dinner.
You come with me tonight.
“He’d take you downtown for a steak and a talk but not a word about baseball,” Blanchard once told a reporter. “If you were a farm boy, he’d talk about farming. If you were a city boy, he’d ask where you went to school.”

He took in homeless teammates like strays. “When I got divorced, he saw I was depressed,” Pepitone said. “He says, ‘I got two rooms at the St. Moritz. You come stay there.’ So I stayed for a year.”

One season he gave Jerry Lumpe the keys to his house in New Jersey. Merlyn and the boys had gone back to Oklahoma. “He’d already paid the rent, and he said, ‘Just go out,’” Lumpe said. “We stayed for two months or something. He never asked for a dime.”

Lumpe also inherited the sports jackets Mantle left behind in the closet. “Take ’em,” Mantle said. They fit. Lumpe would have worn them even if they hadn’t.

As with many who grow up poor, money didn’t stay in his pocket long unless he had mislaid it—like the paycheck that Sheehy found stuck between the cracks of the trunk he used to store players’ valuables. Or the uncashed $1,000 check from Wheaties he dug out of his pocket one day on a Manhattan street corner while searching for a piece of paper on which to write his home address for a visiting Oklahoma fireman.

He was a soft touch, always good for a loan. He picked up every tab (that wasn’t picked up for him) and overtipped on every one of them. “Mickey would tell you before you go out, ‘Don’t even try it,’” Clete Boyer said. “If you tried to pay your share, he’d say, ‘I won’t go out with you no more.’ And he meant it.”

Pepitone saw him leave $50 on a 50-cent cup of coffee. “He’d say, ‘You workin’? You deserve whatever I’m gonna give you,’” Pepitone recalled. “A lot of these waiters, they’d come up to Mickey, ‘Can you autograph this?’ Well, he didn’t like that. But you didn’t say nothing, you served him, shit, you’d get a two-hundred-dollar tip for a dollar-and-a-half sandwich.”

Once on a spring training bus ride from Tampa to St. Pete, he saw a man lying on the railroad tracks.
Hey, bussie, stop!
The driver pulled over. “Mantle got off and gave him a hundred dollars,” Kubek said.

Years later, Kubek was greeted by a homeless man as he left his New York hotel: “Hey, Tony, Mickey just walked by an hour ago and gave me a hundred dollars.”

“He always did it in the dark so no one knew,” Kubek said. “I gave him twenty dollars.”

Mantle gave away so much—including his first uniform, at a birthday party—Merlyn finally bronzed one of his gloves and a pair of spikes before they disappeared from the house. “I used to get mad at him because we weren’t exactly in the bucks,” she told me.

The quarter horses he received on Mickey Mantle Day in 1965 were shipped to Harold Youngman’s ranch as a gift for the ranch foreman’s children. A matched set of holsters and replica six-shooters? Handed over to a lost boy being minded by a cop at the players’ gate.

Every winter just before spring training, he hosted an elaborate banquet at “Mickey Mantle’s Holiday Inn” in Joplin, inviting all the major-leaguers who lived within a 200-mile radius. All expenses paid. “The first year it was a very formal dinner,” said Shirley Virdon, Bill’s
wife. “Everybody was all dressed up in white gloves and tuxes. We had all this service, wine for every course, silverware all lined up. None of the ballplayers knew how to use it. I can still hear him giggling.”

His generosity was reflexive and dutiful. After Mutt died, Lovell never worked or wanted; she received regular checks from the Social Security Administration and the New York Yankees. “Every time the Yankees paid him,” his sister, Barbara, said.

He provided in a way that Mutt never could—far more than the necessities. He made sure Barbara had the fashion accessories the popular girls flaunted; she never forgot that pair of beaded Indian moccasins. His childhood friend LeRoy Bennett thought his largesse did not always benefit his twin brothers. “Mickey brought back big cars and big hats and big money to Commerce. Mickey kind of spoiled them rotten before they got to the point where they could be men of enough character to play baseball.”

Faye Davis, his half-brother’s widow, thought some family members, including his mother, treated him like an ATM machine. Whenever Ted’s friends brought up the money he fronted for Merlyn’s engagement ring, her husband replied, “Yeah, but he gave it back to me a hundredfold, many times over.”

“What’s more,” she said, “Ted was always getting arrested or something, and he’d get him out of jail.”

His teammates saw the guilt he felt about his absence from his own family. “Really, really, really guilty,” Tresh said—and how, out of the spotlight, he doted on other people’s children. Some days when he was carpooling with Ryne Duren, Merlyn would call and say he didn’t need a ride to the park. Duren figured the sonofabitch had gotten drunk without him the night before. “I found out later that Mickey Mantle visited an awful lot of kids in a hospital,” Duren said. “He didn’t allow her to say where he was.”

A
Sports Illustrated
reporter traveling with Mantle for a story about “life on the road with The Mick” was in Mantle’s hotel suite in Kansas City when a man called from the lobby identifying himself as a friend of Mantle’s brother Frank and asked to bring his kids up to say hello. Whitey Ford was puzzled, pointing out that Mantle didn’t have a brother by that name. “I know I don’t,” Mantle replied. “I figured the fella’d be embarrassed in front of the two kids and all.”

One year at spring training, he paid a cabana boy to climb a royal palm
and fetch fronds to make hats for all the Yankee children, recalled one of the recipients, Tony Kubek’s son, Tony III. He heard from his parents how after home games, while waiting for the crowd to disperse, Mantle would go to the family room to say hello to the wives and children. He was the only player who did that, his mother told him. When arrangements needed to be made for the inevitable World Series trips, Kubek said, “He always made sure the players’ wives knew where they had to be.”

His father, the Yankee shortstop, wondered whether it was because Merlyn and the boys weren’t there.

Mantle remained in the hospital for five days after collapsing in the base path on May 18. He was released at noon on May 23 and appeared in the clubhouse an hour and fifteen minutes later. He was still on crutches. He told reporters he could do without them if he dragged his leg but not if he planned on bending it. The Yankee brass was counting on the whirlpool to heal him sufficiently to make the West Coast trip the first week of June.

When that didn’t work, he went home to Dallas, where the Cowboys’ trainer, Wayne Rudy, supervised his rehabilitation. Running back Don Perkins said the Cowboys didn’t know who he was, but they knew he was somebody when he took off his shirt.

In his absence, the Yankees won fourteen of twenty-eight games. Ford sent him a bouquet of eight tired daisies, because that’s what the batting order was without its heart. General manager Roy Hamey summoned him to join the team in Los Angeles to provide moral support. “I won’t say the players are brooding about him, but maybe they’ll feel better if he’s around,” Hamey said.

The Yankees won two out of three games from the Angels and moved back into first place. Mantle cracked wise to his boys: “I got you into first place. Now you’re on your own.”

For five weeks, he was team mascot and comic. Elmer—his locker room nickname—appeared in the dugout during batting practice one day decked out like Mortimer Snerd, Edgar Bergen’s dim-witted puppet, with a shred of chewing tobacco pasted over a prominent front
tooth, his cap pulled low on his brow, and his ears protruding. Mantle rendered the Orioles’ batting-practice pitcher incapable of throwing the ball over the plate.

When he began taking batting practice,
Sports Illustrated
reported that his legs “trembled like those of an old card table.” His teammates gave him a new nickname—“B & G,” for blood and guts. He replied to the incessant inquiries for medical updates by pinning a sign to his chest: “Slight improvement. Back in two weeks. Don’t ask.”

He came off the disabled list on June 16, summoned to pinch-hit against Gary Bell in Cleveland. Fifty thousand witnesses saw him blast a three-run homer in the top of the eighth inning to give the Yankees the lead. That proved fleeting; the memory endured. It was his first—albeit unacknowledged—hangover home run. “Pinch-hit, eighth or ninth inning, when he was too drunk to play,” Linz said, one of perhaps three or four times he saw Mantle play in that condition.

Mantle returned to the starting lineup on June 22.
Sports Illustrated
excoriated Yankee management for taking “a cold and ruthless gamble” with his health. “Faced with a losing streak and the distasteful prospect of not winning the pennant for a change, the New York Yankees rushed the most valuable property in baseball back into action last week and ran the risk of losing him forever.”