The Last Boy (15 page)

So Nathan did what scientists hate most: he assumed. He knew the distance from home plate to the beer sign—460 feet. He calculated that the ball had left Mantle’s bat traveling at about 113 miles per hour at a launch angle of 30 to 31 degrees. He assumed that the wind had been blowing 20 miles per hour, less than the highest reported gusts; that the ball had been deflected but not severely; that it had nicked Mr. Boh at a point 55 to 60 feet above street level but retained enough horizontal speed to traverse the 52-foot distance from the edge of the sign to the roofs of the houses on Fifth Street.

According to Nathan’s calculations, the front of the second house was 512 feet from home plate. The back of the house was about 540 feet from the plate. Its tin roof slanted six inches to the rear. “If my estimate of where the sign was is correct, then very little deflection would be necessary to get the ball to about where Dunaway said he found it,” Nathan said. “It could have hit the roof of the second or third house and rolled down into the backyard.”

In short, according to the laws of physics, the fate of the ball as described by Donald Dunaway is scientifically plausible. The best hypothesis is that he was telling the truth.

On Saturday, October 31, the day he was scheduled to check into Burge Hospital in Springfield, Missouri, for surgery on his damaged right knee, Mantle called in sick. Bad stomach, Merlyn told Mantle’s minder Tom Greenwade, who had made the arrangements. It wasn’t just a case of preoperative nerves, though there were some of those. There was a matter of family honor to settle—a footrace with his brother Ray to determine who was the fastest Mantle. “I thought I had better find out before coming up here,” he told Kenny L. Brasel, a reporter from the
Springfield Leader & Press.

Ignoring his doctor’s caution against strenuous exercise, Mantle challenged Ray to a 100-yard dash. He won, then got sick to his stomach.

His queasiness was understandable, given his well-founded apprehension about going under the knife. He knew what his doctors could not—he was never the same after the 1951 World Series. Straightaway, he could
still fly down the line, his fanny getting lower with each step. But he knew he had lost lateral movement, the ability to change directions, to cut and run. And he didn’t tell Frank Sundstrom, the young surgeon who took the preoperative history, how much pain he was in until after the operation.

Mantle arrived at Burge Hospital on Sunday, November 1; surgery was scheduled for the next afternoon. He checked into a two-room suite—one for the patient, the other for Greenwade, the designated spokesman and security guard. Mantle didn’t want to go under the knife—what twenty-two-year-old who made his living with his body would? He especially didn’t want to do it in New York, Springfield papers reported, where his convalescence in Lenox Hill Hospital in the fall of 1951 had been disturbed by the “aggressive attitude of Easterners” who ignored the “No Visitors” sign on the door.

Yankee general manager George Weiss had referred him to a Springfield physician named Bertram Meyer, who had introduced him to Dan Yancey, a local orthopedist with a national reputation. Mantle had reinjured his knee on August 8, Ladies’ Day at Yankee Stadium, chasing down a hard hit ball to left center field in front of 68,000 people. “By lightning work, the Oklahoma kid held the blow to a single,” the
Times
reported, “but as he stopped short to make the pivot for the throw to second base he gave his right knee a severe jolt.”

“Sprained ligament,” said team physician Sidney Gaynor. “Yankee Stadium jinx” was Mantle’s diagnosis. Lying on a clubhouse couch, with his cap perched on his still-sweaty brow and an ice bag balanced on his knee, he bemoaned his fate. “It’s the same sort of an injury I received in the 1951 World Series. I’ve never been hurt in a baseball game until I joined the Yankees.”

Fitted with a bulky brace that laced above and below the knee, he talked his way back into the lineup on August 18. When he failed to reach a ball he should have caught, Stengel sent him back to the bench, where he remained, save for four pinch-hitting appearances, until August 29.

And so a season that had begun with a bang in April, with a league-leading .353 batting average in June and four 4 RBI games by mid-July, ended with respectable but less-than-stellar totals: .295 BA, 92 RBI, and 21 home runs, only 5 of them after August 8.

On September 4, the Yankees received an anonymous death threat
postmarked Boston, warning Mantle if he played at Fenway Park over the Labor Day weekend his career would “come to an end with a .32.”

Though the FBI concluded that the letter was most likely the work of a crank or perhaps a very young Red Sox fan, police hauled Mantle off the train in Hartford, Connecticut, en route to Boston and escorted him to Fenway with a security detail. He hit a home run and later told reporters that he had never circled the bases faster.

His two World Series home runs (a two-run game-winning home run in game 2 and a grand slam in game 5) helped the Yankees vanquish the Dodgers in yet another interborough championship. He also helped Dodger pitcher Carl Erskine set a new World Series record for strikeouts by contributing 4 of a record 14 in game 3. “He would take a good fast ball pretty much over the plate and swing at the curve ball out of the strike zone,” Erskine said. “Stengel was screaming at him from the dugout.”

Having created—and profited from—the myth of the Tape Measure Home Run, Yankee officials now wondered why Mantle swung at each pitch as though he wanted to detonate the ball. They were more worried about his physical condition.

The previous fall, the Army had again revisited his draft status. Again he was ruled 4-F but not because of the osteomyelitis that had previously disqualified him. A new Selective Service guideline—the Mantle rule, it was called—mandated that anyone who had not received treatment for the disease in the previous two years was eligible to serve. On November 3, 1952, the Army surgeon general in Washington ruled that Mantle was excused because of a “chronic right knee defect resulting from an injury suffered in the 1951 World Series.” The report cited the routine “rejection of persons with dislocated semi-lunar cartilages or loose bodies of the knee which have not been satisfactorily corrected by surgery.”

That grisly center field injury—not the sprained ligament in August—was the condition that brought Mantle to Burge Hospital two years later. With the technology available in 1953, Mantle’s doctors simply couldn’t see how badly he had damaged his knee. Today’s orthopedic essentials, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and arthroscopic surgery, were still decades away. The best sports orthopedists in the world had no way to visualize the extent of the injury or to predict the sequential degeneration that would follow.

They had no reason to doubt that torn cartilage fully explained the swelling, locking, and buckling of his knee. They had justifiable confidence in their sunny prognosis—that the damage was limited and the ligaments were intact. True, his knee would never be as strong as it had been prior to October 1951, but they believed he could regain 95 percent of its preoperative strength. The surgery, Yancey promised, would prohibit further “slipping of the knee” and eliminate Mantle’s tendency to favor it. He would report to spring training on time and run without inhibition or the need for a brace.

His patient was less sanguine: “I don’t know what I’m getting into, but this is my own idea,” he said as he was wheeled into the operating room.

That morning Frank Sundstrom, Yancey’s young associate, took a patient history and did a preop physical. He held the retractor during surgery and stitched up the 2½-inch wound. He did not see any pre-operative indication of a previous ligament tear or prior knee surgery. He found no significant abnormalities resulting from osteomyelitis. He noted in Mantle’s chart what so many other medical professionals observed: he was an astonishing physical specimen. “One of the best athletic bodies I had ever seen, and that was even before steroids,” Sundstrom said fifty years later. “He had such beautiful, strong, well-defined muscles.”

That singular male beauty was noticed in the Yankee locker room as well. “Mickey’s muscles, in spite of their size, zip with the looseness and speed of a lightweight boxer’s,” trainer Gus Mauch said. “When I massage his arms and shoulders, they transmit some sort of extra something which I never experienced before in over thirty years of handling athletes.”

But, Mauch believed, this apparent perfection masked an imbalance between muscle, bone, and connective tissue. As his successor, Joe Soares, explained: “Mantle had a severe, congenital condition. His muscles were so large, but his joints—wrist, knees, ankles—were frail. This discrepancy between the awesome muscles and the weak joints caused the vast majority of his muscle tears and injuries, and exercise wasn’t going to help this constitutional defect.”

Sundstrom concurred: “A ligament will withstand so much tension on it before it deforms or strains or tears,” he said. “I suspected that he would suffer ligament damage or tendon damage because of the horsepower in his muscles.”

Bunny Mick, a lifer in the Yankee organization, saw evidence for Sund-strom’s theory as Mantle took batting practice one day. “He screamed in pain, grabbing his chest as if he had had a heart attack. He’d swung so hard he ripped the muscle in his chest.”

In short, Mantle’s strength was his weakness. He tore himself apart. This flawed medical logic would become an essential element of Mantle mythology. But it would not survive the test of time and medical scrutiny. Mantle wasn’t brought down by the way he was built or his cavalier attitude toward off-season conditioning and rehabilitation. It was this simple: given the existing state of sports medicine, nothing could have prevented the degeneration of his right knee, short of another line of work.

When Yancey opened Mantle’s knee, he found, as expected, a bucket-handle tear of the medial meniscus, a piece of cartilage shaped like a crescent moon that fills and cushions the space between the femur and the tibia. The only surprise was the extent of the damage; the cartilage was split at one end and separated at the other, suggesting the wear and tear already occurring inside the joint. He removed approximately 30 percent of the meniscus, a piece of tissue “about the size of your little finger,” Sundstrom said, using the latest in orthopedic knives. Greenwade was summoned to the operating room to examine what
The Sporting News
called “vagrant cartilage.” Looked like “a piece of pork rind fish bait,” he declared.

Yancey patiently explained to the press that cartilage functions “like a shock absorber.” Though it does not grow back, he confidently—and erroneously—assured reporters that fibrous tissue would eventually fill the void. The surgery was unremarkable, the postoperative course smooth, the future unimpeded. “It was a fairly common thing,” Sundstrom said. “If you had to have something wrong with your knee, you’d want this to be it.”

Reconstructing Mantle’s medical history is almost as difficult as it was to diagnose the extent of his injuries in 1953. His family had none of his medical records, and the Yankees hadn’t retained them. Gaynor stipulated in his will that all of his remaining files were to be destroyed after his death and his daughter, Deborah, complied with his wish. There are no records remaining at Burge Hospital, and Lenox Hill Hospital in New York would not acknowledge whether any records remain in the archive, citing privacy laws. When Mantle’s son Danny contacted the Mayo Clinic, where his father had had subsequent checkups and surgeries, he was told there was nothing in the medical records pertaining to his father’s care.

Compounding the problem is the fact that Mantle’s accounts of his medical history were often inaccurate, inconsistent, and incomplete—beginning with the erroneous assertion that he had his first knee surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in October 1951. The date was never challenged. Why would it be? Who forgets his own medical history? And so the phantom surgery of 1951 was added to the list of surgical events solemnly updated with each of Mantle’s successive physical disasters.

The fact that no surgery was performed until November 1953 does not lessen the impact or severity of his original injury. On the contrary. It is extraordinary that Mantle played two full seasons following the World Series injury on an unstable, unrepaired knee.

Various accounts (newspaper, magazine, and book) described Mantle’s initial injury as torn cartilage, torn ligaments, or torn tendons. A later iteration described a fractured kneecap, the bone protruding through the skin, and blood sullying his uniform. This may well have been an extrapolation based on Mantle’s gory recitation.
I could feel my leg snap. I really thought my leg had fallen off at the knee.
None of the three teammates who first rushed to his side—Houk, Silvera, Kusava—remember blood in the outfield; nor is any evident in photographs taken when he was examined in the locker room.

Just how fateful was that moment in center field? To answer that
question, I assembled a “case history” from newspaper clippings, contemporaneous photographs, and interviews with teammates, trainers, and physicians. I presented the evidence to Dr. Stephen Haas, who was team physician for the Washington Wizards and Capitals and is now the medical director for the National Football League Players Association. I asked him to make an educated forensic diagnosis, a plausible case history for what happened to Mantle’s knee.

“It appears that the most likely critical event was an acute combination of torn medial collateral and anterior cruciate ligaments and a medial meniscal tear,” Haas said.

In modern vernacular, he blew out his knee.

This “unhappy triad” of injuries was named and identified by Haas’s mentor at the University of Oklahoma, Dr. Don O’Donoghue, in 1950. Knowing what it was and doing something about it were two entirely different things. “It is not surprising that the ACL tear was not seen since the surgical techniques at that time made it difficult to fully visualize that structure,” Haas said. “I am sure the meniscal tears, and loose bodies, got all of the attention at surgery because they are not as subtle and relatively easily treated. It probably satisfied the surgeon as to the cause of his symptoms.”

Don Seger, who became the Yankees’ assistant trainer in 1961, had worked on Mantle in spring training in the mid-Fifties. Even then he was struck by the degeneration of Mantle’s knee. He too is convinced that Mantle suffered the unhappy triad. Before the advent of MRI, doctors used what’s called the “anterior drawer test” to diagnose a ruptured ACL. “It pulls your leg forward while you’re sitting on a table and your leg’s at ninety degrees and you’re relaxed,” Seger said. “You pull it back and forth forward to see how much play you have in it, how far your leg would go away from your knee. That’s the ‘drawer sign,’ like pulling a drawer out. He’d sit there and wiggle his knee and make it go forward. I almost winced to watch him do it.”

Mantle turned this sickening flexibility into a kind of parlor trick. “Watch this,” he said when his minor league teammate Keith Speck visited the clubhouse in Minnesota one day. “He pushed that one bone in his lower leg, it would come out two inches,” Speck said. “He pushed out behind his knee with his thumb, and the bone would go right straight out.”