The Last Boy (19 page)

But, according to the new math, he overvalued the strikeouts and undervalued the walks. In the sabermetric universe, an out is an out is an out. Strikeouts carry more emotional weight than statistical import. To the gimlet eye of a modern stat geek, walks are the key to Mantle’s superior on-base percentage and the reason he fares so well in a preponderance of the new offensive metrics.

Nor is Mantle’s self-flagellation over his lifetime .298 batting average warranted. “He was measuring himself with the yardstick he grew up with in the 1930s,” Thorn said.

Little wonder that teammates fulminated at all the “what ifs.” “I hate it when people say how much he wasted,” said Clete Boyer. “Jesus Christ, how much better could he have been?”

On a flawless spring training day in 2006, arms folded over a slight pin-striped paunch, Reggie Jackson turned away from tracking the flight of one hundred batting-practice hacks to consider the question of Mickey
Mantle and white-skin privilege. Forty-five minutes into Jackson’s disquisition, Derek Jeter jogged over to find out what was holding Mr. October’s attention. “We’re just talking about how Mantle would have been remembered if he was black,” Jackson said.

Jeter, a post-racial hero who has perfected the art of public speaking without saying anything at all, executed the patented midair pirouette usually reserved for hard-hit balls in the hole and headed in the opposite direction. It is the one “what if” nobody wants to talk about. If Mickey had been black and Willie had been white, what kind of conversation would there have been? Would there even have been a conversation? How much does race influence the way they are remembered?

“I’m glad you asked me that,” Jackson said. He was a distinct minority in that regard. He considered briefly the tormented life of Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion, who inspired Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama
The Great White Hope
. “He lived a life on the dark side with alcohol and women. I don’t know that we condemn men for that. In this country we accept it as part of being a man. I don’t think Mickey would have been disparaged if he had been black.”

“Would he be forgiven?” I asked.

“We’re going to forgive Doc Gooden; we’re going to forgive Darryl Strawberry. I think character flaws bring compassion for all colors. Now certainly, I don’t know that if Willie Mays were white there would be any question that this guy’s the greatest ballplayer of all time.”

So, if the races were reversed, would there have been an argument? “No,” Jackson said. “I don’t think so. Mickey was super-talented and he played for the Yankees in New York and he was white.”

That’s why former pitcher Jim Kaat believes, “Mantle was so much more of a national figure,” than Mays. “Most of the kids that played baseball or followed baseball were country boys from Oklahoma, North Carolina—good old country boys. In that era, most of the kids playing baseball were white. And that’s why Mickey was the perfect hero.”

Ironically, because of race, Mantle may be disproportionately adored and historically undervalued. “This sounds strange to say, given all the adulation that surrounded him, but in a certain sense I think Mantle is now underrated and may be even more so as time passes and fewer current fans actually saw him play,” said Bob Costas, the erudite sportscaster,
who idolized Mantle as a child, but was clear-eyed about his hero by the time he eulogized him as an adult. “When he retired he was third on the all-time home run list, but 536 doesn’t seem as monumental today. In addition, he was essentially shot at age thirty-three but played four more years. Those years took his lifetime average from .309 to .298 and his slugging percentage from .582 to .557. It’s easy and understandable for some people to say, ‘Sure, Mantle was great but because he played for the Yankees and was a charismatic white player at a time when most of his greatest contemporaries were black or Hispanic, he was overglorified.’

“And a cursory look at raw numbers supports that notion. Mays and Aaron eventually went way past him. Frank Robinson had fifty more home runs and his lifetime average was only four points less. Lesser Hall of Famers like Willie McCovey, Eddie Matthews, and Ernie Banks are actually pretty close to him on the home run list. Roberto Clemente was a different kind of player, but he was passionate and stylish and his life had great meaning beyond baseball.

“So what’s the big deal about Mickey? Here’s the big deal—Mays is the greatest all-around baseball player I’ve ever seen. Aaron is the true home run king and his career achievements are staggering. And yet at his best, in his prime, from the mid-Fifties to mid-Sixties, Mantle was pretty much their equal and at times was better. That’s even with all the injuries. Who knows what he would have been had he been healthy, since he was the greatest combination of natural power and natural speed the game has ever seen. But even as it was, look closely at the numbers—especially OPS, the combination of on-base and slugging percentage, which is the best measure of a hitter’s value.

“In his prime, Mantle’s OPS was higher than Mays’s and significantly higher than Aaron’s in any stretch of their careers, as were his home runs per time at bat. Bill James has always ranked Mantle’s peak value as the highest of his contemporaries and virtually every one of the new baseball metrics is very favorable to him.

“Sure, there is some nostalgia and mythology connected to Mickey, but the real baseball truth is this—the more knowledgeable you are about the game and its history, the higher you rate him.

“Race certainly played into how some people
identified
with Mantle
and Mays, just as it later did with Bird and Magic. But it doesn’t change the fact that for a decade Mantle was virtually Mays’s equal, just as Bird was no worse than a very close second to Magic, no matter the racial perceptions.

“Those who say there was no real comparison between Mays and Mantle are considering it from the end point based on career totals, but that’s not where the whole Mantle-Mays debate took shape. It took shape in the Fifties and early Sixties when they were the game’s most dynamic players and when you could make a fair case for either one. Overall careers? Mays hands down. In their primes? Pretty much a toss-up. And that would have been true if Willie was white and Mickey was black or if you painted both of them blue.”

Monte Irvin was Mays’s first roommate and became Mantle’s friend when he was invited to his fantasy camp in the Eighties. Like Jackson, he believes there would not have been any discussion about “who’s better?” had the races been reversed and Mantle would not be “quite as loved and adored. The reason Mickey was liked so much was number one, color; number two, talent; number three, he was personable.”

Like McCovey, Irvin believes that the press protected Mantle, shielding his indiscretions because of his race. “I don’t think they would have covered up some of the things they did if it was the other way around,” McCovey said. “That’s the only way I feel he benefited from being a white guy.”

Irvin watched with admiration as Mantle improved himself first as an outfielder and later as a public person. He listened when fantasy campers asked Mantle
the
question. “ ‘Well,’ he’d say, ‘Mays was a better fielder. I had more power and hit the ball farther.’ He came out and told the truth.

“He made people like him. I told Willie, ‘You should be a little more personable. They’d like you the way they like Mickey.’

“But he never did.”

Atlantic City, April 1983

I
had been to the Claridge Hotel once before, on Valentine’s Day, 1965. It was my father’s idea for a romantic, if belated, celebration of my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. He hadn’t counted on the chlorine fumes seeping through the air vents. “What a dump,” my mother sniffed.

The Claridge opened for business in December 1930, which was one kind of gamble. Set back from the boardwalk, it fronted on Brighton Park, where a fountain illuminated by thirty tinted lamps threw off a wild array of pinks, yellows, and greens. Twenty stolid stories high, with a gleaming gold cupola perched at the top, the Claridge was known as the “Skyscraper by the Sea,” the best place in town to ride out a hurricane. Its thrusting architecture, supposedly inspired by the Empire State Building, has earned it a spot on a list of the world’s ten most phallic buildings, according to a Web site that purports to measure such things.

The hotel’s name, appropriated from the elegant London establishment,
was spelled out in marble script on the lobby floor. A grand spiral staircase dominated the gilt and marbled entry way. Generations of newlyweds posed there like figures atop a wedding cake. My parents were not among them.

Lyndon Johnson sweated out the 1964 Democratic Convention at the Claridge, which lacked air-conditioning. It went downhill from there. The last of the grand hotels built along the boardwalk, it was also the last to open for gambling after the casino trade arrived in 1976. When I showed up in April 1983 for my 11
A.M.
interview with the new Director of Sports Promotions, I was greeted by a doorman decked out in full Beefeater regalia; barmaids introduced themselves as wenches. The spiral staircase had been ripped out to make room for additional slots. But “a little bit of Britain” just wasn’t pulling in the nickel-slot-playing day-trippers schlepping down the Garden State Parkway from Manhattan—“bus people,” as they’re known in the trade. Management needed a way to compete with the bigger, glitzier gambling emporiums springing up along the boardwalk.

In 1980, Willie Mays had signed on with Bally’s Park Place Hotel and Casino and was promptly banished from baseball by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. So Mantle knew what to expect when he accepted the job at the Claridge. Lee MacPhail, his old Yankee boss, said, “I wish you wouldn’t do it.” Kuhn advised following DiMaggio’s caffeinated example: be a Mr. Coffee. “I would, but nobody ever called me,” Mantle replied.

On February 8, 1983, Mantle signed a $100, 000-a-year contract that called for him to spend a minimum of sixty days a year at the Claridge, “the smallest and friendliest” casino on the strand. All he had to do was show up and be nice.

Mickey was late. I waited for him in the London Pavilion, a glass-enclosed dining room, formerly a veranda, where Sinatra and the rat pack once soaked up the rays and took in the ocean air. I sat by the window and gazed at the slate gray ocean, thinking about what Howard Cosell had told me about my hero and trying not to: “Mickey Mantle should be in jail. He’s a drunken whoremonger.” I thought about the questions I wanted to ask him and the ones I was dreading to ask. The dog-eared pages of the notebooks from that weekend bear witness to my anxiety.
Ask re: Dad. Ask re: son Billy. Ask: Who’s better? Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays?

By the time Mickey arrived, the dining room was empty and the powdered eggs in the stainless-steel buffet trough had returned to their original state.

“Hi, I’m Mick,” he said, sticking out his hand.

“Hi, I’m nervous.”

“Why?” he drawled. “Scared I was gonna pull on your titty?”

Had I been thinking quickly, had I been thinking at all, I would have replied, “Yes.”

“Coffee,” he said. “Can’t I get a cup of fuckin’ coffee?”

There wasn’t time for a jolt of joe. A blue stretch limousine was waiting in front of the hotel, along with a reporter from the New York
Daily News
, the hotel’s public relations director, and Bill Greenberg, one of six high rollers selected by the casino’s marketing department to play a round of golf with Mickey Mantle.

The chauffeur put pedal to the metal and five people with nothing in common except the occasion slid all over the plush velour interior trying not to collide with one another. For fifteen minutes no one said a word except “Excuse me.”

High roller Bill wore his prosperity around his waist and a thick gold chain around his neck; white chest hair billowed from his golf shirt and caught in his jewelry. His tone was familiar and obsequious. “So, Mick,” he said, “you gonna play in that leukemia thing in Wilmington?”

“The leukemia thing” was a golf tournament. Whitey Ford was scheduled to be there.

“Very good lobster in Wilmington,” Mickey replied.

“And good crabs,” I added.

“I led the league six straight years in the crabs,” Mickey said. “Did you know that? Major league record.”

“Still hold it?” Bill asked.

“Still hold it. And my wife was second four times.”

The engine thrummed. Vodka sloshed inside a faux cut-glass decanter. I mentioned my recent interview with Boss Steinbrenner in which he had floated the notion of turning Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park into a water park for disadvantaged youths from the South Bronx. Mickey laughed. “It was 480 in center field when I played,” he said. “It’s 420 now, and he’s talking about bringing them in further. I said to him, ‘They ought to let them throw the ball up and hit it.’ That pissed him off.”

I told him about the time my grandmother’s ample cleavage failed to conceal my Sammy Esposito glove from the serious-looking men in yarmulkes
guarding the entrance to Yom Kippur services at the Concourse Plaza. “We got thrown out,” I said. “They thought I was being disrespectful. I thought they were being disrespectful.”

Mickey laughed. “Your grandmother must have loved you very much.”

Our common history in the old stomping grounds established, he asked me, “What was that tall building? You could see it over the center field fence?”

“The Bronx County Courthouse.”

A “golden fortress,” New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia had called it. The courthouse presided over the intersection of 161st Street and the Grand Concourse, across the street from the hotel where I chose the voice of the Yankees over the word of God. “Well, anyway, somebody used to get up there with a big mirror and shine it in the visiting team’s eyes. It was a long ways off. Hell, it was like lightning. First of all, you couldn’t hardly hit it over the center field fence. I only hit two over in eighteen years, and that was the only two I ever saw hit over.”

Bill interjected: “You got a big write-up in the paper the other day. I meant to bring it. Billy Martin really chewed up Bowie Kuhn. He said, ‘Mickey’s like a brother to me.’ You got the same temperament, right?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Mickey replied. “He got traded because he was a bad influence on me. They found out it wasn’t Billy. It was Whitey. Billy left, and it was the same old shit.”

He trotted out one of his stock Billy the Kid lines: “I always tell him if it hadn’t been for him, I could still be playing. Him and Whitey.”

Bill asked what Whitey was up to. Mickey shrugged: horses, golf, a few investments. “He does good on the outside,” he said, as if Ford had been paroled.

Mantle wasn’t doing so well when former Yankee co-owner Del Webb introduced him to Bill Dougall, an executive in the Del Webb Corporation, on the golf course at the Sahara in Las Vegas. Webb hinted that maybe Dougall could find something for Mantle to do. Some years after Webb’s death, when Dougall was named president of the Claridge, he thought of The Mick. “I made a deal with him, but the deal I made with him was nothing like the one that Willie Mays made,” he assured me.

Dougall didn’t want anyone confusing The Mick with a hotel ambassador like Mays or a Vegas greeter like Joe Louis or with the furniture. No,
Mantle would be at the Claridge only “when he’s active and participating in an event,” Dougall declared. “We wouldn’t have Mickey sitting like a statue, for Christ sake.”

The Del Webb Corporation was a major player on the Vegas strip but new to Atlantic City. The Claridge was a trial run before committing big dollars to the East Coast gaming industry. Hiring The Mick as a front man was a natural—what better way to mitigate reservations about legalized gambling than to bring in the All-American Boy? “We’re not trying to make money off of him,” Dougall told me. “The main thing is national exposure.”

He did not tell me that Mantle’s contract contained a clause prohibiting him from drinking in public while on duty.

Mantle’s excommunication by Kuhn was immediate. Publicly, he brushed it off. “Fourteen years, all I’m doing is going to spring training as a batting instructor, which I wasn’t, hanging around, same as here, signing autographs.” His unconscious wasn’t as easily mollified about the foreclosure of any meaningful role in the game that had been his life’s work. He began to see a chiseled tombstone in his dreams.
HERE LIES MICKEY CHARLES MANTLE: BANNED FROM BASEBALL.

Mickey shrugged. “He had to do it. He did it to Willie. He made his mistake when he did it to Willie. In the back of my mind it bugs me a little. It sounds worse than it is. A guy or two said, ‘Jesus Christ, you were my boyhood idol, now you’re banned. You must have done something bad.’ I feel really kind of bad no one took up for me. It’s, like, ‘Well, fine, he’s gone.’”

Mays took up for him, sort of. “He’s never gonna harm baseball or anybody else,” Mays said. “The only one he ever harmed was himself.”

It’s not as though he was in the casino plugging silver coins in a nickel slot, which is where his mother, Lovell, parked herself when she visited the twins at the Vegas casino where Webb had gotten them jobs as pit bosses. Lovell did not believe in coming home with money in her pocket. The kids chipped in to buy her a glove to protect her lucky hand.

“
Time
magazine came around, and they wanted to get a picture of me dealing craps and blackjack,” Mickey said. “Well, there ain’t no way I would do that. One thing I said I wouldn’t do is be a shill or somethin’. I would never do anything degrading.”

He decided to lighten the mood with a joke. “God calls Saint Peter over, and he says, ‘Saint Peter, I was down on Earth and I made this man and this
woman and I forgot to put their sexual organs on them. You take this pecker and this pussy down there and put ’em on them.’

“Saint Peter says, ‘Okay.’ And he’s getting ready to leave, and God says, ‘Be sure to put the pussy on the short, dumb one.’”

The PR woman noticed the weather. “Getting nicer.”

“Brightening up,” Bill said, as the limo approached the gate of the Lin-wood Country Club.

“I hold the club record here,” Mickey said. “Twelve lost golf balls. Nine holes.”

The Linwood Country Club opened for business in 1921 in response to what the Atlantic City
Press
called “overcrowding of the existing courses.” The overcrowding was most apparent to Jews blackballed by country clubs catering to Atlantic City swells. The club, built on the site of a planned racetrack, was surrounded by marsh and dune grass and adjacent to the posh Atlantic City Club.

The course sits back from the ocean in view of East Egg Bay and the Atlantic City skyline. A cruel, coastal wind was blowing hard, rattling the cattails and mussing Mickey’s thinning hair. But he was there to announce his first official event for the hotel, the Mickey Mantle Invitational Golf Tournament. The fancy title Dougall had bestowed on him—Director of Sports Promotions—meant creating sporting events for him to promote.

Of the fifty or so shivering souls assembled outside the caddy master’s shack—cameramen, soundmen, network correspondents, public relations flacks, hotel executives, caddies, and reporters—only eight were actually scheduled to play golf, six high rollers plus Mick and Bill Dougall. The point of the outing was not so much to play golf but to announce that Mickey would be playing golf, which required seeing him play golf.

The press release announcing the tournament that had come across my desk promised a day with The Mick, unlimited cocktails, a filet mignon dinner, a free T-shirt with a big number 7 on the sleeve, and a one-on-one interview. Golfers committing to play in the June event would receive a Mickey Mantle Invitational Golf Tournament sweater with a baseball embossed over the left breast. Mickey took one look at the design and grumbled, “Hell, it’s like wearing your ball cap downtown.”

A caravan of golf carts was waiting at the first tee: four for the golfers, four
for the assembled media—the New York
Daily News, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, CBS Sunday Morning
, and local camera crews—and one for assorted beverages. The network guys wired Mickey for sound and told him not to venture into any water. “I play ‘bout half my golf in the water,” he replied.

As Mickey climbed into the lead cart, his right leg already stiff from the cold, I asked whether he ever walked the course. “I don’t walk,” he said. “I can’t walk.”

On the first tee, Mickey took a club from his bag and stretched, the way he used to unlimber with a bat behind his back. Reporters craned their necks, soundmen jostled for position. He addressed the ball to a symphony of camera shutters. His first shot went wide right, ricocheted off a tree, and came to rest in swaying beach grass. Mickey set off in pursuit, driving in circles. The media caravan drove in circles behind him. “We want to get him looking for the ball,” a correspondent informed his cameraman with an urgent golf whisper.

“If you use this shit, it’s going to be the dullest TV show ever put on the air,” Mickey said.

His second shot found a trap. Kicking the damp sand back into place, he said, “This’d be a good job for Billy. He could get a lot of practice here.”