The Last Boy (9 page)

Dick Cavett broached the delicate subject when Mantle appeared on his late-night talk show in the spring of 1969 with Whitey Ford and Paul Simon. Cavett was asking about the psychological impact of being made to switch-hit, and noted that when “parents teach a kid who’s right-handed to become left-handed,” it can lead to emotional trauma.

Then he threw Mantle a spitter. “I wondered if any troubles showed
up in your personality because of that? Maybe I can just ask Whitey, ‘Was he a bed wetter?’”

“It’s true,” Mantle replied with an easy grin. “’Til I was about sixteen years old. You think
that’s
what went wrong?”

The camera cut to a reaction shot of the shaken singer. “
Mickey Mantle
wet his bed?” Simon gasped, as Ford steadied his arm.

Shortly after the show aired, Daniel Zwerdling, a
Washington Post
reporter working on a story about new treatments for bed wetting, decided to call his childhood hero. “I thought he’d hang up on me,” Zwerdling said. “I was more embarrassed than he was. He said something like ‘ShitIdunno, all I know is, I was pissin’ in my bed.’

“I asked, ‘Did you have any scars? Did you go to therapy?’

“He said, ‘Hell no, my daddy was a lead miner.’”

In a family where doing without and making do were the norm, Mutt and Lovell always made room in the meager budget for baseball. “Mickey came from a
baseball
family,” Mosely said. “They’d give up anything, but not baseball.”

Mickey was often the beneficiary of their largesse. At Christmas, when all the other children got a pair of socks, there was always enough money to buy him a new baseball glove. He would cry, he later told a friend, because he didn’t get any toys. When he was fourteen, Mutt took him to St. Louis to see his hero, Stan Musial, and the Cardinals. Providence offered a chance meeting in the hotel elevator, but Mutt wouldn’t allow Mickey to ask for an autograph. A glimpse of a hero was enough.

Lovell was equally devout about baseball. Mosely recalled: “During the day, when the kids were in school and her husband was workin’ in the mines, she had the St. Louis Cardinals game on the radio, and when she was ironing or doing her housework, she was keepin’ score of what every one of those guys did!”

At the dinner table, she would re-create all nine innings. Lovell knew as much about baseball as any woman, but she was uncharacteristically low key in offering her opinions. “She could critique Mickey, but she
would do it real quiet so Mutt wouldn’t hear anything,” his pal Nick Ferguson said.

Mantle got his fierce, competitive intensity from her. “She is the one that instilled all this fire that made him not the ballplayer but the person that he was,” said Larry, the baby brother who was on the receiving end of bullet backyard passes and lethal glares when the football wasn’t caught. “Mickey didn’t tolerate people not giving their best. Those passes were ninety miles an hour. If you didn’t catch it, you’d get this terrible look.”

The look Bil Gilbert of
Sports Illustrated
later likened to “a nictitating membrane in the eye of a bird.”

“It wasn’t that much of a fun game,” Larry said. “I quit all the time.”

But his threats were meaningless; his big brother would never let him leave the field.

On Sundays, instead of church, the Mantles attended Mutt’s semi-pro games in Spavinaw and Whitebird. No one was allowed to get out of the car if the sports report was on the radio. “Mutt was a catcher/pitcher,” said Jerry VonMoss, whose father, Ed, managed the Whitebird Bluebirds. “His brother Tunney was also on the team. One day, Mutt was pitching and Tunney was catching. Tunney called for something, Mutt threw something else. They threw down their gloves, met midway between the mound and the plate, and had a fight.”

Mickey always bragged on his father. “Best semi-pro ballplayer in Oklahoma,” he told me. But others remember his talents more objectively. “He was a very mediocre ballplayer,” Ferguson said. “He was not as good as a lot of other players on the teams there. Nowhere near.”

“He was good until he broke his leg sliding into second,” Barbara said.

If Mickey Mantle was the product of Mutt’s thwarted ambition, he was also the beneficiary of his undivided attention during the best, healthiest years of his life. Mutt would not have the time, energy, or drive to invest in his younger sons. His health was failing by the time Ray and Roy and Larry came of age for team sports. Mickey was his one chance to get it right. Maybe that’s why, VonMoss says, Mutt “drove him like a nail.”

Playtime was over when Mutt got home from work. Every afternoon was punctuated by the rhythmic bang of the ball against the corrugated metal siding of the ramshackle shed. “Every day at 4
P.M
., Mickey had to
be home, no matter where he was or what he was doing, to do batting practice,” Max said. “They’d throw a tennis ball. They’d stand him up against that leaning shed. He’d hit it up against the house. If it hit the ground, it was an out; below the window, a double; above the window, a triple; over the house, a home run. Every day.”

Everyone in town knew about the day Mutt came home early from work and caught Mickey batting right-handed against a right-handed pitcher in a Gabby Street League game at the Paul Douthat field outside Picher. Climbed his ass. Raised holy hell. “Boy, the crap hit the fan over that,” Max said. “That was a no-no. Mickey never done it again.”

Of Mutt’s hard schooling, Larry Mantle said, “I don’t know how good friends they were, Mickey and Daddy. Daddy was Daddy, and Daddy was the boss.”

Mutt was a baseball savant far ahead of his time in envisioning the future of baseball specialization. He was also a realist who recognized his son’s personality and talent and the discipline needed to harvest it. “He wanted him to be good and knew what he had to do, and that was it,” said Mosely, who made his living as a high school phys ed teacher and football coach.

Like any father, Mutt wanted better for his sons. By the early Fifties there was precious little ore to gouge out of the earth—except for the supporting pillars, in the mines the ore in the Tri-State area had pretty much played out. A job at the B. F. Goodrich plant in Miami represented the highest ambition for most boys Mantle’s age. “Get out of school, get rich, marry your high school sweetheart, and buy a new car on time—that was the hope and the prayer,” his cousin Jim Richardson said.

If Mickey got out, they all got out. It was a huge—if unarticulated—burden to place on one boy’s shoulders. “He was their summer wishes and their winter dreams,” his oldest son, Mickey, Jr., wrote later.

Will Rogers, Oklahoma’s most famous export before Mickey Mantle, once said, “Oklahomans vote dry as long as they can stagger to the polls.” They continued to do so until April 1959. Prohibition was written into
the state constitution in 1907, when the “wets” lost the battle for the soul of the Oklahoma and Indian territories. Although near beer was legalized nationally in 1933, bootlegging and home brew were as much a part of Oklahoma culture as going to church. Ted Davis was driving for a bootlegger, bringing booze in over the state line, when he was seventeen. Uncle Luke, one of Lovell’s brothers, made home brew, Barbara said. “If he didn’t sell it, he gave it away.”

In Commerce, dreams and diversions were few: beer, baseball, and brawling. “That’s what we done, drink and fight,” said Herman Combs, who worked for Mutt at the Blue Goose Mine. Mutt’s brother Tunney (after boxer Gene) got his nickname after knocking a guy’s eye out in a barfight while trying to rescue one of Lovell’s brothers.

Alcoholism wasn’t recognized as a disease, much less a hereditary one. But it ran deep in Lovell’s family. “The alcoholism came from Mickey’s mother’s side,” Merlyn told me. “Her brothers all had a problem. Two or three of them were alcoholics. I don’t know if they died of it, but they were real alcoholics.”

Lovell’s sister Blanche did. Aunt Blanche was “a sneaky alcoholic,” Barbara said. “You never saw her drink, but she did every day. She lived with us for a while, and you knew she was drinking.”

How? “Because she was drunk.”

Blanche’s body was found in her apartment a week after her death. “Ted was one of them who found her,” Faye Davis said. He had been sober for five years when she married him, but the damage was done. “He didn’t drink anymore, but he lost his mind. He just went nutty as a fruitcake. He started carrying a pistol and seeing things that weren’t there, and I thought, ‘Better take him to the doctor.’ And he had to go to a nurse’s home.”

His father, Bill Davis, was an alcoholic, she says; Lovell didn’t drink. Mutt kept a bottle of liquor in the icebox. Larry remembers the look on his father’s face when he downed a shot. “He’d take a couple swallows of whiskey and then drink the Coke right quick and then give this terrible sound—
ps’shooow
—and shake all over. If somethin’ affected me that bad, I don’t think I would drink it.”

None of the family members I spoke with thought Mutt was an alcoholic. Mantle offered contradictory accounts of his father’s drinking. In
his 1994
Sports Illustrated
confessional, he said, “Dad would get drunk once in a while, like when he went to a barn dance and might have five or six drinks. Hell, for me five or six drinks wouldn’t have been a full cocktail party!”

Merlyn confided in the wife of Mantle’s friend Larry Meli at a dinner in the Eighties. “Mickey can’t help the carousing. Mutt was like that.”

He described Mutt as a habitual drinker in conversations with Herb Gluck, the ghostwriter of
The Mick
, with his friend Pat Summerall, and in a family history taken by his Georgia physician, Dave Ringer. “I think he thought his dad was an alcoholic,” Ringer said. “Didn’t talk a lot about it. Didn’t talk much about his dad at all. But I do recall that.”

Mantle told Greer Johnson, his companion during the last decade of his life, that when he was a boy of nine or ten “his father would take him to the bars, sit him up on the stool while he drank.” He wouldn’t have been the first guy in town to do that. “He always led me to believe that his dad was an alcoholic,” Johnson said.

Nick Ferguson recalls outings to local watering holes with Mutt when he and Mickey were teenagers. “I guess he was about sixteen and I was two years older,” he said. “Mutt took us both to a local drive-in-like thing and got beer for Mickey when he was underage.”

“Wasn’t no such thing as underage,” Max Mantle said.

Mutt did not want his son to go out for football. Mickey did it anyway, which may be the only documented act of rebellion in his young life. Mosely was the starting quarterback and star athlete at Commerce High. “I think he just played because all the rest of us did,” Mosely said.

He was good and he was fast, scoring ten touchdowns in seven games as a fullback in a single-wing formation during the one season he played. Showed the opposition “a good, clean white ass,” he bragged later to minor league teammates. Ralph Terry, a future Yankee whose hometown played in the Lucky Seven Conference against Commerce, said, “He’d run sixty yards for a touchdown. Two or three plays later, he’d limp off.” Max, the team manager, would rub his legs on the bus ride home.

Mutt’s worst fears were realized one October afternoon when Mickey was kicked in the left shin during practice just twelve days shy of his fifteenth birthday. He was the second-string quarterback behind Mosely. While the ball was being handed off, there was a mix-up in the timing of the play. He was helped off the field by his teammates and taken to Max’s house, which was close to school. His leg turned “black and blue and red and hot,” Max said.

The Commerce football coach, Allan Woolard, didn’t think it was anything serious until Mantle failed to show up for school the next morning. “I went over to his house to check with Mick and he was on the divan with his ankle propped up,” he told a reporter in 1951. “It was swollen terrifically and was as red as watermelon. He also had a temperature of 103.5 degrees. We immediately took him over to the Picher hospital, and they started treating him at once.”

In telling the story of his infamous childhood infirmity, Mantle always minimized its impact as well as its duration: he got kicked in the shin, went to the hospital, doctors threatened to cut off his leg, and he and his limb were saved by the heroic intervention of his mother, who told the sawbones, “Like hell you are.” A new wonder drug called penicillin also helped.

In fact, he was hospitalized five times over a period of thirteen months. During those forty days in the hospital, he was exposed to more than a whiff of mortality. “It was a wonder he didn’t die,” said Bennett. “He was yellow in color and pale.”

The sequence of events was recounted in a local newspaper in 1951, and reprinted in a 1997 Ottawa County historical brochure:

Medical records at the hospital show that Mantle was first admitted on Oct. 10, 1946 for treatment of an “infection at the lower end of the tibia on the left leg.” Penicillin treatments of approximately 50,000 units every three hours were given. He received approximately 300,000 units a day. He was first dismissed on Oct. 22. At the time osteomyelitis was suspected but there were no definite indications.

A short time later—on November 15, 1946, Mickey again was admitted, received treatment and was dismissed Nov. 18.

Osteomyelitis is a bacterial infection of the bone, usually caused by
trauma. Recognized by physicians since antiquity, it was little understood in Commerce, where it was called “TB of the bone” or “cancer of the bone.” Neither was a trivial diagnosis in an area ravaged by tuberculosis and in a family that had just lost a grandfather and an uncle to cancer. Prior to the advent of antibiotics, osteomyelitis was treated with maggots, which ate away the diseased flesh, or by amputation. Mantle’s half brother, Ted, was treated with maggots during a childhood bout with the disease and suffered a recurrence due to shrapnel wounds he received in the Korean War. Mantle never mentioned receiving maggot treatment, but a physician in Picher later told Max Mantle’s wife that he had, his cousin said.