Willie Mays, the Say Hey Kid
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral; photograph from Bettmann/Corbis
WILLIE MAYS
The Life, the Legend
By James S. Hirsch
Illustrated. 628 pp. Scribner. $30
Related
Excerpt: ‘Willie Mays’ (February 10, 2010)
Up Front: Pete Hamill (February 28, 2010)
Willie Mays, at 78, Decides to Tell His Story (January 31, 2010)
Dwight Garner’s Review of ‘Willie Mays’ (February 10, 2010)
Audio
Associated PressWillie Mays in 1973.
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A long time ago in America, there was a beautiful game called baseball. This was before 30 major-league teams were scattered in a blurry variety of divisions; before 162-game seasons and extended playoffs and fans who watched World Series games in thick down jackets; before the D.H. came to the American League; before AstroTurf on baseball fields and aluminum bats on sandlots; before complete games by pitchers were a rarity; before ballparks were named for corporations instead of individuals; and long, long before the innocence of the game was permanently stained by the filthy deception of steroids.
In that vanished time, there was a ballplayer named Willie Mays.
He came to a Manhattan ballpark named the Polo Grounds in 1951, when he was 20, to play for the New York Giants. Within a few months, he showed that he had the potential to become one of the greatest players ever to walk on the green grass of the major leagues. He could hit, he could run, he could catch, he could throw. And he brought to the playing of baseball a mysterious, almost magical quality that has disappeared from the professional game. Willie Mays brought us joy. All of us.
Even those of us who from birth were fanatical acolytes of the secular church of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Dodgers were in my DNA. My father was an immigrant from Belfast and didn’t become truly American until he got baseball. I’m sure that passionate embrace was true of millions of other immigrants, and was swiftly passed to their American children. My father took me to my first ballgame at Ebbets Field in 1946. I went with my own friends one June day in 1947, just before my 12th birthday, and saw Jackie Robinson in his first brave season, saw him get hit by a pitch, then steal second, then drive the pitcher nuts with his jittery feints, and then score on a single. And heard the gigantic roar from all the Brooklyn tribes. Bed-Stuy was joined at last with Bensonhurst and Park Slope, Flatbush and Bay Ridge. For Robinson and the team president, Branch Rickey, had done more than simply integrate baseball. They had integrated the stands. From the box seats to the bleachers, we were consumed by love of the Dodgers. The phrase “Dem Bums” was uttered with deep affection.
All those old passions rose in me again when reading James S. Hirsch’s fine new book, “Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend.” Above all, I remembered Mays getting a thunderous round of applause when he first came to bat in games at Ebbets Field (the only other visiting player to hear such cheers was Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals). Even the most fanatical Dodger fans wanted Mays to go 3 for 4, steal two bases and make one astounding catch in center field, as long as the Dodgers won, 6-4. Here I must plead guilty to nostalgia, but not to sentimentality, which is always a lie about the past. Like millions of others, I was there. And I remember the joy of watching a young man named Mays play the game for everything it was worth. To all of us then, it was worth a lot.
“By the time he retired,” Hirsch writes, “he was an American icon whose athletic brilliance and stylistic bravado contributed to the assimilation of blacks during the turbulent civil rights era, a distinctive figure of ambition, sacrifice and triumph who became a lasting cultural touchstone for a nation in search of heroes.”
In his long, fascinating account, Hirsch tells the full story of Mays’s baseball life. He was born in 1931 in a mainly black mill town outside Birmingham, Ala., where he was raised by his father, Willie Mays Sr. (known as Cat), and his mother’s two younger sisters. His mother, Annie Satterwhite, never married his father, but the strapped Depression household was full of feminine warmth. Beyond that small community, the world could be ominous with danger. In Alabama, there were still living Americans who had been born into slavery. The Ku Klux Klan, the most enduring of American terrorist organizations, remained the ultimate enforcer of the iron rules of segregation. When Willie was 7, the family moved to Fairfield, a nearby town that was biracial. By then, the boy had discovered baseball, and he was tutored by Cat, who played semipro ball. Young Willie learned to hit and run and slide and catch and throw. The full curriculum. Most important, he learned the rules of the game. They were at once a challenge and a comfort.
“Willie Mays,” Hirsch writes, “always recalled his childhood as a joyous, sunlit time surrounded by loving friends and family who encouraged his dreams and sheltered him from hardship.”
In great detail, Hirsch — the author of “Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter” — tells the story of the rise of the teenage Mays, who first starred in high school sports (including basketball and football) and then, even before graduation, joined the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro leagues. Older players guided him in baseball and in life. In 1950, he was signed by the New York Giants for $4,000 and assigned to a minor-league team in Trenton; in 1951, he moved to the triple-A Minneapolis Millers. He was hitting .477 in the first 35 games when the Giants called him up.
The Giants’ owner, Horace Stoneham, assigned a boxing promoter named Frank Forbes as the kid’s personal guardian, charged with warding off all temptation and finding him a place to live in Harlem. But his baseball guardian was the Giants’ manager, Leo Durocher. Hirsch gives us a delightfully raffish portrait of the man Mays would call Mr. Leo for all the years to come. Mr. Leo’s desire to win, at all costs. His baseball intelligence. And his marvelous gift for obscenity (the one Durocher characteristic Mays did not adopt). With his nerves pulsing steadily, Mays started off poorly, going 1 for 26 (the one hit was a home run off the great Warren Spahn). Then he started to hit, and the career had begun. That rookie year, he was in the on-deck circle during the playoff game with the Dodgers, trembling with stress, when Bobby Thomson hit “the shot heard round the world.” Before he was done, Mays would hit 660 home runs of his own.
Most of the book concentrates on baseball. It’s full of recalled moments, including the amazing catch of Vic Wertz’s drive in the 1954 World Series (and the even more amazing throw that followed). The baseball brilliance is here, along with the slumps and the sporadic collapses from exhaustion. The career of Willie Mays, Hirsch reminds us, underlines the fact that even the best hitters fail seven times out of 10. We are also told about the various strategies Mays adopted to retain some privacy in the face of immense public celebrity. We are reminded of the failure of Mays’s first marriage and the success of his second. We learn about his money problems, in those years before free agency created baseball millionaires, and about his generosity, especially to kids. We learn again how Mays and other black players had to endure racism in those early years. We get a better sense of his reluctance to plunge publicly into the civil rights movement, owing to a combination of modesty and caution (he was attacked for that caution by Jackie Robinson). In his own fashion, Mays seemed to be saying that he challenged virulent racism in the way he lived and by the way he played the game.
For me, starting on Page 269, Hirsch reveals a story I never knew: what happened after the Giants and the Dodgers left New York at the end of the 1957 season. Like many others, including my father, I erased baseball from my life that year. I wouldn’t read about it. I didn’t watch a single game on television. I was embarrassed and embittered by the childish naïveté that had fueled my passion. Like most Giant and Dodger fans, I could never root for the Yankees. So I never saw Mays play for San Francisco. Not an inning.
Hirsch fills in those blanks, causing me even more regret. I missed the great years of Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson and Henry Aaron. I missed seeing Mays battle the winds that made Candlestick Park the worst stadium in baseball (probably costing him a hundred career home runs). I didn’t see another baseball game until the Mets arrived in the tottering shell of the Polo Grounds in 1962, before Shea Stadium was ready. I went to the park to see them play the Pittsburgh Pirates, but all I could see was Willie Mays. I waited for Shea.
In this book, Hirsch evokes a time now gone, one he himself didn’t experience. He was born in 1962, and never saw Mays play. But he has studied the films and videos. He has drawn on newspaper and magazine articles from that era, and previous books about Mays (most notably Charles Einstein’s “Willie’s Time,” published in 1979). He has interviewed many people, including Mays, who has “authorized” this biography. The result: Hirsch has given us a book as valuable for the young as it is for the old. The young should know that there was once a time when Willie Mays lived among the people who came to the ballpark. That on Harlem summer days he would join the kids playing stickball on St. Nicholas Place in Sugar Hill and hold a broom-handle bat in his large hands, wait for the pink rubber spaldeen to be pitched, and routinely hit it four sewers. The book explains what that sentence means. Above all, the story of Willie Mays reminds us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy.
Pete Hamill, the author of more than 20 books, is a distinguished writer in residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.