The Last Hero

THE MICK HARDLY LOOKS HIS YEARS. Twenty summers after his last game with the New York Yankees, his hair is still more blond than gray. The face is split by the wrinkles born of a life in the sun, but the impish grin is there. The shoulders remain strong and square, the kind you need to power a baseball 500 feet, and the stomach is surprisingly flat for a man whose wrecked knees won’t let him walk an entire round of golf. He weighs only ten pounds more than the 200 listed on his baseball cards, the cards that sell like gold at the collectors’ meets and are passed on to sons who never saw Mickey Mantle in his prime.

On the playing field, despite a doctor’s logbook of injuries and illnesses, Mickey Mantle made it look so easy. From 1951 into the mid-Sixties, he was a superstar before the word was invented. Today, far from center field, center stage in New York, Mantle lives quietly in the Dallas home he and his wife Merlyn have shared for thirty years. He has undergone-is still undergoing-the curious reentry process that happens to those whose skill and achievements thrust them into celebrity when they are still not old enough to vote. The star, especially if his gifts depend on youth and strength, must someday come back to earth, to the mundane world of bills and lawns and shopping centers.

But a star of Mantle’s magnitude never makes it all the way back. So he lives in limbo, somewhere between the god he was, synonymous with speed and power, and the middle-aged man he is now. That’s where Mickey Mantle is today. And it doesn’t always look so easy.

Mantle is candid enough to admit that the slow-fading splendor of his Yankee legend keeps him popular and in demand. He still puts food on the table with what he did in baseball twenty years ago. As a professional Mantle, he is on the road around two hundred days a year. He made 147 public appearances in 1987, doing baseball card shows, banquets, and conventions. He turned down at least twice that many requests. For fifteen years now, Mantle has made appearances for the Reserve Life Insurance Company. And there is the Mickey Mantle-Whitey Ford Fantasy Camp, held three times a year in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Fifty campers per session, $3, 500 per camper. He also does color commentary for fifteen to twenty Yankee games a year. Buttressed by assorted other investments, Mantle makes far more now than he ever did while playing ball in the days before the $300, 000 utility infielder. There are even serious negotiations with a film studio for a movie based on his life. (Mantle says that Nick Nolte could play a credible Number 7.)

And yet Mantle can segue, in a sentence, from the satisfactions of the here and now to the glory days of his pin-striped past. “I can’t explain it, ” he says in his soft Oklahoma drawl. “I’m more popular now than I’ve ever been, even when I was playing. ” He ponders this a moment. “Baseball was everything. I miss it real bad. From the time I was bora until 1969, baseball was my whole life.”

Then he starts to talk about the dreams. “I still have them, but not like I used to. I used to have them every night. I’ll be trying to make a comeback but I can’t hit the ball. If I do hit it, I can’t run. “

Given the awesome heights to which Mantle soared, his lingering dreams are understandable. The nineteen-year-old kid was plucked from the backwater of Commerce, Oklahoma, and transported to the Big Apple before it went sour. Not just any team, but the Yankees, the dynasty of dynasties before George Steinbrenner turned it into a private bank vault crowded with spoiled, temperamental prima donnas. At the time no city in America had a more aggressive sports press than New York, where writers instantly decided that Mickey Mantle would be the return of the Babe and Lou Gehrig rolled into one and squared.

“Unless all signs fail, ” The New York Times announced on April 1, 1951, on the eve of Mantle’s rookie season, “his name eventually will ring down through the annals of baseball like some of the other greats. At camp Mantle has eclipsed even the great Joe DiMaggio. “

“I’d been reading about DiMaggio all my life, ” Mantle says, “and suddenly here I was dressing beside him. There was a lot of pressure, no doubt about it. I always wondered what the other outfielders, Gene Woodling and Hank Bauer, were thinking. Like why was the press always talking to this kid? Who the hell is Mantle, anyway?”

Answer; arguably the greatest player ever to put on cleats. In Mantle’s first fourteen seasons, the Yankees won the American League pennant twelve times and the World Series seven times. Yes, he played on fantastically talented teams with great supporting casts-Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Billy Martin, Elston Howard, Roger Maris. But there was never any doubt who was the star of stars: Mantle, the switch-hitting country boy made for a Wheaties box with his blond hair, boyish smile, and bulging muscles. No player has ever captured the imagination of the country more Chan did Mantle; no player was ever more strongly associated with the American dream of rising from humble roots to grandeur.

“He could beat you a million ways, ” says veteran sportscaster Merle Harmon. Among those ways, ruefully counted by opposing pitchers, was the home run: 536 of them, many tape-measure blasts, put Mantle third on the all-time list when he retired, behind Babe Ruth and Willie Mays. He led the league in homers four times (twice he clouted more than fifty in a season, a feat accomplished by only five players), in runs scored six times, in slugging percentage four times. He was voted the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1956, 1957, and 1962 and finished second in the balloting in three other years.

Mantle also had speed to burn. Before injuries hobbled him, he was generally regarded as the fastest player in baseball. His time to first base from the left side was an astonishing 3. 1 seconds (ninety feet in one and two and three seconds), the fastest ever recorded before the Seventies. A first-rate bunter, Mantle with his speed intact was almost impossible to keep off base.

Mantle hit. 311 with twenty-three home runs in his first full year with the Yankees, but the chinks in his physical armor soon began to show. Back in high school, a bruised shin had developed into osteomyelitis, a bone infection. In the 1951 World Series, he caught his cleats on a drain in right center field while chasing a ball hit by Willie Mays, tearing ligaments in his right knee. From that time on, playing with pain would become part of the Mantle legacy. The knee problems and other injuries-hamstring pulls, a broken bone in his foot, shoulder problems-would haunt him until the end of his career. Even in 1961, which may have been the greatest year in Yankee history, Mantle’s physical problems dogged him. All fans remember Mantle and Roger Maris in their famous home-run duel, chasing the legendary sixty put up by Babe Ruth in 1927. Maris, of course, hit his sixty-first home run on the day the season ended. But Mantle might have surpassed Ruth himself but for a freak injury: a flu shot became infected, causing an abscess on his hip. That sidelined Mantle for the final week of the season and robbed him of twenty or so at-bats; he ended the year with fifty-four homers. Mantle saw limited action in the World Series that year, but millions saw him crack a single; as he strained around first base, the wound broke open. The bloody stain on his uniform became a badge of courage for countless young fans.

The end came quickly for Mickey Mantle. As the Sixties wore on, the grim joke had it that his legs required almost as much tape as some of his home runs. However, Mantle believed that if you were paid to play, you played; he seldom asked to be taken out of the lineup. His numbers dropped dramatically in 1965, when he was only thirty-three years old. And the team’s decline seemed to mirror Mantle’s. The Yanks lost the World Series in 1964, then fell to sixth place in 1965 and last place in 1966. (Not since 1912 had a Yankee team inhabited the cellar. ) Many of Mantle’s talented friends retired or were traded. He was left alone to shoulder the burden, but his body was not up to the task.

“It was getting so I didn’t even want to go to the ballpark” Mantle recalls. “I never thought I’d say that. But Billy was gone. Whitey was gone. Yogi was gone. ” And with fewer dangerous hitters in the lineup, enemy pitchers found it easier to pitch around Mantle. “I couldn’t get any pitches to hit. Every time I came up it seemed they were taking the bat out of my hands. “

Unable to score from second on a single or go from first to third on a hit to the outfield, Mantle spent his last seasons in frustration. “When you’re used to winning almost every year, it’s tough to play on ninth-place teams. It just wasn’t fun anymore. “

So Mantle retired, waited the mandatory five years, and was unanimously selected to the Hall of Fame. And yet, despite his towering deeds, he remains one of the all-time “what if” players in baseball history.

Comparing Mantle with Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, for example, shows that while Mantle was a great young player, he burned out earlier than these other greats of the game. Aaron hit 755 career home runs, Mays 660, Mantle 536. Aaron and Mays now rank first and third in career homers, while Mantle will fall to eighth this summer (barring catastrophic injury to Philadelphia’s Mike Schmidt). But when the three players had finished the season of their thirtieth birthdays, Mays had 368 homers, Aaron 366. Mantle led both with 404. Consider: had Mantle hit the same percentage of his home runs after age thirty that Aaron did, he would have finished with 841 for his career-a mark that would probably stand forever.

And there are other “what ife”: what if Mantle had been more conscientious about rehabilitation after his injuries? What if he’d played in any other stadium than Yankee Stadium, where the endless stretch of center field, known as “Death Valley, ” swallowed so many potential home runs? And what if Mantle had partied less, worked out more in the off season?

Mantle, Martin, Ford, and other Yankees of Mantle’s era had reputations for late-night drinking and wild parties, though the press, following the gentleman’s agreement common in sports and politics before the Seventies, seldom reported the carousing. Mantle knows that his midnight rambles helped make him “over the hill” at thirty-four.

“I never thought about what I could have done until I saw all those other guys pass me, ” he says. “I could have been way up there in the vital stats. I just wasn’t very smart about taking care of myself. But when you’re twenty-five and leading the league in everything, it’s tough to know these things. “



MICKEY AND MERLYN MANTLE LIVE COM-fortably today in their Preston Hollow home. The house is tastefully done, with pastels and Southwestern art abounding in die living areas. Mantle paid $59, 000 for the house in 1957 and could sell it for four times that amount today. He needs to work, however, since he is from the generation of ballplayers who actually made less money than brain surgeons and famous actors.

“You want to know what it was like?” he asks, a smile flickering across his face. “Between 1956 and 1957, after I won the Triple Crown [leading the league in hits, home runs, and average], I got my salary doubled from $32, 500 to $65, 000. In 1957, I batted . 365, and the first contract the Yankees offered me was for the same money, $65, 000. I finally got a $10, 000 raise or something, but can you imagine what those years would be worth today?”

Well, imagine. Mantle’s top salary in baseball was $100, 000 a year. This past winter, the Chicago Cubs’ Andre Dawson lost his arbitration case and had to settle for $1. 85 million a year. When asked what he could get from the Yankees now, Mantle echoes a reply he heard from Joe DiMaggio. “At contract time, when Steinbrenner met me at the door, I’d say, ’Hi, partner. ’”

Players in the Fifties had no arbitration, no free agency, no long-term contracts. Mantle signed eighteen one-year contracts with the Yankees. The stars of his era usually knew what the other stars were making, so they had some idea of what to shoot for, even though they didn’t always get it. But outside of baseball, Mantle was fair game. Early in his career he signed with an agent who promised, as agents will, to make him rich, and all Mickey had to do was give him half of everything he earned. The Yankees managed to get him out of that one. Later, Mantle and Whitey Ford bought shares in the Canadian Bomb Shelter Survival Corporation for $10, 000 each. They never saw their money again. Near the end of his career came Mickey Mantle’s Country Cookin’, a chain of down-homish eateries that bit the dust despite Mantle’s unofficial company slogan, “To get a fresher piece of chicken, you’d have to be a rooster. ” Shaky business deals followed him like cheers after a home run until he met Roy True, a senior partner in the Dallas law firm of True, Rhode, and McLain, as his playing days were ending.

“Everybody had a Mickey Mantle deal, ” True says, “and Mickey simply had no business experience. He felt like he needed someone who only had his interests at heart. Mickey didn’t need me nearly as much as he thought he did, but what I gave him was the ability to say, ’That sounds like a good deal. Go talk to Roy True about it. ’”

And talk they did. Today, Mantle is one of the few sports celebrities who is a business unto himself. Mickey Mantle’s Restaurant and Sports Bar, which opened in New York earlier this year, is a testament to his lasting fame and marketability. Mantle put no money into the deal, but he will receive a base salary of $100, 000 per year (plus percentages) and will build equity in the business. What the investors wanted from Mantle is what he and Roy True are most careful about lending-his name.



UNLIKE MANY SPORTS STARS, RETIRED OR active, Mickey Mantle is not bitter about the gilded cage of success. He seems truly appreciative of his fans, aware that they are responsible for his success. He knows he fulfills a need for those who idolize him.

“I’ll be going through an airport, ” he says, “and you’d think Robert Redford was there. It’s kind of embarrassing. But when I’m at a card show and a guy comes up who you know is the president of a company or something and he’s got tears in his eyes sayin’, ’I never thought I’d get to shake your hand, ’ man, that makes you feel good. I know that some people need to be able to have someone on a pedestal. ” Mickey shrugs, as if it is accidental that it is he who is on so many. “I carry cards on me so I can sign autographs on airplanes. “

Dale Hansen, the effusive Channel 8 sports anchor, had a chance to see the Mantle charisma close up last January, when Mantle was the inaugural guest on Hansen’s KRLD talk show. “They had to actually turn people away, ” Hansen says. “There were people hanging over the railings. I mean, how many restaurants turn people away at 7 o’clock on a Tuesday? The crowd consisted of five-year-olds to people over seventy. And Mantle was great. I figured, you know, Hall of Famer, he’d show up, get it over with, and leave. But he signed autographs and joked and laughed. I was working the crowd with a portable mike while Mickey stood for the whole show so the people in the back could see. I thought that was a hell of a nice gesture. I think he was not only appreciative but truly amazed that so many people still cared so much about him.”

Why the response? Dale Hansen has his own reasons. “Mickey Mantle comes from the time when sports heroes were just that, sports heroes. I know the so-called flaws of his lifestyle, but that’s not how we want to think of him. And I think the fact that he hasn’t overexposed himself is part of the mystique. Though I don’t think he did it by design. “

Hansen’s interview with Mantle was friendly and reverent, and the sportscaster makes no apologies for throwing softballs. “Look, I think I was helped as a kid by having a Mickey Mantle, ” Hansen says. “With the type of stories and reporters we have today, and I think I fit into that category, I don’t know that there will be another Mickey Mantle. I don’t know that it’s possible. “

It would not be accurate to paint Mickey Mantle as a bitter man caught in the time warp of the past. He will never lack for money. He has four children and a devoted wife, and he will always be surrounded by adoring fans who remember the glory of Mantle in his prime. But one gets the impression that the winning he does in life today pales when compared to the winning he did on the diamond.

“You know, ” he says in a voice that is barely a whisper, “some days it seems like forever since I played. It’s only been nineteen years. ” He nods toward the cover photos on the wall and the trophy room overflowing with the symbols of another life. “I come in here and look at these pictures and it seems like it all happened to someone else.”