But 900 miles to the west, a young girl, too, papered her bedroom walls with pictures of the Mick. She studied the box scores and stuffed copies of Sport magazine inside ones about Elvis. Late on a summer night, her bedside radio turned low, she could pick up Ernie Harwell broadcasting a Tigers-Yankee game or sometimes Mel Allen, and even from such a distance, the electricity of Mantle at the plate was transmitted through all that static. Girls were affected by Mickey, too.
This generation was reminded of Mantle’s magnetism last week as the 63-year-old Hall-of-Famer lay critically ill in a Dallas hospital, waiting for a liver transplant to save his life. Forty years of abuse – of glad-handing fans and heavy-handed bartenders buying him Just one more – badly damaged Mantle’s liver. When he was rushed to Baylor University Medical Center, doctors found liver cancer and a lingering case of hepatitis; he was given two weeks to live. Overnight, though, a donor was found; doctors insisted that like any other extreme case, Mantle was moved to the top of the list. He may leave the hospital within a month; survival rates average five years.
The statistics tell some of the Mantle story. In his 18 seasons with the Yankees, from 1951 through 1968, Mantle hit 536 home runs, batted .298, captured one Triple Crown and three MVP awards, and helped lead the Yankees to 12 pennants and seven world championships. And yet.
In tandem with his electrifying performances, a parallel drama was being enacted. With every success, there came a small tragedy. One, which particularly dispirited the girl in Chicago, was in 1961, when Mantle and teammate Roger Maris set a torrid pace toward breaking Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs. In early September, Mantle developed an abscessed hip and had to be benched. Maris got his asterisky 61 homers; Mantle had to settle for 54.
Always it was the legs. Back then Mantle’s bad fortune was keyed to his rookie year, when, during a World Series game, he and DiMaggio were chasing a ball and Mantle pulled up short, terrified he might crash into the great DiMag. His spikes caught on a drain cap and he tore up his right knee. Despite four operations, the weakened joint could never keep up with the powerful body. His injuries made as much news as his heroic hits.
It was this dramatic interplay of brute strength and fragility that fueled Mantle’s legend. But his problem was more than a balky knee. He drank too much, caroused too often, did nothing to preserve his body or to stay in shape. Mantle had been robbed–by himself.
Exactly when this realization hit Mantle is unclear. But several years after he retired, he was interviewed by the young girl who had grown up to be a reporter. As her tape recorder whirred into the night, Mantle became very drunk. Finally, they left a restaurant on Central Park South and, as Mantle stepped off a curb, he stumbled. Mortified, the woman stared at this legend lying in the gutter. Then Mantle scrambled to his feet, grinned sheepishly and said, “New shoes.”
Fallen hero: By 1980, a certain sadness had begun to show. The woman, in a second interview, now found in Mantle a vulnerability, a humanness, more in keeping with a fallen hero than a hero. At the age of 48, the faded blue eyes needed reading glasses, the middle had spread and the legs were all the more brittle. Poignantly, he spoke about how his past still haunted his days–and especially his dreams.
“I’m in a taxi, trying to get to Yankee Stadium,” he revealed. “I’m late and I’ve got my uniform on. But when I get there the guard won’t let me in. He doesn’t recognize me. So I find this hole in the fence and I’m trying to crawl through it. But I can only get my head in. I can see Billy and Whitey and Yogi and Casey, And I can hear the announcer: ‘Now batting… No. 7 … Mickey Mantle.’ But I can’t get through the hole. That’s when I wake up. My palms are all sweaty.”
Mantle may always feel he let people down. But his finest moments often came in the late innings. And since 1994, when he entered the Betty Ford Clinic to stop drinking, he has tried to repair his fractured relationships with his three living sons and his wife. Like the game of baseball, the molding of a hero has no time limits.
