Remembering Mickey

Sporting News, The, August 21, 1995 by Roger Kahn

Some will talk about the flawless baseball instincts, the stunning foot speed and, of course, those home runs that almost beat Sputnik into orbit. But to celebrate the glorious career and the complex, driven, profoundly touching character that was Mickey Mantle, first come into a locker room at Ebbets Field. No air conditioning. No carpeting. No amenities. We are talking hardball, major league hardball, 1952.

Mantle was 20 years old, the pride of Commerce, Okla., and the 24-karat golden apple of ol' Casey Stengel's eye. And this was one of those great World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers. Brooklyn, the team of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese and Duke Snider, moved ahead, three games to two. Game 6 was tough and grinding, and Mantle won it for the Yankees with an eighthinning homer, a 400-foot line drive into the center-field seats. Now, of course, the seventh game was everything. Mantle homered again, a high, majestic drive to right that knocked out the Dodgers' starter, Joe Black. Then he singled home the final run in the Yankees' 4-2 victory. Headlines would bellow: Yankees Win Fourth Series in Row.

Mantle batted .345. "Nice Series, young man," said Rud Rennie, who covered the Yankees for the Herald Tribune. "What are you up to now?"

"Headin' back to Oklahoma. I got me a job working with the pump crew down in the lead mine."

"Work in the mines?" Rennie said. "You're the star of the World Series. You don't have to do that any more."

"Yes, I do," Mantle said. "My dad died, you know."

"Yes. Sorry, son."

"I got seven dependents counting on me." Mantle named three younger brothers, a sister, his mother and his wife, Merlyn.

"That's six," Rennie said.

"The baby is due in March," Mantle said.

Rennie looked grim. "I can handle it," said 20-year-old Mickey Mantle. Then, brightening, "Anyways my father-in-law, Giles Johnson, says he's gonna name the baby 'Homer.'"

Youth and responsibility. Triumph and sadness. The power and the glory and the lead mines. Mantle lived on many levels and swung through many moods, but I think you begin with a poor boy, the lead miner's son, who ran with the hounds of poverty at his winged heels. That and the shadow of cancer, his own ghastly, self-fulfilling prophecy that cancer, which killed his father and his uncle, was lurking close and soon would drag him to eternity. Yet, and for all that, Mantle was mostly a happy guy.

I knew him, covered him, raised glasses with him across five decades. Probably his most famous home run was the 1953 wallop in Washington off Chuck Stobbs, which was calculated at 565 feet. He launched that missile righthanded. Batting lefthanded in Yankee Stadium in 1956, he cracked a line drive that was still rising when it crashed into the facade fixed to the roof of the third deck. The baseball was still climbing at a point 108 feet high and 380 feet distant from home plate. "The guys I played with," Mantle said, "figured that was my best shot."

Two other homers out of his grand total of 554, which includes the World Series, as it should, rush up from memory. In the fifth game of the 1953 World Series, Mantle came to bat in Brooklyn with two out and the bases loaded. Chuck Dressen, the Dodgers' manager, yanked lefthander Johnny Podres and summoned Russ Meyer, a righthander with a good curve and an excellent screwball. Mantle would swing around now and bat lefthanded. "Don't give this kid a fastball he can hit," Dressen said. "Keep the breaking stuff down around his knees."

Meyer threw one pitch, a hip-high curve, and Mantle drove a monstrous fly ball to left-center field. The ball sailed and sailed, carried and carried, high into the upper deck, landing with such force some claimed to have heard the sound of furniture splintering. That sort of thing just didn't happen, a lefthanded batter reaching the upper deck in left-center at Ebbets Field. Not many righthanded batters could clout a ball that far. I remember sitting in the press box in disbelief. Mantle's batting power was a thing apart. In the next pew, my Herald Tribune colleague, Red Smith typed:

"Collins, Bauer and Berra trotted around the plate and waited there for Mantle, the fourth man in Series history to hit a home run with the bases loaded. Berra straddling home plate flapped his fins like a circus seal applauding his own cornet solo. They leaped upon Mantle as he arrived and struck him with repeated blows. Jubilantly they convoyed him to the dugout where the whole Yankee squad had come boiling out onto the lawn to pummel the young man."

The Yankees won the game, 11-7, and won the Series, their fifth straight, four games to two. Mickey Mantle had truly arrived. He was 16 days shy of his 22nd birthday.

The other homer was simply an incident on a summer night. Mantle stepped up at Yankee Stadium and swung righthanded and everyone watching knew that this drive would not be caught. It climbed farther and higher than seemed possible, carrying over the center fielder, soaring over the flagpoles, finally crashing into a bench halfway up the bleacher. Briefly the crowd sat silent. You couldn't hit a baseball that far. Then came a swelling roar. "Make it an even 500 feet," said a newspaperman, one hand to his face in amazement, "give or take a couple of miles."