Like Ruth, Mickey hits towering line drives. Like Ted Williams, he smacks crackling line drives. Like DiMaggio, he beats out hot-to-handle grounders . . . Ruth, Williams, DiMaggio.
—“Young Man from Olympus,” Time, 1953 (cover story)
There will never be another like him. Never.
—Buzz Bissinger, The Classic Mantle
There never has been a purer baseball talent than Mickey Mantle.
—Maury Allen, You Could Look It Up
It was like watching a young, blonde god.
—Gil McDougald, New York Yankees, 1951–60
Larry Doby and his integration of the American League were as much shadowed by the achievements and the legend of Mickey Mantle as they were by the shadow of Jackie Robinson and his integration of the National League. An Amazon search produces citation to fifty-eight books by or about Mickey Mantle, surpassing even the number written about Jackie Robinson (fifty-five) and certainly the number written about Larry Doby and his integration of the American League (one). Many of the treatments and phrasings in the “Mick lit” are beyond superlative, beyond over-the-top products of checkout-counter journalism: one of “the greatest players of all time”; one of the “most naturally talented players of all time”; or “the greatest centerfielder of all time.”1
Mantle batted .298 lifetime, with 536 home runs and 1,509 RBIs, over an eighteen-year career. He won the Triple Crown in 1956 (batting average, home runs, and runs batted in), becoming only the fourth player to do so. He was the American League Most Valuable Player (MVP) three times (1956, 1957, 1962). He possessed blazing speed, both in the outfield and on the base paths, stealing sixteen bases in 1957, eighteen in 1958, and twenty-one (his peak) in 1959 (they did not steal as many bases then as they do today). So there is quite a bit of reality backing the legend—but not completely.
Take the matter of Mantle’s injuries. What the reality was is far from clear. In the second game of the 1951 World Series, Mantle, while in right field chasing a blooper (hit by Willie Mays), caught his rear cleat on a drain or drain cover. He tore ligaments, putting him out for the remainder of the series and requiring a five-day hospitalization.
Later, though, at the conclusion of the hospitalization, the Yankees doctor pronounced Mantle fully healed, which medical staff at Johns Hopkins corroborated: “Examination reveals that the cartilage was not damaged and that the torn ligament on the inner side of his right leg has completely healed” (December 1951).2 Surgery was not required until two years later, occasioned by another injury to the knee, this time to the cartilage rather than ligaments.3
Since that 1951–53 time frame, though, the biographers have never stopped passing out the purple hearts. “That October [1951] was the last time Mantle set foot on a baseball field without pain,” or “It seemed incredible that he could play through such pain every day.”4 The 1969 New York Times headline announcing Mantle’s retirement was “18 years of Pain, Misery and Frustration.”5 Mickey Mantle’s 1951 injury “alter[ed] the entire course of his career.”6
Mantle undoubtedly was injured then and injured again many times in his career, especially because he always played all out. For the rest of his career, before each game Mantle wrapped that right leg with so many ace bandages that he looked like a “mummy.” The Mick was the “Man of Mishaps,” “a tragic figure,” “the champion hard luck guy,” “the most famous invalid in the long history of sport.”7
Then, too, any professional athlete whose career spans any length of time has injuries, playing through greater pain for longer durations later in their careers. Mantle’s injuries and the pain they caused him may not be appreciably different from those that other professional iron men have endured. If it had not happened to Mantle then, the odds are great that it or some other severe injury would have happened to him later, as it invariably does to most athletes playing a sport at the highest level.
The principal difference, then, is that Mantle’s injury, at least the one to which so much pain is attributed, came in his very first season, and not in the middle of or later in his career. “He would play the next seventeen years struggling to be as good as he could be.”8 Playing with extreme and excruciating pain is part of the Mick legend. In his playing days Mickey Mantle early on became a martyr. He remained a martyr throughout his career.
Any retrospective on the Mantle legend should emphasize the stellar achievements of a baseball player called “a hero all his life,” “the Natural,” “the All-American boy.”9 “It was Mantle and Mantle alone who did things in the baseball field that were not simply spectacular but crossed the line into the world of the surreal, the unfathomable.”10
Mantle made his first marks playing semipro baseball for the Whizzes in Oklahoma, where he hit two home runs out of the park into the Spring River. He was then “discovered in the middle of nowhere by the legendary Yankee scout Tom Greenwade.”11 Known throughout the Missouri-Oklahoma-Kansas territory, Greenwade was noted for his three-piece suits, felt hats, and black Cadillacs. But he did not merely discover Mantle; rather he swindled Mantle and his family and bamboozled many others as well.
Scouts for other teams such as the Indians had heard of Mantle. Greenwade conspired with Mantle’s high school principal to put other scouts off the scent. During a storm and a rain delay in a game Mantle was playing, Greenwade corralled Mantle and his father, Mutt, putting them in the backseat of his Cadillac. He told Mutt that his son “was a marginal prospect. He might make it, he might not,” remarking, “Kid is kind of small.” He persuaded Mantle and his father to sign for $1,150 when other, less promising Major League prospects in the region were signing for bonuses of $25,000 or $50,000. Moreover, $750 of that amount was contingent upon Mantle sticking with the Yankees’ Independence, Missouri, farm team beyond June 30.12 “Greenwade did not become a legend until he discovered Mickey Mantle.”13 He achieved that only by being deceitful.
In his fifty-plus-year Major League Baseball career, Branch Rickey saw every aspect of it, as a player, a field manager, and a general manager of the Cardinals, the Dodgers, and the Pirates. He developed the first true farm system at St. Louis and reprised the act at Brooklyn for the Dodgers. One salient truth he learned from his vast experience was that “there is more room for the twilight zone double cross in scouting than in any other phase of the baseball business.”14 Mickey Mantle learned that lesson early in his baseball career.
After spending the summers of 1949 and 1950 in the minor leagues, Mantle reported to Yankee spring training at Phoenix, Arizona, in 1951. Ordinarily, the Yankees trained in Florida, but at that time Del Web, an Arizona real-estate developer, and the father of Sun City, owned half of the Yankee baseball club. He wanted to showcase “his” team in his home city.
In 1950, the previous year, Mantle had hit .383, with 26 HR, 136 RBIs, and 141 runs scored, being named Most Valuable Player in the Western League.15 Soon, in his first year with the big club, Mantle merited superlatives. He had hit .402, with 9 HRs in spring training 1951. “He has more speed than any slugger and more slug than any speedster—and nobody has ever had more of both of ’em together. The kid ain’t logical. He’s too good,” said Yankee manager Casey Stengel.16 “The kid runs so fast that he doesn’t bend the grass when he steps on it.”17 Sportswriters termed him “the Commerce Comet,” after his home town of Commerce, Oklahoma; “the Colossal Kid”; and “the Wonder Boy.”18 Others termed Mantle “the Yankee Oakie Doakie”; “Rookie of the Eons”; “Magnificent Mantle”; “Mighty Mickey”; the “One-Man Platoon”; and “the Future of Baseball.”19 The press coverage “bordered on the hysterical. No matter what paper you read, on what day, you [would] get Mickey Mantle, more Mickey Mantle, and still more Mickey Mantle.”20 He was heralded as a “phenom” before he had even arrived in New York.21
Not all of Mantle’s instant fame was based on performance on the field. There was a cosmetic fillip as well: “Blond and blue-eyed, with a coast-to-coast smile [and] with his limitless potential, Mantle was America incarnate.”22 Fast-forwarding a bit, here is one hero-worshipping biographer’s description of Mantle in a 1952 Yankee clubhouse photo: “The smile on his face was soft and serene. You could see the perfect alignment of white teeth and the soft eyes and the bull neck of someone who was all of twenty years old. He was as all-American as apple and pecan and cherry pie put together under one crust. He was boyish and beautiful. The legend had only just begun.”23
Few competitors, especially black ones like Larry Doby, Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, or Monte Irvin, African American players then in the major leagues, could compete with Mantle’s boyish good looks, blond hair, and muscular physique. Without fault whatsoever on Mantle’s part, there was a certain racial tinge to the near-instantaneous rise of the Mantle legend. But for Mantle not all was blue sky either.
The DiMaggio Cloud. The Mickey Mantle legend was not without storm clouds scudding over the horizon. First to be confronted were the legend of Joe DiMaggio and the long shadow it cast; second came the demotion of Mantle to the Yankees AAA farm team, the Kansas City Blues, in July, 1951, for forty games; third came the death of Mickey Mantle’s father, Mutt, in May 1952; and fourth, Mantle had to endure the continued criticism of his 4F draft classification and failure to serve during the Korean War, accompanied by catcalls and taunts of “commie rat,” “draft dodger,” and worse. Another storm cloud, the injury to his right knee in game 2 of the 1951 World Series, has already been described.
Joe DiMaggio, christened Giuseppe Paolo in the Fishermen’s Wharf area of San Francisco, was the incumbent center fielder for the Yankees, known as “Joltin’ Joe” or the “Yankee Clipper.” DiMaggio burst on the scene in his rookie year, 1936, when Mantle was only five years old, hitting .323 with 125 RBIs in his first season. His 1941 string of base hits in fifty-six consecutive games is a record that has endured to the present day.
Oblivious to his humble roots, DiMaggio exuded an “intimidating frostiness” to fans and teammates alike. Second baseman Billy Martin thought that DiMaggio “looked like a senator or president” rather than a baseball player.24 Mantle’s impression was that “you needed an invitation to approach him.”25 DiMaggio could be reserved even with his family and closest friends and even in the best of times. “If he said hello to you,” DiMaggio’s contemporary Hank Greenburg said, “that was a long conversation.”26 On road trips DiMaggio spurned a bus ride with his teammates from hotel to stadium. He rode alone, in a taxi.27
Every day, in the clubhouse, Mantle would go by DiMaggio’s locker, “just looking for word of encouragement . . . but DiMaggio never said a word. It crushed Mickey.”28 Mantle had hoped that Joe DiMaggio would assist him in his transition to the outfield from shortstop, where Mantle had played throughout his Minor League career. Not only did DiMaggio not help; no one else in the Yankees’ spring-training clubhouse befriended or spoke to Mantle, other than Yogi Berra.29 The Yankees made no effort to provide Mantle with a mentor or a surrogate uncle to guide him in his first several weeks with the club, as other teams had done.30
When Mantle came up in 1951, “instantaneous pressure and expectations [were] placed upon him as a worthy successor to the great DiMaggio.”31 A 1951 New York Times profile of Mantle summed it up: “Not even Jesus could have met all the expectations” put upon the newest Yankee.32 The New York press characterized Mantle as the “inheritor of the Babe Ruth–Lou Gehrig–Joe DiMaggio legend.”33
Mantle’s boyhood hero had been Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals. The Yankees’ front office immediately corrected Mantle’s “misconception [about] the story line he was expected to follow—Joe D was his hero.”34 But Joe would not deign to speak to him: “No one spoke to Joe. Teammates, reporters and clubhouse attendants seemed to part in front of him . . . . Mantle was even more terrified at the thought of talking to the Yankee Clipper than to a reporter. He needn’t have worried; Joe DiMaggio scarcely knew that Mickey Mantle existed.”35 DiMaggio, “perhaps resentful that a nineteen-year-old rookie had been anointed as his successor, said and did nothing to encourage the painfully shy rookie.”36
By mid-July of his first Major League season, Mantle was hitting only .260. Casey Stengel informed him that in order “to get his swing back,” the Yankees were sending him down to the Kansas City affiliate. Stengel worried that Mantle struck out too often, as with many others in baseball back then, not realizing that with an increase in power and home run production comes an automatic increase in the number of swings and misses. Mantle, though, did strike out often, too much by the standard of the stars of that day. For instance, DiMaggio struck out twenty-four times in 1946 and thirty-two times in 1947. “In contrast . . . Mantle would strike out that many times per month.”37
It worked. In forty Minor League games with the Blues, Mantle hit .351. He was called back up to the big league club, with the bonus that he received uniform “7,” the number he wore the rest of his career and which he made famous.38
The third storm cloud passed over Mantle early in the 1952 season when his father, Mutt, died from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age forty on May 6 of that year. Mutt had named Mickey after Mickey Cochran, an All-Star catcher of the twenties and thirties (Philadelphia Athletics and Detroit Tigers). Mutt rolled baseballs to the infant Mickey before he was old enough to play catch. In third and fourth grade, Mantle converted into a switch hitter, at his father’s insistence. Mutt raised son Mickey from the cradle to be a Major Leaguer. Mutt’s death “was the defining moment of his son’s life.” Without Mutt, Mantle “was adrift. . . . Free to make his own decisions, he made bad ones. He wasn’t under anyone’s finger anymore.”39 Mickey Mantle’s leading biographer, Jane Leavy, concludes that “Mutt’s ghost would remain the animating force in his life for the next forty years.”40
Chapter 11’s discussion of why Satchel Paige should not have been the first black in the major leagues projects onto Paige some of the scorn later heaped on Mickey Mantle for avoiding military service and possibly the Korean War. Satch had served neither in the United States’ massive, global effort in World War II nor in the military at all. We can get an idea of the scorn that fans and the media might (hypothetically) have heaped on Paige by revisiting the scorn they actually did heap on Mantle.
Mantle’s Oklahoma draft board had, of course, exempted Mantle from the draft and possible service in the Korean War. The ensuing draft dodger “stigma would [nonetheless] plague [Mantle] through the entire decade and result in more hate mail, booing and bad feelings than had ever been directed at an athlete.”41 Boos, catcalls, and curses followed Mantle every time he took the field.42 “The backlash was so severe that the Yankees asked the draft board to reexamine [Mantle’s] case.”43 In one Mantle biographer’s estimation, there merely were “nagging questions as to why [Mantle] had been declared 4F and therefore exempt from the draft during the Korean War.”44 More unbiased accounts describe the toll more accurately as lasting and significant. For instance, biographer Allen Barra concludes that “Mickey’s rejection by the draft board would stain his reputation for a decade.”45 Along with his rejection by Joe DiMaggio, his demotion to the minor leagues, and the death of his father, criticism of Mickey Mantle’s draft status and his failure to serve clouded the early years, and more, of his Major League playing career.
Mickey Mantle moved from a question mark to an exclamation point before he had played his first regular-season baseball game. The Yankees left their spring-training facility in Phoenix to play a series of exhibition games up and down the West Coast. Several of those games were in Los Angeles. The finale was to be a doubleheader against the University of Southern California (USC) on the USC campus.
Rookie-to-be Mantle hit a towering home run that landed in the middle of the adjacent Trojan football practice facility, at a spot estimated to be six hundred feet from home plate. “Six days earlier he had been mere background in some Hollywood flack’s snapshot,” but after reports of that home run had circulated, Mantle “moved to center stage, where he would remain the rest of his life.”46 “Who is this Mickey Mantle who knocked my Yogi off the front page?”47 Carmen Berra asked.
Thus was born a central ingredient of the Mantle legend, the tape-measure home run, a score of which Mantle hit throughout his career. As developed in the chapter that follows, reality did not always square with the legend, including the tape-measure home run part of it, but before he had even set foot in New York City, Mantle had become Oklahoma’s most famous export, at least since Will Rogers.48
Mickey Mantle’s tumultuous rookie year has already been described. He hit a respectable .267, with thirteen home runs, but this performance did not meet expectations for the Oklahoma Kid, the Rookie of the Eons, the Phenom, of whom most had anticipated much more.
In 1952, his sophomore season, Mantle began to string together performances that guaranteed him a subsequent position in the Hall of Fame, a string that lasted until 1965. His batting averages were .311 (1952), .295 (1953), .300 (1954), and .306 (1955). His performance then escalated to .353 (1956) and .365 (1957), as if the blood in his veins had been replaced by high-octane jet fuel. For a few years in the midst of the string, Mantle’s performance trailed off a bit, to a mere mortal star’s pace of .304 (1958), .285 (1959), and .275 (1960). In 1961 Mantle found his second wind, hitting .317 that year, .321 (1962), .314 (1963), and .303 (1964). In that stretch the Yankees appeared in twelve of fourteen World Series, winning seven of them. With a couple of exceptions, Mantle’s home run totals ranged from thirty to thirty-one to as high as fifty-two and fifty-four. He was among the fastest players in the major leagues, timed from home plate to first base in 2.9 seconds. As a center fielder he won several Gold Glove awards. He became the “most sought after endorser in American sports: Wheaties, Camels, Gem Razor Blades, Esquire socks, Van Heusen shirts, Haggar slacks, Louisville Slugger baseball bats”; the manufacturers of these and other products paid him to appear in their commercials.49
Beginning in 1965 both Mantle and the Yankees began to taper off, at first gradually and then suddenly, as Hemingway described bankruptcy. His playing career ended in 1968. By then the once-proud Yankees had fallen to last place in the American League. Mantle, though, had earned his place in the record books, giving a solid basis for growth of a legend that already existed.
The first images the public viewed were of the young, blond baseball player chewing gum and blowing bubbles in center field, a tad bit irreverent but nothing as naughty as, say, Hollywood actors and starlets partying in Las Vegas. In the clubhouse the Mick became known for squirt-gun fights and other forms of boyish, raucous behavior.
His partners in crime became well known too. Casey Stengel called pitcher Whitey Ford, infielder Billy Martin, and Mantle his “three musketeers.” The first episodes were away from New York, thus hidden somewhat from public view. For instance, Mantle wrecked his new Lincoln Continental while drag racing with Billy Martin racing his new Cadillac.50 Both were drunk, but it was the off-season and in Oklahoma, away from the New York press.
As Mantle’s celebrity status grew, a certain innocence radiated outward from the ballpark. “Night club stars were thrilled to be in the company of America’s most celebrated young baseball star: Joey Bishop, Larry Storch, Buddy Hackett and other [stars] flabbergasted Mickey by asking for his autograph.”51 His celebrity status, though, whetted Mantle’s appetite for the big, flashy New York clubs, the limelight, and the booze. His own fatalistic attitude toward life, based on the death of his father at such a young age, and a “reckless immaturity” fueled the mix.52 The public image of Mantle, however, was still one of a proclivity for engaging in horseplay and pulling pranks, perhaps widening into whispered stories of “legendary carousing . . . with partners in crime Billy Martin and Whitey Ford and Hank Bauer.”53 Sportswriters in those days, though, refrained from commenting on players’ lives away from the baseball diamond or on road trips.
Then came the “Copa Caper.” In May 1957 Mantle, Yogi Berra, Hank Bauer, Whitey Ford, and their wives were celebrating Billy Martin’s twenty-ninth birthday with a night out at the Copa Cabana nightclub. A large loudmouth at the next table recognized the Yankees and came over to them, not exactly picking a fight but saying things the Yankees found unpalatable. The group took it to the restroom, where later the loudmouth was found unconscious, bleeding on the floor with a broken jaw.54 No one has ever determined what happened or who did what to whom, but educated guesses were made that night at the Copa Cabana. One newspaper’s headline assumed things, reading “It Wasn’t a No Hitter.”55 Criminal investigations but no prosecutions followed, although civil suits for damages were filed later. “The Copa kerfuffle was the first public intimation of Mantle’s off-field embrace of la vida loca . . . . Whitey, Billy and Mickey: grown men with little boy’s names.”56
The Yankees traded Billy Martin that summer to Kansas City, not only because of the Copa caper but a mere day or two after the hot-headed Martin had picked a fight with Larry Doby, then playing for the White Sox. Martin’s punching Doby was the last straw for Yankee management.
After the Yankees traded Martin, Ford and especially Mantle had New York all to themselves: “[Mantle] was the king of New York. Everybody loved Mickey. . . . Men wanted to be him. Women wanted to be with him. His domain was vast. . . . Wherever he went—Danny’s Hideaway, the Latin Quarter, the ‘21’ Club, the Stork Club, El Morocco, Toots Shor’s—his preferred drink was poured as he walked through the door. Reporters waited by his locker. . . . Boys clustered by the players’ gate, hoping to touch him.”57
Jim Bouton was an ex-Yankees pitcher who had enjoyed some success in a medium-length career as a Yankee, 1962–68 (21-7 in 1963, 55-51 over seven years). In 1970 he published Ball Four, a book mostly about his season with the expansion team Seattle Pilots. The book though, included a tell-all about his years as a Yankee and about Major League Baseball. Bouton regaled readers with exposes of Yankee behavior—water guns, water balloons, whoopee cushions, hard drinking, fighting, and carousing, peeping Tom exploits extraordinaire—in which Mantle figured prominently.58
During Mantle’s baseball career and shortly thereafter, baseball had moved from a cone of silence over player’s off-field escapades, to selective reporting of incidents too big to cover up (the Copa Caper), to tell-all, mildly shocking (back then very shocking) no-holds-barred revelations. Mickey Mantle, “the last boy in the last decade ruled by boys,” figured prominently in Bouton’s and other tales.59 Major League Baseball, as best it could, tried to discredit and even ban Bouton and his book from the game.
Some say that most people “hate the sin but love the sinner.” So it was with Mickey Mantle. The counterintuitive upshot of all his peccadilloes and shenanigans was to augment and enhance, not deduct from, the Mantle legend, while it might have torpedoed a less highly regarded ball player. Mantle’s All-American boyish looks, a “boys will be boys” forgiveness on the part of his fans, and his absolute toughness overrode any negative connotations. On the field Mantle played hard, and well, with superhuman performance in everything, playing through injuries, and hangovers as well.
Performance on the field acted as a counterweight to Mantle’s drinking and carousing off the field. He announced his retirement in spring 1969. Without the counterweight of being on a team and playing regularly, Mantle drank more heavily. He played golf and made celebrity appearances throughout the United States. He did endorsements and commercials (“I want my Maypo” in 1967).
One thing he did not do was to resume a family life, in part because he never had a family life to resume. In 1958 his wife, Merlyn, and his four young sons, moved from New Jersey to the Preston Hollow section of Dallas, Texas. The Mantles had built a home there. Still tony Preston Hollow is where former president George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, now make their home. During his playing days Mantle stayed in New York, while, in pursuit of a more normal existence, the Mantle family moved to Texas. Life in a prestigious section of Dallas did not save Mantle’s family. All four of his sons and his wife ended up with severe alcohol and drug dependencies.
In the early 1980s Mantle faced numerous medical bills for treatment of his son, Billy, who had been diagnosed with cancer. In 1980 Bally’s Atlantic City casino had hired former San Francisco Giants center fielder and Hall of Fame entrant Willie Mays as a public relations representative and official greeter of sorts. Bowie Kuhn, then commissioner of baseball, promptly banned Mays from all connections with Major League Baseball, invoking the no-tolerance rule that Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had implemented following the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal. Despite the potential of a lifetime ban like the one imposed on Mays, Mantle needed the money enough to take the risk. He accepted a job similar to Mays’s for $100,000 per year, requiring him to “smooze with the high rollers” at Claridge’s, the oldest, and what many considered the most downscale, the smallest, and the most threadbare of the Atlantic City casinos. “It was degrading and . . . Mantle knew it was degrading.”60 Predictably, Bowie Kuhn banned Mantle from baseball.
Then and there, at Claridge’s, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Mantle’s really heavy, world-class drinking began. In the mornings he began his day with “the breakfast of champions”: brandy, Kahlua liqueur, and half-and-half or cream. He would put two shots of vodka into a glass of wine before drinking it. Seeing an individual ordering a drink at the next table, Mantle would order ten or more of the same drink, polishing off all ten, or even twenty, one after the other.61
In 1985 Mantle met a Georgia schoolteacher named Greer Johnson. Soon thereafter he began cohabiting with Johnson in a townhouse in Greensboro, Georgia, outside Atlanta. His marriage with Merlyn of some twenty-five years, long over in many respects, was thus visibly rendered asunder. Greer Johnson became Mantle’s lover, housemate, companion, handler, and employee.
The baseball memorabilia craze of the 1980s could have saved Mantle, and perhaps did for a few years. He was the number one attraction for all the card shows, signings, auctions, and other events that took the country by storm, rising very quickly to a $1.2 billion industry. Greer Johnson booked him, arranged his travel, accompanied him, banked the receipts, and kept the books. For his part, ever the loyal and faithful teammate, Mantle used his star power to persuade show and action promoters to include Yankees less prominent or less remembered than Mantle. After several years, however, the baseball memorabilia craze declined, swiftly returning to the $200 million level from whence it had come. Mantle continued his drinking. One of his favored hangouts became the Preston Trail Country Club, where he could be found, if not playing golf, drinking and allowing fellow members to bask in the Mantle aura.
Mickey Mantle entered the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Springs, California, on January 7, 1994. He stayed thirty-two days and remained sober thereafter, which was not to be long. Later in 1994 Mantle’s third son, Billy, died of a heart attack at age thirty-five, weakened by the bouts of chemotherapy and other treatments he had undergone to beat cancer.
A short time later, doctors diagnosed Mickey Mantle with cirrhosis and cancer of the liver, detecting a severe and prolonged decrease of liver function. They said his liver was “like a door stop.” The Baylor Medical Regional Transplant Center put him on the liver transplant list. He cleared the list. In early June 1995, while transplanting the healthy liver into Mantle, surgeons saw what they had been unable to assess previously: cancer had metastasized from his liver to his pancreas. Mantle had a few weeks left. In August 1995 he reentered the hospital. He died early in the morning of August 13, 1995, at age fifty-three.
Mickey Mantle’s tombstone reads “The most popular player of his era.” His lawyer, Ray True, uttered a partial eulogy: “To me he was one of the saddest, loneliest people I have ever known. He had no place in the world.”62 Oscar Wilde said, “I drink to keep body and soul apart.” So did Mantle. But another Mantle friend, Tony Molito, opined, “Mickey Mantle was not destroyed by alcohol. He was destroyed by celebrity,” by his own legend.63