They called him “Buck Duck” or just “Buck,” though Willie never knew how he got that nickname. Ernestine later speculated that it came from his “high behind.” Several decades after Willie Mays became one of the greatest brand names in baseball history, his childhood friends still call him Buck.
And Buck was different from everyone else. It wasn’t just his strength, speed, and agility but also how he did things—he was brashly inventive, visually dramatic, unpredictably daring. Willie hated chores, for example, but not if he could turn them into a game. Mop the floor? Turn the mop into a dance partner and whirl it across the linoleum (he’d seen it in the movies). Dry the dishes? Slide them down the counter or flip them in the air, then dive before they crash (he’d seen it in baseball games). He chopped wood so the pieces fell in precise cuts, ironed jeans with perfect creases, turned his bicycle with grace and balance. “I knew he was not an ordinary person—I could sense that early on,” Loretta Richardson says. “Most people do routine things the routine way, but he would do things with more creativity than anyone else.”
He rode his bike by standing on the crossbar or even on the handlebars, and sometimes he would carry three friends with him, perched on the handlebars, the crossbar, and Willie himself, the quartet barreling down a hill and holding on for dear life. That was tame compared with Willie’s penchant for standing on the back fender of Herman Boykin’s truck as it sped at 60 mph from town to town. “It was absolutely crazy,” Boykin says.
Willie was later celebrated as a five-tool player, but that neglects his other sensory gifts. His peripheral vision was superb, allowing him to execute perfect no-look passes on the basketball court and avoid collisions in the outfield. His hearing was so sharp that he could pick up soft conversation from the other side of the room. “Someone would make an off-the-cuff statement, and he could hear you,” Boykin says. “It was a little uncanny.” It helped Willie get quick jumps on balls in center field, the crack of the bat foretelling the ball’s flight.
“His ears were a weapon,” Boykin says.
Mays concedes that his exceptional talents made him unique as a youth. “I don’t like to say this too much, but I was something special, and all the young kids I ran around with, they knew that,” he says. “So they all protected me from a lot of things that ordinary people get in trouble with.” Adults also looked out for him. His teachers allowed him to leave school early for baseball practice. When he was ill, Dr. Drake made house calls but wouldn’t necessarily charge the family. “He was one of the guys who said I was going to be a great, great athlete,” Mays says. In fact, everyone—family, friends, teachers, professionals—made it easy for him. “They knew that I had a chance of doing something better than they did, so life wasn’t too hard for me.”
As a boy, Willie enjoyed listening to cowboy songs on his aunt Sarah’s radio, memorizing the words to such favorites as “I’m an Old Cowhand.” He fantasized about becoming a cowboy himself, and Sarah suggested he might become a singing cowboy. “We’ll call you Bing,” she said. But sports took priority, even on the radio. When Willie was ten, he listened to the reports of Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak, giving him a new idol. “Call me DiMag,” he told Charles Willis. He actually followed three players—Stan Musial and Ted Williams as well as DiMaggio—reading stories about them in the Sunday newspaper and watching newsreel footage before movies. But DiMaggio was his favorite. His comprehensive skills, combined with grace and poise, evoked his father’s injunction for Willie to become a complete player. He studied how the Yankee center fielder threw, ran, and hit, and patterned his open batting stance after him.
The possibility that he might play in the major leagues never crossed his mind. His dream was to play for the Birmingham Black Barons. But when Jackie Robinson opened the 1947 season at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he had a new hero and greater aspirations. “I had a hope then that I could be one of those guys,” he says. “I didn’t know how, but that was in my mind. I could do the same things they could do if I got the chance.”
Baseball probably wasn’t his best sport. “He was always a great athlete,” Otis Tate says, “but he was better in basketball and football,” which he played in high school.
The football team, called the Baby Hornets, regularly scrimmaged against college squads. Even as an underclassman, Willie could easily break tackles and kick the ball fifty to sixty yards. But he played quarterback, his rippling arm providing uncommon strength, his long fingers allowing him to expertly guide the ball. “He was the greatest passer I’ve ever seen,” says William Richardson, a friend. “He was just unbelievably accurate, and he could throw the ball sixty, seventy, eighty yards on a line.” The local newspapers compared him to Harry Gilmer, five years older than Mays, who was starring at the University of Alabama. That a black high school student was being compared to a white college player—they both used the “jump pass”—was itself a breakthrough. Mays’s most acclaimed moment in football occurred when his team played against Booker T. Washington High School in Pensacola, Florida. With three minutes left and Fairfield losing, 7–0, Mays “heaved a seventy-yard pass which was caught, then he ran for the extra point and tied the game,” according to a school history.
His exploits were equally dramatic in basketball, where he played “quick forward,” relying on a picturesque “skyhook” with an unusually high arc. One year, he led Jefferson County in scoring and his team to a state championship. “We had a center,” Mays says, “and when he got the rebound, the first thing he would do is look for me, because I was down the court already.” He could score thirty or even forty points a game, but he says that he would often stop at twenty because “that was enough.”
Mays concurs that baseball was his third sport, but the decision to make it the centerpiece of his life was never in doubt. Practical considerations won out. Football meant excessive risk of injury; basketball required height. But the most important factor was money. For most of Mays’s youth, there were no equivalents in football or basketball to baseball’s Negro Leagues. By the time he reached high school in 1946, segregation in professional athletics had begun to crumble, with the three major team sports integrating in a five-year period—the National Football League and the All-American Conference in 1946, Major League Baseball in 1947, and the National Basketball Association in 1950. But professional football and basketball players first attended college. Willie received scholarship offers in both sports, but college didn’t appeal to him; football was nixed as well because blacks didn’t play quarterback in the professional leagues.
Even before the major leagues were integrated, baseball offered the most financial opportunity. Black players in the Industrial Leagues, Negro Leagues, and semiprofessional leagues were all paid, and Willie participated at an early age. When he was fourteen, his father would take him to his Industrial League game as an extra man, and Willie would play if the team was shorthanded or the score was lopsided. The teams would either charge admission or pass the hat, then split the proceeds. Willie would receive a full share, some days ten or twelve dollars.
Around that time, he also began playing for the Fairfield Gray Sox on a sandlot field enclosed by railroad ties. The youngest player on the team, Willie proudly wore his first uniform—a blue cap inscribed with an “F” and GRAY SOX printed across his chest. The players weren’t paid, but Willie was able to showcase his skills for leagues that did pay. Shortstop was his initial position, but he threw so hard, the first baseman complained. So the manager, Cle Holmes, had him pitch, but Cat Mays objected because a pitcher’s lot was too risky. He had taught his son to hit, run, and field so Willie could play as long as possible. If he was turned into a pitcher by some benighted manager and hurt his arm, his career would be over. Cat’s anxiety grew when, after pitching nine innings, Willie came to bat with the game tied. He smashed the ball and sped around the bases with the winning home run, only to become dizzy and collapse on the field. When he opened his eyes, his father was looking at him. “You were bearing down too hard out there,” he said. “This is what happens.”
Cat told his son that he needed to avoid injury so he could stay on the field. The advice was practical, but it was about more than just baseball. Jon Miller, the longtime announcer for the Giants, has heard Mays describe how his father tried to protect him. “This was about survival,” he says. “This was about a young black man who would go out in the white world. If you get hurt and can’t play, they’ll dump you like some trash on the side of the road.”
Cat told Willie’s manager that if he wanted the youngster on his team, he would need to find another position for him. And he did: he sent Willie to center field.
Willie had no objection to playing the same position as DiMaggio, and while the move may have been driven by circumstance, center field suited him perfectly. The infield confined him. Now he was free to roam.
Even as a teenager with the Gray Sox, Willie made plays that fans would talk about for the rest of their lives. David Stokes was seven years old, sitting in a red wagon, when he watched Willie track down a ball in deep center field as a runner tried to score. “We thought he was going to throw the ball to the second baseman,” Stokes recalls. “Instead, he threw the ball to home plate. No one could believe it. The catcher put up his arms, but the ball went over the catcher and over the fence.”
The ball hit a small shop, smashing against a sign—DUCK INN—on the door. “After he hit the sign, most of the kids in Fairfield, including me, started throwing footballs, baseballs, and rocks as far as we could,” Stokes says. “Everyone wanted to throw the ball like Willie.” When Willie lost a fight to a burly teenager, the defeat devastated Stokes. “To me he was indestructible.”
Stokes, now a retired master sergeant from the army, has only briefly met Mays, yet his connection runs deep. When he was eleven, the aunt who raised him died, and as he stood next to the open casket in the crowded church, with the choir singing hymns and the trumpeter playing his mournful tribute, the grieving boy thought of Willie Mays, racing across the outfield, his body and arm whirling with raw, balletic fury. “Willie,” he says, “was our hero, our Superman, our role model.”
Willie loved sports partly by default. “In the South,” he said, “you only had certain things you could do, and if you didn’t play a sport, what else could you do?” But his commitment was more layered. While he was drawn to the playing fields by his father and his own natural skill, sports also had rules, structure, and clarity. For a soft-spoken youth who would live in four houses before finishing high school and was indifferent about school and church, sports were his refuge.
“During baseball season, we played till late afternoon,” he said. “When baseball season was over, we played basketball till eleven or twelve at night. And football we played—especially in the summer—until nine o’clock. I used to play on the high school football team, and then we’d go play sandlot ball on Sundays, without any shoulder pads. And when we didn’t have shoes, I used to kick barefoot.”
As a teenager, Willie made one effort to get a real job. Britling’s Cafeteria in Birmingham hired him to wash dishes, and he lasted one day, apparently quitting before he was fired. He left early because he didn’t want to miss his game. “I ain’t going back for the money,” he told his father, “because I want to play baseball.”
That was fine with Cat, who had already warned him about the coal mines—if he worked there, he would die there. Lung cancer might get him, or the mine itself might collapse on him. The fenced-in mills weren’t much better, disabling workers with severed fingers, ripped shoulders, burned arms, and shattered eardrums. Some men walked out so dirty that their wives couldn’t recognize them, so hot they could pour sweat out of their shoes, so dazed that they confirmed what Cat said of the mills: they were death traps.
“Okay,” Cat told his son upon hearing of his aborted career as a dishwasher. “You play baseball, and I’ll make sure you eat.”
In the South’s strata of black baseball, community teams like the Fairfield Gray Sox were sometimes called semipro, even though compensation wasn’t offered. The industrial teams and the minor league circuits were a notch higher, both feeding into the actual Negro Leagues, as they are now known, in which the Birmingham team played.
In 1946, Willie Mays turned fifteen and was attracting attention from beyond Fairfield and Birmingham and even Alabama. Beck Shepherd was a baseball enthusiast in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who owned a minor league team that played in the Negro Southern League, the Chattanooga Choo Choos.
Like a dozen other owners, scouts, and managers, both black and white, Shepherd later claimed that he “discovered” Willie Mays, in this case playing baseball on a “cow pasture diamond” in Alabama. As he told a reporter, “I said to myself right then, ‘Get this boy to play on your Choo Choos, and you’ve got it made.’ ” He wanted to sign Willie to a contract, but Aunt Sarah told him Willie had to finish school. “Let me have that boy for five years, and he can buy his own school,” Shepherd told her. Sarah held firm.
Willie never signed a contract, but he was allowed to go to Chattanooga, where he moved into the Martin Hotel and played for the Choo Choos during the summer. They were hard to miss on the road, what with “Choo Choos” scrawled on the side of the bus, and they played games from Texas to New York. “We learned it was a big world,” says Harold Shepherd, Beck’s son and a batboy on Willie’s team. On the road, when the men found nightclubs and other diversions, Harold and Willie went to the movies or played cards in their hotel room.
Willie was initially assigned to shortstop, but the first baseman had trouble with his throws from deep short—on one play, the ball simply ripped off his glove. Willie returned to the outfield, where his education in baseball continued. “We’d go out there early, look at the field, and see what’s wrong,” recalls his teammate Frank Evans, who is ten years older than Mays. Some fields had embankments; others, slopes or ditches. “You don’t wait until you get in the game to see what’s out here,” Evans told Mays, “because otherwise you can get yourself killed.”
Evans worked with Mays on his baserunning (“tag everything with your left foot”) and hitting, but he offered no pointers on throwing. “The Lord blessed him,” he says, “with a helluva’n arm.”
Mays’s youth made him the target of jokes so severe that on one road trip, Beck Shepherd stopped the bus and told his team to ease off the boy or he’d leave them all on the road. “Willie and I would have finished the trip alone,” Shepherd later said. “Willie was a better ball club all by himself than all the rest of the players I had put together.” The teasing stopped.
Willie had other concerns. The players were paid a percentage of the gate, so if rain canceled the game, they received no money. On one road trip, bad weather postponed four or five games, and Willie was running out of cash. “We’d eat loaves of stale bread and sardines and crackers and RC Cola, and I remember—we were in Dayton, Ohio, at the time—I said to myself, if this ever gets over, I’m quitting,” Mays said.
Back in Chattanooga, he called his father and said he was coming home. He told Shepherd he was returning to Birmingham because his mamma was sick, and he asked for $2.50 in bus fare.
“You be back tomorrow?” Shepherd asked.
“Yeah,” Willie said.
He never returned. He had been with the team about a month.
The Choo Choos folded several years later, and by the time Mays was playing in the Polo Grounds, Shepherd was running a shoeshine parlor in Chattanooga. But his brush with the future Hall of Famer had a residual value. In 2005, a copy of a Choo Choos team photograph with Mays sold on eBay for $2,750.
The following year, Willie was playing for the TCI wire mill team with a special teammate—his father. Cat was thirty-six, still fit but past his prime. They patrolled the outfield, father in center, son in left. Since Willie was a boy, he had measured his own talent by his father’s. How much faster, stronger, and smarter was he than I? The gap had been closing until this season, when fly balls that Cat once would have handled—if only to protect his son—were now fair game for either. “My father had always been a symbol of strength to me, strength and ability,” Willie said. “But one day you grow up and you surpass your father. I know now that it’s a fact of life, even though it made me feel strange at the time.”
He remembers the game in which the torch was finally passed. It was the last contest of the season, and Willie knew he was almost ready for the Birmingham Black Barons. A line drive was hit between Cat and Willie, and Cat yelled, “Let me take it!”
Willie knew that Cat had earned the right to catch that ball, then he realized that his father was too far back and the ball was sinking too fast. So he did what his instincts and training had prepared him to do—he raced in front of his father and caught the ball off the top of his shoes. Afterward, no words were spoken on the field or back in the dugout.
“I knew that I’d shown him up,” Willie said. “And he knew it. I’ve never apologized to him for making the play. He’s never apologized to me for trying to call me off.” They could still share their lives, but they could no longer share the same outfield. “The only thing worse than being shown up by youth is being shown up by your own flesh and blood,” Willie said. “Because then you have to pretend that you like it.”