Willie Mays took his World Series paycheck of $5,000, the most ever paid to players of a losing team, and returned to Fairfield, where he bought his second car, a green Mercury convertible. His father didn’t know how to drive, so he enlisted his friends, Otis Tate and Herman Boykin . Seeking an open, flat space, Tate took Mays to a ball field and taught him how to steer and shift gears while motoring around the bases. He drove the way he ran, full tilt. “He drove a car faster than anyone I ever knew in my life,” Boykin says. Mays was not a reckless driver—he was never involved in any accidents of note—but he loved the speed and status of luxury cars, which remained a lifelong passion.
Mays wasn’t home for long. He was soon playing for Roy Campanella’s Major League All-Stars, a barnstorming squad that competed against Negro League stalwarts in exhibitions across the South. Campanella’s team included the Giants’ black outfield, undoubtedly a big draw. But Mays had to be in Birmingham on Saturday, October 27—the city declared it Willie Mays Day. He would be the guest of honor at an afternoon parade, and in the evening, his barnstorming team would play against the Black Barons at Rickwood Field, where Campanella would give him a trophy.
The city’s tribute made sense. Birmingham had a rich baseball history, and now its native son was bringing it glory. What’s more, the city’s powerful police commissioner, Eugene Connor, was an avid sports fan, baseball being his favorite. Before entering politics, he broadcast minor league games from a radio station with information from a ticker tape. Mays himself grew up listening to those games. “He’s o-u-u-t-t!” was one of Connor’s bellowing phrases. The Sporting News described Connor as “one of Dixie’s most popular announcers.” He was unusually adept at “shooting the bull,” filling the time between pitches with amusing chatter, a skill that led in part to his memorable nickname, “Bull” Connor.
Baseball, in short, was Connor’s springboard into politics, and in a perfect world, he would have been the master of ceremonies for Willie Mays Day. Instead, he killed it.
The bands and schoolchildren had already gathered for the parade when the authorities broke it up “by decreeing its permit had been canceled,” according to the Birmingham News columnist Alf Van Hoose, who wrote about the aborted event in 1968 . (The local press does not seem to have covered it at the time.) Van Hoose did not spell out why the parade was canceled. He didn’t have to. Bull Connor was not about to let his city honor a black man. Van Hoose noted the irony of Birmingham’s position: “No official recognition had ever been taken of Birmingham’s most famous athlete, a man not without honor in every great city in the land.” Van Hoose, who covered sports for more than four decades in the South and was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, called the incident “an embarrassment.”
It’s unclear whether the city also shut down the scheduled exhibition game. Newspapers published advance articles, but there are no stories about the game itself.
Almost sixty years later, Mays himself says he has no recollection of those events, which suggests the game was not played. He also says he bears no ill will toward Birmingham, and even if he did, he would not say so publicly. (The worst thing he’ll say about Bull Connor is that he got overexcited announcing ball games.) Mays, to be sure, loved the adulation, but Birmingham’s snub probably didn’t bother him if only because he was celebrated everywhere else.
Besides, he wasn’t the biggest loser. The man who lost the most—the baseball aficionado who would have stood shoulder to shoulder with America’s new idol, who would have exalted the Say Hey Kid’s accomplishments, who would have basked in the reflected glory of Willie Mays—that man was Bull Connor, doomed by his own bigotry.
Mays had more important worries than a canceled parade. The day he returned home, he received a letter from the Selective Service, instructing him to report to Draft Board 122 in Fairfield within ten days. America was at war. Mays thought he wouldn’t have to serve and applied for a 3-A classification: “registrant deferred by reason of extreme hardship to dependents.” With his stepfather struggling to keep a job, Mays was contributing part of his paycheck to his mother and his nine half-siblings; the army would pay him only $75 a month. He thought that constituted hardship. Uncle Sam had other ideas.
The armed forces were ill prepared in June 1950, when the North Korean Army crossed the 38th parallel, triggering the U.S. involvement in the Korean War. The military needed an additional 500,000 recruits, and the Selective Service was soon drafting 80,000 men a month.
The draft itself was a sensitive matter, particularly in the early days of the Cold War. Young men were expected to serve their country, to fulfill their “military obligation,” at a time when the line against Communist aggression had to be drawn and when the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, claimed to hold the names of American traitors. Time ’s Man of the Year in 1950 was the American soldier, who fought bravely against Communism.
Baseball stars such as Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, and Ted Williams served in World War II, and the game’s best athletes were expected to serve in the feverish environment of the early 1950s. Those who didn’t, like Mickey Mantle, were ridiculed. Mantle’s draft board had classified him as 4-F—physically unfit; his chronic osteomyelitis, or inflammation of the bone, in his left leg disqualified him. The classification was met with scorn and disbelief—how could someone who could hit, throw, and run like Mickey Mantle be physically unfit for anything? He received hate mail and heard cries of “coward,” “draft dodger,” and “Commie.” His draft board in Oklahoma was also vilified. The backlash was so intense that the Yankees asked the draft board to reexamine the case, even if it meant losing Mantle for two years.
Mindful of perceptions, the Selective Service did not exempt baseball players. The Yankees’ Whitey Ford and Billy Martin were drafted in 1950. The Phillies that year lost a top starter, Curt Simmons, when his Pennsylvania National Guard unit was mobilized. The army drafted Don Newcombe in 1952. The player who drew the most publicity was Ted Williams, a World War II aviator whose Marine Corps Reserve unit was also activated in 1952. To allay concerns that Mantle received special treatment, his draft board had him examined three more times; he was still deemed 4-F (though strong enough to hit forty-four home runs in 1952 and 1953).
Willie Mays didn’t hide his feelings. At a draft physical in Birmingham, where the government tested his coordination, Mays told the Birmingham News: “Naturally, I’m not interested in the army, but if I have to go, I’ll make the best of it.”
Mays passed his physical, but he also had to take an aptitude test. The Armed Forces Qualification Test had a hundred multiple-choice questions that examined verbal and math skills and gauged a candidate’s ability to perform certain tasks. The test wasn’t difficult—its main purpose was to match recruits with suitable assignments. But failing it was a disqualification for the draft.
As the principal breadwinner in his family, Mays believed he shouldn’t have to serve, so he flunked the test on purpose. It was a bad decision. The well-publicized results reinforced the image that Mays was “no Einstein.” A reporter for Sport, noting that Mays had failed the test, seemed impressed when he watched him autograph a bat “in a series of firm, swift strokes... a legible and handsome signature.”
More important, Mays’s gambit didn’t work. His draft board initially said that it would not ask for a second exam, but it changed course and demanded that Mays be retested. No explanation was given, but the draft board officials may have determined that Mays, who graduated in the upper half of his high school class and had traveled more widely than most people in Alabama, was no dummy. When he took the exam again in January, a proctor looked over his shoulder. Mays passed.
The cat-and-mouse game wasn’t over. Mays formally requested an exemption because so many family members depended on him, but his appeal was rejected by his draft board as well as Selective Service officials. Exemptions were supposedly given in one of two circumstances—for married men who were fathers and for men who were present in the home of those claimed as dependents.
Mays failed on both counts, but the Selective Service acknowledged that he was drafted because of who he was. Mays “owes perhaps a greater obligation to his country than other boys, because of his promise in the sports world,” said Colonel James T. Johnson, the top Selective Service official in Alabama. The rationale was absurd. As Gayle Talbot of the Associated Press said, “Just why does Willie owe a greater debt to his country than the kid on the next block who throws like a sissy? Are boys being penalized because they are promising athletes?”
Truth be told, Mays was an imperfect army recruit for another reason: he didn’t like guns.
The news of his conscription did not surprise the Giants. Horace Stoneham didn’t want to bring Mays up in 1951, in part because he expected Willie to be drafted. Assuming they would not be so lucky again, the Giants traded Eddie Stanky to the Cardinals for outfielder Chuck Diering before the 1952 season. Mays, however, didn’t know when he’d have to report to the army, so he went to his first spring training with the Giants.
For years, the Giants had trained in Miami, but in 1947 they moved their camp to Phoenix; the Cleveland Indians also migrated to Arizona, settling in Tucson for their training. Less rain, drier heat, and lower costs were among the lures of these small desert cities. The Indians’ owner, Bill Veeck, also recognized that Arizona’s racial climate was better than that of Florida, whose laws prohibited blacks and whites from competing on the same field. Whether Stoneham considered race in moving to Phoenix is unclear, but teams with black players were clearly motivated to leave Florida. By 1953, five of the seven integrated squads trained in either Arizona or California.
While conditions were better in Arizona, Jim Crow was still enforced. In 1948, the Indians’ Larry Doby couldn’t stay with his teammates at their hotel in Tucson but had to live with a black family two miles from the ballpark. Two years later, the Giants’ first black players, Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson, could stay with their teammates at the Adams Hotel in Phoenix but were not allowed to linger in the lobby, use the swimming pool, or eat in the dining rooms (they had their meals in their own rooms). When Irvin complained to the Giants, he was told that those were the laws and there was nothing the organization could do. Irvin didn’t press his complaint because he didn’t want to jeopardize his chances of making the team.
These conditions hadn’t changed when Mays attended his first spring training. The setting was actually an improvement for Mays on the previous year’s spring training in Florida, when the black Minneapolis Millers lived apart from their teammates. At least now Mays lived in the same building as everyone else.
As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the second half of the 1950s, spring training’s racial hypocrisy became a flash point for activists, black journalists, and the players themselves. Most of the attention remained on Florida. By the early 1950s, most Florida towns, unwilling to forfeit their lucrative fees as training sites, allowed integrated games, but they still imposed strict racial codes for transportation and housing and in the hotels, restaurants, and movie theaters. The most outspoken critic was Jackie Robinson, though other black players, typically those not raised in the Jim Crow South, also demanded an end to the humiliation. In the early 1960s, the St. Louis Cardinals’ Curt Flood, Bob Gibson, and Bill White all objected to segregation in St. Petersburg, and some restrictions, such as separate housing, fell.
There was less criticism from the players in Arizona, perhaps because they knew conditions were worse elsewhere. When the Giants and Indians broke camp, they played exhibition games in Los Angeles and San Francisco, then headed east while playing in Salt Lake City, Denver, Oklahoma City, Dallas, and other southern cities, where many fans had not seen integrated teams. Racial slurs were common, but the black players—the Indians and Giants combined had about eight in the early 1950s—had little recourse if they wanted to play in the big leagues. They endured the taunts and found other ways to cope. When the Giants had a game in Dallas, for example, Irvin said he and Durocher could only laugh at the drunk, pathetic fan who kept yelling, “Get up, nigger!” when Luke Easter fell to the ground with a pulled hamstring. “It was really comical and wasn’t nearly as bad as it sounded,” Irvin said. “But again, we were used to that kind of stuff, so it didn’t make any difference.” Vic Power, a native of Puerto Rico who spent eleven years in the major leagues, used humor against degradation. With the Indians in the late 1950s on a trip through Little Rock, Arkansas, a waitress told him that the restaurant did not serve Negroes. “That’s all right,” Power said. “I don’t eat them.”
Willie Mays said he didn’t need any coping mechanisms against racial indignities. As a product of the Deep South, he had been warned. He had been prepared. And he would not be deterred. As he says, “There wasn’t much you could do except ignore them and play the games.”
Leo Durocher began spring training in good spirits. For the previous season, hailed as the greatest comeback in the history of the National League, he had been named Manager of the Year by the Baseball Writers Association of America. He had received twice as many votes as the runner-up, the Yankees’ Casey Stengel. Mays was upbeat as well, eager to play as long as he could until the army called him up, and the fans and the press celebrated his arrival in Arizona. He was still a shiny bauble on a dull, flat landscape.
The New York Journal-American, for example, contrasted Mays to Dodger outfielder Carl Furillo, “one of the best players in the game,” whose “close mechanical perfection is something of a guarantee that nobody ever would dream of going to the park to watch him perform.” Mays’s unpredictable brilliance, on the other hand, made it possible for him to “draw more at the box office than a well-nigh perfect but colorless player.”
Lengthy stories were published about Mays taking infield practice, snaring ground balls hit so fast that “flames seem to be leaping from the seams,” and firing to home plate with such velocity that Durocher had to dive for safety, only to rise and “threaten the player with his fungo bat.” The Sporting News reported: “Willie Mays, a keen showman, is rapidly becoming the idol of local fans that Mickey Mantle was last year.... Willie intrigues them with his antics, his amazing throwing arm and his lively pepper games with Durocher. He makes a perfect straight man for the Giant pilot.”
And when Durocher approved of a play, he picked up where he left off the year before: “That’s my boy, that Willie!”
During camp, Durocher invited the team to a dinner party at his home in Santa Monica, California, where the athletes could mingle with the manager’s celebrity friends, such as Gracie Allen, Ava Gardner, Jack Benny, George Burns, and Kirk Douglas. Thanks in part to Durocher, Mays befriended many movie stars and television personalities over the years, including Rat Pack luminaries Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Mays felt comfortable with fellow entertainers, and they enjoyed the company of an athletic superstar. Mays was always eager to fit in. In 1952, he had brought to Arizona sports coats and slacks, but when he was told that conventional attire at Durocher’s party was a suit, he bought one for $150.
The good mood that spring came to a swift end during an exhibition game in Denver on April 2. The Giants were playing the Indians, and Monte Irvin came to bat in the second inning. Irvin believed this was a pivotal year for him. After last season, Horace Stoneham had doubled his salary to $25,000, a good sum in those days. But shortly after signing the new contract, Irvin realized he could have received $10,000 more if he had been more adamant. How many more good years did he have left? He needed a strong season to cash in on his success.
Facing Bob Lemon in the game at Denver, he drew a walk and was on first base when Mays lined a hit into right center. Irvin sprinted around second and tore for third. The outfielder, Pete Reiser, realizing he had no play on Irvin, threw to second to try to cut down Mays. Unaware, Irvin never let up but continued to third, legs churning, dirt flying. The high altitude made it harder to breathe, so he was somewhat winded when he heard the ball hit shortstop Ray Boone’s glove. Irvin tried to pull up, but something went terribly wrong. “His spikes caught,” Arnold Hano wrote, “and his body’s furious momentum, unleashed, pinwheeled over the leg and flipped Irvin on his face.”
The noise alone was harrowing. “On the bench,” Bill Rigney said, “we could hear the ankle pop like a paper bag.” Irvin’s fibula in his left ankle had snapped, thrusting through the flesh. He screamed, rolled over, and smothered his face in the crook of his right arm. Third base coach Herman Franks covered his eyes and walked away, later explaining, “I couldn’t stand to look at it.” Neither could Irvin. When trainer Doc Bowman reached him, he kept saying, “Doc, I don’t want to look at it.” A cigarette helped calm him as Bowman wrapped his leg with a sock and administered a shot to ease the pain. The ambulance seemed to take forever.
Willie Mays never made it to second base. When he saw and heard the calamity at third, he collapsed to the ground, pounded the dirt, and began to cry. His first thought: the injury was his fault. If he hadn’t hit the ball to right center, Monte would be okay. The shortstop tagged out the stricken Mays. A photograph shows a distraught black player on the Indians, Harry Simpson, walking off the field with his arm around Mays, who has tears in his eyes, a grimace on his face, and his left hand below his heart. He looks as if his best friend had just been shot.
Durocher was more practical though no less dour. “They’re carrying our pennant chances off the field,” he said. Irvin had surgery that day and was out until August.
By the time the season began, Willie knew he’d be reporting to the army at the end of May. The team started hot, as if it knew it had to stockpile wins before it lost its center fielder. During one stretch in April, the Giants won sixteen out of eighteen games. Sal Maglie won his first nine, and Larry Jansen, six out of seven. Though Irvin was disabled, his baserunning advice to Mays from the previous year still paid off.
In the opening game against the Phillies, the score was tied in the bottom of the sixth when Mays led off against Robin Roberts with a single. He advanced to third on Don Mueller’s hit. Next to the plate was Whitey Lockman, a left-handed hitter. Mays didn’t steal home, as Irvin had done in a similar circumstance, but when the third baseman inched toward the shortstop, Mays could lengthen his lead and force the action. As the Baltimore Afro-American wrote: “Mays displayed one of his hitherto unknown talents.... He began taking long leads off of third, ala Monte Irvin and Jackie Robinson, thus harassing Roberts to the point that the Phils’ ace threw wildly.” Mays scored on the bad pitch, and the Giants won, 5–3.
Any notion that Mays’s rookie season was a fluke was put to rest in the Giants first game against the Dodgers at Ebbets Field, where he made what might have been the greatest catch of his career.
With the Giants leading, 6–5, the Dodgers had two on and two out in the bottom of the seventh, and Bobby Morgan was the hitter. He pulled the ball into deep left center, so far “that it was doubtful that anyone in the park, even the most optimistic of the Giant rooters, entertained a hope that [Mays] would reach it,” wrote one reporter. But Mays fled across the outfield, reached the base of the wall, and dove just to the right of the 351-foot marker. He caught the ball backhanded, then crashed to the ground, bounced on the turf, and smashed into the rubber base of the wall. He lay motionless. Left fielder Hank Thompson, who was replacing Irvin, ran over, lifted Mays’s glove and pulled out the ball. Umpire Jocko Conlan, who had hustled into the outfield, threw up his right fist.
The batter was out, the inning was over, but Mays was still down. Durocher and Doc Bowman sprinted out of the dugout. So too did envoys from the Dodgers—Ralph Branca, Roy Campanella, Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, and Jackie Robinson. There were anxious moments as Mays, struggling to regain his breath and focus, barely moved for several minutes. The Dodger announcer Vin Scully later said that he wondered if Mays was still alive. Watching on TV in his hospital bed was Monte Irvin, who later said, “My heart was in my mouth.” Mays finally got up, and more than thirty-one thousand fans gave him a standing ovation. As he headed off the field, he saw the outline of Jackie Robinson walking away. Mays was touched.
“Jackie was coming out here to see if I was all right?” he asked Durocher.
Robinson had done just that, but Durocher saw an opening. “Are you nuts?” he said. “He only came out here to see if you still had the ball in your glove.”
The Dodgers won in extra innings, but after the game the talk was about Mays.
Pee Wee Reese: “The greatest catch I ever saw in my life.”
Jackie Robinson: “That was the most amazing catch I ever saw.”
Giant coach Fred Fitzsimmons said he’d never seen “a better play in thirty-seven years in this business.”
Hank Thompson: “He could have been seriously hurt, maybe with a shoulder separation, because he landed awful hard on the shoulder, but that’s the way he is, because he never thinks of protecting himself.”
Watching the game from the stands was General Douglas MacArthur, a baseball fan, who said, “It was a wonderful game, but for me the big show was Willie Mays.”
Irvin again: “I can’t think of another player who would have dogged that kind of catch for fear of getting hurt. It would just be instinctive to protect yourself. Willie didn’t.... A foot deeper, and the ball, Mays, and the wall would have created some jumble.”
Mays himself ranks it as one of his top three catches. Some of his most spectacular grabs are ranked lower because, in his mind, he had them all the way. Others, he was uncertain about, and he was uncertain about Morgan’s. What raised that catch to another level was his hanging on after he slammed against the ground and the wall. Mays rarely left his feet to make catches; asked why, he says, “Because I didn’t have to.” This time, he had to. With his arms outstretched, he absorbed the full impact of the landing, suffering lacerations on his right elbow, thigh, and knee. Though undiagnosed, he probably suffered a slight concussion. Overnight his side stiffened, and the team expected him to miss at least one game. But the next day he arrived at Ebbets Field three hours early for heat treatment. This was no time to rest, he figured; his season would be over in less than six weeks.
Mays’s final appeal to the Selective Service for hardship status had been rejected on April 11. He asked that he report to the army in New York, not Fairfield, so he wouldn’t lose a day traveling. His reporting date was finally set for May 29, so he was at Ebbets Field on May 28 for his final game in 1952—exactly one year after his New York debut at the Polo Grounds.
Mays had entered the season with questions about his hitting. His power was undeniable, but his rookie batting average of .274 suggested holes in his swing (he still lunged at balls), and his decline at the end of the season indicated that pitchers had found his weak spots.
Those concerns were not allayed during his aborted 1952 season, in which he hit only .236 in thirty-four games. Some reporters speculated that pitchers had indeed caught up with him; others wondered if Irvin’s absence had unsettled him or if the unrelenting media scrutiny was wearing on him. All these factors probably contributed to his slow start. Mays, however, dismissed the chatter, noting that ten out of his thirty hits had been for extra bases (including four home runs), and he had twenty-three RBIs; only Bobby Thomson had more. Mays was also a streak hitter, and he believed he was just getting into a groove—he had two doubles and a home run in his penultimate game. All those hits were to right field, a sign that his slump was ending. Durocher, not surprisingly, guaranteed that Mays would have hit at least .275 had he played the entire year.
Most important, at least to Mays, was that he knew he was helping the Giants win. When he went into the army, they had the best record in baseball, 26–8, with a 2½-game lead over the Dodgers.
His final game, before more than fifteen thousand Dodger fans, was a poignant farewell. For all the bitterness between the Dodgers and Giants, Mays was embraced by both sides. When the batting orders were announced before the game, the crowd cheered Willie’s name. “This was in Brooklyn, mind you, where ‘Giant’ is the dirtiest word in the language,” Red Smith wrote. “And the Giant they were talking about and cheering is a baby only one year in the major leagues, a child who is only learning to play baseball.”
Before the game, Durocher was muttering how he wished the army had taken him and left Willie. His words were rarely taken at face value, but he was believable when he said, “I sure am going to miss him, and I don’t mean only on the field.”
Mays himself betrayed no nervousness about his impending army stint, placing it in a positive light. “It’s undoubtedly for the best,” he told reporters. “I’m still young and I might as well do my army duties now. If everything goes well, I’ll only be twenty-three when I get out. Many a fellow hasn’t even reached the majors by then, so there will be plenty of time for me to play baseball. I’ll probably be better off, stronger, more mature in every way.”
While he wasn’t sure what to expect over the next two years, the army itself didn’t intimidate him. “I was raised to say ‘yes, sir,’ and I always respected authority,” he said. He was less scared than sad, for he was leaving the one thing he loved and saying good-bye to Leo, Monte, the Giants, the fans, the umpires, and even the Dodgers. The army would never treat him so well.
The game itself was unremarkable. In his first three at-bats, Mays took a third strike, flied out, and grounded out, while in the field he charged a line drive so hard that, according to Red Smith, “the collision would have been fatal if he’d missed the catch.” The crowd was riveted by his every move. “There was a feeling in the stands that, somewhere along the way, he would break loose,” the columnist Frank Graham wrote. When Mays came up for his final at-bat in the eighth inning, the Dodger faithful rooted for him, “everybody in the place howling, clapping, yelling for a farewell hit.”
On the first pitch, Mays took a mighty swing, topping the ball straight down and flailing so hard that he lost his balance and crashed to the ground. The second pitch he missed on another big cut. He finally met the third pitch head-on, a low fastball, and scorched it to the left side—but Pee Wee Reese grabbed it at shortstop. The loud applause followed Mays to the dugout, where he tipped his cap hurriedly.
The game ended with another Giant victory, their seventh in a row, and the crowd cheered Mays again as he jogged in from center field. Some fans asked him for his autograph, and all four umpires wished him well. In the clubhouse, he received a jeweled tie clasp from his manager and a portable radio from his teammates. Photographers flashed their bulbs, friends slapped him on the back, and Leo hugged him.
Tears fell from Willie’s eyes as he said, “Just hold ’em until I come back, fellas,” and in Brooklyn’s fading light, the organist Gladys Gooding played “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”
Private Willie Mays was inducted at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey and then sent to Fort Eustis in Virginia, in the coastal town of Newport News. Established in 1918, Fort Eustis was primarily used for physical training and for teaching unarmed combat. Mays, assigned to the Transportation Replacement Training Center, completed eight weeks of basic training, though he never took soldiering seriously. One Monday morning, he came out late for roll call with his hat turned backward, a pant leg pulled up, and his shoes untied. “He was just having fun,” says Fred Lovell, who was in Mays’s company. “He would come out and sort of put a show on for the other people.”
That did not sit well with a new master sergeant, who had just returned from Korea and didn’t know Mays was a ballplayer. The sergeant thought he needed to teach the upstart a lesson, so he threw Mays to the ground, held him, and began cursing him. Mays could hold his own in any brawl but knew not to fight a white officer, who, according to Lovell, “was mad as a wet hen.” Lovell had become friends with Mays and had also known the sergeant since before they were in the army. Urged by other members of the company, he walked over to the red-faced sergeant, put his hand on his shoulder, and said, “The only friend I got in this company is this man.” The sergeant listened, calmed down, and released Mays.
Mays was eventually able to repay Lovell. After Mays became an instructor in physical training, he simply marked Lovell’s card every time he was supposed to take his training test. Lovell, who raised chickens in Georgia after leaving the army, said more than fifty-five years later, “Willie Mays was one of the nicest guys I ever met.”
Mays qualified for overseas service by December 23, 1952. Photographs were released of Mays in his uniform, creased hat, and shiny black shoes, saluting an officer, doing calisthenics, and marching. But the photos were a ruse. Mays never went overseas and was never close to combat, beyond making a hard slide into second base. Mays’s job in the army was to play baseball.
Just as the military had boxing exhibitions, it sponsored baseball teams, and the Fort Eustis Wheels now had the Rookie of the Year wearing their quirky uniform: the letters across the chest, FT. EUSTIS, written in an elegant cursive, the E in lonely isolation, while a large, blocky E appeared on the front of the cap. But to Mays the uniform felt good, and the stakes were high. He was told that his company commander bet on games, and his job was to win them.
He was given all the necessary amenities. Halfway through the season, when Mays said he was sore, the commander brought in a black trainer from Richmond to rub him down. Mays was excused from KP, guard duty, and virtually all other responsibilities. This would keep him fresh, though First Lieutenant (Retired) Virgil Saxon says that Mays was excluded for practical reasons as well.
“Those young recruits would have just mobbed him,” he recalls. Mays never asked for special treatment—he was just given it. “He didn’t play up his fame or anything. He was a very humble guy,” Saxon says. Asked what Mays did in the army, he says, “Played baseball and read a lot of comic books.”
Mays later said he understood the role that he was assigned: “If you didn’t feel like soldiering, they didn’t mind, but if you didn’t feel like playing that day, they got mad as hell.”
He was not the only professional ballplayer in the military to get a pass. He would play with or against Brave pitcher Johnny Antonelli and Red Sox outfielder Karl Olson. There were two Pirates, infielder Dick Groat and pitcher Vernon Law, as well as Don Newcombe and numerous minor leaguers. These players followed in the footsteps of Stan Musial, who in 1945 was drafted by the navy, served on a ship repair unit in Pearl Harbor, and played baseball every afternoon to entertain service personnel.
The military used ballplayers as well as boxers like Joe Louis as entertainers, and Mays was the ultimate drawing card. “There would be four or five thousand people attending those games,” recalled Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Stu Hoskins. “We didn’t have a place to put them.” Mays played the game with the same abandon that he had used with the Giants. In July, with Fort Eustis winning, 19–0, he stole home. Durocher gasped when he read it in the newspaper and promptly called his wayward prodigy to ask, in no uncertain terms, if he was out of his fucking mind. Fuming and sputtering, he called as well when he heard that Mays had sprained his ankle playing basketball. But he also played the good cop, sending money to Mays to smooth out any hard feelings and cover any needs. Stoneham was generous too, sending Mays a new car each year he was in the army.
It was in the army, as a baseball instructor, that Mays developed his most distinctive fielding trait. On one occasion, his pupil thought the way to catch a fly ball was to hold the glove face up, below the belt, as if he were taking out an old railroad watch and looking at it. “You gotta be crazy,” Mays told him.
The soldier suggested that Mays try it. He began throwing him fly balls, and Mays caught them with his glove around his belly button, palms up, thumbs out. At first it felt peculiar, but then he noticed something. When he caught the ball in front of his face, the conventional way, his body and feet would be in unpredictable positions. When he caught the ball at his belt buckle, his body would automatically be in the “rightest, most comfortable stance.” He also believed he saved fractions of a second throwing the ball from that position because once he caught it, his arm did not have to whip all the way around. He tried it out in army games and liked it. The “basket catch” was born.
Mays was not the first to use it on a regular basis. One of his own teammates, Bill Rigney, caught infield pops that way, and some baseball writers have questioned whether the basket catch actually helped Mays. Arnold Hano believes that Mays would have dropped fewer balls using the conventional technique—although, given that he set the career record of 7,095 outfield putouts , his approach couldn’t have hurt him too much. Nonetheless, the catch was of a piece with a frequent comment by writers that Mays had a “knack for making the easy catches look hard.”
Some commentators ascribed a deeper cultural significance to Mays’s unusual glovework. Gary M. Pomerantz compared the night that Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in the NBA to Mays’s basket catch, which he called “an unnecessary and showy display of virtuosity.” Pomerantz wrote, “A tradition runs deep in black culture and athletics to respond to the challenge of humiliation with just this kind of gorgeous, awe-inspiring overkill as proof of value in a world that would devalue black life and performance.” As further examples of such overkill, he cited the young Cassius Clay’s “big-mouthed showmanship,” Malcolm X’s “overheated rhetoric,” and James Baldwin’s “snaking, furious sentences.”
Mays didn’t necessarily feel confined by the norms of baseball or society, but he did want to create a new template, to expand the boundaries of the possible. He acknowledges that the basket catch appealed to him in part because of its dramatics and daring. Fans took comfort in balls that were caught at or above the chest. The outfielder never lost sight of it until it smacked in his glove, and if the ball did pop out, he could still recover before it hit the ground. All safeguards were lost with the basket catch. A bobble cannot be saved, and the outfielder will temporarily lose sight of the ball after it passes eye level until it hits the glove below the waist. “That gives it a sense of risk, of danger,” Mays says—a frisson of excitement that he loved to create.
He developed another fielding edge in the army. He slipped the glove up on his long, powerful fingers so that the bottom half of his palm stuck out of the mitt, leaving his fingers in its heel. The greater portion of the glove was empty. “The pocket, where the ball hits, doesn’t have any of me at all,” Mays said. This would have been impossible for most players, but Mays’s strong hands allowed him to control the glove, and by sliding it up, he added several inches to his reach. The photograph of his most famous catch, in the 1954 World Series, shows the heel of his hand exposed as the ball settles in his glove.
Mays’s laughter and high voice gave the impression of someone who was excitable or immature, but even as a young man he had a smoothness, an unshakable calm, that served him well in tense moments. That was true of his most memorable road trip in the army.
The journey began as just another baseball game, against the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps in North Carolina, which Mays helped to win through his cunning. He came to the plate in the top of the eighth with a man on first, and he lined a single to right; the baserunner rounded second and headed for third when Mays inexplicably took off for second. He had no chance of beating the right fielder’s throw at second base. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Bob Akers, who played for Camp Lejeune, later said.
Abruptly, Mays threw up his hands, as if to say, “You got me.” And there he stood, defeated, like Lee at Appomattox, prepared to negotiate the terms of his surrender. The shortstop caught the ball and dashed toward him. Then Mays retreated. The shortstop threw the ball, and Mays was now at full speed, in a hot box, a diversion so maddening that the fielders didn’t notice his motioning the man on third to scamper across the plate. Fort Eustis won, 1–0. “Willie taught us the art of winning big league style,” Akers said.
While most of the Fort Eustis team rode down on a bus, Mays drove his convertible, and after the game, Akers struck up a conversation with one of his passengers. Before long, Mays was driving three marines and an army private to Jacksonville, where they stopped at a bar and began ordering. To Akers’s surprise, Mays drank only Coke, and despite his standing, he was without pretense. When they complimented his baserunning, he said, “Aw, it was just something that came up.”
When the bar closed after midnight, Mays drove his four passengers along a rutted country road and stopped at a shack, where they were met by a beefy man in overalls, no shirt, and a gun. One of the marines collected some money from his fellow passengers, followed the man inside, and returned with a quart of clear liquid—“a fiery substance that burned lips, tongue, and tummy,” Akers said. “The purest white lightning we ever drank.” The fruit jar was passed around, each man taking a swig. When it went to Mays, he held it, put it to his lips... and gave it back. It was a gesture of solidarity, of camaraderie. His temperance made him an outlier but not an outcast.
The night wasn’t over. On a road outside Jacksonville, flashing red lights appeared in the rearview mirror, and a sheriff’s car drove toward them. Mays had not been speeding, but the sight of a black man driving a Mercury convertible in the dead of night in the pinewoods of North Carolina was sufficient cause to stop him. One of the marines hid the fruit jar as Mays pulled over.
The sheriff walked to the side of the car, looked at its occupants—four black men and Akers, who was white, all in civilian clothes—and asked, “What’s a white boy doing with a bunch of niggers?”
Akers mumbled something and shook his head.
“Y’all been drinking?”
“We had a couple of beers,” a marine said.
Turning to Mays, the sheriff said, “Boy, let me see your driver’s license.”
One marine said, “Say, you know who this is? This here’s Willie Mays.”
“I don’t give a rat’s mother who it is. Shut up before I run you all in.”
Mays silently handed over his license as well as his military identification card.
If the sheriff took them in, Mays had the most to lose. He was the driver, the baseball star, the celebrity. The publicity could have been devastating, particularly if the moonshine was discovered. But Mays never flinched; he showed no emotion, and he didn’t say a word. He gave the sheriff no opportunity to rebuke him. He knew he’d have these kinds of experiences—he’d been programmed. The sheriff returned his documents.
The marines and the army private handed over their military IDs. That they were all servicemen clearly weighed in their favor. Jacksonville was a strong military town, so any effort to railroad them would not have been well received. “Okay, get your black and white asses back to the base,” the sheriff said.
Mays started the car and drove off, and nothing more was said of the encounter.
Akers always remembered how Mays’s disposition on the baseball field—his standing on the basepaths, unnerved and motionless as all hell broke loose around him—matched his coolness in the car. In both cases, Akers said, “he was in total control.”
Mays lived off the base, and like almost everything important in his life, baseball played a central role in his arrangements.
When he arrived at Fort Eustis, Mays agreed to play for a black semipro team called the Newport News Royals. A player he knew from the Negro Leagues, Joe Anthony, had recruited him, and Mays juggled the weekend games in the semipro league with the military contests during the week. Anthony had a fourteen-year-old nephew, James “Poo” Johnson, who befriended Mays at the games. “We hit it off right away,” he says.
The teenager knew that Mays’s baseball schedule often kept him away from Fort Eustis, so he asked his parents if Mays could live with them in Newport News. It wasn’t terribly practical: Mays still had to report to the base, and the Johnsons lived an hour away, in a dingy brick apartment building. But all the parties agreed to the arrangement. The benefits to Poo were obvious. “God just put Willie Mays in my life, and I was the hero in the neighborhood,” he recalls. Mays gladly sacrificed the convenience and comforts of the military camp for the security and friendship of an extended family—Poo lived with his two sisters and his parents, while his grandmother and uncle were nearby. For the rest of his army tenure, Mays stayed with the Johnsons, sleeping in one of the twin beds in Poo’s room.
On the ball field, Mays was almost always the youngest, but in his Harlem neighborhood and now in Newport News, he was often surrounded by youngsters, and he enjoyed his new role. Mays would buy the kids ice cream, give them extra sweaters that menswear stores had sent him, take them for rides, get into snowball fights, and play flag football. Crowds would watch the football games on Sunday mornings, and Johnson swears that Mays could throw a football farther than any quarterback in the NFL.
In some ways, Mays was still a kid himself—he and Poo would have farting contests—but he recognized that he was now a role model and, in Poo’s case, a big brother.
“I had a habit of going out late,” Johnson recalls, “and he would read me the riot act. He would tell me, ‘Don’t do anything that would make your mother feel bad.’ I was hanging out with guys who were into drinking and smoking, and Willie steered me away from that. He said, ‘Take care of your body. If you want to play sports, you have to take care of your body.’ ”
Mays realized how his celebrity could be a positive force. When a white grocer in Newport News, a friend of the Johnsons, was struggling, Mays started shopping there. He talked it up, and others—black and white—began shopping there as well.
In a low-income community, Mays’s own success was writ large, but his generosity tempered most resentment. He would loan his new car to soldiers or friends. He made sure that Poo and his two sisters had lunch money, and he helped with the rent for one of their neighbors. One winter, Mays had just purchased two double-breasted overcoats when he and Johnson saw a homeless man on the street. “Man, you cold,” Mays said to him. He took off his blue overcoat and gave it to him.
Johnson recalls, “We saw that guy on the street several times that winter, and he still had the overcoat on.”
On a furlough in the summer of 1953, Mays surfaced at the Polo Grounds and walked into the clubhouse for the first time in over a year. Everybody ignored him. Finally someone shouted, “Hey, Willie, where you been?”
“You know where I been—in the army.”
“Oh.” And everyone turned away.
Mays shrieked with joy at the gag—the silent treatment, again—and had a laugh with his slumping teammates. He told reporters that watching the game was hard because it made him nervous; Durocher speculated that Mays’s absence would cost the Giants twenty wins that year.
• • •
Mays never considered himself an agent of social change, but he made history nonetheless. Sometimes he was the first black to integrate a white organization, but as a member of the Newport News Royals, he was responsible for white players integrating a black organization.
At any given game, Mays was allowed to invite three army players onto the black Royals team, and the invitations were attractive—each player was paid for the game. Mays would invite white guys, driving them in his car. His agenda was simple: he wanted to win, and these players were the most talented. Because he had more than three good players to choose from, he would rotate the lineup, allowing more men to get paid. The Royals, with their games in small-town Virginia or rural North Carolina, were typically denied access to restaurants, but black families would invite them for meals. Now things were different. Now white players, accompanied by Willie Mays, walked into black homes, sat down at their table, and ate their food. No one questioned it. Mays broke other taboos. He would take a soda from a white player, put a peanut in it, sip it, and give it back. Everyone would stare, and he would turn and laugh.
“I did it,” Mays says, “because I felt that whatever I would do, they would do. Everybody would watch it, and it was no big deal.” He recalls having long talks with several white players. “They would ask me questions, ‘Why do they call you different names?’ I would say, ‘I don’t know. They’re just ignorant. They hear things and try to repeat it.’ ”
Willie downplays the social importance of his actions, but Poo Johnson, then and now one of Mays’s few close friends, says Willie understood the racial barriers he was breaking. “He was aware that he was helping the cause, and this was his way of doing it,” Johnson says. “Instead of stepping out and marching, he was changing attitudes one person at a time.”
Mays had a furlough in November 1952, so he rejoined Roy Campanella’s barnstorming team in the South. One of his teammates was Monte Irvin, recovered from his broken ankle, and Irvin returned to New York with an effusive report on his protégé. “You’d never have thought Willie had ever been away,” Irvin told reporters. “He looked as if he’d been playing every day all season.” Of course, Mays had been playing almost every day, but the impression was that even while training for war, Mays’s baseball skills had not been impaired. Irvin said he saw Mays grab a line drive off his shoetops, straighten up, “and throw one of those patented strikes to double up the runner [at third]. You’d never seen such a surprised guy in your life as that runner.”
• • •
In January 1953, Mays once again filed papers asking for an army discharge on the grounds of financial hardship. This time he listed twelve dependents, including two half-brothers, seven half-sisters, his mother, and his two aunts. His mother was pregnant as well. Mays’s chances seemed favorable, for other big leaguers had been released from the service after claiming hardship. The Dodgers’ Billy Loes and the Indians’ Bob Kennedy had been sent home for that reason. So too had the Yankees’ Billy Martin, though the army then changed its mind and recalled him to duty.
Mays’s appeal was again rejected.
On April 15, Mays’s mother died while giving birth to her eleventh child—he called the day he received the news his worst in the service, and he attended her funeral in Fairfield. He was certain the army would let him go now. The baby, Diane, survived, so the financial needs of his family were even greater. But the army again spurned his appeal. Mays later said, “I always have believed that if a lesser-known soldier had gone through that ordeal, he would have been free to leave. I don’t know whether the army was concerned because the public thought it would be playing favorites or whether there was just some technicality. All I knew then was that I was very sad.... It didn’t help my final months in the army.”
Certainly the Giants wished he was out, for his value, actual and perceived, had skyrocketed. The Giants had a .765 winning percentage when he left the team. For the remaining 120 games in 1952, it dropped to .550. Given Mays’s struggles, his departure couldn’t be measured in the loss of, say, hits or runs scored. His contributions were described as intangible, almost mystical. While Mays was on the team, the Giants had stolen fifteen bases in thirty-four games (Mays getting four). But over the next nineteen games, they stole just one base while winning about half their games. According to the Sporting News, “Stolen bases in themselves aren’t too significant, but in this case they do point up to one of the big reasons why the Giants have been struggling.... The going of Mays tipped the balance. Whereas the Giants were once full of running, they’ve now lost their daring and fire—both on the bases and in the field.”
The Giant pitchers were definitely affected. Sal Maglie was knocked out of five straight games after Mays left, in part because of poor outfield play. “He just made such a difference out there,” Maglie said after the season. “You didn’t have to worry about striking guys out all the time. You just gave the batter a pitch that he’d hit to center and you knew that somehow Willie would get it. That takes a lot of pressure off the pitcher and gives him a chance to save his best stuff for the real tight spots. Maybe it’s subconscious, but I’ve been bearing down too hard ever since Willie left.”
Without Mays and Irvin for most of the year, the Giants were still competitive, winning ninety-two games and finishing in second place, 4½ games behind the Dodgers, and earning Durocher a new two-year contract. But the team collapsed in 1953—or, more specifically, the pitching collapsed. The Giants won seventy games and finished thirty-five games behind the Dodgers. They actually hit better in 1953 than in 1952—scoring forty-six more runs and hitting twenty-five more homers, though the numbers are a bit deceiving. It was a hitter’s year generally, with a 15 percent increase in runs scored in the National League. The Giants’ ERA jumped accordingly, to 4.25 from 3.59, but lousy defense, particularly a slow outfield, contributed to the high total.
Durocher, as he tended to do with bad teams, lost interest; at some point he allowed the players to make out the lineup. He also developed a habit, when a ball fell in the outfield, of saying, “Willie would have had it,” and to any reporter who happened by, he waxed nostalgic about his boy Willie.
Mays’s baseball career in the army ended on July 25, 1953, when he chipped a bone in his left foot sliding into third base for Fort Eustis. His foot was in a cast for more than six weeks, and he was confined to the base hospital. Mays had faced major league pitchers that season: Joe Landrum and Erv Palica of the Dodgers, Tom Poholsky of the Cardinals, Alex Konikowski of the Giants, as well as Antonelli and Newcombe. And in fifty-seven games he had hit .389, driven in fifty-four runs, and smacked fifteen homers, striking deep blows into the pinewoods of the South that people would talk about for decades.
After the 1953 season, the Giants traded their World Series hero, Bobby Thomson, to the Milwaukee Braves for Johnny Antonelli. Trading the author of the most famous home run in Giant history was difficult, particularly for a loyalist like Horace Stoneham, but the team could not compete without better pitching. Thomson was also expendable because the Giants’ center fielder was returning.
Mays’s defense alone would be a lift. As the Giant publicist Garry Schumacher said, “Willie catches the triples.” (Others, including Vin Scully and the Dodger official Fresco Thompson, were later quoted as saying, “Willie Mays’s glove, where triples go to die.”) But Mays’s greatest contribution would be as an antidote to the “chamber of gloom” that had become the Giants’ locker room. As the Sporting News wrote, “He’ll give the Giants a happier club house.... There’ll be laughs and yelps and nobody will get a chance to sit and brood over the hits they didn’t get, the bad pitches they made, or the bobbling balls that got away. Willie won’t let them.”
The army released Mays on March 1, 1954, but his service did not leave the news entirely. He was one of ten athletes whose military records were investigated by the Armed Services Defense Activities Subcommittee in Congress. The records of Whitey Ford and Billy Martin were also scrutinized. The investigators were charged with determining if these athletes had been “pampered” or “coddled” while in uniform. Congress issued a report on July 22 confirming that they had been. Mays himself was never interviewed or asked to appear before Congress, and his reputation suffered no real harm, but at a congressional hearing in May, he—along with two other African American athletes, retired boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson and featherweight champion Sandy Saddler—received most of the attention. The subcommittee members said they had investigated Mays because of complaints by “GI’s, their parents, and other citizens.” Obviously, not all of Mays’s peers appreciated his special treatment.
The congressional hearing conveyed the army’s corrupt handling of personnel that worked in Mays’s favor. One investigator, Lloyd B. Kuhn, testified that two soldiers were “levied” for overseas duty on December 13, 1952, while Mays was passed over. Brigadier General Herbert Powell, deputy chief of staff for personnel, testified that the failure to put Mays in required basic training “was clearly a violation of directives.”
Congressman Charles P. Nelson of Maine asked one witness, “When a fellow like Willie Mays is inducted into the army, how does he happen to be assigned to Fort Eustis?”
Lieutenant Colonel Alfred H. Crawford, Jr., who was stationed there, said he wasn’t sure, but “we think there was shenanigans pulled.” He drew a chuckle when he said, “Our ball team was mediocre, but Willie Mays was one of the finest players I’ve seen in my life.”
Neither the hearing nor the report captured the government’s truly farcical treatment of Mays. He had a legitimate financial hardship case. Nonetheless, the Selective Service drafted him in part to demonstrate that it treated everyone equally, yet the army gave him preferred treatment at every step. For baseball’s finest outfielder, it was a Catch-22.
Mays never even knew that he was part of a congressional investigation or a government report. Had he known, he wouldn’t have cared. He had done nothing wrong, and now his army days were over. But to his credit, he never exaggerated his military service or made himself out to be a false hero. As he said in an autobiography, “I have no pride in my Army career. But I have no apologies for it either. I did what the man said.”