Roger Kahn was not in good spirits when his newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune, sent him to the sun-baked hills of Arizona in February of 1954. Kahn’s father had died in October, and he would no longer be covering the team that he loved, the Brooklyn Dodgers. They were the best beat in baseball—a talented roster that served up drama and heartbreak (the Dodgers had lost four out of the last seven World Series, including the last two) and Jackie Robinson, through whom Kahn had written insightfully about bigotry in baseball and society. The twenty-six-year-old reporter had covered the Dodgers for the past two pennant-winning years, and in time he would write his classic, The Boys of Summer, about that team. But now he was assigned to the New York Giants—the fifth-place Giants—known for their despondent players and despotic manager.
Leo Durocher quickly shook him from his stupor. Kahn described him as “cheap and obscene and devious and suspicious and wholly magnificent [whose] vital exuberance renewed me.” Durocher told Kahn that he would tell him stuff that no other reporter knew, threatened to tell his boss that the young writer was a “no-good, lying, cocksucking, motherfucking son of a bitch” if he betrayed him, and assured Kahn that he could get movie stars to sleep with him if he just stuck with Leo. Kahn, having read Faust, declined the offer.
Kahn quickly sized up the real story of spring training: the fanatical expectation of Willie Mays’s return. A mythology about him had settled in. When Mays joined the Giants in 1951, the team was in fifth place. After he arrived, the team finished in first place. When Mays played with the Giants in 1952, they were in first place. Then he left, and they fell to second, then last year they were back in fifth place. Without Mays, they had no chance. With him, they were winners. And now, with his return, they would win again. That was the assessment of Horace Stoneham and Leo Durocher. So too of Chub Feeney. A graduate of Fordham Law School, he was Stoneham’s nephew, so he joined the family business and became the Giants’ de facto general manager. Feeney knew what day Mays would be released by the army, so he had a habit, after a drink or two, of singing, to the tune of “Old Black Joe”: “In seven more days / We’re gonna have Willie Mays.” Each day he lowered the number of days until Mays would arrive. “That song, like the sandy wind, became a bane,” Kahn lamented.
But the Giants were again forced to hype Mays’s return. Their failure in the previous year had driven fans from the Polo Grounds; in two years, attendance had plunged 23 percent, to 811,518 (fewer than 11,000 fans per game), and had fallen 33 percent since 1946. So the Giant officials pumped reporters with stories about Mays, who could revive fan interest. Meanwhile Durocher, who was always an outsider in Stoneham’s clubby world, had lost much of his standing in the organization. He needed to win to keep his job.
It was 1951 all over again, and the Giants needed the return of their savior.
While Kahn was nobody’s puppet, he fulfilled the Giants’ wishes. On February 28, the Sunday before Mays was to report, he wrote a story beneath the headline: SHADES OF PAUL BUNYAN. The article read in part: “It’s only human to wonder whether this is a man or superman.... Willie is 10 feet 9 inches tall. He can jump fifteen feet straight up. Nobody can hit a ball over his head, of course.... Willie’s speed is deceptive. The best indication of it is that he’s a step faster than any line drive ever hit. ... Willie can do more for a team’s morale than Marilyn Monroe, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Rita Hayworth, plus cash.” To push the gag further, the Herald Tribune published a doctored photograph of Mays that distorted his legs, making them twice the length of his upper body.
Few players in major league history have entered a season with Superman and Paul Bunyan as their peers. Advance ticket sales rose.
It was unexpectedly cold on the morning that Mays was discharged from Fort Eustis, and the Giants dispatched Frank Forbes to retrieve him. Mays, having gained about ten pounds of muscle, was bigger and more mature than when he’d entered the army, but the Giants were still protecting him. Forbes met him at the gate, gave him his overcoat, and stuffed newspapers in his own shirt to stay warm. He then drove Mays to the Washington airport. That day, four Puerto Rican nationalists had entered the House of Representatives and opened fired from a gallery, wounding five legislators. With tensions high, the authorities at the airport stopped the two dark-skinned travelers and questioned them. Frank Forbes insisted that he and Willie Mays were just trying to get to spring training. Once cleared, they still had to wait five hours but finally boarded an American Airlines flight at midnight.
The next day at Giants camp was “M Day,” according to Kahn. At Phoenix Municipal Stadium, where old stands extended partway down each line and a wood fence ringed the outfield, the players were stretching and warming up for an intrasquad game. The clear sky allowed for maximum visibility, and whenever a plane appeared in the distance, someone cried, “Willie’s plane!”
“Feeney,” Kahn said, “this is ridiculous.”
Not to Feeney, who sang, “In no more days, we’re going to have Willie Mays.”
Mays’s plane landed in Phoenix shortly before 11 A.M., and he was met by Garry Schumacher, who picked up Mays’s two identical suitcases. One was heavy; the other, so light that he thought it was empty.
“Willie, what the hell you got in these bags?” he asked.
“In the heavy one, I got all my clothes,” Mays said. “In the other one, just my glove and my jock strap.”
Schumacher interpreted that to mean one thing—he had “come to play” and did not want his clothes tainting his baseball items.
Mays went straight to the clubhouse at the ballpark. On the field, in whispers at first, the players began telling each other, “Willie’s here.” The first man to greet him was the clubhouse attendant Eddie Logan, followed by a gaggle of reporters and photographers. The first player to see him was Sal Maglie, naked and dripping wet.
“Hey, where you been?” Mays piped.
“In the showers,” Maglie replied.
“That’s just what I thought,” Mays said. “Knocked out again.”
Monte Irvin saw him next, pumped his hand, and asked, “How’s your game, roomie?”
“What game?” Mays asked.
Irvin smiled and shook his head.
“You mean pool?” Mays asked.
“Your game, roomie,” Irvin said. “I mean baseball.”
Photographers converged, taking pictures of Mays while he was buttoning his baseball shirt, tying his new spikes, and shaking hands with everyone in sight. He finally emerged on the runway leading to the field. Halfway up, someone yelled, “Hey, Leo, here comes your pennant!” A jubilant Durocher met him and, with his right arm around Mays’s neck, almost mauled him in a bear hug. The last time Mays had seen Durocher do that was when Bobby Thomson hit his home run. Seconds later, Mays moved up the runway toward more cameras, a big grin on his face, his teammates pressed around to welcome him. He finally reached the dugout, where reporters could ask him some questions. The light banter had one revealing, and widely reported, exchange when Mays was asked if he had signed a contract yet.
“No, but I’m easy to sign,” he said. “I love to play.”
“There’s a story out of Fort Eustis,” a reporter said, “that says you want $20,000.”
Mays blinked. “How could I ask for that kind of money?” he said. “That man Stoneham would take a gun and shoot me if I asked for that kind of money. Whew.”
By law, Mays could earn no less than what he was making when he entered the army, and that’s what he got—$13,000.
The game began with Mays on the bench, stalking and squirming, eyeing Durocher, who let the tension build. The slight ankle fracture Mays had incurred the previous summer had healed, and he had played basketball all winter. Now he was ready for baseball. Finally, in the fifth inning, Mays was sent in to pinch-hit. He ran to the batter’s box and, first pitch, swung mightily and missed. Lunging for the ball, he was out of sync and struck out on two more swings. But he was still a sight. Kahn didn’t believe he’d ever seen anyone swing so hard.
An inning later, with Mays in center, a sinking line drive was hit toward him, and he charged forward, dove, and made a graceful somersault as he caught the ball. “For Willie, that’s absolutely nothing,” Barney Kremenko told Kahn. The next time Mays hit, Kahn wondered if a contrarian story might be in order about how rusty Superman had become. He was looking for specific flaws in Mays’s form when he hit a fastball 420 feet over the fence.
An inning later, with a runner on first, a batter slammed a long drive to right center. Mays raced to the right center field fence, speared it, spun, and threw a strike to first base, doubling off the runner. There were cheers, howls, and pandemonium ensued. The camp was electric. Last year’s walking dead had been revived. Soon, another hitter walloped a ball to dead center. Mays galloped fifty feet straight back and caught the ball over his shoulder.
After the game, Mays deflected questions on how well he’d do this year. “All I know is that I got a lot of work to do,” he said. “You gotta work to be a regular.”
Roger Kahn was less restrained: “This is not going to be a plausible story, but then no one ever accused Willie Mays of being a plausible ballplayer,” he wrote. “This story is only the implausible truth.”
Durocher was more succinct: “Willie must have been born under some kind of star.”
• • •
Kahn was aware of Mays’s image as “loveable but an American primitive.” When he spoke to Mays during long train rides that spring, he found someone who may have been naive but was more thoughtful and serious than the stereotype. In one conversation, Mays told him there were three important things about playing in the major leagues: “First, you got to love the game. If you don’t love the game, how are you gonna learn about it? Second, you got to watch your drinking. I seen guys, good players, they liked to drink more than they liked to play ball. I don’t see how you can drink a lot and be a great player. Then you got to get your sleep. You don’t have to go to bed by eleven, but twelve, twelve-thirty, something like that. You ought to be in bed by then because you have to get eight hours of sleep. You shouldn’t get more. A fellow gets to sleeping too much, he gets lazy. You shouldn’t sleep too much and you shouldn’t sleep too little. Eight hours.”
A few train cars away, Kahn mentioned, some of the Cleveland Indians were drinking hard. Mays shrugged. “You think I could play like I been playing if I was drinking? No way.”
Kahn was impressed. Drinking and carousing were so prevalent—among players as well as sportswriters—that Mays’s rectitude was quaint, even jarring. Mays also discussed his development as a player, starting in Alabama, and acknowledged the importance of his instructors, including Durocher. But Mays’s real edge had nothing to do with coaching: “Leo is a friend of mine, and he says this and that, but nobody can teach you nothing. Not me or nobody and nobody can write a book that will teach you. You got to learn for yourself and you got to do it your way. If you love the game, you can do it.”
Later that spring, Mays was playing an exhibition game, and Tris Speaker, considered one of the greatest defensive center fielders of all time, was in the stands. After the game, he was asked about a throw of Mays’s that had cut down a runner at the plate. “Well, it wasn’t that good a throw,” he said, “because it was too high. It couldn’t have been cut off.”
Mays, who’d always given a loft to his throw, heard about the comment, and he started lowering his pegs. “By the time the season started,” Sport noted, “he was throwing them so hard and low the infielders were having trouble handling them.”
Durocher spoke to him, and some of the loft returned.
Mays rarely talked about racial incidents, but during that exhibition season he was involved in two on consecutive days, one in Las Vegas and the other in Los Angeles. They are reminders that while Mays never drew attention to racial indignities, he knew them all too well.
The Giants and the Indians had an exhibition game in Las Vegas on a gray afternoon. After the game, the Giants had arranged for a bus to take the team to the New Frontier Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas strip, where they’d get a free dinner and a show. A second bus was to take them to the airport at 11 P.M.
Mays, joined by Kahn, ate roast beef and watched Robert Merrill, the operatic baritone, sing an aria from Pagliacci in which Canio, the clown, sings of having to make people laugh, though his own heart is broken. At the conclusion, Mays, genuinely moved, said to Kahn, “You know, that’s a very nice song.”
He soon went to the gambling room and stood with a group of people at a dice table. Other Giants, including Monte Irvin, Whitey Lockman, and Sal Maglie, were trying their luck at blackjack or the slots or just watching the action. Kahn also showed up, chatted briefly with Mays, and moved on. On his way to the roulette table, a short, burly man grabbed his arm and pointed at Mays. “That guy a friend of yours?”
“I know him,” Kahn said.
“Well, get him away from the dice tables.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Get him the hell away from the dice tables. We don’t want him mixing with the white guests.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“Yeah, I know who he is. He’s a nigger. Get that nigger away from the white guests.”
Kahn determined that he was a security officer and noticed a significant bulge on his left hip. “Do you know this is America?” he asked. “Do you know that fellow just got out of the army?”
“That don’t mean nothing. I was in the army myself.”
“You bastards invited him down to your hotel.”
“Who you calling a bastard?”
The argument continued. Garry Schumacher arrived and tried to defuse the matter. Kahn finally pulled out his press card, showed it to the security officer, and said triumphantly, “I really have to thank you. You’ve given me one helluva story for the Sunday New York Herald Tribune .”
The officer retreated, and Kahn walked over to Irvin, the senior black on the ball club (he was thirty-five), and told him about the incident.
“When did this happen?” Irvin asked.
“Right now.”
“Where’s Willie?”
“Still at the dice table, I guess.”
“He’ll only get hurt,” Irvin said. “I’m going to get him.”
Without another word, Irvin found Mays and led him toward the nearest exit.
Mays didn’t want to go. “Plane ain’t gonna leave for two hours, roomie,” he said. “What we gotta leave for?”
“Come on, Willie,” Irvin said. “We’ll get the bus lights on and you and me can play some cards.”
Kahn was soon approached by two hotel officials, a vice president in a buckskin jacket, Maury, and his young assistant, Shana, who was “attractive in a hard-faced sort of way,” and they repaired to a bar for a drink. Maury explained they didn’t have anything against Negroes, but the dice tables were different. “There’s a lot of body touching around the crap tables,” Shana said. “People brushing against each other real close.” Maury explained that customers shooting dice, particularly those from Texas, didn’t want Negroes brushing up against their women. He said they were really a very liberal place—Lena Horne had performed there—and he invited Kahn to stay the night, eat, drink, and “Shana was free.” The quid pro quo was understood. Kahn was tempted, but after one dance with Shana, he stepped away, made it to the bus, and was on the Giants’ plane to Los Angeles that night.
He was going to write the story, but Irvin pleaded with him to reconsider. “This is something that Jackie Robinson handles all the time,” he said. “But if you write what happened, you could put Willie in the middle of a huge racial storm. I think that would be too much for the kid. If you don’t absolutely need to write what happened, I’d appreciate it, and I know Willie will appreciate it in time.”
Kahn agreed. He included a sanitized version of the anecdote in a profile of Mays in Sport in 1956. He revived the incident for the same magazine in 1969, which included the racist language. A complete account appeared in his 1997 memoir, Memories of Summer .
Irvin confirms that he asked Kahn to hold the story. His job, he says, was to protect Willie. “I thought Willie wouldn’t have liked it much, the racial comments,” he says.
In 1996, Kahn visited Mays in Atherton, California, and he broached the Las Vegas incident for the first time. Mays told him that Durocher had filled him in shortly after it occurred. Kahn complained that he didn’t get to write the story for his paper or take a shower with the girl.
“What can I tell you?” Mays laughed. “You’re on your own.” But then he turned serious. “There is something I can tell you. One word. Thanks. I wasn’t much for controversy. Not then. Not now either. I guess not ever.”
The day after the Las Vegas misadventure, the Giants were in Los Angeles for another exhibition game, and Mays again discovered the value of having protectors, particularly Academy Award winners. This time the team was at the Biltmore Hotel, with Mays sharing a room with Irvin. A cousin of Mays’s called and asked if she and a girlfriend could stop by. Mays said yes. Five minutes after they got to the room, the phone rang. It was the house detective, who told Mays that he could not have any women in his room, and if he did, he would have to leave the door open.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Mays asked. He explained the guests were his cousin and a friend of hers. “You want me to keep my door ajar? Are you out of your mind?”
The door stayed shut. Several minutes later, there was a knock. Mays opened the door to the house detective.
“You can’t have a female in this room with the door shut,” he said.
Mays asked how he even knew anyone was in the room.
“I trailed her,” the detective said.
“Do you trail everyone?”
“This is the way it is.”
At that point, Mays’s cousin said she didn’t want to get him in trouble, and she and her friend left. Later that day, Irvin told Durocher what had happened. Durocher had plenty of friends in Hollywood, and the next day one of them showed up—Frank Sinatra, who had just won the Academy Award for best supporting actor in From Here to Eternity . He apologized profusely to Mays for the embarrassment and said he would make sure such a thing never happened again. The hotel manager apologized as well.
Mays thanked Sinatra for his help.
“If I played baseball like you, I’d be the happiest guy in the world,” Sinatra said.
In countless interviews and two ghostwritten autobiographies, Mays never mentioned the casino or the Biltmore. In his mind, controversy was kryptonite, and any brush with it, no matter how innocent his own involvement, could damage him irreparably.
The major leagues that Willie Mays returned to was different in one important respect. Saddled with declining revenues, old stadiums, and waning fan interest, the teams were now on the move. In 1953, the Boston Braves settled in Milwaukee and played in the new County Stadium, the first to be built with public money. In 1954, the St. Louis Browns went to Baltimore, were renamed the Orioles, and played in Memorial Stadium, where an upper deck had been added. And in 1955 the Philadelphia Athletics migrated to Kansas City. The Ice Age of big league baseball, in which all the teams had been frozen in place since the turn of the century, had ended.
Greed was not the issue. It was survival. In 1948, the league’s attendance had peaked just shy of 21 million and had been in decline ever since, reaching 14.4 million in 1953. Television was part of the problem, but so too were dingy ballparks ill suited for suburban fans increasingly reliant on cars. The clubs needed modern stadiums in new markets, and they found them. The Braves were Exhibit A. In their last year in Boston, they drew 281,278 fans. Their first year in Milwaukee, they attracted more than 1.8 million. The next year, 2.1 million. The other teams took note. Far from dying, baseball was in demand by second-tier cities that were willing to confer subsidies and tax breaks for the cachet of a big league team.
Attention inevitably focused on the Giants, by far the weakest financially of the three New York clubs. By the end of 1953, the Giants had lost money for five straight years; the Dodgers were profitable in four out of five years, and the Yankees were in the black each year. In addition to the Polo Grounds’ poor condition, the stadium had a large number of cheap seats and relatively few expensive box seats. The fear of crime, particularly at night, also kept fans away—white fans. Those fears, legitimate or otherwise, were inflamed after a game on July 4, 1950, when a spectator was shot dead by a youth who fired a .22-caliber gun in a haphazard fashion from the edge of Coogan’s Bluff.
Rumors of the Giants’ departure began to circulate in 1954, fueled in part by Durocher, who said they ought to move to San Francisco. Speculation about the Dodgers was equally rampant: their efforts to get government money for a new stadium had been unsuccessful, and they were convinced that Ebbets Field was not viable economically.
Horace Stoneham, in an interview in the Sporting News in November, stanched the rumors of the Giants’ leaving town. He said the team had a lease on the property until 1963 and there was “no chance for a shift.” The Sporting News seemed to agree, noting that “Stoneham is as much a New York man as Durocher is a Hollywood lover.”
The Giants’ financial struggles were the furthest thing from Willie Mays’s mind on Opening Day at the Polo Grounds on April 13, 1954—in effect, his second debut. He knew full well how much success the city’s two other center fielders had enjoyed in his absence. Duke Snider, at twenty-seven, was the elder statesman of the trio. He was also in his prime. In 1953, the sweet-swinging left-hander had crashed 42 home runs, driven in 126, and hit .336, with a league-leading .627 slugging percentage and 132 runs scored. Mickey Mantle, five months younger than Mays, was blossoming in his own right. Over the past two years, he had 44 home runs and 179 RBIs, with a .303 batting average. Both Snider and Mantle had helped lead their teams to pennants. Mays did not like being third seat in a three-piece orchestra.
Before the first pitch against the Dodgers, the Giants paraded behind Major Francis Sutherland’s Seventh Regiment band to the center field flagpole, where they watched a Marine Corps color guard raise the flag. Then the players marched back, and Mayor Robert F. Wagner, a southpaw, threw out the first ball. The crowd of 32,397 included General Douglas MacArthur, Robert Wagner, and Jerry Lewis. Willie Mays gave them a show.
In the sixth inning, with the score tied 3–3, he came to the plate, dug his back foot in, waved the bat a couple of times, and glared at the pitcher. He was a study of balance and leverage, free of extraneous movement, and when he swung, his hips opened, and his massive arms and supple wrists created a vicious whiplash effect. Unfazed by two-strike counts, he never shortened up or choked up. “If there was a machine to measure each swing of a bat,” Branch Rickey said, “it would be proven that Mays swings with more power and bat speed, pitch for pitch, than any other player.”
He was facing Carl Erskine, a compact right-hander who threw one over the plate. Mays unleashed his thirty-four-ounce bat, hitting the ball with the savagery of a man denied for almost two years the pleasures of a major league fastball. The result was breathtaking: the ball traveled on a straight line into the upper deck just over the 414 marker. Arnold Hano estimated that the ball would have traveled 600 feet had it not hit the stadium. It was hit so hard, said columnist Frank Graham, “that it was still soaring when it crashed into the seats.”
The Giants won, 4–3. Now, Mays thought, it was his turn to show Mickey and the Duke something.
The homer was both the climax to all of the preseason hype and the opening salvo of a yearlong publicity binge. The New York Post columnist Jimmy Cannon, perhaps the most influential sportswriter of his generation, framed Mays’s unrivaled connection to the city in his tribute the next day.
“You’re Willie Mays of Fairfield, Ala., who is part of the small talk of New York,” Cannon wrote. “This shall be your city as long as your talent lasts.... Kids forget the squalor of their childhood as they emulate the shambling urgency of your gait. They speak as though you lived on the same block with them.” Cannon said Mays did far more than entertain the fans at the Polo Grounds. “Strangers, aching with loneliness, spoke to those who sat along side of them. And they mentioned your name.... You brought people together in the bantering arguments of sports. You made time pass for the bored with a bright rush. It is a fine accomplishment in a terrible age.” What was most important about Mays, Cannon wrote, was not the achievement but the specter, the myth. “Your frantic image dashed across the screens of television sets in living rooms decorated with splendor you wouldn’t believe. You’ve become a metropolitan fable, told in saloons and pool rooms and related on street corners, in home and playground.”
The headline was: YOU’RE WILLIE MAYS—A YOUNG LEGEND. Three weeks later, he turned twenty-three.
The Giants were not supposed to be competitive in 1954, having finished thirty-five games out of first place the previous year. Besides Mays, the Giants’ only other meaningful addition was thought to have been pitcher Johnny Antonelli, who cost the team its best power hitter, Bobby Thomson. The pennant was expected to be a battle between the Dodgers and Thomson’s new team, the Milwaukee Braves, which was fielding a rookie outfielder, Hank Aaron.
After the Giants’ 1953 collapse, Stoneham publicly rebuked Durocher for his constant lineup changes and insisted that this year the team stick with one group of regulars until changes were necessary. Durocher ignored the injunction, beginning the season with twelve different lineups in twenty games. The juggling didn’t work—the Giants lost eleven times—but there was reason for hope. They shut out the Phillies in three consecutive games, highlighting the team’s strength—starting pitching, led by Antonelli, Maglie, and Ruben Gomez.
The biggest disappointment that first month was Mays. In Arizona, Durocher had predicted that he’d hit .300, a reasonable goal in light of the media hoopla. In the first twenty games, he showed some power—four homers and nineteen RBIs—but he was batting only .247. The looming concern about Mays—a great glove and arm, terrific speed, but a mediocre bat—might be true. The Giants were in fifth place.
Durocher, as he had done before, pulled Mays aside, told him that he had reverted to trying to pull everything, and urged him to go to right field.
The next game, on May 8 in Pittsburgh, Mays hit a home run and a single, and the Giants won, 2–1. All Durocher said to Mays was, “I told ya.”
That day, Durocher also announced he would now stick with one lineup, with Mays batting fifth, behind Irvin and before Don Mueller. Stoneham had presumably pressured him to make up his mind. The Giants promptly won thirteen out of their next twenty, Mays being the difference. He hit .449, whacked nine homers and four triples, and drove in twenty-five runs. Some of his feats were memorable. On May 24, in Philadelphia, he came to bat in the seventh inning and smashed a ball into the lower left field deck. An inning later, he crushed one onto the left field roof with a man on base, giving the Giants a 5–4 win. Mays had three hits, drove in four, and threw out Earl Torgeson at home plate when he tried to score on a fly ball.
The Giants reached the .500 mark on May 21, and by June 9, they were ten games over, at 30–20. They took over first place on June 15 in the midst of a terrific month, winning twenty-three out of twenty-seven. They kept winning and on July 21 peaked at thirty-two games over .500, seven games in first place.
As with any winning team, many players contributed. Don Mueller, a left-hander known for his scientific place-hitting, would lead the league in hits with 212. Alvin Dark, the captain, hit a solid .293 and was steady at short. The starting troika of Antonelli, Maglie, and Gomez would win fifty-two times, register thirty-seven complete games, and lead the Giants to a league-best ERA of 3.09.
But the catalyst for the Giants was as predicted. By June 1, Mays had raised his average to .300. On June 21, he hit his twentieth home run, equaling his total from his rookie season. He was a more patient hitter and could make adjustments at the plate. In the second week of June, for example, in a four-game series against Milwaukee, he went 0-for-12 (though he drew five walks). Two weeks later, in three games against the same team, he went 5-for-11, with four homers and nine RBIs.
The next series was against the Chicago Cubs at the Polo Grounds, and on June 25, Mays entered the game with five homers in the past six contests. His first time up, his blast to left field rebounded off the grandstand wall and bounced away from the outfielders, and Mays dashed around the bases for an inside-the-park home run. Woozy from the heat, he sunk to his knees in center field after the start of the next inning. He gathered himself, however, and stayed in the game, driving in another run on a forceout.
The baseball world began to notice. When Mays hit his home run that day, his twenty-fourth of the year, the public address announcer at Ebbets Field, Tex Rickards, said to the crowd: “Dodger fans, we thought you would want to know that Willie Mays just hit another homer.” The crowd cheered, but the Dodger players came to the top step of the dugout to convey their unhappiness with Rickards, who was later confronted by Pee Wee Reese, the Dodger captain. “Who in the hell wrote that one for you?” he asked.
“Mr. O’Malley,” he whispered, referring to the team’s owner, Walter O’Malley, who later told reporters: “I thought Mays hitting another homer was a point of interest to the fans.”
What he really wanted, of course, was to encourage the fans to come see Mays. Reporters could not recall the Dodgers’ ever promoting an opponent on the loudspeaker, particularly someone from the Giants. But Mays transcended the deep wounds of an ancient rivalry. Even Dodger fans wanted to watch him.
The next time the Giants played at Ebbets Field, for three games starting on July 6, Mays hit four homers and drove in nine runs.
Mays now had thirty home runs in eighty games, already surpassing the top individual total for any Giant in 1953—Bobby Thomson with twenty-six. He also had at least one long clout in every National League city except Milwaukee. Pitchers increasingly knocked him down. “But his reflexes are so sharp he can get out of the way of the close pitch,” the Sporting News reported. “He has hit the dirt often, but he does not complain.” Other teams were riveted. One reporter noted, “Even the Yankees themselves spend half their time talking about Mays and what he does.”
They had good reason to talk. Mays was on pace to break Babe Ruth’s record of sixty homers in a season. Since the Babe had reached that milestone in 1927, only two other players had challenged it—Jimmie Foxx (fifty-eight in 1932) and Hank Greenberg (fifty-eight in 1938). No one had exceeded even fifty home runs since 1938. Sixty home runs was the most prestigious record in baseball: it combined the singular achievement of the long ball with Ruth’s heroic qualities; his early death, at fifty-three in 1948, only added to the public’s longing for him.
As both Roger Maris and Hank Aaron later learned, challenging a baseball god involves crippling pressures, and in July 1954, it appeared to be Willie Mays’s turn. The Sporting News published a graph, with photo insets of the two principals, showing Mays ahead of Ruth as of July 11: Mays hit his thirty-first home run eleven days before Ruth hit his. An illustration, stretching the entire length of the page, was also telling. At the bottom was Mays, standing on top of a globe, swinging a bat, driving a ball through some clouds to the top of the page, where an oversized Babe is resting with a crown on his head and, inscribed on his chest, “The Immortal Ruth.” The ball knocks the crown ajar, and the Babe, bug-eyed, looks down at Willie as if to ask, “Who is this wannabe?”
The comparison ruffled Mays. After he hit two home runs against the Dodgers on July 8, reporters cornered him in the clubhouse and asked if he knew how many Ruth had. “Of course I know,” he said, eyes flaring. “Everybody knows. He hit sixty.” Asked how he felt about being ahead of Ruth’s pace, Mays bridled: “Wish you wouldn’t ask that. I won’t think about that, not at all. When you think about home runs, you go up and swing too hard and it’s a strikeout. If you don’t think about home runs, you swing right and maybe you can get a home run.” Noting that, in June, he was one swing away from tying a Giant record for the most homers in consecutive games, Mays continued: “They told me about having a chance to tie one home run record, and I got thinking about it and I didn’t come close. No, sir. I’m not thinking about Babe Ruth. I’m not even thinking about home runs.”
Mays later said that, at the time, he didn’t appreciate the magnitude of Ruth’s record, but even if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered. He always insisted that he never played for personal records. In retirement, he joked that if he had known how meaningful records were, he would have gone for them.
Mays did read the newspaper stories that compared him to Ruth and, for that matter, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and other greats, but he always seemed more mystified than impressed. “That’s funny stuff,” he’d say, “real funny stuff.” But he also acknowledged that he felt the pressure. “For the first time,” he later said, “I had the feeling that people were going to be disappointed in me if I didn’t do something. I felt defensive.”
After the tense interview at Ebbets Field, Mays hit only three home runs over the next eleven games, and Frank Forbes noticed the connection. “When reporters started asking him a lot of statistical things like will he break Babe Ruth’s record and things like that,” he recalled, “he didn’t come out and say anything, but these questions put things in his head, and I noticed that week he was trying for the long ball more often, and so he was striking out more than usual.”
The routine was broken up by the All-Star Game in Cleveland on July 13. Mays was selected for the first time, and he, like most of his peers, took the game as seriously as any regular-season contest. To play with and against the best players was an honor, a responsibility. In his first game, Mays came off the bench and singled in two at-bats, but his presence alone had an impact. Braves manager Charlie Grimm said after the game, “Willie Mays is the only ballplayer who can help a team just by riding on the bus with them.”
But the best line of the year went to a sportswriter from St. Louis who, noticing a shiny object on the grass in center field, said, “Look, Mays just lost his halo.”
If 1954 marked some of Mays’s greatest achievements, it also represented one of his saddest moments. His aunt Sarah had developed cervical cancer five years earlier, and she battled it bravely as Willie followed her condition at a distance. When the cancer spread to her lungs, she could no longer fight it. Willie knew Sarah was in the hospital and, before a game on July 17 in St. Louis, asked Eddie Brannick, the traveling secretary, to stay apprised of her condition. After the game began, Brannick got the news that she had died. He told Durocher, and Durocher decided to tell Willie, who broke down and cried in the dugout. Mays did not take the field in the fourth inning, marking his first rest of the season.
Aunt Sarah was thirty-six. The adult who was most responsible for raising Willie, who took him under her wing when she was thirteen, never got to see him reach the top of his profession, but she saw him realize his greatest dream and knew that the family’s lofty expectations would not be denied. Not long before she passed away, she was asked about her de facto son. “Willie is wonderful to me,” she said. “He’s always sending me money and things. Only trouble he ever gave me raising him was when he used to run off and play ball and leave the dishes he was supposed to wash and dry. At night, if I told him to be home, he was never late.”
Her funeral was not held immediately, so Mays went to Cincinnati and played four games in three days. Then, accompanied by Forbes, he went home to Fairfield. The moment he entered his aunt’s house, he wept. Sarah, active in her church and the community, had a large network of friends and relatives, and they all came by to pay their respects. Forbes estimated that over several days, he saw a thousand people pass through the house, cars and bodies jamming the unpaved road in front.
But few of them saw Willie, who was in his bedroom in his pajamas and robe. People went to his door to greet him, console him, or give him a note, but he kept the door closed, unwilling to open it except to get a glass of water. And when he saw the crush of people, he asked someone to get the water for him. Recalled Forbes, “He was a captive of his hometown admirers, the halt, the lame, the old snuff-chewers, and the drugstore cowboys.”
The funeral service, on July 22 at Jones Chapel A.M.E., began at 2 P.M., the hottest part of the day. The church held five hundred, but people were standing four or five deep in the rear. Beautifully wreathed flowers covered the coffin as tributes were spoken by friends and family; Forbes spoke on behalf of Horace Stoneham and the Giants. Despite temperatures exceeding 100 degrees, the funeral lasted over three hours, including a sermon of an hour and twenty minutes.
Mays left early. The Alabama heat almost caused him to faint, and Forbes took him back to the house. He never went to the cemetery because he was too upset. Forbes noted another reason he stayed home. “There were people who wanted to exploit him,” he said. Two radio stations wanted to interview him, but Forbes said Willie was too bereaved to cooperate.
Mays’s experience in Fairfield centered on a heartrending event, but the pattern was played out many times. When the masses wanted him, even well-wishers and admirers, he found comfort in isolation. When a friend or loved one died, he could not confront the sadness of the cemetery. And when he was at his most vulnerable, he had to be wary of those who might exploit him.
The day after the funeral, Stoneham called Forbes and said that Durocher was clamoring for Mays to return. Mays had only missed two games, but Durocher saw no reason why the death of a beloved aunt should keep him away. So Mays and Forbes flew to Milwaukee, where the Giants had a night game, but they did not arrive at the stadium until the ninth inning. It was too late: Giants relief pitcher Hoyt Wilhelm gave up a game-winning hit to Bobby Thomson. Afterward, according to one reporter, “Durocher divided his energy between bawling out Wilhelm for feeding Thomson a fat pitch and gently rubbing Willie’s neck, as a gambler rubs a lucky coin. ‘Willie’s back,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’ ”
For all his emotional trauma, Mays continued to perform. In a doubleheader in Cincinnati, before he went home, he had five hits, including his thirty-third home run. His first game back, he hit another homer off Warren Spahn and dazzled on the bases. In the fourth inning, on first base with two outs, Mays raced to third on a sharp single to right. The throw came in to second baseman Danny O’Connell, who wheeled and faked a throw to third. He feinted several more times, then Mays bolted for home, barely scoring under the infielder’s high throw.
Mays said that baseball revived him—he would hit two more home runs over the next four games—but the Giants went into a tailspin, and their grieving center fielder was implicated. In the thirteen games that followed Aunt Sarah’s death, the Giants lost nine. Even with Mays back in the lineup, the Giants lost seven of ten. The drought represented the first real losing streak of the year and one of only two in the entire season. What happened? “The inevitable conclusion,” Arnold Hano wrote, was “that Mays’s bat was there along with his speed and daring, but his spirit had been crimped by his aunt’s death. This leaden-spirited Mays was not quite the same young man, and the wonderful contagion this time was a grim ailment.”
Mays discounts the speculation—every team suffers losing streaks—but the comments highlighted the nearly magical powers imputed to him.
At his emotional nadir, Mays achieved the apex of his standing as an iconic figure in American life, appearing on the cover of Time on July 26. In an era that preceded television’s dominance of the news, Time was America’s preeminent newsweekly, its cover, the most valuable real estate in journalism. Only newsmakers, historical figures, and the occasional legend appeared there. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Joseph McCarthy, and Humphrey Bogart were so honored in 1954. Jackie Robinson, in 1947; Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1957.
Mays, at the time, was the youngest African American to appear on Time ’s cover. It showed him with his bat cocked, his biceps rippling, his right thumb extended. It also emphasized a quirk in his batting style. Most hitters stand at the plate with their eyeballs fixated straight ahead. Not Mays. As shown on the cover, his pupils strained all the way to the left, as if to reduce the distance between them and the pitcher. He was a portrait of concentration, of strength, but his soft black face also showed youth, vulnerability, even sweetness. The story was a flattering, if by now familiar, account of an emerging boy wonder—“a smooth-muscled athlete with a broad, guileless face, he plays baseball with a boy’s glee, a pro’s sureness and a champion’s flair.” Oddly, Mays himself is quoted only once: “When you tag ’em good, they’ll go over the roof of any park.” Otherwise, his protectors—Durocher, Forbes, Dark—do his talking. The reader is left to assume that Mays is to be appreciated, even glorified, but not heard.
The cover was part of Mays’s new role as a cultural phenomenon. Television loved him. In July, he appeared on three network shows in one weekend, including as the Mystery Guest on What’s My Line?, and was on fifteen other radio and television shows. Ben Gross, the television critic for the Daily News, wrote that Mays was a “TV natural. He spoke his lines with the ease and friendly charm of a professional.” Sport said, “Whenever [Mays] has been on TV, he has been loose and smiling. The cameras don’t frighten him.” When the Today show featured him, its camera crew spent the day with him in Harlem. The Giants played that night, and the crew members asked Mays if he would get a hit early in the game so they could go home. Mays hit one out of the park his first time up.
Mays also had cameo roles on sitcoms. In the 1960s, he appeared on the Donna Reed Show as well as Bewitched, in which he played a “warlock.” In 1954, in preparation for another television show, the director asked how he was going to play himself. Mays, puzzled by the question, replied, “I don’t know. Just turn those cameras on, and if it ain’t me, let me know.”
His life was described in serial form in two newspapers and was carried by a national wire service. Reporters hounded him. “It has gotten to the point the last couple of weeks,” Garry Schumacher said, “that Willie couldn’t take a shower without some reporter waiting to get in with him.” A headline in Newsweek read: WILLIE MAYS: THE HOTTEST THING SINCE BABE RUTH. The New York Times Book Review opined on what people were talking about these days: “Topic A is either the hydrogen bomb, sex, where-shall-I-go-on-my-vacation, or Willie Mays.” In August, Vogue called him “The Joy Boy of The New York Giants [who plays with] a kind of physical intuition, backed by almost perfect reflexes, [which] tells him where the ball is coming from.” That same month, Ethel Barrymore, in a profile in the New York Times, asked, “Isn’t Willie Mays wonderful?”
The Washington Post wrote: “It’s hard to pick up a paper these days (unless you start with Page 1 or the comics) without having the name of Willie Mays hit you in the face. Willie is easily the most publicized athlete since Jackie Robinson who made good and is still doing a fair job.”
Sports Illustrated, in declaring that the “golden age” of sports was right now—the summer of 1954—said: “Willie, by himself, is almost enough to make it that. At twenty-three, Willie is already being talked of as one of the all-time greats. It is not only Willie’s performance on the field and at the bat; it is Willie’s Way. For Willie is, above all, happy to be playing baseball and he makes everyone who sees him feel happy too. And it is important to remember that in no other age of sport could Willie play on a big-league ball team. Indeed, less than twenty years ago, a Willie Mays could not have purchased a ticket to sit in the grandstand in many major league parks. No Negro could.”
The most enduring off-field image of Mays emerged in 1954—his playing stickball on St. Nicholas Place with kids from Harlem. He also played basketball and hopscotch, jumped rope, and even participated in hide-and-seek, but it was stickball that captured the public’s imagination. The game’s charm was its simplicity and resourcefulness: hitters used a broom handle, pitchers threw a pink rubber ball, home plate was a manhole cover. So was second base. First and third bases were fenders of parked cars. One strike, or one foul, was an out.
Mays played regularly during his first several years in New York. He didn’t spend much time with the older players—even in 1954, the Giants’ next youngest player was three years older than Mays. He would play stickball in the afternoon before night games, or he’d play in the evening when the Giants had a day game. New York sewers are reportedly placed about thirty yards apart. A two-sewer hitter was pretty good, but Mays was a mind-blowing five-sewer slugger. Could he really hit a rubber ball 450 feet? Who knows, but a report that he could hit the ball six sewers was a definite exaggeration. Monte Irvin thought Mays was going to damage his swing, but Mays thought the thinner bat and smaller ball helped his hand-eye coordination.
Mrs. Goosby watched Mays from the window of her first-floor apartment and called him in for dinner, but she couldn’t always keep him on schedule. As a rookie, he once lost track of time, and with a real game about to start, Durocher sent Forbes to look for him. He found Willie on a manhole cover.
His neighborhood diversion would have gone unnoticed, but one day a newspaper photographer showed up and took his picture swinging the broomstick. A new angle on America’s newest hero! No fewer than six national magazines, including Time and Newsweek, soon ran stories or photographs of Mays playing stickball. Collier’s ran a four-page photo essay on the subject. The headline: WILLIE’S BEST HITS AREN’T FOR THE GIANTS.
The game itself reflected the gritty resolve of the participants. They played in the Harlem streets, after all, because there were no parks nearby. They used a broomstick, sawed off six inches, with tape at the end for a handle, because they had no bats. They used manhole covers because they had no fields with actual bases.
The stories reaffirmed the existing stereotype of Mays—a childlike man with childlike tastes—while adding to his cult status. Though a full-blown celebrity, he was still of the city, part of the streetscape, approachable and engaging. As described in Collier’s, one night a patrolman yelled to him, “Cut that out, Mays. I’m a Dodger fan and I don’t want you practicing nights!” Mays giggled and sang out, “You a Dodger fan? Man, I’m sorry for you!”
The coverage showed Mays’s legitimate fondness for children and his recognition of their needs. A nine-year-old named Gabriel Moses told Collier’s : “Willie will play catch with us younger kids when the big fellers aren’t around. He’s always telling us, ‘Throw harder, throw harder. How do you expect to be a big leaguer if you don’t throw hard?’ He’s nice to us kids, takes us for sodas and all that. No swelled head with Willie.” Added fourteen-year-old Carl Martin: “He doesn’t let us think he’s too great. He’s a nice, friendly guy.”
Collier’s swooned:
Willie’s influence for good on the small fry of Harlem, not only in stickball but in his casual contacts with them, is almost immeasurable. The most completely unaffected athlete to come along in a generation, Willie is friendly as a kitten and gracious almost to the point of ceremonious politeness. Besides, how would you feel, as a kid, if you had a real big leaguer on your block who played ball with you, chatted with you, joked with you and treated you as an equal? Boys are hero worshipers, but few of them get a close-up of their idol the way the kids do along St. Nicholas Place.
To millions of American kids, Collier’s concluded, Mays “already has replaced Superman and Captain Video.”
Mays’s inroad with adults was also strong. From the time he was a rookie, he had been represented by Art Flynn Associates, an advertising and publicity firm, whose principal was Stoneham’s friend. “I want my boy well protected,” Stoneham told Flynn in 1951. “Can you handle it?”
Flynn, having represented Ty Cobb and Joe DiMaggio, certainly could. Among other things, he developed an orange brochure touting the “Amazin’ Willie Mays,” and by 1954 he was charging between $500 and $1,000 for each radio and television appearance. He had also arranged endorsements for Minute Maid Frozen Juices ($700), Foster Grant sunglasses ($3,000), and Grove Furniture ($750). Wheaties, Polaroid cameras, and MacGregor sporting goods soon followed. Flynn said that no second-year player in history—including Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and Stan Musial—had been in such demand. Speaking requests poured in from unlikely outposts. The publisher of the Lethbridge Herald, in Alberta, Canada, for example, invited Mays to speak at the annual Kinsmen’s Sportsman’s dinner, but the Kinsmen’s Club couldn’t pay the $1,000 fee.
Musical tributes raised Mays’s profile even further—three songs about him were released in 1954, including “Amazing Willie Mays” by the King Odom Quartet and “Say Hey Willie Mays” by the Wanderers. The most famous, “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song)” by the Treniers, a rhythm and blues group from Mobile, Alabama, featured Mays himself with several lines; the recording session was supervised by a young Quincy Jones. At the beginning of the song, Mays settles an argument among fans over whose ball it is. “It’s Monte Irvin’s!” Mays cries. At the end of “Whaddya say?” Mays chimes in gleefully: “Say hey!” The upbeat lyric captured the moment and the man and became the audio corollary—heard in most any documentary about Mays—to the images of his World Series catch.
The actress Tallulah Bankhead reflected on Mays’s dramatic qualities in a Look essay, “What Is So Rare About Willie Mays.” Bankhead acknowledges that she’s a rabid Giants fan, in part because she finds all the other teams lacking. Who would root for the harmless Cubs? she asks. “The Cubs are cute. Or the Dodgers? I have never dodged anything in my life. Cincinnati? Too many Republicans.”
Her greatest passion was number 24: “Everything he does on the field has a theatrical quality. Even when he strikes out, he can put on a show. In the terms of my trade, Willie lifts the mortgage five minutes before the curtain falls. He rescues the heroine from the railroad tracks just as she’s about to be sliced up by the midnight express. He routs the villain when all seems lost.” Bankhead also noted: “There have been two geniuses, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.”
Mays’s image of youth, bordering on gullibility or callowness, was deeply embedded in the media coverage, and in some ways he was complicit. The Herald Tribune, for example, published a lengthy story in September by Mays, as told to a reporter: “I’d Play for Nothing.” Mays not only said he would “play for nothing,” but “I’d play ball even if they charged me”—an endearing comment, perhaps, but one that made him look like a naif. Mays recounted his signing of his contract on the first day of spring training that year. Giant officials gave him his contract, Mays explained, and all he asked for was a pen.
“Aren’t you even going to see how much we’re paying you?” Durocher asked.
“I don’t care nothing about that,” Mays quoted himself as saying. “If you say it’s okay to sign, I’ll sign. I’m only interested in playing.”
He elaborated on his feelings about baseball. Playing it reminded him of a fellow he once saw in a show: “He was a tap dancer and how he could make his feet fly! He was having so much fun at his work and enjoying himself so much. I never saw anything like it. When the folks applauded him, he just kept dancing away. All he’d do was laugh and say, ‘It’s a shame to take the money.’ Of course, he said it to get a laugh, but I could tell he meant it all the same. And that’s sort of the way I feel about baseball.”
Mays spoke from the heart. He did trust Durocher with his contract. He probably would have played for free. His greatest joy, like that of the dancer, was to entertain. His attitude pleased fans, particularly those who expected obedience from minorities. But the image of the smiling black dancer or ballplayer who was just grateful to perform, regardless of compensation, conjured up the worst stereotypes of Negro servitude. Moreover, it was a discordant note in the emerging civil rights movement, highlighted that year in the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was illegal.
What’s most striking about this very public phase of Mays’s life is how opaque he really was. In his television appearances, he spoke in the fluid, superficial platitudes of the medium; the dozens of articles on him rarely revealed his inner life or what he thought of his own improbable celebrity. Most hewed to the narrative of Mays as the “uncomplicated” Negro, the “uncalculating lad,” or—as Sport called him—“this playful laughing boy from the steel-mill country of Alabama.” Mays himself was not one to volunteer information except on baseball and the Giants. He was physically expressive but not communicative. Sport described him: “You get to know him and learn things about him because his emotions are on the surface, showing through his face and eyes and quick smile. You look at him and you can almost tell what he is thinking. You ask him about a recent great play and he starts talking, then suddenly stops as if he is thinking the rest of it to himself. He [doesn’t] finish the experience for you.”
Mays censored himself out of fear of misspeaking or stumbling into controversy. He reveled in the adulation but despised the scrutiny. In one instance, almost mistakenly, he did reveal part of himself.
In a New York Times Magazine story on July 11, a headline read: “NATURAL BOY” OF THE GIANTS: “In a dour age, Willie Mays fulfills the specifications of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in temperament and Leo Durocher in talent.” The story, written by the magazine’s Gilbert Millstein, adopted a patronizing, if conventional tone: it claimed that Mays, like Rousseau’s “Natural Man,” was good and simple, but only because he had not been corrupted by society.
“Since Mays is a Natural Man in an unquestionably naughty world,” Millstein wrote, “he has had to be tended with great care, his instincts being basically sound but, like those of all Natural Men, somewhat protected.”
While Mays had been protected, he had not lived in a vacuum for twenty-three years. He had traveled around the country, had been schooled by wise and cynical men, and had silently endured the racism of the day. The reporter interpreted Mays’s reticence, his high voice, and his dialect for immaturity. But the story had at least one virtue: Mays described his ambivalence about his sudden fame and the intense pressures it had imposed.
“Sometimes I feel sorry I’m in this,” Mays said. “Guys come to you and say, ‘Do this, do that.’ Sometimes I wish it hadn’t happened, but I guess it just had to be. When I’m playing ball, I don’t think about nothing but playing ball. It’s just my way. I sometimes don’t like to talk. I don’t come out to the ballpark to talk to a lot of guys at once.”
Mays wasn’t a Natural Boy. He was a shy young man trying to please everyone in a world that wanted more than he could give. His refuge, his solace, was between the lines, and in 1954 he gave more than anyone could have imagined.