As soon as spring training began in 1955, Willie Mays knew something was wrong. Leo Durocher, instead of basking in his World Series triumph, seemed distracted. Stories were circulating that he and Horace Stoneham had had a falling out, which wasn’t unusual. Those stories had been around for years—at best, their relationship had always been an uneasy partnership forged out of mutual need, not respect. But an incident in the off-season had deepened the divide.
Durocher was given a testimonial dinner at the Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles, where his Hollywood friends—including George Burns, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, and Milton Berle—auditioned their latest one-liners, and Danny Kaye served up an imitation of a besotted Horace Stoneham. Before Kaye began, he gathered the empty bottles, dishes, and utensils around him. Then he stood up, his shirt pulled out, his pants unzipped, his hair disheveled, and he went sprawling across the table, sending glasses, knives, and forks everywhere. He pulled himself up, teetered, screwed up his face, and asked, “Where can a guy take a piss?”
Stoneham was not amused. Variety reviewed the performance approvingly, and the Sporting News said, “They’ll be talking about it from Toots Shor’s to the Stork Club for weeks.” Durocher did nothing to soften Stoneham’s fury when the owner heard that his manager had almost died laughing.
The World Series was their doom, Stoneham and Durocher each believing the other was assuming too much credit. Mays knew that Durocher had talked about quitting baseball to work in television and that Stoneham preferred members of the “Giants’ family”—retired players like Bill Terry and Mel Ott—to manage his clubs. Nonetheless, as Mays prepared for the season, he was no less dependent on Durocher than he had been as a rookie. When he was playing winter ball in Puerto Rico, Stoneham visited him with a new contract. It called for $25,000, roughly double what Mays had started at in 1954, though he’d received bonus checks along the way. Before Mays signed it, he told Stoneham he needed to speak to the boss.
“What do you mean, ‘boss’?” he asked. “I’m the boss.”
“No, I mean Mr. Leo,” Mays said.
Stoneham smiled and called Durocher at his home in Los Angeles. After Mays spoke to him, Stoneham wanted to know what he had said.
“He said you should give me $5,000 more.” Which Stoneham did.
On another occasion before the season began, Mays was picked up for speeding in Woodbury, New Jersey. In the courthouse, he saw a man with four kids who had also been nabbed. The man couldn’t pay the thirty-dollar fine, so Mays, feeling sorry for the kids, paid it. The grateful father asked where to send a check. Mays shrugged. “Just send it, ‘Care of the skipper, New York Giants,’ ” he said. “I’ll get it.”
Mays had ties to other members of Durocher’s family. In addition to Laraine Day, Leo and Laraine’s adopted son, Chris, was part of Mays’s life. Chris, six years old in Willie’s rookie season, watched games from the dugout, his right foot on the top step, just like his father. “I remember Willie was always very friendly and outgoing with me,” Chris recalls. “He had time for me whereas a lot of the players couldn’t be bothered.” Mays would get him gloves, bats, and autographed balls. “I knew Willie would do anything for me.”
When Chris traveled with the team, he sometimes stayed with Mays. At first Willie thought he was babysitting for the boy until he realized that the boy was probably there to babysit for him. They would read comic books, watch cartoons, go to movies, and just as Mays took white ballplayers in the army to black neighborhoods, he would take Chris to black restaurants and homes for chitterlings, black-eyed peas, and cornbread. His father laughed when he discovered his son’s new interest in soul food. One time in Cincinnati, Willie and Chris were driving through town when a police officer pulled them over. Mays tried to explain who he was and why he had a white boy in his car. The officer called the hotel to confirm that Durocher knew where his son was. Mays was allowed to drive on.
As Chris saw it, Willie was like his older brother because his father treated Willie just like a son. “He kept Willie under his wing and made sure he didn’t go astray,” Chris says. “My father looking out for Willie is what made him a great ballplayer.” They were one big happy family. “Life was never so sweet,” Chris recalls, “as during those years.”
Mays couldn’t imagine the family breaking up, but he also knew that 1955 was the final year of Durocher’s contract. The Giants were heavily favored to win another World Series, which was probably the only thing that could save Durocher’s job.
The team, however, was aging, and with age came injuries and ailments. In 1955 alone, second baseman Davey Williams, suffering back pains, was diagnosed with “spinal arthritis” and had to retire after eighty-two games. His double-play partner, Al Dark, missed forty games with a separated shoulder and a broken rib. Sal Maglie, at thirty-eight, was traded midway through the year to Cleveland. Johnny Antonelli had arm problems and was briefly suspended by Durocher when he complained about getting pulled from a game. Hank Thompson was only twenty-nine, but his preference for alcohol caught up with him, and he was out of baseball the following year. Wes Westrum, at thirty-two, lasted three more years but would never again play as many as seventy games in a season.
And then there was Monte Irvin. The Giants thought that Irvin, at thirty-six, had one more season in him, but he began the year slowly and was soon platooning. He was hitting .253 when the Giants played an exhibition game against their Minneapolis farm club. After the game, Durocher approached him in the locker room.
“Monte, you’re not swinging the bat like you used to,” he said. “We’re going to leave you here.”
Irvin was stunned. “It’s just a matter of time before I hit my stride again,” he said.
Durocher said no, and that was it—his career as a Giant was over. At least if Durocher had told him before the trip, he could have packed his belongings. Instead, he had to send for his clothes. It was a heartless move against a man who had brought nothing but honor to the Giants. Irvin didn’t sulk but finished out the season with Minneapolis: in seventy-five games, he hit .352, with fourteen home runs and fifty-two RBIs. The following year he was signed by the Cubs, and in 111 games, he hit a respectable .271, smacked fifteen homers, and drove in fifty. Having proved that he could still play, he retired.
Mays lost his roommate, his best friend on the team, and one of his principal protectors. Irvin describes Mays as “upset” when he got the news of his demotion, but he remained philosophical for reporters. “I’ll miss Monte,” he told them. “He was like a father to me. Guess I’ll be rooming by myself awhile now. You gotta keep on laughing. That’s the true champion, I guess. Takes the downs with the ups. There’s an awful lot of front-runners in this world.”
Like any father, Durocher sometimes had to discipline even his most gifted son, and in 1955 he benched Mays for the first time. While the year would be one of his best ever, Mays hit under .300 during the first three months. It was considered a disaster, in light of the pundits’ spring training expectations that he could hit .400. (Mays always insisted he couldn’t.) When Mays, with a batting average of .279, came to the ballpark in Milwaukee on June 18, his name was not in the lineup, and he thought Durocher was playing a joke. He asked Freddie Fitzsimmons about it. The coach told him to talk to the manager.
Earlier in the season, Durocher had pulled Mays aside and urged him to try for home runs, the exact opposite of the advice he’d given him the previous year. But Durocher told him the team didn’t have enough power. Mays obliged, hitting seventeen long balls and driving in forty-two runs by the middle of June. But now he had only three hits in the last seven games, had recently been picked off a base, and had run into a double play. Durocher told reporters that Mays seemed to be “confused.” His misplays had followed some early lapses when he had missed cutoff men and thrown to the wrong base.
So Mays silently watched the contest from the bench, a Giant loss that he later described as the longest game of his life. He was on the bench the next night as well, and the Giants lost again. Durocher spoke to him after the game and chastised him, as he had in previous years, for trying to pull so many balls. Pitchers were throwing down and away, and Mays was getting himself out on weak ground balls to the left side. His average had fallen by almost seventy points from last year’s.
Durocher’s psychological gamesmanship with Mays always centered on building his confidence, cajoling and pleading, exhibiting more faith in Willie than Willie had in himself, convincing him of his own greatness. He told Mays he could drive the ball to the opposite field and still hit it out of the park. “If you hit the ball to right field, you’ll become one of the greatest hitters of all time!” he implored.
“Okay, Mr. Leo, I’ll go to right field,” he said.
“You better, or I’m not going to put you back in there.”
Mays kept hitting home runs, to right and everywhere else, but he also experienced his single worst moment, to date, as a Giant.
On August 19, against the Dodgers in the Polo Grounds, Mays charged a base hit from center field, missed the ball, and failed to run after it. The hitter, Duke Snider, circled the bases. Mays had committed errors or miscues before, but they usually occurred from excessive effort—trying to take one base too many, overthrowing an infielder, bumping into another outfielder. Never had he been guilty of indifference, of giving up. For the first time, the home crowd booed Willie Mays, and they booed loudly. After the game, he tried to justify his action. “In our field, if you miss it in center, it’s gone,” he said. “Why bother about it? You can’t get anybody out if you miss it.” His excuse was roundly criticized by reporters as well as Durocher, all of whom noted that the failure to hustle could never be justified. He had committed not just a physical error but a baseball sin. Suddenly, Mays seemed not so fresh and naive. As the Sporting News lectured: “Willie had better grow up.”
Mays discovered that every lapse was magnified. Several weeks before a June series in Cincinnati, he was asked to appear at an instructional clinic for kids. He said he would try to attend. The day the noon clinic began, the Giants had arrived late the previous night from Milwaukee and Mays missed it. He said he had never confirmed his attendance. There was no written invitation or confirmation. But it was front-page news—Willie Mays had disappointed the children.
Since Mays had arrived in New York, everything he did seemed to work out, but it couldn’t last forever. Some financial setbacks occurred. He and Monte Irvin wanted to open a liquor store in Harlem, which Roy Campanella had done in 1951. Irvin approached a New York lawyer named Howard Cosell, who had assisted other athletes as well as actors, to help them. After the 1954 season, Irvin and Mays used most of their World Series winnings, about $11,000 apiece, to purchase a liquor store, in Brooklyn, with the intention of transferring the license to Harlem. But a licensing agent with the New York Liquor Authority was caught taking bribes, and all transfers were frozen. Irvin and Mays were saddled with a money-losing store, and the enterprise ended badly for all concerned. They never got the license for Harlem, and Irvin, after using additional money from his wife, said he lost between $25,000 and $30,000 on the business, which he sold in 1957. He says that Mays “just walked away from it.” Mays, however, in an appeal to the state liquor authority to reinstate his license, alleged that the store had been sold without his consent. The authority rejected his appeal, leaving him with nothing to show for his investment. Mays and Irvin remained friends, but it was their last business venture together.
Even more costly, for Mays, were the fraudulent promises he received for commercial endorsements. Through his agent, Art Flynn, in 1955 he agreed to endorse a firm called the American Heritage Investment Company in Houston. He was to receive a base salary of $37,000 spread out over five years, plus “2% of gross premium income on a semi-annual basis from April 10, 1956,” according to a letter from Flynn. But by the end of 1957, Mays had received nothing.
Flynn had been snookered, and it apparently took him two years to realize it. In a letter dated November 27, 1957, to the company’s “Mr. J. B. Salas,” Flynn wrote: “Inasmuch as you had not formed the company in February 1957 when you wrote, we would appreciate knowing if and when the company was formed.” Alas, Flynn had gotten Mays a very lucrative business deal with a company that didn’t exist.
Mays says he has no recollection of that deal but says that many arrangements fell through. His outside income, compared to that of most athletes, was not insignificant. In 1956, his earnings from “Royalties, Testimonials & TV Appearances” were $8,421, according to Flynn’s records. That included two royalty checks from his ghostwritten autobiography for $122.32 and $218.66, and $1,000 for attending a Masquerade Party for Wolf Productions.
Those were respectable earnings in a year when the average take-home pay was $3,600 but a pittance compared to what New York’s other marquee baseball player was making. In 1956, Mickey Mantle made $70,000 in endorsements. To be sure, he was at the height of his stardom, having won the MVP that year, but the disparity between him and Mays threw into sharp relief the different commercial opportunities for white and black athletes. Some of Mays’s friends, including Irvin, believe that Mays was unhappy with the wide gap between his outside earnings and Mantle’s, but Mays says he wasn’t. He insists that the disparity in endorsements reflected the added commercial value that all Yankees were given. Race, he says, was not a factor.
There probably was a “Yankee premium,” but race obviously played a role in shutting out Mays and all black players. In 1957, Hank Aaron won the MVP award and appeared in his third consecutive All-Star Game, but that didn’t translate into endorsements. “I played in a small town in Milwaukee, but it was definitely related to race,” Aaron says. “Willie got a few endorsements, but not as many as he should have.” On one occasion in the 1950s, according to the Sporting News, a “food outfit” in Cincinnati wanted to use “all-star” squads from the National and American leagues for an advertising campaign. When Frank Scott, the business representative of MLB’s players, recommended four blacks on the National League team, including Mays, “the reaction of the company’s advertising manager was indeed unusual,” he said. “He called up, shouting indignation. He demanded that I line up four white National replacements.” Scott refused, and the deal was called off.
That Mays publicly discounts race as a drag on his outside income is consistent with his refusal to ever cite race on any matter. He will never play that card. To do so is to invite controversy, to appear the victim, to arouse sympathy for a man who disdains pity. On some issues, Mays is so steadfast, so intractable, that his public and private views have probably merged. He undoubtedly believes that both he and Mantle got what they deserved.
With Durocher protecting him and providing for him, 1955 was Mays’s last year of baseball innocence. Mays visited Durocher at his mansion in Beverly Hills, where at elegant soirees Leo introduced him to the biggest names in Hollywood—Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Doris Day, Glenn Ford, and Jerry Lewis. Mays, at ease with his fellow entertainers, made a good impression. “Movieland,” the Sporting News wrote, “seems as ‘gone’ about Willie as fans everywhere he plays.”
Mays wasn’t loved by everyone, particularly by those who resented his special treatment, but his generosity became almost as storied as his play. Irvin, while rooming with Mays in Cincinnati, once got a call from a man who asked to see Willie, who said to let him up. The visitor said that he had lost his job, needed a loan, and would pay it back. Mays gave him a bill. Afterward, he said to Irvin, “That’s another twenty down the drain.”
“So why did you give your money away?”
“I used to play ball with him,” Mays said. “He’s all right.”
The Saturday Evening Post, in 1957, noted that Mays would “carry up to $1,000 around in his pockets and hand money around almost upon request.” His favorite restaurant was the Red Rooster in Harlem, and according to the Post, “Almost everybody at the Red Rooster—including the guy who sweeps up—has at least one of Willie’s monogrammed sports shirts. Willie buys them in lots. To admire a Mays shirt is to get it hot off his back.” When a Red Rooster manager complained that her watch didn’t work, “Willie whipped off his own and insisted that she take it, although it was a specially engraved watch that Look magazine had awarded him for being picked on its all-star team.”
Mays sent clothes back to his boyhood pals and money to his half-siblings; in 1952, when he was barnstorming through the South and was called to his draft board in Birmingham, his teammate and former manager Piper Davis entrusted him with money to deliver to his wife. When Davis finally returned to Birmingham, he discovered that Mays had given her more money than Davis had handed over.
Mays was never quoted or cited in the Post story as a source for any of these anecdotes. Others spoke for him. “Willie is the greatest, just the greatest,” said Jimmy Hall, the bartender. “He’s just a big, generous, overgrown kid.”
The Red Rooster’s owner, George Woods, himself a big Giants fan, called Mays “the baby,” a reference to his youth, not his maturity. Mays would always order a soft drink with six cherries, a straw, and a piece of lemon, and the bartender would tease him that the cherries would get him drunk. Woods roped off a table for Mays, but that could not keep the masses at bay. “Everybody seems to be after him,” he said in 1955. “He can’t sit down to eat before he’s wanted on the phone. Some newspaper man wants an interview; his agent wants to see him; somebody wants pictures; he’s got to rush off for a TV show. It goes on that way all night. The fellow has little time to himself. How does he take it? Better than Babe Ruth—and I knew him too.”
Desperate to meet Mays, women, from bobby-soxers to dowagers, went to the Red Rooster and watched the Giants game on a large television. Each passing inning, each out, would raise the excitement level. Finally, the game would end, and their golden boy would soon appear. “They start gathering early in the afternoon,” Woods said. “They know Willie comes here for dinner, and these girls open up with me, hoping for seats that will provide a good vantage point of Mays having a meal.”
But the adulation didn’t make him boastful. According to Woods, Mays always credited Durocher or Dusty Rhodes for winning the World Series, and whenever anyone asked him about himself, his response was the same: “You got to ask the other guys.”
Woods captured the essential paradox of Mays. He was “the happy-go-lucky player people see doing amazing things in a ball game.” But he was also “a serious young man who keeps his business to himself.” He loved the company, the attention, the noise, the sea of strangers and sycophants and starlets who engulfed him each night, yet he disclosed nothing about himself. His most aggressive admirers would literally rip pieces of clothing off his body. A young woman at the Polo Grounds once jumped over the wall and onto the field, driven, she said, by an irresistible urge to pat Willie Mays on the shoulder. The drop was fifteen feet, and she was carried off the field with a broken leg. Mays protected his privacy with maddening efficiency. Woods once drove him to Richmond, Virginia, to be interviewed by a newspaper friend, but Mays would only talk about others. “He was running true to form,” Woods said. The interview “didn’t work.” As the author Joe David Brown once wrote: “Willie volunteers about as much information as a brass Buddha.”
Mays thought nothing odd of his reticence. His father had been the same—a tactic to guard against misstatement, to protect himself. But Willie made a revealing comment to George Woods. One night, surrounded by young women, he confided, “They ain’t kidding me. If I was just plain Joe Doakes, they wouldn’t even bother to look at me.”
This insecurity is common for celebrities—do they love me for what I do or for who I really am? Most celebrities don’t care as long as they reap the benefits of their fame. But Mays did care. He wanted to be liked and accepted. The irony is that he never allowed the public to get to know him. Instead, he maintained that shell of privacy, which only hardened over time.
The Giants finished the 1955 season with a respectable record, 80–74, but they were never in the race. The Dodgers got off to a blazing start and finished 18½ games ahead of New York. Mays’s failure to hustle earlier in the season proved an aberration. On September 21, the Giants played a meaningless doubleheader against the Pirates. Mays started both games, and in the first inning of the nightcap, he sprinted to the right center field bleacher wall, just beyond where he’d caught Vic Wertz’s drive, trying to make a catch. He rarely crashed into walls but in fact did just that, ending up on the ground for several minutes. He didn’t catch the ball either. He was taken off the field on a stretcher and, at Presbyterian Medical Center, he was diagnosed with a severe hip bruise and strained ligaments in his back. The Giants had the next day off, but Mays was back in the lineup the following day.
It was the final series of the year, against the Phillies, the season ending with a Sunday doubleheader. Mays had fifty home runs, one behind Johnny Mize’s single-season record for the Giants. In the first game, he faced Robin Roberts, whose good control helped him win games but not without high home run totals, and in the first inning Mays hit one out to tie Mize’s record.
During the second game, Mays was already beginning to think about his off-season barnstorming plans when Durocher called him over. They went into a tunnel between the dugout and the stands and squeezed into a small bathroom for the players. Durocher placed both his hands on Mays’s shoulders.
“I want to tell you something,” he began. “You know I love you, so I’m prejudiced. But you’re the best ballplayer I ever saw. There are other great ones, sure. But to me you’re the best ever. Having you on my team made everything worthwhile. I’m telling you this now, because I won’t be back next season.”
Mays had known about the rumors but couldn’t comprehend it. “How can you leave?” he finally asked. He said he had only been back from the army for two years and they were just getting started.
Durocher said that Stoneham had made the change and that Bill Rigney would be the new manager. “I already talked to Rigney about how to treat you,” he said. “Besides, you know I’ll always be looking out for you. If there’s anything you ever want or need, all you have to do is call me.”
Mays had tears in his eyes. “But Mr. Leo, it’s going to be different with you gone. You won’t be here to help me.”
Then Durocher told him something he would never forget. “Willie Mays doesn’t need help from anyone,” he said, then leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
Mays later described it as his saddest moment in baseball.
The Giants released a statement saying that Durocher had “resigned,” but no one believed it. Because his contract had expired, he had nothing to resign from. He left the Polo Grounds gracefully, shaking hands with Stoneham for the photographers, praising all of his players, and discussing his new career with NBC. Some of the fans, perhaps the very ones who’d despised him when he first arrived seven years earlier, yelled, “We want Leo!”
It turned out that Durocher was better at schmoozing with television stars than being one. Without his baseball uniform, he was just a short, balding white guy who was uncomfortable in front of the camera. He returned to baseball, first as a bench coach with the Dodgers in 1961, then, in 1966, as the manager for the Cubs. That lasted six years with little success, after which he managed the Houston Astros for two more years.
By the time he retired, he had managed in the major leagues in five different decades and had won more than two thousand games, placing him fifth on the list for most wins. (He is now tenth.) Durocher lived until 1991, but the Veterans Committee of the Baseball Hall of Fame waited until he was dead before electing him into the Hall, in 1994.
Whatever his shortcomings as a person, Durocher’s development of Mays stands as a monumental contribution to baseball. Mays believes that in 1951, every other manager in the big leagues would have sent him back to the minors. That’s what any responsible manager would do with any young player in the throes of despair. Mickey Mantle, to take one example, was sent down as a rookie. Mays was so depressed, he didn’t even want to go to Minneapolis. He wanted to quit altogether.
Had Mays returned to Minneapolis, his self-image shattered, his vulnerabilities exposed, the arc of his career would have been quite different. He was only twenty, but he applied so much pressure to himself, took failure so hard, he would have required considerable time and nurturing to regain confidence. He also would have faced additional racial barriers, as black players were less likely to get second or third chances. Mays’s hiatus from the majors could have been quite long.
Without Durocher, would Mays have fulfilled his potential as a big leaguer? Would he have retreated to the safety of the Negro Leagues or, haunted by failure, stalled out as a career minor leaguer?
Mays accepts those as real possibilities. When his career ended, he said, he “probably wouldn’t have made it” without Durocher. “Leo made me believe in myself. He forced me to. He wasn’t only my manager, he was my friend.... He put words in my mouth and ideas in my head.”
Durocher shared that view. In 1958, he told the American Weekly: “If I had fined instead of fathered Willie Mays, he today might be one of the best ballplayers in Minneapolis.”
His handling of Mays had its critics. Durocher, they said, pampered him in a way that led to his feeling entitled for the rest of his career, and Durocher invoked troubling stereotypes of Mays as a helpless farmhand at the mercy of a benevolent plantation owner. Both views have some merit, though not with Mays, who bristles at the notion that Durocher always treated him with kid gloves. Durocher, Mays notes, did bench him for two games, but he never gushed over another player as he did Willie.
Some of Mays’s friends also believe Durocher simply used him as a meal ticket—1954 was his only World Series championship as a manager—but that sells him short. Durocher’s affection for Mays was real. As a desperate manager, it was Mays who helped him win the Series. As an inveterate cynic, it was Mays who lifted his spirits and made him laugh, even in his darkest moods. Noted Sport in 1954: “Building a baseball myth is something Leo does well. His enthusiasms run hot and cold, and he has heaped extravagant praise on so many that you can never be sure how much of it he believes himself. Yet... you still get the feeling that Leo has a strong sentimental attachment to Willie. It is doubtful he has ever had the feeling before.”
As Roger Kahn says, “To the extent that Leo Ernest Durocher could love anyone not named Leo Ernest Durocher, he loved Willie.”
The feeling was mutual, for Mays never trusted another manager, or maybe anyone, as much as he’d trusted Durocher. “His departure,” Mays said, “was a source of regret that would stay with me for the rest of my big league career.” Mays now had to look to others for guidance, or maybe even himself. That prospect was frightening, and those around him noticed. “It was a big change,” said publicist Garry Schumacher. “When Leo left, it was the end of Willie’s carefree youth.”