She caught Willie’s eye at the Red Rooster, a stunning, light-skinned black woman with high cheekbones, a fashionable dress, and perfectly tipped fingernails, a portrait of glamour and sophistication. Her name was Marghuerite Wendell,[10] though some press accounts identified her as Marghuerite Wendell Kenny Chapman, a name that traced the contours of her complicated personal life.
Willie and Marghuerite were introduced in May of 1955 by the famed composer Oscar Hammerstein II, a Red Rooster patron whose family had roots in Harlem. Mays called her shortly thereafter and asked her to a drive-in movie. They had several things in common. They both avoided alcohol and didn’t care for large parties or big crowds, they both loved poodles, they both had a sense of style and a taste for luxury, and they both knew about the harsh glare of celebrity.
But Marghuerite was very different from her suitor. She was born and raised in St. Louis, studied “domestic science” in high school, and briefly worked as a cook for the vice president of Bell Telephone Company. But she had other interests. She moved to New York before she was twenty and in 1946 had a baby girl. She told Bill Kenny, the lead singer with the Ink Spots, a popular rhythm and blues group, that he was the father, and the couple married. Kenny, however, later concluded that he was not the father, and the couple divorced in 1949. In 1954, she married a wealthy Detroit doctor, Roland Chapman, but that marriage lasted less than a year.
She was said to be two years older than Willie, though one report said she was over thirty. At least to Willie’s friends, the age difference seemed significant. “Margie,” as some called her, was part of Negro café society, knowledgeable about the entertainment business, comfortable in nightclubs, worldly, a woman who made an impression. She counted among her acquaintances the jazz greats Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Earl “Fatha” Hines. She was friends with the boxers Johnny Bratton and Joe Louis, who introduced her to her first husband. There were conflicting reports that she had been a New York model or a Chicago showgirl. Miles Davis, another friend, praised Marghuerite as “one of the hippest women I’ve ever met.” A gossip magazine described her as “America’s leading dusky playgirl [who] commuted between New York and Los Angeles with the regularity of an airline host.”
But a big baseball fan she wasn’t, though she admired Joe DiMaggio—“He was Mr. Baseball to me,” she said. Even after meeting Willie, she saw only two or three of his games that year. “Oh, sure, I knew that three strikes meant you were out, and four balls meant that a man could take a base,” she said, “but that was all baseball meant to me. Until Willie.”
Though he was famous, handsome, and single, Mays’s personal life generated relatively few tabloid headlines. Race may have diminished interest, or perhaps there just wasn’t much to write about. But his relationship with Marghuerite Wendell received some notice. The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, wrote, “For many months, there had been much newspaper and street corner speculation about whether or not the baseball phenom would wed the shapely divorcee. More and more they had been seen exclusively in each other’s company.”
They weren’t with each other exclusively. Mays’s travels allowed Marghuerite to date others, and he didn’t like that. “He got to the point,” Monte Irvin says, “where he liked what he had, and she would be seen with other men here or there, and she told him, ‘Willie, you don’t have any rings on my fingers, so I can date whoever I want to.’ That really got to him.”
On Valentine’s Day of 1956, two weeks before spring training, Willie and Marghuerite, joined by several friends and relatives, drove to Elkton, Maryland, to get married. Willie never formally proposed to Marghuerite because, he said, “I don’t believe in that.” But they went to the Elkton courthouse because they could obtain a marriage license there without delay; it was also the courthouse where Marghuerite had married her first husband. (Her marriage license with Willie said her second divorce had been on June 27 of the previous year.) Mays drove his light green Cadillac too fast and was ticketed for speeding, adding fifteen dollars to the day’s expenses and providing fodder to news reports about his headlong rush to matrimony.
When Willie and Marghuerite returned, they were shocked to see her home surrounded by photographers, camera crews, and reporters. Someone had leaked the news. They were also surprised by the public’s unfavorable reception of the marriage, as if his fans didn’t want to see him grow up. According to the Saturday Evening Post : “Willie suddenly felt the outside world’s snarl.” One reporter went to their house and asked if they had to get married. Another reporter, from a black publication, was so caustic that Willie refused to let him in, prompting the charge that he was “anti-Negro.”
In truth, most of Mays’s friends urged him not to marry. He barely knew Marghuerite, and she had traveled in very different circles than he had. When she visited Willie’s friends and family in Fairfield, it felt as if she had come from a different planet. How else to explain her spandex outfits? “Marghuerite came down and went out with my wife and me,” Herman Boykin recalls. “She was okay, but she had covered some territory and knew about places he knew nothing about.” Another friend, William Richardson, says, “Sometimes a country boy needs to be with a country girl.”
Horace Stoneham asked Roy Campanella to try to talk Mays out of the marriage; Campanella declined. The most vocal opposition came from Frank Forbes, who had long warned Willie about financial predators and who saw his principal job as protecting him from seductresses. He wasn’t the only one who believed that Willie’s new wife was interested in his money, but he was the most adamant. Look at her track record. A singer, a doctor, and now a baseball player. But the warnings just strengthened Mays’s resolve, and when he defied Forbes, the break between the two was so complete that they stopped talking to each other.
Several days after the marriage, Roger Kahn, seeking an interview, visited Mays at his new home, the one Marghuerite already owned in the East Elmhurst section of Queens. It was midday, and Marghuerite received him—“a beautiful woman,” Kahn wrote, “who stared hard and knowing when she said hello.” She told him that Willie had not come down yet. Kahn mounted the stairs and found Willie sitting in the center of a large bed, wearing pale ivory monogrammed pajamas. He rested against a red satin headboard, with a stylish tan telephone on his nightstand and a booming twenty-one-inch television near his feet. Three trophies were lined across the top of the set; the largest, for winning the MVP, featured bright gilt figurines of ballplayers running, batting, and throwing. His closet door, slightly ajar, revealed a vast assortment of suits.
“Man, I’ve been busy,” Mays said. “But it’s time for me to be settling down. I’m twenty-four years old.”
He still had that face-splitting smile and uniquely eager expression, though the faint outlines of jowls were now visible. The telephone didn’t so much ring as toll softly, and the interview was interrupted by a caller who wanted to sign him for a newsreel. Mays asked if there was any money in it; he heard the response and told the caller to contact Art Flynn.
After the call, Kahn told Mays there was no money in newsreels. Mays said he knew that. “But Art Flynn, he tells me if they use my picture for advertising, there should be something in it for me. I don’t know. I just let him handle it for me, things like that.”
He retained a maddening innocence, particularly about business, including baseball. At one point, when talking about contracts, he said he disapproved of players who worried about salary. “You shouldn’t fight about how much you gonna get,” he said. “You love the game and practice it and play it good and you don’t have to worry. The money, it’ll come.”
The money did come to Mays, but most teams paid their players as little as possible. In 1955, Giant pitcher Johnny Antonelli won fourteen games and posted a 3.33 ERA, but his salary was cut by 25 percent, from $28,000 to $21,000. The Giants said he could restore his lost wages by winning at least twenty games, as he had in 1954. He won twenty in 1956. Players also knew they would be discarded as soon as they lost their usefulness. During spring training of 1958, the wife of shortstop Eddie Bressoud suddenly took ill. Three days later, she had surgery for a brain tumor; she died on the operating table. Bressoud took only one day off, he later said, in large part because “there was no security in the major leagues at that point unless you were a star. They expected you back.”
Mays was protected from those pressures, and he bore no grudges against Stoneham for firing Durocher. “I been lucky,” he told Kahn. “Mr. Stoneham is my friend.... We never argue how much I’m gonna get. Whatever he says is right is okay with me, because he’s my friend.”
Mays was too trusting. Within two years, he fired Art Flynn after concluding that he was spending Willie’s money for his own purposes. Then there was Marghuerite. As delicately as possible, Kahn mentioned the “impression” that his wife was trying to take his money—or, as he wrote in Sport, it appeared that “Willie is a child in the hands of a femme fatale.” Surprisingly, Mays parried with a quick, candid answer.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t know what’s gonna be for sure, but I think Marghuerite can help me and I can help her, so we can help each other. Sure, they’re gonna talk about her and me. Same people was talking and writing columns last summer how I was gonna marry this girl and that girl. Well, they was wrong then like they is wrong now. Oh, I don’t know for sure, but I think I know and I think it’s gonna work out.”
Then Mays pointed to his chest with a mixture of defiance and pride. “I’m the only guy,” he said, “who knows what’s in here.”
Marghuerite, in an interview with the Pittsburgh Courier, defended herself. “They told me I was too old for Willie,” she said. “They kept emphasizing that I had been married twice before. These things haven’t meant anything to Willie and me. I’ve never before loved anybody but him, and he knows it.... We don’t need or like a lot of people around. In fact, we’re both halfway antisocial.”
Not everyone who met the couple disapproved. Edward Linn, who often wrote perceptively about Mays, said, “Mrs. Marghuerite Mays seems to be a very charming, very sweet woman. The feeling of those who finally got to meet her was that Willie had done very well for himself.”
The marriage, for Mays, did not defy logic. Her beauty, and the intimacy she offered, was part of her appeal, but so too was her experience. She could show him a world, even around New York, that he had never seen. Her age, her travels, and her connections were an asset, not a liability. Leo was gone. Monte was gone. His aunt Sarah and his mother had been gone for several years. Now, so too were Frank Forbes and Mrs. Goosby.
His father was still with him. Willie had moved Cat Mays to New York in 1954, rented an apartment for him in Harlem, and found him a job as a security guard at a supermarket. Father and son were together again, but Cat, now in his forties, no longer saw himself as a guardian or even a confidant. All his efforts—pushing young Willie to excel in sports, instructing him on how to behave, calling him in the minor leagues—were to prepare him to be a professional ballplayer. Now he was done. He stopped calling Willie after he joined the Giants in 1951, though he would receive updates from Durocher. Even after he moved to Harlem, he rarely went to the Polo Grounds but listened to the games on the radio. He still saw Willie regularly, but he didn’t join him at the Red Rooster or on excursions into the city. Cat remained what he had always been—a loving father and a fount of goodwill but a complete mystery. Willie has no memories of Cat’s celebrating any of his son’s achievements or of his communicating any of his feelings. “It wasn’t like that,” Willie says. “He didn’t talk that way.”
There was a vacuum in Mays’s life, and it was persuasively filled by Marghuerite Wendell Kenny Chapman Mays. “He’s the most wonderful human being I’ve ever known,” she told a reporter. “If he were any better, I’m afraid he’d be a saint.”
Mays’s life on the baseball field was about to change as well. Spring training of 1956 marked the first time he had put on a Giant uniform without Durocher as his manager. That Bill Rigney struggled to connect with Mays at the beginning was probably inevitable. No one could replace Durocher, but Rigney made a point of not even trying.
Rigney was a good man, respected by players and reporters, the kind of company loyalist that Stoneham long favored as a manager. He grew up in California, the son of a tile setter, and he had to scrape his way to the majors. His rail-thin body, even as an adult, was often described as “gaunt” and “frail.” One writer said he was not much bigger than “a eucalyptus sapling.” His eyeglasses gave him a professorial look, and he turned gray prematurely. He began his professional career in the Pacific Coast League, one year playing all 180 games without missing an inning. He spent six years in the minors, three more in the military, and was twenty-eight before he finally reached the majors with the Giants in 1946—the first big league game he ever saw, he played in.
“Rig,” as they called him, joined the team as a middle infielder known more for his bench jockeying than his physical skills. But no one questioned his courage. In one game, when he was playing shortstop, Phillie catcher Andy Seminick slid wide of the bag to break up a double play. Though he was forty pounds lighter, Rigney tore off his glasses and swarmed his burly adversary.
From the outset of his playing career, Rigney was labeled a future manager, and when he retired in 1953, he was promptly named manager of the Minneapolis club. In 1955, the Millers took first place in the American Association, and Rigney was named the league’s manager of the year. In the final weeks of the season, Stoneham told him that he’d be managing the Giants the next year.
Rigney and Mays overlapped in Willie’s first two seasons in New York, and the new manager needed no lecture on his center fielder’s abilities. But he knew that some players remained angry at Durocher’s favoritism of Mays. Rigney wanted to establish his own authority, to create a different culture, so he vowed to treat all the players the same. On the first day of spring training, he said, “Aside from center field, shortstop, and right field, every position is up for grabs. And if anyone can show me enough to move out Willie, Alvin [Dark], or Don [Mueller], even those spots may not be safe.” Rigney declared that it was now a “new era.”
Mays didn’t think there was anything wrong with the old era and thought that he never had to worry about his job. Rigney wanted to show that no player was above criticism, so the first time that Mays overthrew a cutoff man, Rigney stopped play to censure him. On another day, he benched Mays for a practice game. Sitting out of uniform in the stands, he saw Mays pacing in the dugout. “I don’t think I could have made him sit down if I had been on the bench,” he later said. “Even where I was sitting in left field, I was conscious of that glare he sent my way.”
Durocher had reprimanded or corrected Mays aplenty but had done so privately, and with a smile, or in a way that left Mays encouraged and motivated. Those subtleties were lost on Rigney; Mays found him remote and cheerless.
Rigney’s instincts weren’t necessarily wrong. He needed to restore the morale of some of his neglected players but not at the expense of the one Giant who was most sensitive to criticism. Besides, the notion that all the players should be treated the same was nonsense. As one Giant official said, “Rigney was out to prove that Willie was just one of twenty-five guys. You could see Willie looking at him out of the corner of his eye for a couple of kind words, but Rig never even had a smile for him. Well, Willie ain’t one of twenty-five. If it helps him to tell him how good he is, why not tell him how good he is? That’s what I always thought leadership meant.”
Mays did not dispute that he needed compliments. “There is some general truth to that, particularly about me wanting to be praised, because it always seemed to me that when the fans cheered, I did better,” he said. “I believe this is true of every ballplayer who’s ever lived.”
Marghuerite saw how upset Willie was and, after spring training, she called Durocher, even though they had never met. Maybe he could help. Durocher already knew of the problems. He had given Rigney a single piece of advice: “The one thing you must never do is holler at Willie.” Which Rigney did the first day. After Marghuerite spoke to Durocher, he called Willie and told him that Rigney’s style might be different, but he appreciated him every bit as much. “Actually,” Durocher recalled, “I thought Rigney was being stupid. But I didn’t tell that to Willie.”
Winning would have alleviated some of the managerial tensions, but the Giants were no longer a winning team. With few exceptions, their veterans were all past their prime. Hank Thompson missed half the year in part because of a beaning; it was his last season. Don Mueller’s batting average slipped below .300 for the first time in four years; he finished at .269. There was little magic left in Dusty Rhodes’s bat.
The Giants had some talented players in the minors, but they needed more experience, and Stoneham was unwilling to bring in high-priced players for their immediate needs. As the losses piled up, familiar faces left the team. Alvin Dark and Whitey Lockman were traded. Sal Maglie had been dispatched the previous year. Johnny Antonelli threw well but would be the only starting pitcher with a winning record. A humiliating low point occurred when the Dodgers’ Carl Erskine threw a no-hitter against the Giants on May 12 in a nationally televised game. It was Mays’s first year in which the Giants lost more games than they won and finished in the second division. Attendance dwindled.
Mays looked around one day and realized that, with all the turnover, he barely knew half his teammates. They had been his family, and now many were gone. “You don’t lose players that are part of a winning tradition, such as Dark and Lockman, without feeling an emptiness,” he said.
Tensions between Mays and Rigney came to a head just after the All-Star break. In a game in St. Louis, Mays hit a pop fly behind home plate and stood there, expecting the ball to be caught in foul territory. But the wind blew it back, and the catcher was in fair ground when he gloved it. When Mays returned to the dugout, Rigney said, “I’m fining you a hundred dollars for not running.”
Mays sulked, and after the game he approached Rigney and asked about the fine.
“You know why,” he said.
Mays said it was a fluke. When was the last time he’d not run out a fair ball? He said he was guilty of misjudgment, not lack of effort.
“That’s just the way it’s going to be,” Rigney said. “No exceptions, you or anybody else.”
Mays was still steamed. He thought Rigney was trying too hard to manage him, giving him too many signs, too much instruction. Durocher just let him play and then corrected him when bad habits formed. And he never fined Mays. He gave him money. The incident in St. Louis angered Mays so much that he called Durocher, who told him there was nothing Willie could do but accept it.
The season only got worse. The Giants won eight out of twenty in July, due in part to one of the worst slumps of Mays’s career. A reassessment was in order: yes, Mays put up terrific numbers, but he was an unusually streaky hitter, and when he didn’t hit, the Giants didn’t win. (Durocher told reporters that all hitters are streak hitters.) Rigney began touting rookie outfielder Jackie Brandt, a blond, baby-faced slugger acquired midseason, as if he were the next Willie Mays. The real one simmered.
The Giants finished in sixth place, 67–87, and twenty-six games behind the Dodgers, who won the pennant in the final weekend of the season. Mays was no longer the Giants’ lucky charm, and while he led the league in stolen bases with 40 and was the first 30–30 National League player (he had 36 homers), his average fell to .296, the first time he had finished below .300 for a full season.
Meanwhile, across the Harlem River, Mickey Mantle had enjoyed one of the greatest offensive years in baseball history (.353 average, 52 homers, 130 RBIs), good for both the MVP and the Triple Crown. The Yankees beat the Dodgers in the World Series, 4–3, with Mantle slugging three home runs. In the competition among Willie, Mickey, and the Duke—or just between Mays and Mantle—the Yankee won decisively.
Reporters speculating on what caused Mays’s midseason slump, or his “off-year” in general, cited two factors: he couldn’t play without Durocher, or he couldn’t play as a married man. The speculation annoyed him. Mays did not concede that he had a bad year and felt underappreciated. He played in 152 games, six more than the team’s next highest player, shortstop Daryl Spencer, who hit only .221 with fourteen home runs. Why wasn’t anyone complaining about him? Mays, however, did acknowledge that “in some ways, it was one of my most difficult seasons.”
Many professional athletes have lost money through financial fraud or crackpot business deals or poor investments. They’ve been misled, duped, cheated; they’ve paid the price for getting too rich, too young, too fast. Mays’s financial problems overlapped some of these themes. There were unfulfilled promises, bad advice, loans not repaid, and lousy business ventures. But most of his economic difficulties were self-inflicted, and they began in New York. He always enjoyed spending money on creature comforts—the new cars, the $250 suits, the silk ties. As a kid, he saw that the most respected men in Fairfield drove the best automobiles, wore the finest clothes, and carried the most cash. As a young player, he saw Durocher’s profligate spending, on homes, apparel, and furnishings, as evidence of success and sophistication. He liked that, though if he had looked closer, he might also have seen Durocher’s huge debts. Now married, Mays had a wife who also enjoyed luxury.
They bought a home at 502 West 168th Street, in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. The building, three stories high but only eighteen feet wide, had been rebuilt and refurbished “until it looked like a doll house,” wrote Dan Daniel. “It’s painted black in front with white trimmings. Inside are ornate furnishings the likes of which no ballplayer ever before had lived with.”
The dining room featured one wall covered with mirrors. A heavy chandelier, with crystal-like diamonds, hovered over the table, which had a thin glass top and curved marble legs. Heavy drapes marched across the wall; a large potted plant filled a corner. In the game room stood upside-down wineglasses with delicate stems, baskets of Italian wines, barstools, and a velvet-smooth pool table. The bedroom had brocaded drapes and bedspreads, yet another ornate chandelier, and another wall of mirrors. (Mirrors were prominent in Mays’s homes throughout his life.)
The home was gorgeous, ostentatious—and unaffordable, and rumors that Mays was broke began to spread. In an interview with the Pittsburgh Courier, Marghuerite insisted they were saving money, but the newspaper was skeptical: “Among the things she speaks of is a lavish home upon which was spent some $35,000 for furnishings and the services of contractors. The three-story domicile is completely air-conditioned, from top to bottom, and it might be stated rather candidly that Mrs. Mays did not satisfy her luxurious tastes in decor at a neighborhood hardware store.”
Mays was broke. He had gone to Stoneham for advances, or loans, on his future salary. Stoneham was generous to a fault, occasionally giving Mays thousand-dollar “bonuses” during the season. In 1955, Mays bought a Cadillac for $5,900 and billed the Giants, asking them to take it out of his salary. At the end of the season, Stoneham simply made a present of the car. By 1957, Mays’s official salary was just under $50,000 a year, making him the highest-paid Giant in history. Still, Stoneham acquiesced to Mays’s requests for advances, and by the early 1960s, Mays owed the Giants more than $65,000. He made no effort to pass the blame. He later acknowledged, “The problem wasn’t bad investments, in stocks or ventures.... It was buying a new car bigger or sooner than you had to, or 20 tailor-made suits instead of half a dozen you could buy off the rack, or paying retail for the most expensive pool table you ever saw, or getting married and throwing thousands into drapes and carpet and even wallpaper—that was me.”
Mays did not dig himself out of debt until the mid-1960s, and he was so consumed by his losses that money surpassed almost everything else as a source of worry.
In 1957, the relationship between Rigney and Mays improved. They seemed to have recognized they were stuck with each other so they might as well make the most of it. With one year under his belt, Rigney didn’t have to prove his authority. At spring training, he stopped dwelling on Mays’s shortcomings and made sure the young players were aware of his skills. “When they hit it to him,” he told his infielders, “please go to a base. Don’t confuse the issue by asking me why. Just be there. He knows.”
One of the players asked, “What does he know, skip?”
Rigney briefly pondered the question, then snapped, “I don’t know what he knows, but Willie knows. So just get your ass to a base.”
According to Mays, Rigney stopped overmanaging him. “He told me to go out and play my game,” he said. “Nothing more, nothing less. And I did.”
The two still had their disagreements. When Mays, battling a midseason slump, was taking batting practice, Rigney tried to give him some advice; Mays loudly rejected it, saying he should be left alone while swinging. “It was one of the few displays of temper by Mays as a Giant,” the Sporting News reported, calling it a “prima donna outburst.”
But Rigney finally understood that Mays responded to carrots, not sticks, and he embraced him almost as extravagantly as Durocher had. “All I can say is that he is the greatest player I have ever seen, bar none,” he told reporters in 1959. “When he’s around it makes me feel good just to walk into the locker room and start suiting up. I know then I have a chance.”
In an interview after he retired, Rigney said he eventually realized that Mays did not need a manager so much as a father figure. “He thought I didn’t care about him,” Rigney said. “Well, I did care about him.” His style was simply different than Durocher’s. The problem was not that Mays didn’t like the manager but that he didn’t know whether the manager liked him. Rigney acknowledged, “If I had to do it over again, I think I would have been a little more active in his life.”
The reconciliation between Mays and Rigney could not save the Giants in 1957. They lost three young players to the military draft: first baseman Bill White, who had twenty-two home runs in his rookie season the previous year; and two outfielders, rookie Willie Kirkland and Jackie Brandt. On the first day of spring training, the Giants’ projected starting catcher, Bill Sarni, walked onto the field and dropped straight to the ground, suffering a heart attack at twenty-nine; he survived, but his playing career was over. The Giants had to wait another year before they could rebuild. Instead, they brought back former stars—Bobby Thomson from Milwaukee, Whitey Lockman from St. Louis—as if to revive a play that had long been shut down. Stoneham liked reuniting his Giant family, which was a noble sentiment, but nostalgia doesn’t win games. On May 3, the Giants were in sixth place, and they stayed there the rest of the year. Rigney looked tortured, his gray hair now turning white, his body looking more emaciated, his cigarettes piling up in ashtrays, his ulcers worsening, a man who had not turned forty but whose nickname—“Old Bones”—fit him well. His team had quit on him. After losses, wrote one reporter, “the ballplayers dressed in silence or sat, heads down, eyes absently pointed either to a questionable future or a happier past. Men walked aimlessly about, barefoot, or sat reading their scant fan mail or else they hurried to get out of the dank sepulchral clubhouse.” The players said their lethargy mirrored the empty cavern in which they performed. “Playing before crowds of twelve hundred in the Polo Grounds,” Lockman said, “was like walking through a morgue.”
Mays didn’t quit, and for that reason alone 1957 may have been his finest year. He had more ground than ever to cover in the outfield. In right was plodding Don Mueller, who at thirty had slowed down even further but was still a spring chicken compared to left fielder Hank Sauer. The heavy-legged slugger, who arrived in the off-season, was forty. And on the bases Mays was never better. In a game against the Phillies on April 21, he performed one of his most exhilarating excursions. With the score tied 1–1 in the ninth, he came to bat with one out against Robin Roberts. He chopped the ball to short and slid under the wide throw. The ball bounced away, so Mays tried for second and slid in safely. He then stole third with another slide under the tag. Then, on a short hit to right, he slid safely home with the winning run. Mays had slid around the entire diamond.
A month later, at Wrigley Field, he went from first to third on a ground-out and then stole home. On several occasions, he scored from second on groundouts. Infielders began committing errors on hurried throws whenever Mays was on base—a valuable contribution but impossible to record. He also executed one of his finest, and most dangerous, catches that year at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. The center field fence was so far away—462 feet—that the Pirates stationed an enclosed batting cage there because they figured no one could hit the ball that far. But against the Giants, Roberto Clemente did just that. Mays ran headlong to the cage, leaped, and caught the ball. “We thought from the bench, ‘Here’s the end of Willie,’ ” pitcher Mike McCormick recalls. “But he kept his feet the whole time.”
Young fans found in Mays a role model for their own aspirations. Most kids don’t make it to the majors, but John Curtis did, and his dreams began when he walked into the Polo Grounds as a small boy from Long Island. Sitting in the upper deck, he saw “that expansive green grass field and the perfect symmetry of the [diamond]—it was like seeing Oz for the first time.” He watched in awe as the players took their warm-ups, “aghast” that even a pop fly, appearing so easy to handle on television, required so much skill and judgment to actually catch. And then Mays came out, and everything he did looked so easy. Loping across the field to catch fly balls. Throwing perfect strikes to home plate from three hundred feet. Spraying line drives to all parts of the ballpark. “And during the game,” Curtis recalled, “he was so colorful and so full of energy. He just seemed at that moment to symbolize what that whole game was about. The harnessing of immense talent. And from that moment on, I knew that that was what I wanted to do. If I was going to grow into a baseball player, I wanted to be someone with the authority and grace of Willie.”
Starting in 1970, Curtis played in the major leagues for sixteen years, a respectable left-handed pitcher (lifetime ERA, 3.96) praised as much for his verbal eloquence as his fastball.
The fans showed their appreciation of Mays in 1957 by voting him as the All-Star center fielder—they tried to, anyway. He was leading the vote until the end, when the commissioner’s office received a sudden groundswell of 550,000 ballots from Cincinnati. If counted, the starting team for the National League would have consisted of seven players from Cincinnati, quite a showing for a fourth-place team. (Only Stan Musial survived the ballot stuffing.) The prospect of Gus Bell starting ahead of Willie Mays was too much to bear for Commissioner Ford C. Frick. He rejected the late Cincinnati votes, securing Mays’s starting berth. (The next year, he transferred voting responsibilities to the players, coaches, and managers; not until 1970 would fans cast ballots again.)
In the All-Star Game, Mays hit cleanup behind Aaron and Musial, and in two late-inning rallies, he delivered a single and a triple, with an RBI and two runs scored. But the American League won, 6–5.
From the beginning of spring training, speculation had intensified that both the Dodgers and the Giants would be leaving, raising the possibility that New York would be without a National League team. Over the past five years, the Braves, Browns, and Athletics had all moved to new cities, confirming a fundamental shift in the game. Baseball teams were no longer simply sources of community pride or family touchstones that connected the generations. They were hard financial assets to be leveraged, bargained, and maximized, capable of being moved around the country like pieces on a chess board.
But the asset itself—the baseball team—was only as valuable as its players, and by 1957 both the Dodgers and the Giants were declining teams with only one megastar between them. With or without Willie Mays, baseball’s transcontinental expansion would occur, but Mays was the source of New York’s deepest sorrow and California’s greatest hope.
The Dodgers, like the Giants, had an aging ballpark with inadequate parking for an increasingly suburban fan base that could now watch games on television. The difference was that the Dodgers were both popular and highly profitable. The Giants were neither.
In 1956, the Giants drew 629,179 fans, dead last in the National League and a decline of 46 percent since 1954. Not since 1943, during World War II, had so few people attended Giant games. In 1956 and 1957, only the Washington Senators drew fewer fans than the Giants. Unlike their money-losing years from 1948 to 1953, the Giants did squeak out profits, but they could not keep pace with their Gotham rivals. Between 1947 and 1956, the Giants earned $405,926; the Dodgers earned $3.5 million, and the Yankees, $3.6 million.
On the field and at the gate, the Giants were a woebegone third in a three-team town. They made money only because of their increasing media revenue, receiving $600,000 a year for their television rights. That income, combined with Stoneham’s insistence in years past that the Giants would never leave New York, convinced some people that the team would stay but find another stadium. What everyone acknowledged was that the Giants would be out of the Polo Grounds by 1962, when the team’s lease expired.
While Stoneham made relatively few public statements, Dodger owner Walter O’Malley was more outspoken. For several years, he had demanded public support for a new domed stadium at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic avenues in Brooklyn. At the same time, he’d been flirting with the city fathers of Los Angeles, who were pleading with him to move the Dodgers there. O’Malley sold Ebbets Field in 1956, and the following February, as spring training was to begin, he acquired the territorial rights to Los Angeles from the Chicago Cubs, which had a minor league team there. O’Malley continued to insist that he wanted to stay in New York, but he was laying the groundwork to move.
By spring training, Stoneham had already decided to move the team to Minneapolis and had begun enlarging his minor-league stadium there. In March, O’Malley met with him to discuss the Dodgers’ consideration of Los Angeles, and he asked Stoneham if he would consider San Francisco instead of Minneapolis. O’Malley knew that San Francisco was eager for a team, and it made more sense to transport two National League teams to California—and a historic rivalry at that—than one team.
Stoneham initially said he wasn’t interested, but it wasn’t long before San Francisco Mayor George Christopher began taking secret weekend shuttles to New York to meet with Stoneham. “Getting a major league team into San Francisco,” Christopher said, “is a crusade with us.” He pledged that the city would build a new park with 40,000 to 50,000 seats; parking lots and concession deals would be part of the package. The mayor predicted annual profits of $200,000 to $300,000 for the Giants. While O’Malley continued to stall and haggle, Stoneham was sold. In May, he called Russ Hodges into his office and asked, “Do you want to move to California?” (He did.) Stoneham said the Giants would be going to the West Coast with or without the Dodgers.
Had Stoneham wanted to stay in New York, he had one more valuable chip to play. In June, the St. Louis Cardinals made him a $1 million offer ($750,000 in cash plus several players) for Willie Mays. He seriously considered the deal but didn’t pull the trigger because of the club’s pending transfer to San Francisco. Cardinal general manager Frank Lane told the St. Louis Globe Democrat that he made four separate offers for Mays, to no avail. Chub Feeney told Lane that if the Giants traded Mays and then moved to San Francisco, the people in that region would throw him into the San Francisco Bay.
Only the formalities of the Giants’ move remained. In May, the National League voted in favor of a resolution allowing the Dodgers and the Giants to leave New York, and on July 18, Stoneham held a press conference at the Polo Grounds, overlooking the elevated railroad that had brought hundreds of thousands of fans to Giant games since 1890. “There is no longer any chance to survive here,” he said. “I have been in this city fifty years and am more sentimental about New York and the Giants than any of my board of directors, but I must recommend to them that we can no longer hold the Polo Grounds.”
New York City’s council president, Abe Stark, condemned San Francisco’s mayor as a “pirate,” but Stoneham blamed the fans. The Polo Grounds drew more than 20,000 fans only twice in the entire season. “We’re sorry to disappoint the kids of New York,” he said, “but we didn’t see many of their parents out there at the Polo Grounds in recent years.”
On August 19, in an 8–1 vote, the Giants’ board made the move official, though the vote was only for show. Stoneham could have overruled it. He and his sister, Mary Aufderhar, held a controlling interest in the National Exhibition Company, which owned the franchise. Stoneham, who received a salary of $70,000 a year, cited no personal responsibility for the team’s hardship, but he was not blameless. For years he failed to invest adequately in either his team or the stadium, nor had he pursued alternative stadium options. But between 1952 and 1956, the Giants were one of only two National League teams that paid dividends. As the principal shareholders in the Giants, Stoneham and his sister received the bulk of those payments. (Horace’s son, Pete, was also on the payroll.)
The one dissenting voice was that of Joan Whitney Payson, a fifty-four-year-old heiress who had acquired a 9 percent stake in the Giants. She was American royalty: her mother, Helen Hay Whitney, was the daughter of John Hay, who was an aide to President Lincoln and secretary of state for President William McKinley. Her father, the industrialist Payne Whitney, was the son of William C. Whitney, secretary of the navy for President Grover Cleveland. Her brother, John Hay “Jock” Whitney, owned four newspapers, including the New York Herald Tribune and Newsday . In 1927, she inherited, along with her brother, her father’s estate, with an estimated value of $239 million, the largest then recorded in the United States. She was one of America’s richest women.
Joan Payson loved horses, fine paintings, and miniature antique furniture. And she loved Willie Mays. A Giants fan since the age of six, she was so enthralled with Mays that she not only watched him at the Polo Grounds but would take the train to Philadelphia to watch him there. Desperate to keep him, and the Giants, in New York, she offered to buy the team from Stoneham. He refused. But Payson vowed—somehow, some way—to bring Mays back to New York.
On October 8, the Dodgers officially notified the National League of their intention to move to Los Angeles.
In later years, the person who was most closely associated with the two teams’ leaving New York, and who remained the most vilified, was Walter O’Malley; perhaps there was more sympathy for Stoneham because his plight in Harlem seemed beyond repair or because the Giants were not as integrated into the community as the Dodgers were in Brooklyn. But Stoneham still broke the hearts of fans who couldn’t believe that the Giants, one of the founding clubs of the National League, would leave the city they had played in since 1883. “Horace, one of New York’s own, will have to adapt himself to the way and the habits, and the manner of life, of a city more than 3,000 miles away from Toots Shor’s,” Dan Daniel wrote.
Willie Mays never believed the rumors that the Giants might leave New York. Couldn’t believe them. The team had simply been there too long. So the news shocked him as much as it did most everyone else. And the prospects were disconcerting. He knew nothing about San Francisco. New York was home: everything was familiar; the fans loved him. He didn’t particularly want to say good-bye to New York, and New York certainly didn’t want to say good-bye to him.
A letter writer to the Sporting News said, “I don’t mind the Giants, as a club, moving, but what kind of justice is it that would move Willie Mays?... Let the rest go anywhere they please, but leave us Willie.” Gay Talese, with characteristic verve, wrote in the New York Times : “Undoubtedly, the exportation from New York to San Francisco of the 180-pound package of rare tenderloin labeled Willie Mays Jr. must be recognized by Manhattan historians as a grave event.”
Mays turned twenty-six that year, and by most appearances, he looked and played as he had since he arrived in New York. But he was no longer the unstudied Alabama youth who showed up in 1951. He had outgrown the playful little brother role, the brunt of teammate jokes. His laughter and smile were not as conspicuous, the pepper games less frequent. The Say Hey Kid was no longer a kid. Even his cap didn’t fly off as much, though that was due to adjustments by the manufacturer. “Willie’s lid flew off so easily because of his receding forehead,” cap maker Tim McAuliff said, “so I just reversed the sweatband and it made for more friction, which keeps his hat in place. Or at least more than it used to.”
Bill Rigney, in an interview with Sport in 1958, said the first time he noticed a real change in Mays was the year before. “Willie was talking to some reporters while we were waiting for a plane, and he was dressed well and he spoke well,” Rigney said. “He’s still the same good-natured, lovable guy he always was, but he’s no longer naive. I suddenly realized that Willie of 1951 was gone forever.”
The stickball games were also gone. Marghuerite believed they further drained his energy. “I don’t like him to do it,” she said. “Nobody knows how much a game takes out of Willie, because he gives so much to it, but show him a piece of wood and ball, and that’s it.”
She had a point. The game did take a lot out of Mays, physically and emotionally, and 1957 saw him hospitalized during the season for undisclosed reasons. He rested for three days at Harkness Pavilion in the first of four or five vaguely defined hospitalizations—“exhaustion” was usually cited—during his career. But the first incident should have been a warning about the unrelenting pressures on him.
It was always a silent struggle for Mays to meet expectations that could never be satisfied, and the one person who understood it was Jackie Robinson. Whatever their differences politically, Robinson recognized the monumental challenge that confronted someone so young and unprepared. On Opening Day 1955, at a game between the Giants and the Dodgers, Robinson said, “I don’t envy Willie. He’ll be playing under the most terrific pressure all year, more than he can handle. Everybody is expecting him to duplicate or better his great season of 1954. They won’t settle for anything less. Look what happened today. Every time he came to bat, the fans started yelling for a home run. Every place, every time, it’s ‘We want Willie. We want Willie.’ Wherever the team goes, Willie is the center of attention. Sure he’s great, maybe the greatest, but he’s still a kid.”
Mays’s bubbly media image persisted long after it could be accurately applied to him. Bill White, for example, lived with Willie and Marghuerite when he joined the Giants in 1956. “I never saw the stickball-in-the-street phase,” he said. “I never heard him say, ‘Say Hey,’ except in television commercials. All I saw was a man with a good baseball mind. It used to take us about forty-five minutes to drive to the park, and every day Willie would talk to me about the pitchers we were going to face: what they threw, what their ball did, what to expect in the clutch. He would tell me who you could steal off and who you couldn’t, pitchers and catchers both. He would even tell me how to play the different batters at first base. And this was when he was in his ‘larky’ stage as far as the press was concerned.”
White adds in an interview five decades later: “The ‘Say Hey Kid’ helped his image, but there was a man under there that they never saw, a man of great pride, intelligence, and integrity.”
Even his given name—Willie—may have reinforced a disparaging image. Unlike, say, “William” or “Willard,” “Willie” was a child’s name, and according to Bill White, it was a name that newspapers often gave rookie black players. In his own case, the Sporting News announced his promotion to the Giants by describing him as “Willie White... a fast, powerful Negro first baseman.” White told reporters that he was “Bill.”
If Mays was seen only as one-dimensional—a supernova in center field who brought joy to the Polo Grounds—that was more than enough for any Giant fan. In 1957, he laid to rest any notion that either a new wife or a new manager would doom him. His .333 average was the third best of his career, while his .407 on-base percentage was his second best. He had a twenty-one-game hitting streak, which equaled one he’d had in 1954 and was a career high. He led the league in triples (twenty), slugging percentage (.629), and stolen bases (thirty-eight), and he was the first player in National League history to hit at least twenty doubles, triples, and home runs in one year. In December, he received the Gold Glove from the Sporting News, the first year the award was given. He was the only National League outfielder chosen; in subsequent years, three outfielders from each league were selected.
It was fitting that he ended in a blaze of glory. Though he was a New York Giant for only five full seasons, the memory of his greatness was seared so deeply that he was always associated with that team, in that town, at that time, and New York fans would always claim him as their own.
The final day at the Polo Grounds, September 29, was cool and gray, the flags whipping in the wind. Ray Robinson, a sportswriter, said he was “one of 11,606 pallbearers” who attended; his bleacher ticket cost seventy-five cents. Before the game, Bobby Thomson stood for the photographers, pointing to the left field seats. Matty Schwab, the head of the grounds crew who lived in a small apartment at the Polo Grounds, escorted Bill Rigney to center field, where they cut out a big piece of grass. Schwab wrapped it up and planted it in the outfield of the Giants’ next ballpark in San Francisco. Giant old-timers were introduced to the crowd—men who had played for John McGraw, such as Carl Hubbell, as well as later Giants, such as Monte Irvin and Sal Maglie. They all stood with grim faces, as if they were at a wake—which, in a way, they were. The most elegant honoree was Blanche McGraw, John’s widow, who still went south with the team every spring and rarely missed a home game in Section 19. She was presented with a bouquet of roses and wept softly into her corsage.
In tribute to past glories, Rigney started all his players who had been on the 1954 championship team: Johnny Antonelli on the mound, Wes Westrum catching, Whitey Lockman at first, and Don Mueller, Dusty Rhodes, and Willie Mays in the outfield.
The game was a hapless affair against the Pirates. Roger Angell, sitting in the upper deck with his daughter, said it was the quietest crowd he had ever heard at any game. In between innings, a man stood with a sign: GIANT FAN 55 YEARS. Another sign said: GO, GIANTS, GO. Another: STAY, WILLIE, STAY. Gallows humor was in order. “If the Giants don’t win,” said one fan, “nobody will show up tomorrow.”
But Mays demonstrated his virtuoso skills. In the first inning, the Pirates’ Bob Skinner drove a ball into deep left center that rolled all the way to the wall. Rhodes gave chase while Mays positioned himself in medium left center. Rhodes finally reached the ball, picked it up, and threw it to Mays. But the ball came in low, skipping several feet in front of him. Mays bent down and trapped it with his back to home plate, rose, whirled, and fired. Skinner was trying for an inside-the-park homer, but the throw was a one-hop strike to the catcher—not as balletic as the Throw in 1951, not as dramatic as the throw after the Catch in 1954—but fierce and graceful nonetheless. The runner was out.
In the bottom of the seventh, Mays came to bat with the Giants on their way to losing, 9–1. The defeat would leave them with a season record of 69–85, twenty-six games out of first place. There was not much riding on this particular at-bat. Mays grounded the ball to third base—a routine grounder, an easy play—and third baseman Gene Freese fielded the ball cleanly. Then he got lazy, and he relaxed and floated the ball to first. It was accurate and ordinary—but too late. Mays had blown past the bag for an infield hit, running as though the pennant were at stake. “It was my first time in my thirty-five-plus years of watching ball games I had ever seen a man beat out a routine ground ball that had been fielded cleanly,” Arnold Hano wrote. It was Mays’s second hit of the game.
Mays came to bat for a final time with one out in the bottom of the ninth. The fans cheered when he stepped into the box. He kept his head down, adjusted his feet, then focused on the hurler. He took the first pitch and then another, but the applause never stopped. Instead, it gained momentum and strength, the fans standing and roaring with undiluted passion, the noise rising from the ancient concrete stanchions until Mays finally had to acknowledge it. He stepped out of the box and reached toward his cap and touched the bill as though he were going to lift it in thanks—then he froze. He lowered his hand, gripped the bat again, and stepped back in.
After the game, Mays said he was going to doff his hat but checked the impulse. He feared it would have been seen as showboating.
In Ted Williams’s last at-bat at Fenway Park, he hit a home run, but he refused to tip his cap to the cheering fans. Williams, however, was not motivated by humility. As John Updike famously wrote, “Gods do not answer letters.”
Mays would have liked such a farewell, a home run in his final at-bat, but he grounded out. Nevertheless, he was cheered again as he returned to the dugout.
“I never felt so nervous,” he said after the game. “My hands were shaking. It was worse than any World Series game. I got a home run my first at-bat in the Polo Grounds and I wanted to bow out with another. I tried very hard to show them how I felt. I wanted to do something for the fans.”
Watching the game was twelve-year-old Lanny Davis, who had come with his father to say farewell to Willie. The boy found consolation in his last at-bat. “My hero hustled to the very end,” he later recalled. The game ended. “All of a sudden,” Davis said, “I saw number 24 literally leap up the steps of the Giants’ dugout, right in front of me, so close I almost touched him, and there he was, tearing full speed toward center field to the safety of the clubhouse. As soon as I saw Willie lead the way out of the dugout, I had only one thought: I have to shake Willie’s hand and thank him and say good-bye. I have to! Without the slightest hesitation, I jumped over the rail and ran after him.”
He had plenty of company. Though the voice on the loudspeaker asked people to stay off the field, thousands swarmed onto the grounds, a whirlwind of affection, nostalgia, anger, and excitement. They pulled out the home plates on the diamond and in the bullpen. They uprooted the bases and the pitcher’s rubber, which had been nailed into the ground with eighteen-inch spikes; a girl with a penknife sliced it to pieces and shared them with friends. They ripped down the canopy over the bullpen, tore it apart, and dispersed the shreds. They yanked out telephones and flung telephone books and snipped the green foam rubber covering the fences. They dug up large clunks of sod and dirt and carried them out in cans and boxes. Lanny Davis, who in time became a prominent Washington lawyer and special counsel to President Clinton, stuffed dirt in his pockets and kept it in a paper cup in a desk drawer for years.
Members of the grounds crew, some of whom had been tending the green lawn there for more than thirty years, stood along the third base line. They had wanted to say good-bye to the players, the coaches, and maybe even the sacred terrain, but they could only watch in silent horror.
Before the game, Rigney had warned his players that seething fans were going to rush the field, and he instructed them to drop their hats and gloves and just make it to the clubhouse. Most of the players did that, though Mays held on to his cap. Clutching it against his chest, he had to avoid so many people that even Dusty Rhodes beat him. All over the field, the fans were cheering: “We want Willie! We want Willie!” Then hundreds gathered at the foot of the clubhouse, and leading the serenade was Lanny Davis: “We want Willie!”
Mays heard the cheers and was deeply moved—he recalled other times, in ’51 and ’54, when fans stood in the same spot and chanted his name and he returned their adoration with waves and smiles—but Rigney had instructed all the players to stay inside. Still they called his name. Mays quickly changed his clothes and figured it was the last time he would sit in front of his battered wooden locker, see the faded green concrete walls, and smell the room’s pungent blend of sweat, liniment, and tobacco.
Outside, Lanny suddenly realized something was wrong. He couldn’t find his father. At first he wasn’t afraid, but as the mob grew in size and the yelling became more urgent, he grew frightened, panicked. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was his father.
“How did you know where I was?” he asked.
“I knew where you’d be.”
Then Willie came out, just briefly, and waved to the fans. “He looked down the stairs,” Davis said more than fifty years later. “He looked at me, and he pointed his finger at me, as if to say, ‘Hi, kid; bye, kid.’ To this day, I am certain he was talking to me, only me.”
All of the players were soon out the door, but according to one report, “Willie, alone of all the Giants, left with the cheer of the crowd in his ear.”
The mood turned uglier outside. Instead of pining for Willie, they called for the owner: “We want Stoneham! We want Stoneham—with a rope around his neck!” Stoneham had not been seen at the ballpark all day.
At least Walter O’Malley attended the Dodgers’ final game at Ebbets Field, where it was announced to the crowd that the year’s attendance was 1,026,158—“the thirteenth straight year over a million. And the only team to leave after doing it.”
Gladys Gooding, the organist for sixteen years, played “Don’t Ask Me Why I’m Leaving,” “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You,” and “Auld Lang Syne.”
New York had no National League champion in 1957. The Milwaukee Braves, led by the young stars Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews, won the first of two consecutive pennants.
An era had ended, and at the Giants’ final game at the Polo Grounds, Blanche McGraw was the last to leave, still clutching her red roses. “I still can’t believe it,” she said as she was helped to her car. “New York can never be the same to me.”
No more Giants. No more National League. No more Willie. For any New Yorker, it was hard to grasp. “I didn’t feel anything,” Roger Angell wrote. “Nothing at all. I guess I just couldn’t believe it. But it’s true, all right. The flags are down, the lights in the temple are out, and the Harlem River flows lonely to the sea.”