Willie Mays no longer played stickball in the street, but he was still accessible to his young fans. “Get me talking about kids,” Mays once said, “and you’ve got me talking about one of my two favorite subjects. Baseball is the other.” Plenty of athletes paid lip service to children; visiting them in the hospital was a time-honored tradition, the photographs indispensable to buffing a star’s image.
Unlike Babe Ruth, whose image as the lovable galoot was crafted by a publicist named Christy Walsh, Mays had a genuine concern for children. Early in his career, he supposedly reached out to kids because he himself was just a big kid. But that missed the point. Mays always juxtaposed the innocence of children with what he saw as the corrupting influence of adults, a lesson from his own youth. He believed kids genuinely appreciated him while adults would support him only in good times.
In a 1955 article in Coronet, “What Kids Have Taught Me” (as told to the ubiquitous Charlie Einstein), Mays noted that he received tons of letters. “You can tell the big difference between a kid and a grown-up writing to you,” he said, “because the mail from the grown-ups comes in big especially when you’re going good. It’s when you hit a slump that the mail from kids really picks up. ‘Hang on there,’ they tell you. ‘You can do it.’ ”
Mays said that what “you can learn from kids is how to get along with people. They understand you, and they accept you as an equal.” He described how the previous summer, when he had gone to Hempstead, Long Island, for a photo shoot, the cameraman’s son had a ball and glove in the back seat. “Well, the next thing you know,” he said, “we’re having a pretty good game of catch, and here comes the camera director, hollering blue murder.
“ ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we’re all set up. This is important.’
“ ‘This is important too,’ I told him. And of course it was.”
For all the complaints about Mays as a recluse, he was frighteningly accessible to kids, even after he moved to San Francisco. One night in June 1961, a ten-year-old boy named Billy Knox was near Mays’s house on Spruce Street, so he and a friend decided to ring the bell and ask for an autograph. Marghuerite answered and told him that Willie wasn’t home but he could try back in the morning. Early next morning, the two boys returned and waited on the stoop until Mays walked out in a yellow cardigan and brown slacks. They asked for his autograph, and Mays complied. Then Billy had a wild idea.
“Hey, Willie,” he said. “We got tickets to the game today, and we were gonna take the bus, but how about a ride out to the game?”
Mays told them to hop in the front of his Cadillac convertible.
As soon as he pulled out, the boys realized they had forgotten their tickets.
“Where do you live?” Mays asked.
Five blocks away, Billy’s friend said, so Mays drove them to get their tickets. They were finally on their way to the game when Billy exclaimed, “Willie! My mother made us bag lunches for the game. She’ll kill me if we don’t pick up our stuff. She might even worry.”
So Mays now had to drive to Billy’s house. “To this day,” Knox recalls almost forty years later, “I can still see my mom standing at our dining room picture window with her hands on her hips, mouth ajar, awestruck as the lime-green Cadillac sped off.”
After Mays pulled into the players’ lot at Candlestick Park, he turned to the boys. “Meet me here after the game,” he said, “and I’ll take you home.” Billy soon met up with his older brother and his brother’s friend and bragged about his magical ride. The older boys didn’t believe it, so after the game they tagged along. In the parking lot, while the fans were mobbing Mays, Billy and his friend jumped into the front seat while the two older boys hid in the back. By the time Mays saw them, he was already on the road.
“Who the hell is that!”
Billy explained, and a forgiving Mays drove the four boys home.
Two weeks later, Billy was trying to convince a skeptical friend of what had happened. The friend wasn’t buying it. So the next day, with tickets in hand, they showed up at Mays’s stoop at 9 A.M. He saw them, sighed, and said, “Get in the car.”
Knox says that years later, his mother was at a dinner party in San Francisco. Mays was there, holding court, regaling his audience about the time two ten-year-olds talked him into driving them to the game. He was enjoying himself.
Mays was most interested in helping children in need, and he made regular visits to hospitals as well as their homes, typically without media coverage. Lon Simmons, the Giants’ Hall of Fame announcer, recalls when he and Mays visited an eight-year-old boy who was suffering from an incurable disease. They walked into the house, were met by the grateful parents, and were led to the child’s room. On their way, Mays spotted the boy’s older brother, about twelve years old, standing to the side, and went over to him.
“You and I have to work together,” he said. “Here’s the key to my trunk. You get my things.” The youngster lit up, went to Mays’s car, and brought in balls, bats, and gloves for both boys.
“I don’t know what to say to kids who are ill,” Simmons now says, “but Willie just walks over and has them laughing.” In this instance, Mays could see how the illness was affecting the entire family and how the brother needed support as well. “Even though that older boy loved his little brother, he had that feeling that he was on the outside,” Simmons says. “Willie was able to assess the situation and read the kids. It was amazing to me. I get tears in my eyes now just thinking about it.”
More often than not, Mays’s good deeds were revealed by others. The Sporting News wrote an editorial in September 1961 noting that “Mays has been accused of being a loner who resents any intrusion on his privacy.” But it described how Mays had appeared at a state mental hospital in St. Louis to conduct a batting clinic: “Officials at the hospital said it was the best therapy patients could have. What is more important, Mays did not do this for publicity. Had it not been for a tip from a hospital official to a newspaper, no one would have known Willie had been there.”
In the early months of 1963, Pittsburgh Press sports reporter Les Biederman spoke at the Western Pennsylvania School for the Blind. Afterward, the students asked if it would be possible for Willie Mays to visit when the Giants were in town. Biederman wrote to Mays but never heard back. The day the Giants arrived in Pittsburgh, however, Mays contacted Biederman and said he was ready to visit the school. “He simply isn’t a letter writer,” Biederman concluded.
He drove Mays to the school, and when he entered the auditorium, whispers rippled through the crowd of two hundred students. They may not have been able to see him clearly, but they knew he was there. “That’s him now,” one boy said. “He really came.”
Mays was introduced, and he became—in Biederman’s words—“the eyes of these sightless youngsters.”
“It’s nice to see you kids,” Mays said. “Real nice to be here. They tell me you’ve got some questions, so let’s get going.”
Arms shot up. “Hey, Willie! Over here, Willie!”
“Take it easy, take it easy,” Mays squeaked in a chuckling, high-pitched voice. “We got time, lots of time.”
The students were rabid baseball fans. One boy asked him to compare Leo Durocher with Alvin Dark. Mays said, “Durocher was like a father to me. I don’t think I could have made it without him.” Dark had also been wonderful. “Both play good baseball. But I can get along with anybody. Alvin is very religious, and Leo, well, he’s liable to do anything.” The students laughed.
A student asked about Pirate outfielder Bill Virdon.
“You like him?” Mays asked.
“Yeah!” the assembly shouted.
“Well, I don’t! He makes too many catches on me!”
“You ever play in the World Series, Willie?”
Mays raised his eyebrows. “I’m gonna have to send you a radio,” he said.
“Who’s the youngest player on the Giants?” a young girl asked.
“Well, let me see,” Mays said. “We’ve got a fellow named Al Stanek, who is nineteen—but he’s too old for you, honey.” The girl smiled.
Mays was completely relaxed in front of the group, a natural. When he was asked if baseball was easy, his answer, reflecting on hard work and unappreciated sacrifices, resonated. “Nothing is easy,” he said. “Too many people think a ballplayer’s hours are just the time the game takes. They fail to realize we’re at the ballpark two and three hours before a game and a good hour after the game. In between, we must get our rest. No man can do his best if he’s tired mentally and physically. As for myself, I can’t get enough sleep. A man wrote me saying he carried a lunch pail eight hours a day and how come I would get tired just playing ball. Well, I told him he doesn’t have twenty thousand or twenty-five thousand people watching how he carries that lunch pail and his average isn’t printed in the papers every day.”
The audience welcomed the sentiment. Willie Mays trying to convince a group of handicapped children of the humanity of a baseball player.
Mays was also asked about his greatest thrill. “Being a big league ballplayer has always been a great thrill for me,” he said. “But I’d have to say the answer to that question is just being here.” The kids cheered.
After the talk, Mays waded into the group and touched the hands and arms of the students, who reached up and touched his face.
“I gave them only my time and a little bit of baseball,” he told reporters afterward, “and they gave me their hearts.”
Mays enjoyed being a mentor, playing the same role that so many others had played for him. Roy McKercher, for example, was fourteen years old when the Giants hired him as a batboy in 1958. On Opening Day, one of the first players he saw was Mays.
“Are you the batboy this year?” he asked.
Mays extended his hand. “Welcome to the big leagues.”
Unlike most of the players, Mays would ask McKercher how he was doing in school, how his parents were doing, and whether he had a girlfriend. Calling him “Red,” Mays would urge him to bear down in school. When McKercher traveled with the team for the first time, Mays had him sit next to him on the plane so he could give him instructions. “Be sure to be polite and give autographs,” he told him. “Be sure to leave a nice tip but don’t overdo it.... And remember, you’re always being watched because you’re a Giant.” In 1959, McKercher appeared on What’s My Line?, the game show in which panelists tried to guess a contestant’s profession. Afterward, Mays told him that a girl in Chicago wanted to meet him. “Take her out, take her to a nice place, and be a gentleman,” he said. He emphasized that when you have “a little notoriety” you have to be careful.
Mays introduced McKercher to the girl in the lobby. She was a few years older. They went to dinner and a movie, and then she dropped him off back at the hotel. All went well until, according to McKercher, “Willie started spreading rumors that we were getting married.”
“He was like the big brother I never had,” says McKercher, who was a batboy for four years and later worked in law enforcement, becoming a San Mateo County sheriff’s deputy. “Mostly, he taught me how to treat people.” In time, Mays took great pride in telling others, “I helped raise that kid.”
Over the years, newspaper columns and now Internet blogs have accused Mays of brushing off kids who wanted an autograph. Nothing infuriates McKercher more. “So many people idolized him because he was so friendly,” he says. “He would stand there and sign autographs for two hours, say no to one person, and be accused of being a jerk.”
In 1959, McKercher was assaulted in his high school and put in the hospital. Horace Stoneham offered to fly in specialists from the Mayo Clinic, though that wasn’t necessary. The team sent over a basket of fruit, but a piece was missing. A note said: “Red, I owe you an apple. Get better. Willie Mays.”
In 1961, a youth counselor at the Booker T. Washington Center in San Francisco called Mays about a fourteen-year-old kid from the slums who was a sensational athlete but was now in trouble with the law. A member of the Persian Warriors gang, he had been caught stealing from a liquor store.
The counselor told Mays that the boy could play football in college, but now that seemed in jeopardy. His name was O. J. Simpson.
After spending the weekend in San Francisco’s Juvenile Hall, his mother took him home. He dozed off in his room and awoke to voices downstairs. He expected his father had come by to give him a whipping. He went down and looked in the living room. “So there in our crappy little project house was my hero,” Simpson told Sports Illustrated in 1987. “Willie Mays—in my house!”
Simpson had first seen him several years earlier at Seals Stadium. “I never took my eyes off Willie Mays,” Simpson said. “I had heard about his basket catch and the way his cap always fell off when he ran, and I watched for those things. He did them all. He even hit a home run for me.... I hate to go so far as to say that he was my god, because my family was religious, but it almost amounted to that. I could almost say that I worshiped Willie Mays.”
Now, standing before him, Mays said, “You want to come out with me this afternoon?”
The two left the house. Simpson was expecting a lecture, but it never came. Mays had a day off, and he simply had the boy follow him around. They went to a dry cleaner’s to pick up a couple of suits, an appliance store, and then to a friend’s house, where plans were being made for a banquet. Mays also took him to his own house. He asked Simpson what he thought of the new Chrysler and who he thought was going to win the pennant. He never asked about his gang activities or his scuffle with the law, but he did suggest that playing college football in Los Angeles made more sense than Utah, which Simpson was considering. Closer to home and a bigger television market, Mays said. He had one other message: “Do not forget your mother if you should find success.”
Mays later said that his goal was to show Simpson the kind of life he could have if he made the right choices. The boy got the message. “I had an entirely different outlook on everything after that day with Willie Mays,” he said in 1987. “I can’t really say that it turned my life around, just like that.... But that time with Mays made me realize that my dream was possible. Willie wasn’t superhuman. He was an ordinary person, so there was a chance for me.”
In 1994, after Simpson was charged with murdering his wife and Ronald Goldman, a member of his entourage called Mays to see if he would be a character witness for Simpson. Mays said no.
What’s most striking about Mays is the contrast between his dealings with children and those with adults. One group he trusts; the other he doesn’t. With one group, he is open and relaxed; the other, he is tight-lipped and wary. From one group, he expects nothing in return; from the other, he expects compensation. In the early 1960s, Mays began declining certain magazine interviews unless he was paid. Why should everyone else, he figured—the writer, editor, publisher—make money off his name? When he was invited to promote the opening of a new electronics store, he was offered one free television but demanded, and received, three. (He gave the other two away.) Certain that people were trying to take advantage of him, he became a tenacious negotiator for his cars, clothes, and furnishings.
He speaks in general terms about the money that he lent to friends and never got back, as he protects even those he believes have wronged him. Those betrayals, says Poo Johnson, his roommate from his army days and one of his closest friends, have caused him to calibrate every adult relationship. “I know Willie has helped out a lot of people financially who he should not have trusted,” he says. “So Willie keeps friends on a short leash.” Johnson concedes that “being Willie’s friend can be a challenge,” and his lack of trust “has deprived him of some real strong relationships with people who had good intentions.” But, he says, “once Willie knows you have a good heart and knows you will take him when he has his highs and lows, he’ll do anything for you.”
Yet his faith in kids is unconditional, for in them he sees himself—innocent souls who need kind words and meaningful support, as he once did, to fulfill their dreams. So he is usually a soft touch when youth are involved. Consider this anecdote, recounted by Richard J. Martin in a 2001 letter to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
In 1965, Martin was the twenty-four-year-old director of the St. James’ Center in Pittsburgh, an afterschool program for disadvantaged children that was part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. The center planned an awards ceremony one Saturday in June, and Martin wanted a sports celebrity to present the trophies. He checked the Pirates’ schedule and saw they were playing the Giants, so he immediately thought of asking his hero, Willie Mays. Martin’s colleagues thought he was crazy, but he called Bill Nunn, the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, who said he would contact Mays.
The day before the Giants came to town, Nunn called Martin with one question: “How many kids will be there?”
“A couple hundred,” Martin said.
“Willie will do it.”
Martin was flabbergasted. “Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding, Mr. Martin. Willie just wanted to make sure the event was primarily for kids.”
That Saturday, Martin drove to the Carlton House, where the Giants were staying, and asked for Willie Mays’s room number. He assured the skeptical clerk that he was expected. Martin dialed the number, and a soft, tired voice answered.
“Mr. Mays. This is Dick Martin. I believe Mr. Nunn spoke to you about me and the program tonight?”
“Yeah, man. I’ll be right down,” Mays said.
He had played a game that day, but ten minutes later he walked across the lobby in a sharkskin suit and shook Martin’s hand—he was much bigger than Martin had expected—and Martin felt everyone’s eyes in the lobby. They got into his car and were soon driving to an obscure youth center in an impoverished neighborhood. When they arrived, Martin snuck Mays in through a fire escape in the back of the auditorium and immediately pulled aside the fourteen-year-old master of ceremonies—who almost fainted—and instructed him on how to introduce their guest. When the time came, the youngster walked onstage through drawn curtains and shakily announced: “And now, to present the Most Valuable Junior and Senior Softball Awards, possibly the greatest player of all time, Willie Mays!”
The curtain opened, and Willie walked out. The audience of two hundred, students and parents, sat in stunned silence. Then they realized it really was the Giant star, and they shouted, whistled, and clapped for several minutes.
Mays stepped to the microphone and said it was an honor and pleasure to be there. Then he said, “Some people may think that winning a softball award in some neighborhood youth league is no big thing, but I’m telling you that when you win the most valuable award in anything, you’re doing something.” He then called out the names of the winners, two brothers, William and John Moran, who mounted the stage with beaming smiles and had their photograph taken with Mays.
After his remarks, Martin whisked Mays back down the fire escape, where his sister took their picture, and drove him back to his hotel. Martin was in such shock that he never even asked Mays who had won the game that day.
Martin, who later became a teacher and high school principal in Arlington, Virginia, recalled, “I must have thanked him a dozen times for his exceptional generosity. One of the greatest athletes of all time did this for no money, no publicity, no conditions whatsoever. He did it just because he loved kids, plain and simple. What a selfless gesture, what an amazing human being.”
The event had a tragic postscript. One of the winners, John Moran, was killed several years later in Vietnam. “As sad and tragic as this was to hear,” Martin said, “I am heartened with the knowledge that John’s picture with Willie was undoubtedly a highlight of his short-lived life and a memory which he took with him to the grave.”