“For two years after I retired,” Mays said, “I wouldn’t think about anything but yesterday.”
The present was too disheartening. Mays would wake up in the morning, ready to play ball. Or he would wake up in the middle of the night worrying about the game the next day. But there was no game. His responsibilities with the Mets were poorly defined, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. He had too much passion for baseball to sit idly on the bench as others stumbled through the sport that he had excelled at for so long. His body may have faltered, but his competitive spirit was still blazing. So he would go to Shea, put on his uniform, mill around, talk to some of the players, pretend to be useful, and leave before the game started. The yesterdays were all he had.
His adjustment to corporate America wasn’t any easier. For as long as he could remember, his baseball teams had made decisions for him. They told him when spring training started, when to get on the bus, when to play; they arranged for wake-up calls and paid for his travel, lodging, and meals. Mays was notorious for missing appointments and standing up interviewers. Now these problems worsened. The Mets once sent him to Visalia, California, where they have a farm club, but he didn’t show up at the ballpark on the night advertised. He arrived the next night instead.
When Joan Payson died in 1975, Mays lost his most important ally with the Mets. The general manager, Bob Scheffing, who had been closely involved in the trade for Mays, was replaced by Joe McDonald. A new regime was in place. On Donald Grant’s order, McDonald kept a log on Mays to document when he showed up at Shea and how long he stayed. The record did not reflect well on Mays, and the Mets threatened to terminate his contract. His lawyer intervened. So did Bowie Kuhn. A compromise was reached, and Mays’s duties were spelled out more clearly. He now had to sit through home games for four innings.
• • •
Mays was still with the Mets in 1978, when he was elected to the Hall of Fame, receiving 409 votes out of a possible 432 from the Baseball Writers Association of America. No player has ever been elected unanimously, perhaps because, as Red Smith noted, “unanimity is a word some baseball writers can’t spell.” Nonetheless, the 94.6 percent result for Mays was the highest since 1936, when the first five players were enshrined and the three top players, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Honus Wagner, received at least 95 percent of the vote. (To be elected, a player must be named by 75 percent of the voters.) The one hundred and thirty-seventh player elected to the Hall, Mays was only the ninth to be chosen in his first year of eligibility. He was also the only living player inducted that year, entering with two deceased members, Hack Wilson and Warren Giles. Duke Snider, who finished sixteen votes shy of election, said, “It wouldn’t be normal if you didn’t feel disappointed, [but] Willie really more or less deserves to be in by himself.” Snider was elected in 1980.
Cooperstown is forever described as quaint and picturesque, a community on the shores of Otsego Lake that calls itself a village and stands as a monument to America’s pastoral roots. Everyone, it seems, should be so lucky as to “end up in Cooperstown,” but only baseball’s elite are so privileged.
Mays had long expected to get there, but that did not diminish the thrill. His induction ceremony took place on Sunday, August 5, 1979, a broiler of an afternoon that turned the top of Leo Durocher’s bald head pink. The seventy-four-year-old had lost neither his sartorial panache nor his exuberant rhetoric. “The good Lord put me there when Willie came along,” he said. “I never taught him anything. He taught me.”
Twenty-eight Hall of Famers sat on the warm stage while more than five thousand friends, family, and fans filled out the lawns and terraces. Mays drew “the biggest and most raucous turnout of fans in forty years,” according to Ritter Collett, the longtime sports columnist from Dayton, Ohio. The ceremony began with a moment of silence for deceased Hall of Famers as well as Thurman Munson, who had died three days earlier trying to land his airplane. But the somber mood lifted whenever Bowie Kuhn, in his introduction, mentioned Mays’s name. “Willie!” the fans shouted. Kuhn said he enjoyed embellishing the achievements of inductees, but “Willie Mays needs no embroidery. From 1951 to 1973 he played for the fans.” Then he introduced “a legend named Willie Mays.” The fans stood and yelled, and Kuhn, nearly screaming, butchered his next line: “He never gave the fans a penny of short-change!”
Mays, now forty-eight, strode to the dais amid a rhythmic “Say Hey” chant. The lines on his face showed his age, but he was still taut and muscular in his solid blue suit. “Thank you very much,” he said.
“Thank you very much,” shouted a spectator.
“I’m not excited now,” he said. “But I’ll wake up tomorrow, turn to my wife, and I’ll say, ‘Hey, I’m in the Hall of Fame.’ ”
The crowd roared at Mays’s unintentional echo of his nickname. He beamed as fans yelled, “Willie! Willie!” Someone held up an old newspaper showing photographs of Mays, young and smiling, a New York Giant celebrating the pennant in 1951.
Mays said he didn’t have any notes. “I was laying in bed last night and thinking how they wanted me to write this out,” he said. “How could I write it out? How can you put what I feel on paper?” He spoke for nearly thirty minutes, a rambling biography of fact and folklore that described what it was like “coming out of Birmingham and knowing nothing.”
His youth, he said, was about the making of an athlete. “My uncle told me when I was ten, ‘Boy, you have to be a ballplayer.’ And my high school principal told me, ‘We will put you out of school if you don’t play sports.’ And when I was in with the Black Barons as a kid, we had twenty-five guys on the club, and all twenty-five would put me to bed every night. I didn’t get to meet many girls that way, but I got plenty of sleep. When I got to the minor leagues in 1950, I played for Trenton, and I was the only black guy in the Interstate League. When we went to Hagerstown in Maryland on a Friday, they were calling me every name they could think of. But by Sunday they were cheering me.”
Mays talked about his years in New York and looked at Durocher when he said, “He brought out all I had in me.” He acknowledged his struggles in San Francisco: “It took them about five years to get used to me there. They had another center fielder. His name was Joe DiMaggio.” He thanked his owner. “Horace Stoneham was my backbone, and one of the only things about my career I’m sorry about was leaving him. When he told me he was sending me back home, that made it a little easier. There was only one place I wanted to go—New York City.” He was contrite about his tenure with the Mets. “I couldn’t play those last two years. The power was gone out of my arm. The last two years—they were a gift. Almost as if Mrs. Payson and baseball were saying, ‘You gave us eighteen years, we’re going to give you two.’ ” He was candid about his messy finances: “I was never good about handling money. I just got it and spent it. I never worried much about it. Mr. Stoneham helped me when I needed help.” And he was confessional: “I give you one word—love. It means dedication. You have to sacrifice many things to play baseball. I sacrificed a bad marriage and I sacrificed a good marriage. But I’m here today because baseball is my number one love.”
Toward the end, Mays showed that some wounds remained. “I am deeply upset the San Francisco Giants didn’t send me a uniform to give you,” he said. “After eighteen years, they didn’t see fit. The people in the front office just don’t realize I gave my life to baseball. I say this to you not with hate. Forgiveness is everywhere.”
He then stood with Kuhn holding up a New York Mets uniform to present to the Hall. Mays’s comment, it turned out, was in error. The Hall confirmed that it had received a uniform from the Giants; Mays simply didn’t know. But the remark created a sour headline for the day.
A far worse breach was about to divide Mays and Major League Baseball.
It began when Mays received a call from Al Rosen, the former Cleveland Indian who was on first base when he made the Catch. Rosen had recently left his job as president of the New York Yankees to be an executive vice president at Bally’s International, the hotel casino operator. Rosen’s boss, Billy Weinberger, had previously hired Joe Louis to be a “greeter” at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Bally’s was now opening its Park Place Hotel in Atlantic City, and Weinberger asked Rosen to recommend another sports figure who could fill that role. Rosen suggested Mays.
Just as Joe Louis had attracted high rollers to Caesars, Mays could do even more for Bally’s. His celebrity was equal if not greater than Louis’s, and he was in better health, which would allow him to play golf with patrons. Bally’s offered Mays a ten-year contract for $100,000 a year.
Mays was still working for the Mets, and when Rosen notified Kuhn of Mays’s job offer, Kuhn sent Mays a telegram telling him that if he accepted the job, he could no longer be employed by the Mets or any other Major League Baseball team. Mays was devastated. He had always assumed he’d work in some capacity in baseball, be it coaching younger players or simply serving as an ambassador for the game. But Bally’s would pay him twice as much as the Mets. Which job should he choose?
“Willie faced this trauma two other times in his life,” Mae told the New York Times on the day he made his announcement. “First when he was traded, and then when he retired. We sat around our apartment in Riverdale last night with Willie’s lawyer and accountant, using them as a sounding board. Then Willie had a massage and we were in bed by midnight, but sleep did not come easily.”
Mays met with Kuhn one more time and pleaded that he be allowed to work both jobs, but the commissioner wouldn’t bend.
Mays accepted the job with Bally’s, and on October 29, 1979, his contract with the Mets was terminated. Kuhn, offering few specifics, said, “It has long been my view that such associations by people in our game are inconsistent with its best interests.”
Baseball had long been haunted by the Black Sox scandal of 1919, in which gamblers paid players to throw the World Series. Worried about baseball’s image, Kuhn didn’t want anyone associated with the game involved with gambling. He fancied himself the heir to Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the game’s first commissioner, who was responsible for cleaning up baseball after the scandal. Kuhn, as described by Red Smith, was “the game’s upright scoutmaster,” and perception was everything.
The reality was that Mays could in no way affect the outcome of a Major League Baseball game while schmoozing with patrons of a New Jersey casino. He wasn’t working for a bookie. The casino had nothing to do with sports betting. All activities in the casino were legal, and under state law, Mays wasn’t even permitted to gamble there. Part of his job involved going to schools, where he would urge kids not to smoke or drink. He also told them not to gamble.
Kuhn’s decision reeked of hypocrisy. He owed his job to the major league owners and had worked for years as a National League lawyer protecting their cartel. He allowed several owners, including George Steinbrenner and the Galbreath family (which owned the Pirates), to have racehorses. Mays himself had worked in promotions for Suffolk Downs, a racetrack in Boston. That drew no objections. Somehow, blackjack was corrupt; Thoroughbreds were pure.
What made Kuhn’s move so galling was that Mays himself had been such an exemplar. The New York Post ’s Maury Allen wrote: “I know of a hundred ballplayers who have smoked marijuana. I know at least half a dozen who have snorted cocaine. I know of fifty who probably could be medically certified as alcoholics. I know of several hundred who have chased women, gambled excessively on horses, and given less than their best on the field on many days of their career. Willie Mays is not among them.” If Kuhn cared about the game’s image, Allen wrote, he should focus on those problems.
At a press conference, Mays could not conceal his pain. “I think anybody regrets it when his name is dragged through something like this,” he said. “But what skills do I have outside of baseball? Only public relations, dealing with people.... Baseball has been good to me, but I’ve been good to baseball. You ask me if I’m upset and unhappy, I will say yes. I’m not going to challenge Bowie Kuhn. That’s challenging baseball. I’m not here for that. ... Baseball’s my life. I love the game. But I have to protect my family.”
When Mickey Mantle took a similar job at the Claridge Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City in 1983, it cost him his job as a Yankee batting coach. “I wasn’t much of a batting coach anyway,” Mantle said. “I could only teach ’em how to strike out.” Together as rookies in 1951, Mays and Mantle were again united as banished legends.
Working at Bally’s was the hardest thing Mays had ever done. Maybe because baseball had come so easily to him, any full-time job was going to be a struggle. The rhythm and responsibilities of corporate America were alien to him. He had little sense of deadlines, calendars, or even time itself. If a meeting was supposed to start at 11 A.M., that meant, well, he was supposed to be there at 11 A.M. “When you’re the star of a ball club,” he later said, “when you go to the park you do nothing. You’re just there to play. Everything is done for you. But in the business world, it’s different. You have to do things yourself, and I wasn’t aware of that. But my new bosses at Bally’s explained to me that they had to answer to other people, and I had to answer to them.”
Most professional athletes struggle when they leave their protected bubble, but Mays’s stumbles were magnified. The Giants, for example, finally wanted to have a Willie Mays Day in 1979 to formally retire his number. But Mays said he would participate only if he received money, which would be used for his Say Hey Foundation. Mays now understood—baseball’s a business. If he’s going to put tens of thousands of people into the stands, why shouldn’t he receive something as well? The Giants withdrew the offer. Not until 1983 did Mays have such a day, though he got what he wanted—contributions to his foundation.
Old-timers’ games were another minefield. Mays was allowed to play in them, and he took them seriously. Jackie Brandt recalls that when he and Mays were playing in the outfield at Seals Stadium in the late 1950s, he raced in front of Mays to catch a sinking line drive, and Mays yelled, “Jackie! There’s twenty-two thousand people who came here to watch me catch that ball!” Some twenty years later, both men were in the outfield at Candlestick for an old-timers’ game. The first batter hit a fly ball twenty feet from Brandt. Mays dashed across the field but couldn’t reach it. Neither could Brandt, who was limping with a strained muscle in his leg. The ball fell for a hit.
“Goddammit, Jackie!” Mays yelled. “You gotta catch it!”
Brandt just looked at him. “There’s fifty-five thousand people here,” he said, “and they came to watch you catch that ball.”
Mays’s pride could get the better of him. In 1983, he agreed to play in an old-timers’ game at RFK Stadium in Washington. He flew in from San Francisco and warmed up before the game, but was then told he wouldn’t start. “When they didn’t put him in the starting lineup, he was really hurt,” Monte Irvin told reporters. “Then they told him he would pinch-run. He just said he wouldn’t do that. He didn’t want to be hurt twice. He just went inside and showered and flew home.”
“I really felt for him,” Richie Ashburn said. “He came to play. That’s Willie. He couldn’t believe he wasn’t starting.”
The five-inning game ended with the crowd chanting, “We want Willie,” who by then was on the last flight west.
Mays was implicated in a more serious matter in September 1985, during a federal trial of a Philadelphia man who was accused of selling cocaine to big league ballplayers. Retired player John Milner testified that he had used amphetamines when he played for the Mets in the early 1970s. He said the drug, an illegal stimulant, was so pervasive that when he went into the clubhouse, he often found the pills, or “greenies,” waiting for him in his locker. He also said that Mays had “red juice” in his locker. This was, he said, a liquid form of the drug. Mays didn’t give it to him, he testified, “but I went to his locker and got it.” Milner said he didn’t like the red juice and didn’t try it again. He also said he never saw Mays drink it or hand it out.
Milner’s charges created instant headlines and overwhelmed the details of the rest of the trial, the outcome of which has long been forgotten. Jim Bouton’s Ball Four had already exposed Major League Baseball’s widespread use of amphetamines, but Mays’s alleged involvement raised the problem to another level. Mays denied the charges. He said he had received the liquid from his doctor in San Francisco, John Jackson, who appeared on The CBS Evening News to say the solution was a prescription drug called Phenergan VC, a cough syrup. He said he prescribed it for Mays’s ongoing sinus problems and colds.
Mays was angry and hurt by the allegation. “Why am I going on trial for what [Milner] thinks he saw in my locker?” he said at the time. “If you’re going to bring me into this, that’s un-American.”
Asked now about his use of amphetamines or any illegal drugs, Mays says, “I really didn’t need anything.... My problem was if I could stay on the field. I would go to the doctor and would say to the doctor, ‘Hey, I need something to keep me going. Could you give me some sort of vitamin?’ I don’t know what they put in there, and I never asked a question about anything.”
For years, Milner’s testimony was a footnote in Mays’s career. Amphetamines had been widely used in the major leagues since the late 1940s, and other athletes have confirmed Bouton’s description of the players’ easy access to them. Darryl Strawberry said that nine out of ten players were taking amphetamines when he joined the Mets in 1983, and Jerry Remy, who played from 1975 to 1984, says, “We all took amphetamines, for chrissake. You almost have to, to make it through a season like that. But that was no big deal. Everybody knew it.”
The Steroid Era, however, has again focused attention on amphetamines and, by extension, has put Willie Mays in the center of the controversy. Those who defend the players’ use of anabolic steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs draw a moral equivalence with amphetamines. They say each generation of players uses whatever drugs are available, so if amphetamines have not cost any other player his Hall of Fame standing—and Willie Mays, as the most famous player who supposedly took amphetamines, is cited—then the juicers of today should not be punished or stigmatized.
It would be naive to think Mays never took amphetamines. Hank Aaron said he took one, didn’t like it, and stopped. But citing amphetamines as a defense for steroids equates two very different drugs. Steroids, among other things, build muscle mass and enhance performance—clearly evidenced by the surge in home runs at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. Amphetamines restore energy and allow someone to perform at full strength. The medical experts debate to what extent, if at all, the drug increases one’s natural ability, but the drug itself did not change the character of the game and certainly did not distort the record books. (In 2006, Major League Baseball banned amphetamines, and began testing for them, as part of a sweeping new policy against performance-enhancing drugs.)
Mays, of course, laments that his name is connected to any drug, past or present. He would never embarrass baseball knowingly or jeopardize his standing with children. “I’ve tried for years and years to be a hero to the kids of America,” he said after Milner made his charges. “I hope the people won’t take that one statement and crucify me.”
Mays got the hang of his job at Bally’s when he realized it was similar to playing center field. He was still a performer, but now he entertained by signing autographs, attending brunches, hitting golf balls, signing more autographs, going to dinners, and chatting about old times. Patrons would recall a game in, say, Philadelphia in 1955 or Chicago in 1966, and Mays would need only a couple of clues—the month of the game, the starting pitcher—and he could remember how many hits he got, the final score, and who made the error in the sixth inning that allowed the tying run to score. The same photogenic memory that he once used to scout opposing players now regaled gamblers and golfers. It was all in the performance. “I didn’t like it when I started,” he said in 1991. “I like it now because I know what I’m there for. I’m in the business world. I don’t like to play golf, rush home, change clothes, go to a party. Because your mind is so run down, but you got to keep smiling all the time. Because if you don’t smile, someone is going to say, ‘Hey, what kind of guy is this?’ You’re onstage all the time in the corporate world.”
But Mays’s exile from baseball gnawed at him. One day in 1981, he was waiting for a flight at JFK airport in New York when a young man walked up and introduced himself. He said he was Larry Baer and he worked in marketing for the Giants. Baer had idolized Mays as a youth, and they struck up a conversation. They were both flying to San Francisco, and Mays told the flight attendant that he wanted Baer to sit with him in first class.
In the aftermath of the aborted “Willie Mays Day,” some members in the Giants organization viewed Mays as a malcontent who wanted nothing to do with the team. So Baer was surprised when he said, “It’s killing me not being associated with the Giants or baseball. It’s killing me.”
Baer said that the following week, the Giants were having a holiday party at Candlestick for low-income kids from Hunters Point, and Baer invited him to attend.
“I’ll be there,” Mays said.
“Really?”
“I’ll be there,” he insisted.
When Baer told his colleagues what had happened, no one believed him. But at 4 P.M. on the day of the party, Baer recalls, “Sure enough, Willie Mays walks in. We had current players there, but they were chopped liver. It was amazing.”
In October 1984, Bowie Kuhn was replaced by Peter Ueberroth, fresh off his triumph as the maestro of the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Public relations was among his many skills, and what single move could improve baseball’s image more than reinstating two of the most popular players of all time. WELCOME HOME! cried Sports Illustrated ’s cover for March 25, 1985. Ueberroth stood behind Mays and Mantle, all three beaming. At a press conference, the new commissioner assured everyone that “we are going to look for stronger, more clarified guidelines to keep gambling and baseball apart” and that Mays and Mantle “are exceptions to the current guidelines. I am bringing back two players who are more a part of baseball than perhaps anyone else.”
Mays said, “This is a happy occasion for Mickey and me, to have that word ‘ban’ lifted. I don’t think I did anything wrong to leave baseball.... I’m pleased I can keep my job and earn a living. Baseball made me.”
The following year, Mays was back where he began, a “special assistant to the president and general manager” of the San Francisco Giants. He was hired by the man who had engineered his employment at Bally’s, Al Rosen, who had left that company shortly after Mays had joined, returned to baseball, and had just been hired by the Giants. At the press conference, Mays said, “My wife knew that every day when I got up, I wanted to be part of a team. I left [March] open when I went to Atlantic City because I thought I’d be back in baseball someday.”
Mays now had responsibilities with both the Giants and Bally’s while also participating in the growing memorabilia and trade show market. As a player, he blithely gave away historic balls, gloves, equipment, and awards, but he had an epiphany in the 1980s when he gave one of his Gold Gloves to someone who said he was a museum curator, only to discover that he then sold it for $64,000. Whatever Mays endorsed or scribbled on, it seemed, had value. In the early 1990s, he was at a barbecue restaurant in Phoenix, and he doodled on a paper tablecloth. After he returned to his hotel, he was in the lobby when a young man entered waving the very same tablecloth. It was stained and dirty, but he announced that it had Willie Mays’s doodles and the manager had sold it to him for $100. The awards that Mays had long since given away or somehow lost kept appreciating in value. The person who had his 1954 Silver Slugger trophy (for winning the batting title) auctioned it off in 2003 for $120,096.
Mickey Mantle’s memorabilia was priced even higher; one of his old jerseys sold for $54,000. Both men received far more money signing their names than they had ever received playing baseball. If others were going to cash in on their names, why shouldn’t they get a cut?
The value in the Mays and Mantle brands was evident in 1981, when their first names, along with Snider’s, were the title of Terry Cashman’s nostalgic ode to baseball’s golden era, “Willie, Mickey and the Duke”:
They knew them all from Boston to Dubuque,
Especially Willie, Mickey and the Duke.
Mays has now hoarded a massive trove of awards, photographs, gloves, jerseys, trading cards, fan mail, and other memorabilia, which will be part of his estate. He even has one of Joe DiMaggio’s jock straps, inscribed with the number 5, given to him by Whitey Ford at an All-Star Game. What Joltin’ Joe’s undergarment is worth is anyone’s guess, but Mays assumes it’s appreciated in value.
• • •
The demands of his various jobs ensured Mays a chaotic lifestyle but matched his restless spirit. In 1987, Giants publicist Duffy Jennings described the challenge of corralling the fifty-six-year-old Mays for a game to celebrate the twenty-five-year anniversary of the 1962 pennant: “He’s constantly on the road. My file on him for this game has phone numbers in New York, Atlantic City, Birmingham, Palm Springs, Scottsdale, St. Petersburg, and Atlanta. I’m always a day behind him. He’s always on a plane to somewhere. The man has twenty telephones and fifteen cars and they’re always in motion. It’s an amazing process to watch.”
Duffy did not exaggerate. Mays had four houses as well. When Duffy was asked what Mays did for the Giants, he said, “It would be real hard to write a job description for special assistant to the president and general manager, which is Willie’s formal title. His real-life title is Willie Mays.”
On bad days, he could be abrupt at signings, and during other personal appearances, and over the years, he squandered business opportunities by being unpredictable and prickly. He shunned most interview requests and, for those reporters who did break through, made little effort to win their affection. On a public stage for much of his life, he had neither the interest nor the need to give even more of himself. In doing so, he also created an emotional firewall that kept outsiders at bay and his fans bewildered.
But Mays’s firewall is also his protection, for even the most innocent requests can be deceptive. Consider an incident described by Rick Zeller, an executive who worked with Mays at Bally’s. In the early 1980s, they were to meet for a golf tournament at a country club in New Jersey. Zeller was standing outside the clubhouse when Mays drove up, got out of his Cadillac, and walked toward him. Two other men were standing near Zeller, and one said to the other, “Who’s going to tell this nigger that deliveries go in the back?”
When Mays reached Zeller, they greeted each other warmly and chatted briefly. Then Mays left to park his car.
One of the men hurried up to Zeller and asked, “Who was that?”
“That’s Willie Mays,” Zeller said.
The two men bolted after Mays and asked him for his autograph; Mays obliged.
Later that day, Zeller told Mays what had happened, and Mays was more upset by the hypocrisy than the racism.
Mays himself, while confirming the anecdote, would never discuss such an experience. Even long after his playing days have ended—and even when he has been the victim—he does not want to trigger a contentious headline and does not want to appear as if he’s been hurt. He will speak in general about how much he’s endured, but he keeps the details, no matter how fresh or raw, inside. He has followed that course his entire life, and it served its purpose by averting any controversy that could derail his career.
But outsiders always ask, Why doesn’t Willie Mays trust people?
The answer is: for good reason.
“He started out with pretty normal skin,” Herman Boykin says, “but the skin toughened up.”
Or, as Mays says, “You have to assume that everyone wants something from me because of who I am.” It is why there are only three groups that he trusts: baseball players, children, and household pets. None will ever betray him.
Mays also never truly reconciled his own celebrity, which he discussed in 1991 when he was asked about his very public life.
“Well, it’s good and bad,” he said. “It’s good when you go places and they recognize you and you can get most anything, and get the things you need in a hurry. Then sometimes it’s bad, when you want to be by yourself and you can’t. Because you’re in a world where people love you so much and they just want to be part of you. I’m part of the people. Very few of us can say that. The world owns you. The way I try to get away with it is, I don’t go out that much.”
Asked if he had had more joy than sadness in his life, Mays paused. “I would have to say yes, overall,” he said. “Because how many guys can say they played baseball starting at age fourteen and played until forty-three? Now in between you’re always going to have some sadness.” Then Mays, almost sixty years old at the time, affirmed how deeply baseball was carved into his soul.
“You go into a slump,” he said, “and that’s the worst sadness I’ve ever come across.”
The Giants maintained a tenuous foothold in San Francisco. Stoneham sold the team to Labatt Breweries in Toronto, which planned to move the club to Canada. But San Francisco’s mayor, George Moscone, blocked the sale with a temporary injunction, and the real estate mogul Bob Lurie led a group of investors to acquire the team. But the Giants continued to struggle financially, and voters rejected various initiatives to provide public money for a new stadium. In 1992, Lurie announced that he had agreed to sell the club to investors who were going to move it to Florida, but the sale was delayed until an investment group from San Francisco, led by Peter Magowan, the CEO of the Safeway Corporation, could buy it.
The new owners’ first order of business was the courting of Barry Bonds, who had won his second MVP award in Pittsburgh and was now a free agent. By then, Mays’s involvement with the team had been on the wane, but Magowan asked him to be part of the initial meeting with Bonds. At Bonds’s first press conference as a Giant, he said, “This is the greatest moment of my entire life. Every time I step on that field, I know my godfather’s in center field and my dad’s in right field.” He requested number 24 but was told that was not possible, so he settled for his father’s old number, 25.
At the time, the Giants’ star was the fiery Will Clark, and the owners were concerned he wouldn’t get along with the temperamental Bonds. Mays intervened. According to Larry Baer, who was part of the new ownership: “Willie said, ‘I got the answer for you. I’m going to put my locker in the clubhouse right between Barry and Will. There will be no problem.’ ”
Meanwhile, during spring training of 1993, Mays signed a lifetime contract with the Giants, and he played a role in helping build public support for a new downtown stadium (though what mattered more to voters was that it was privately financed). Pac Bell Park opened in 2000. Its name was changed to SBC Park, then to AT&T Park. What hasn’t changed is the magnificent nine-foot bronze statue of Mays, shown after he has taken a mighty swing, or the twenty-four palm trees behind it, or the stadium address, 24 Willie Mays Plaza. Mays has a private box, where old teammates like Johnny Antonelli and Ray Sadecki will stop by, see how he’s doing, still looking out for him. Mays attends spring training games, hobnobs with the club’s investors, visits farm teams, and performs ceremonial functions. But he is happiest in the clubhouse before a game, razzing the players and maintaining ties with equipment managers like Mike Murphy, who has known Willie since 1958 and is moved to tears when he talks about him. Willie likes to say of “Murph”: “I raised him.”
The generational divide between Mays and the younger players is significant—the music, the BlackBerries, the tattoos—but he has always judged players by their contributions to the team. He is old-fashioned but not closed-minded. Asked if Major League Baseball is ready for an openly gay player, Mays asks, “Can he hit?”
For a number of years, Mays’s most visible position with the Giants was as Barry Bonds’s patron.
Bonds had been a divisive figure since entering the majors, winning acclaim for his superior talents while alienating the fans, the media, and his teammates by his truculence and egotism. None of those attributes changed in San Francisco. What did change was that he was now under the eye of both his father, who had been hired as the Giants’ first base coach, and his godfather. Barry Bonds, at twenty-eight, had already distinguished himself as the rightful heir to Mays, having surpassed thirty homers and thirty stolen bases twice in one season. He had collected three Gold Gloves as well. But Mays pushed Bonds for more.
“He would always give me his blessing, but he did not allow me to get satisfied,” Bonds says. “ ‘Boy,’ is his favorite word—he still calls me that—and he would come to my locker and say, ‘Boy, what the hell is wrong with you? Don’t get happy because you hit two home runs. That second swing, you got lucky.’ And I’d think, Can’t you show me some love?” At other times, Mays would tell Bonds, “I have the vision of what you should do. I just can’t do it anymore.”
Bonds’s first year in San Francisco was his best to date (.336, 46 homers, 123 RBIs), as he flourished before the two people who meant the most to him. “For me to satisfy my father and my godfather was more important than anything in baseball,” he says. When his father died from lung cancer on August 23, 2003, at fifty-seven, Mays filled the void. He told Barry, for example, that he should not take too much time off. “I want him back on the field,” he told a reporter. “He needs that. I don’t want him to be lonely. I want him to be positive again. We know how sad he is. He needs to get back on the field and take it out on baseball.”
Bonds could be churlish with reporters, fans, batboys, even teammates, but not with Mays. Giant broadcaster Jon Miller recalls one time when Mays was sitting in Mike Murphy’s office before a game. “Barry came in, and they exchanged a few insults, had a few laughs,” Miller says. “I never saw Barry as relaxed and impish as when he was around Willie.”
It was a rapport born of respect. “I recall when Bonds was at five hundred home runs,” Miller says, “and I asked if he was interested in Babe Ruth. Willie was right there. And Barry said, ‘I’m really only interested in Willie’s record. That’s the only one I’m interested in, no disrespect to the Babe.’ And Willie said, ‘You better not be taking any days off, man. You better get busy.’ ”
Bonds entered the 2004 season one home run behind his godfather. In 2002, Mays had participated in a leg of the Olympic torch run and still had his torch, so he took it to a jeweler and inscribed it with diamonds: “660” and “661.” Mays wanted to be at home plate when Bonds hit 660, so he traveled with the Giants as they opened with two road series. Bonds remained stuck on 659, but in the season opener in San Francisco, he pounded number 660 into McCovey Cove, and Mays gave him his sparkling torch at home plate.
Mays told reporters afterward, “I think it’s appropriate that he did it in a Giants uniform. That’s what I really wanted.” Said Bonds, “I just feel right now I completed our family circle.” Mays was not on the field, or visible to cameras, when Bonds passed him with number 661.
Bonds didn’t follow all of Mays’s advice. Mays recoiled at any headline that was not related to baseball, whereas Bonds seemed to court them. According to Miller, Mays encouraged Bonds to be less hostile to reporters.
“Be nice to those guys,” Mays would say. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m only happy if they don’t like me,” Bonds would explain.
“Well, give it a try.” The pleas usually went for naught.
Bonds’s triumphs on the field ultimately put Mays in an uncomfortable position. Bonds hit seventy-three homers in 2001 for the single-season record, then in 2007 he pursued Hank Aaron’s all-time mark of 755. By then, he had testified to a grand jury that he had mistakenly used a steroid that had been given to him by his trainer. The congressional hearings investigating steroids stirred public outrage against a sport that seemed in permanent denial. Bonds was still loved in San Francisco, but he was vilified across the country as the juicer who held some of the game’s most treasured records. While Aaron vacillated in his support of Bonds, Mays stood by his godson, literally and figuratively, as he was once again on the field to congratulate Bonds when he hit number 756.
In interviews, Mays was asked about steroids in general and in connection to Bonds, but there was no satisfactory answer. He could no more criticize another baseball player, let alone his godson, than he could repudiate a member of his own family. “I’ve always told Barry, ‘Whatever you do, whether right or wrong, I’m here for you,’ ” he says.
But Mays’s refusal to condemn those who would cheat the game was also disappointing. If Willie Mays won’t defend baseball, who will?
Mays’s tactic was to avoid interviews.
Bonds, who hasn’t played baseball since 2007, is currently defending himself against federal perjury charges in connection with grand jury testimony from 2003. Asked if Mays has helped him “through his controversies,” Bonds says, “If not for my father or for Willie, I wouldn’t have been as strong as I was. Willie keeps me going because Willie keeps going.”
Cat Mays had lived in California since 1958. He occasionally went to Candlestick and followed the rest of the games on radio or television. He had access to every modern technology but could never really shed his country roots, sometimes to his son’s dismay. He would, for example, keep his surplus cash in the ice tray of his freezer. Willie asked him why.
“If I get robbed, they won’t think to look there,” he said.
“Okay, man, you do what you gotta do.”
Cat’s relationship with Willie remained one of unspoken love and immense pride—he was in the audience at his son’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony—and just as the father once cared for and protected his son, the reverse would soon be true. In the 1960s, the Chrysler Corporation gave Willie a new car each year, and Willie would give it to his father until Cat’s impaired vision prevented him from driving.
Cat developed glaucoma and moved to a nursing home in Atherton, near Willie. He remained physically fit and always looked sharp. Willie bought him the best clothes, and Cat’s lady friends would arrange them on hangars so the outfits matched. Even when Cat became legally blind, he could make his way around his room and even prepare his own food (again, to Willie’s dismay). Long after his son had retired, Cat enjoyed listening to the ball games on the radio.
In the late 1990s, Cat developed blood clots on his lung and had cardiac issues, and he was hospitalized several times in Redwood City. “When Willie would come to visit,” Dr. Edward Anderson says, “he was the adoring son. Sometimes it was the unspoken word. Just touching him, grabbing his hand. ‘How thing’s going, Dad. How was your day. You look better. You look stronger.’ He was just engaging him. And he wanted to make sure that all the people who were taking care of him knew that Mr. Mays Sr. was someone who deserved the utmost care and respect. He was not just an older blind gentleman.... He wanted skin care, nutrition, everything. Things that sometimes are neglected for an older African American in the hospital.”
Cat died on August 27, 1999, at the age of eighty-eight. The funeral program featured a photograph of Cat, in his fifties, wearing an overcoat, a tie, and a fedora, with alert eyes and a smooth face. Willie wrote the eulogy, which reflected his love for the man who had made his life possible. But one line spoke volumes about his own life. He said of Cat:
“He and his son defied the odds.”
Mae and Willie never had children of their own, though their house was often a refuge for family members. Mae was dealt a blow in 1997 when she was diagnosed with a form of dementia, which was later confirmed as Alzheimer’s. Mae was only fifty-nine, at a young age to develop the disease, and she was a young fifty-nine—still trim and vivacious and beautiful. Willie eventually found help at the Institute on Aging, which sends caregivers to their home each day. Rene Anderson, Willie’s personal assistant, and their friends help out as well. The progressive nature of the disease has inevitably diminished Mae’s strength and her memory, but with help she stays active, jogging down the halls of the house and using the treadmill. Willie instructs her aides to brush Mae’s hair in the morning, apply lipstick, and paint her nails, and Willie holds her elbow and walks with her around their grounds and talks to her in a soft, sweet voice.
“Every time he sees Mae, it’s as though he’s just seen her for the first time,” Anderson says. “He wants to know her plan for the day, and her face brightens up. Sometimes she responds the right way, sometimes not. But Willie expects her to have a good day, and when he’s gone, sometimes she’ll ask about him.”
Willie says he is doing for Mae what he tried to do for his father. “I try to do whatever I can,” he says, “because it’s hard to see her walk around and not be able to understand what we’re talking about. But Rene says sometimes she can understand more than you think she understands. So I just do what I have to do and make sure that she’s okay, and hope that I don’t have to put her in a home or anything like that. As long as I’m around, I don’t think that will happen.”
Mae sleeps in a special hospital bed in her own room, but Willie listens for her. “I find myself getting up at four or five in the morning, going there, and making sure she’s okay.... But it’s difficult sometimes.”
Before bedtime, Mae will watch a ball game on television, sitting in the dark, her eyes focusing and then fading, as if searching for a familiar figure. The game continues, and it’s easy to believe that Mae is looking for Willie to come to the plate, bat in hand, eager to take his licks.
Willie himself was diagnosed with glaucoma in the 1990s and by 2005 had to stop driving his cars and playing golf. He still travels extensively, typically with Anderson and sometimes a friend, and he still uses a rubber band like a money clip for his thick roll of cash. Cash, he learned long ago, is the currency of respect. Willie uses it to shop (badgering the sales staff for lower prices on televisions, clothes, gifts for Mae, whatever) and to tip. He also uses it for those in need. When a friend of his died, he attended the funeral long enough to give the widow an envelope with $5,000 in cash.
Computers fascinate him. While he has difficulty reading small keyboards, he can download music, watch baseball videos, and check stats. Shopping satisfies his competitive spirit. If a friend has bought a new television, he’ll try to buy the same one for less money. A common ploy: he’ll tell the salesperson that he plans on buying two televisions and he expects a discount. When he receives it, he says he’s changed his mind and wants only one—at the discounted price.
Whether in one of his homes or in a hotel suite, he is a loner who does not like to be alone. He prefers to be surrounded by friends who will tell their stories, laugh, and carry on. Willie will chip in his own light stories, his voice rising for comedic effect; sometimes he’ll stand up and hop around to re-create a particular play. But he’s also content to sit back and relax. In the 1990s, President Clinton invited him to spend a night at the White House. He declined, believing the bed and the television were too small. But one suspects he prefers familiar hotel suites, surrounded by familiar faces, to the august ambiance of the White House.
His friends bristle at the caricature of him as “a bitter old man.” Mays is quite aware of the trajectory of his life, from a poor Depression-era black kid in the Deep South to someone who can go anywhere in America and be treated like royalty. “I could not have dreamt,” he says, “the life that I’ve lived.”
Like many older African Americans, he also could not have dreamed that he would see a black man in the White House. Mays met Barack Obama in 2006, before Obama had declared his candidacy for president. Once his campaign for the White House began, he found several ways to mention Mays in his stump speeches. When a news report suggested that Obama was a distant cousin of Dick Cheney’s, he quipped, “Why couldn’t I have been related to someone cool, like Willie Mays.”
Mays had never followed presidential politics, but he closely tracked the 2008 race on television and stayed up until 5 A.M. watching the returns, and he wept when the results were clear. When he woke up, he told Anderson to send an e-mail to Obama:
Dear Mr. President,
Move on in.
Your Friend,
Willie Mays
One of Mays’s few remaining personal goals was to fly on Air Force One, a message relayed to the president by a mutual friend. When Obama flew to St. Louis for the 2009 All-Star Game, he invited Mays to join him on his plane and to be his guest at the game. Asked afterward what his next goal was, Mays said, “Bowling in the White House.”
What is most striking about Mays, in the twilight of his life, is the consistency of his values. When he had his hip replaced in 2004, for example, he was met at the curb by Judy Kaufman, the director of special patient services at Stanford Hospital and Clinics. She picked up one of the suitcases. It was so heavy she nearly dropped it.
“What’s in here?” she asked.
“Baseballs,” he said.
If Mays never mastered the language of affection and gratitude, baseballs gave him a vocabulary for his most vital emotions. A baseball, to Mays, retains a pureness and beauty that transcends any commercial value, and his signature is its gold-plated imprimatur. So he took a whole suitcase of them to the hospital, where he distributed them to surgeons, nurses, technicians, cooks, administrators—anyone involved in his care. Once he was back home, Mays decided to give signed balls to the kids at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. He insisted that he see the sickest children, such as those with cancer or organ recipients. When Kaufman suggested that he sign the balls ahead of time, Mays said no. He wanted the children to see him sign them so they knew the signatures weren’t fake.
Mays, of course, has been visiting kids his whole adult life, but the atmospherics are entirely different. He is now an old man with a paunch, a hearing aid, and eyeglasses teetering on his forehead, a complete stranger to these youngsters. But it doesn’t matter. Mays sits in the tiny chairs in the arts and crafts room or sidles up next to the beds, and he asks the children, some connected to tubes and wires for life support, how they’re feeling. He tells them to stay strong, and he says nothing about himself unless he is asked. Parents madly snap pictures with their cell phones. The children know that this is a special moment and that the baseball he hands over is a possession to be cherished.
Mays has now visited this hospital each Christmas since his surgery. One time a mother asked him to sign a ball, and he barked, “Who are you? This is for the kids.” She said it was for her son, and Willie signed it. Another time, he saw the sibling of a patient and gave him a ball and a hat. “You need this too,” he said.
Dr. Philip Pizzo, the dean of Stanford’s medical school, believes that these visits are connected to the image Mays has of himself as a child. “I think in these kids,” he says, “Willie sees the helplessness, the deprivation, the inability to do what he could do when he was young—to use his body to overcome adversity.” He notes that Mays has to walk great distances through the hospital, that sometimes it’s hard, but he does it with the stoic determination of an athlete. “It’s not that easy for him, but to connect with someone who is more helpless touches something in his own heart.... He just wants to make people feel good. That’s his gift.”
Even as a septuagenarian, Mays defines himself by the player he once was. The license plates on his idle cars display some variation of “WM24” or “SayHey.” His telephone numbers end in “2424.” He was once riding in an elevator with a teenager who was wearing a basketball shirt with the number 24. Right there, Mays traded his baseball cap for the shirt.
Mays had no biological children, and Michael, who lives in New York, has no children of his own. Asked if he regrets not having grandchildren, Mays says, “Not really. It happens if it happens. You can’t make that happen.” Then he switches to his own bloodlines. “I don’t even know if my sperms are there to have kids. I never checked, never thought anything like that.... I guess that’s why we adopted.”
Mays admits to few sadnesses, and won’t here, but the void is apparent. When he says, “If it had happened, it would have been my pleasure to take care of him,” it’s unclear if he’s referring to a biological child or a grandchild, but the meaning is the same.
From his youth and throughout his adult life, Mays has had dogs—a police dog named Star was his favorite—and in the 1990s he adopted a white miniature poodle and named him Giant. When Giant was a puppy, Mays would stuff him in his coat pocket and take him to the ball game. He would wipe off Giant’s wet feet when he came in from outside and would tell others, “This is Giant’s house. He allows you to live here as long as you feed him.” Indeed, when Giant barked, Willie got him a biscuit.
When Giant was fourteen, he developed cancer of the liver or kidney. Some in the house thought he should be put down, but Willie wanted to keep him alive, so he was given an operation and chemotherapy. He soldiered on for a few more months but then got sick, developed breathing problems, and had to be taken back in. The vet said Giant could no longer be treated, so Willie held the poodle, stroking his belly, as the vet prepared to stick in the catheter.
“You’re okay, Giant,” Willie told him softly. “You’re a good boy and I’m so proud of you. I’ve got you. Don’t be scared.” The vet plunged in the needle. Giant gasped, and it was over. Willie had to leave the room before answering: cremation or burial? He later said, “I could feel the life leave his body.”
He’s adopted another white poodle, Giant Too, and is impressed by his ability to flip the top of the candy jar to get the chewing gum.
“All of these poodles,” Mays says, “are very smart people.”
In the movie Manhattan, Woody Allen said Willie Mays was one of the things that made life worth living, right after Groucho Marx but before “those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne.”[12] Charles Schulz used Mays’s name in his Peanuts strips more than any other because he “always symbolized perfection.”
But was Mays the greatest player in the history of baseball?
Let it first be said that Mays, unlike DiMaggio, does not require his introduction to be preceded by “greatest living player,” nor does he tout himself as such. But second, let it be said that, if you ask him, he does think he’s the greatest. Or, as he will say in a soft voice, “I did things that no one else did.”
In many debates, Mays is described as “the greatest all-around player” but is somehow excluded as “the greatest.” This is nonsense. The phrase “greatest all-around player” is redundant—one’s greatness is determined by performance in all aspects of the game. Anyone who designates Mays as “the greatest all-around player” has given him top billing as well.
What makes the assessment difficult is that baseball, more than any other sport, relies on statistics, but the game has gone through so many changes over the past hundred years—live-ball, dead-ball, integration, night games, cross-country travel, expansion, changing pitching mounds, changing strike zones, steroids—that the numbers from era to era mean very different things, so true comparisons are impossible. Another problem is that the numbers, for all their elegance, capture only part of the game, and they disserve Mays by failing to reflect his strategic, intangible contributions (inducing bad throws, quick first steps in the outfield, positioning, knowledge of hitters, and so on). The “five-tool” designation understates his skills by ignoring his intelligence, preparation, and guile. Mays was always better than the box score.
The hard numbers tell a compelling story of power and speed (.302 average, 660 homers, 338 stolen bases), of consistency (Mays strove for 100 runs scored and 100 RBIs each year, and he ended his career with 2,062 and 1,903, respectively), and of untouchable defensive prowess (7,095 putouts, the most of any outfielder). The case for Mays as the game’s greatest is easy to make but impossible to prove: he beat you in more ways than any other player. Unfortunately, the documentation erodes in the yellowing game summaries and in the fading memories of those who saw him.
Was he better than the Babe? Most polls, to be sure, would name Babe Ruth as the greatest. (On his numbers alone, Barry Bonds deserves consideration, but steroids have tainted those accomplishments.) Before becoming a full-time position player, Ruth was one of the league’s top pitchers, and as a hitter he dominated the game like no player before or since. In 1927, he hit sixty home runs—more long balls than twelve out of the majors’ other fifteen teams hit in total. Ted Williams may have been a better “pure” hitter, and others can make arguments for Cobb, Aaron, Musial, DiMaggio, and Mantle, but no player lorded over his competition like the Babe.
In that context, Ruth was baseball’s most dominant player; Mays was its greatest master.
Mays’s legacy would have been enhanced if he had beaten Ruth’s all-time home run record, and Mays’s supporters lament that his time in the army, plus his playing in two ballparks that were unfriendly to a right-handed hitter with gap power, denied him that opportunity. Mays believes he would have hit eight hundred homers if he had not gone into the military and had played in parks like Aaron’s. But given what happened to Aaron when he approached 714—the death threats, the racial epithets, the unbearable stress—one should not be so quick to wish that on Mays. He suffered mightily when trying to pass Mel Ott’s record. He could have passed Babe Ruth’s, but his pursuit would have been a personal trauma.
If Mays’s skills are underappreciated, his achievements have been given a boost by the Steroid Era, which has caused fans to pine for a game that they could still associate with honesty and innocence. Baseball has always been an imperfect institution, but as much as anyone, Mays evokes its highest ideals. His legacy, ultimately, will never be about his numbers, his records, or how he helped his team to win. It will be about the pure joy that he brought to fans and the loving memories that have been passed to future generations so they might know the magic and beauty of the game.
In his easy chair at home, Mays will doze off when the ball game is on, then he’ll wake up in a start when he hears the announcer cry, “A Willie Mays catch!” He’ll peer at the television, watch the replay, and grunt, “He made that with two outs. I made mine with one, and I had to make the throw.”
Or he’ll be watching a game and the announcer will pose some baseball trivia question.
“Me!” Mays will answer. Then he’ll rest his eyes.
On Saturday, March 21, 2009, Willie Mays returns to Fairfield, Alabama, from spring training in Scottsdale. Over the years, he has not been all that visible in Fairfield or the Birmingham area, but he returns to make a contribution of $50,000 in baseball equipment, through his Say Hey Foundation, to kids who play in youth leagues as well as to Miles College and Fairfield High School.
The foundation itself has had a limited reach, but Mays is now seventy-eight, and he envisions it as part of his legacy. He wants to improve its financial footing and find ways for it to make an impact. His trip to Fairfield is one step in that direction.
In the mid-1980s, Fairfield had named a ball field Willie Mays Park, but it had fallen into disrepair. In the days leading up to the ceremony, volunteers in the community gave the park a makeover. They repainted the green stands, graded the outfield, applied fresh chalk along the foul lines, cleaned the barbecue pit, and sought donations for food and beverages. “It came from the heart of each and every one,” says Clarissa Milano, a friend of Mays’s who is on the foundation’s advisory board. “In these tough times, you saw people give back, and that’s what Willie wants people to do.”
The ceremony commences on a sunny morning that draws Mays’s Black Baron teammates James Zapp and the Reverend Bill Greason. Several hundred people are in the stands, and dozens of children, dressed in bright orange T-shirts, with a silk-screen picture of Willie Mays on the back, are lined up on the infield. They are prepared to accept their bags stuffed with, among other things, a bat, a mitt, a batting glove, and a videotape about Mays’s life.
The Reverend Robert G. Twyman, pastor of the First Church of Fairfield, begins the event with an invocation. “We’re grateful for this man who grew up in this community who’s come to give back,” he says. “Bless him in a special way.”
Mayor Kenneth Coachman speaks next, welcoming Willie home, giving him a key to the city, and sharing an inspiration he had at four that morning—that the city should raise funds for a Willie Mays statue at his park, “somewhere in the area of the barbecue stand.”
A young man sings the national anthem, and the emcee thanks a list of sponsors, from AT&T, PepsiCo, and Rawlings to the Fire House of Fairfield and Merita Bakery. Then Willie is introduced. He wears a Giants cap, a blue blazer, and dark pants. He’s lost about ten pounds this year and looks good. As always, he has no notes but speaks from the heart.
“We got a lot of product for the kids,” he says, “so you got to start clapping for these kids. Not for me, because I got mine a long time ago.”
He describes how he was in Birmingham last year on business and was driven around Fairfield. “When I looked around, there was no convenience store where we used to steal stuff, so I knew something was wrong.... The first thing that I wanted to do was to give the kids something to look forward to. And this is why I wanted them to have a day of their own.”
As Willie talks, the organizers nudge the children into a close-knit semicircle around him. “I talked to the mayor and I said, ‘What is needed here?’ And all he had to say was, ‘Just look around, and you’ll see for yourself that we need help.’ ”
Willie says he has good reason to help the people of Fairfield. “They’re the ones that made me,” he says. “They’re the ones who said, ‘Willie, you cannot have any drugs, you cannot smoke, we’re gonna send you home at ten o’clock at night,’ and they did. And I appreciate that, because when I went to New York, nobody had to tell me to be in the house, no one had to tell me to go home. I was there because of all you that saw me play football, basketball, and baseball in this town.”
He acknowledges that returning home isn’t easy. “I know I was kind of hesitant in coming and doing things here. I guess I wanted the kids around me.... That’s what this is all about. It’s not about me. I had my life. I had twenty-two years of baseball. Enjoyed every minute of it. These kids that are coming now need help. [Other people] say, ‘Why are you going to Fairfield with the money that we give you?’ and sometimes you have to say, ‘This is my home, man. Help me. Do something for these kids. Make sure that they have a good life.’ ”
Then Mays does something odd. He notes that he is giving equipment to Miles College but has neglected Lawson State, a community college. “I know that my mother lived about five minutes from there,” he says. “I know she would want me to help whoever I can, and next year, when I come here . . . I will make sure that everyone that’s in sports, high school, college, or whatever it may be, will be supported in this program.”
Mays never mentions his mother, but the reference is in the spirit of his homecoming. The previous day, Eric Fernandez, a friend who helps with the foundation, drove Mays around his old neighborhood and saw the emotion rising in him. “It’s important that the people of Fairfield are proud of him not as a baseball player but as a man,” Fernandez says. “He has a focus now on Willie Mays the person. That’s what he wants his legacy to be.... Now he’s saying I’ve come home to my parents. It’s important to him, an internal check box. When he meets his parents in heaven, he can say with a straight face that I gave back to my community. I did what you wanted me to do.”
When Mays finishes speaking, he helps distribute the equipment, signs balls, and wraps his massive arms around the children for photographs. Reporters, city council members, and friends all want his attention, all want his time. He chats and he smiles, but he can’t stay long. He has to return to Scottsdale. The Giants have added some talent, a veteran lefty, a new shortstop, and a rookie third baseman with a big stick. Willie Mays wants to get back.
It’s spring training, and there’s a feel in the air.