Mickey Mantle is Big J's all-time favorite ballplayer. When he was growing up in Columbia, a young boy, there weren't any professional baseball teams west of Chicago and St. Louis, and there were none at all in the South. Papa, Perky, Big J, and Uncle L didn't get their first TV until about 1953 or 1954. That was while they lived on Denny Road in Columbia. Big J said, "Believe it or not there was only one televised game a week, creatively called
The Game of the Week by CBS." Papa and Big J started watching the game together, and since the Yankees were the dominant team in the land, the televised game usually turned out to be the Yankees versus whoever they were playing that day. They watched Mantle, Maris, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, their home-state boy Bobby Richardson from Sumter, and manager Casey Stengel every time they were on TV.
Big J wrote about some of the highlights of the new, televised games:
The broadcasters for The Game of the Week were Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean. Often when the game was slow (or truth be told, most of the time), by the late innings, Old Diz had drunk one-too-many Falstaffs. One time, the TV camera panned over into the right field bleachers where the crowd was sparse and showed a young man and young woman really going to it. Dizzy's all-time great Falstaff-inspired line was, 'Ah, look out yonda in the bleachers. A couple of youngsters having fun out at the old ballpark this afternoon. It appears as if he's kissing her on the strikes, and she's kissing him on the balls.' There was a blacked-out silence for two or three minutes while the booth got their composure back.
The summer after Big J's high school graduation, Papa won a trip to the Provident national convention in New York City for selling a lot of insurance. He took the whole family along. They stayed in a big, fancy hotel. The popular band, The Herman Hermits, was staying in the same hotel so there were screaming groupie girls running around everywhere. They took a Gray Line boat tour that week up the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge, turned onto the Harlem River going north, came out on the Hudson, and followed the whole western length of Manhattan going south back down to The Battery. The 1964 New York World's Fair was also going on at the same time at Flushing Meadows in Queens. The family spent a whole day there.
The city had constructed a brand new stadium on the fairgrounds, Shea Stadium, which was the first of the monstrous, multi-purpose, cookie-cutter stadiums built for football and baseball, concerts and other entertainment events. There happened to be a game that day between the new New York Mets and the San Francisco Giants. Many New Yorkers were still bitter because the Giants had moved to the West Coast from New York along with the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was practically a home game for the visiting Giants. That day, Papa, Perky, Big J, and Uncle L sat in the third deck of the new stadium and watched Gaylord Perry, a country boy from North Carolina, pitch for the visiting Giants. It was a muggy summer day and Perry was soaked by the end of the first inning, sweat streaming off of his chin. Willie Mays hit the game winning home run for the Giants, and the crowd went went wild.
There is something that I want for you to know about Big J and me, and I want for you to understand it plainly. We were both born and raised in the Deep South, not only physically, but also ideologically. Our childhoods were very different from yours. South Carolina has never been a friendly place for black folks. Your ancestors were slave owners. We have family documents officially freeing the slaves years after Lincoln's "Emancipation Proclamation." Schools and busses and restaurants and water fountains were segregated while Big J was growing up. When he was a boy, he said it was common for pranksters to ride through "Niggertown" in their cars throwing rotten apples at people in their yards. While I was a boy in Camden, I went to an integrated school, but there was a deep divide between whites and blacks. Train tracks literally cut Camden into two distinct communities. South of the tracks, there was extreme poverty. As I grew older and started to drive, I would secretly explore streets most whites never dared to drive. Sad images are stuck in my mind of dilapidated shanties, weathered and oppressed men and women sitting on their porches in the severe heat of summer afternoons. North of the tracks, there were beautiful, shady, oak-lined avenues, horse-drawn carriages in the streets, marvelous marble-columned colonial houses with four-foot high slave entrances in the back--dark tunnels that led into the kitchens. I heard racist jokes on a regular basis. I laughed at them. I even learned to tell them by the time I was 13 or 14. I used the "N word" on a regular basis for a few years, and I believed that I was part of a superior race of human beings. I only tell you this because I want for you to know. I want you to know how far we have come. You see it now. People can change, R.L.
Sometimes when Big J talks about Mickey Mantle now, there is a tinge of regret in his voice--just sometimes. Now, when he speaks of Mantle, he often points out that one of the biggest baseball questions of the day was whether Mantle or Mays was the better player of the era. According to the numbers, it's obvious that Mays was the better of the two, but many whites at the time couldn't see past the contrasting colors of their skins. Mantle was a good ol' country boy from Oklahoma with a million dollar smile. He appeared to be the All-American kid. The TV camera loved him. But Mays was another black boy, born into a working class family in Alabama, trying to break into the white man's world. A lot of people resented Mays and lauded Mantle as a heroic baseball god. Period. No matter that Mantle was a womanizing alcoholic in real life who showed up to as many games hung over or drunk throughout his career as he did sober. I would not understand this side of the Mantle vs. Mays question if Big J had not explained it to me, and I am grateful to him for being so reverend in his honesty about the subject matter. His anomalous transformation from a typical, racist South Carolina boy to the all-inclusive, accepting, and loving man that he is today is heartening.
Regardless of all that ugly stuff, Mickey Mantle was a fabulous ballplayer. There's no telling what he might have done if he hadn't torn up his knee in a stupid drain grate out in center field at Yankee Stadium during the 1951 World Series.
#7 Mickey Mantle. 5-11. 198. Throws right. Switch hitter. Outfield. Hall of Fame. 536 career HR's. Mantle was the greatest switch hitter ever. A real legend of the diamond.
