Mickey and Willie

Acclaimed sportswriter Allen Barra exposes the uncanny parallels--and lifelong friendship--between two of the greatest baseball players ever to take the field. Culturally, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were light-years apart. Yet they were nearly the same age and almost the same size, and they came to New York at the same time. They possessed virtually the same talents and played the same position. They were both products of generations of baseball-playing families, for whom the game was the only escape from a lifetime of brutal manual labor. Both were nearly crushed by the weight of the outsized expectations placed on them, first by their families and later by America. Both lived secret lives far different from those their fans knew. What their fans also didn't know was that the two men shared a close personal friendship--and that each was the only man who could truly understand the other's experience.

Auteur
ALLEN BARRA is the author of Inventing Wyatt Earp, The Last Coach, and Yogi Berra, as well as several essay collections. He is a regular contributor to such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Daily Beast, and Salon.

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Fathers and Sons

If a scientific research team were to conduct an exhaustive study of the ideal places, times, and conditions for breeding the perfect baseball player, they’d surely come up with something very close to Westfield, Alabama, in the heart of Birmingham’s steel industry, or the mining district of Commerce, Oklahoma.

Thousands of southern blacks left their homes during the Depression and moved to industrial cities in the North, but in Westfield, Alabama, William Howard “Cat” Mays chose to stay home. Grueling as the work in the local steel mills was, Cat understood that the promise of a better life in towns like Gary, Indiana, Flint, Michigan, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was remote. He stayed in Alabama. At the same time, countless families from Oklahoma and adjoining states made the decision to abandon everything and make the hazardous trek to California; their stories would be told in prose by John Steinbeck and in song by Woody Guthrie. No one spoke for Elvin Charles “Mutt” Mantle, who chose to keep his family in Oklahoma, taking jobs as a road grader, tenant farmer, and, finally, miner to put food on the table.

For both Cat Mays and Mutt Mantle, the main recreation—practically the only one—was baseball, specifically the industrial league baseball organized by their companies. They raised their boys in a baseball culture. No fathers ever guided their sons toward professional baseball with more single-mindedness than Cat and Mutt. Both men saw baseball as a way to get their sons out of those small towns, out of the mills and mines, although they guided them in very different ways. And once Mickey and Willie left, neither ever lived in his hometown again.

Willie Howard Mays—why he was not named William like his father has never been explained—was born in Westfield on May 6, 1931. There’s no monument or plaque to mark the spot; little of the Westfield that Willie knew remains standing today. A pamphlet printed by the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce in the 1960s called it a “village,” which is inaccurate—Westfield was never a village or a town, but a community of neighborhoods populated by black working-class families whose lifeline was the steel mills in nearby Fairfield. Virtually all the houses were of the type called “shotgun”—it was said that you could fire a shotgun at the front door and the pellets would go out the back door. They were built and owned by mills such as the Tennessee Cast Iron and Railroad Company (TCI), the great subcorporation of U.S. Steel, officially to “benefit” the workers but in reality to maintain their dependence on their employers.

The larger town of Fairfield provided necessary services—such as schools—to the small nearby communities like Westfield. Fairfield was born in 1910, the same year that nearby Rickwood Field opened, and it was a planned community from the start, the result of U.S. Steel’s purchase of TCI.

Years later in his autobiography, Jackie Robinson, criticizing Willie for his lack of involvement in the civil rights movement, would remind Mays of his roots: “I hope Willie hasn’t forgotten his shotgun house in Birmingham slums, wind-whistling through its clapboards, as he sits in his $85,000 mansion in San Francisco’s fashionable Forest Hills, or the concentration camp atmosphere of the Shacktown of his boyhood.” 1

The house Willie grew up in was fairly standard for families of black steelworkers, and not terribly unlike those of most white steelworkers in the Birmingham area. In fact, it was not a great deal different from the house of a zinc miner in Commerce, Oklahoma, where Mickey Mantle grew up. Some might have rated the Mays home as superior: an early Mays biography describes the house he grew up in as “middle class.” 2 It’s doubtful anyone would have said that to describe the Mantles’ house in Commerce; Cat’s family had little money, but his house had electricity, which the Mantle home did not.

Today some of the neighborhoods in and around Westfield are in ruin. All that’s left of most of the original company houses is their foundations. The population has been shrinking steadily for decades, from perhaps 5,000 when Willie was born to just over 1,100 in 1990 and under 1,000 today. The steel industry that sustained these communities began deserting the Birmingham area in the late 1970s, and the industrial baseball leagues that produced Willie Mays were gone at least two decades before that.

The black population of Alabama yielded many fine baseball players, among them perhaps the game’s greatest pitcher, Satchel Paige; the leading home run hitter of the twentieth century, Henry Aaron; and arguably the greatest all-around player in the game’s history, Willie Mays. The greatest concentration of black baseball talent in the country was in the South, and in the South no state produced as many Negro League players as Alabama; in Alabama the preponderance of talent came from the industrial leagues of the Birmingham area.

Mays grew up in a baseball tradition that was more than half a century old when he was born. Baseball had been introduced to the Deep South after 1865 by Confederate soldiers who had learned the game either from their Union captors in prison camps or during breaks when men from the two armies would get together for some R&R before they resumed slaughtering one another. How the game came to be popular with southern blacks is a subject on which historians are split. Some say that free blacks learned it from their former masters. Others suggest that black soldiers in the Union Army, who numbered perhaps 200,000, picked it up from their white comrades. Yet a third possibility is that blacks watched white men play, then went home and played it themselves. It’s likely that all three factors had a role.

The father of black ball in Alabama was a man named Charles Isam Taylor, who went to Birmingham from South Carolina in 1904. A veteran of the U.S. Army and the Spanish-American War, Taylor worked his way through Clark College in Atlanta, where he helped organize the school’s first baseball team. For four years, Taylor made a living by staging and promoting (and sometimes playing in) baseball games for Birmingham’s black fans. In 1910, realizing that there was more money to be made above the Mason-Dixon Line (where black teams could be matched against white teams), Taylor moved his team to the industrial town of West Baden, Indiana. The fans were heartbroken, and at least one black newspaper, the Birmingham Report…