NPR News

Excerpt: 'Willie Mays'

NPR | By James S. Hirsch

Published February 15, 2010 at 12:17 PM EST

On May 24, 1951, a young center fielder who had dazzled crowds in the minor leagues left Sioux City, Iowa, traveling light: a change of clothes and some toiletries, his glove, his spikes, and his two favorite thirty-four-ounce Adirondack bats. The twenty-year-old Alabaman was driven to the airport in Omaha, Nebraska, where he bought a ticket from United Airlines for an all-night journey, landing in New York early the following day. He had been there once before, three years earlier, to play in the Polo Grounds with the Birmingham Black Barons. On that team the veterans had protected him, instructing the youngster on how to dress, act, and play ball; on how to represent his team, his city, and his race. But now, on a sunny morning at La Guardia Airport, Willie Mays slid into the back seat of a taxi and pressed his face against the window, alone. He had never seen so many people walk so fast in his life.

Mays was driven to the midtown offices of his employer, the New York Giants, and promptly escorted inside. At 5-foot-11 and 160 pounds, he did not yet have the sculpted body that would later evoke comparisons to Michelangelo's finest work. He was taut and fluid, but not physically imposing. Only his rippling forearms and massive hands, each one large enough to grip four baseballs, hinted at his crushing strength.

Mays entered the office of Horace C. Stoneham, the Giants' shy but personable owner, who was rarely seen in the clubhouse or interviewed by reporters. He had thinning hair, a ruddy complexion, and thick-framed glasses, and while his counterpart at the Brooklyn Dodgers — Walter O'Malley — had the aura of a corporate chieftain, Stoneham more closely resembled a rumpled bank manager who preferred the intimacy of his office to the bustle of the lobby. Alcohol was his most notorious vice, but undue loyalty wasn't far behind. He liked to hire family members and fellow Irishmen and hated to trade or cut Giants who had lost their usefulness. But give him his due: he cared deeply about his players, about their finances, their family, and their well-being, and he would help them as he would his own children.

He also needed good players, and he never needed one more than he needed Willie Mays.

The Giants were a family business, and Stoneham was only thirty-two when he inherited the team after his father's death in 1936. At the time, the Giants were the National League's preeminent franchise, having won eleven pennants and four World Series since the turn of the century. They captured consecutive pennants in Horace's first two years at the helm — clubs essentially assembled by his father — but the team grew stale, fan interest declined, and championships became a memory.

In 1951, after a dismal start, the Giants risked, not just a losing season, but irrelevance or even ruin. The franchise had lost money in each of the last three years and had been eclipsed by New York's other baseball teams. Their blood rival, the Brooklyn Dodgers, had won three pennants in the last decade, with Ebbets Field featuring social history as well as fierce competition.

Since 1947, the Dodgers had been led by Jackie Robinson, whose breaking of the color barrier, combined with electrifying play, made for riveting theater. Yankee Stadium, meanwhile, was its own showcase of dominance and glamour: five World Series championships in the past decade, one deity in center field. Joe DiMaggio would turn thirty-seven in 1951, his final season, after which the landscape would be ready for a new hero. But the Yankees had already found their next wunderkind in the zinc mines of Oklahoma. The rookie Mickey Mantle — his brawn and speed exhaustively chronicled in spring training, his alliterative name tripping off the tongues of wide-eyed reporters, his blond crew cut and blue eyes capturing the hearts of young fans — was poised to be Gotham's next baseball god.

Who needed the Giants?

"Glad you could make it so soon," Stoneham told Mays as the rookie entered his office. "But they aren't glad where you came from."

Mays, confused, said nothing.

"The Minneapolis fans," Stoneham said. "They're upset." Mays had begun the season with the Minneapolis Millers, a Giants' farm club. In thirty-five games, he had hit .477; one searing drive, in Milwaukee, punctured a hole in the fence. Stoneham told Mays that the Giants were putting an ad in a Minneapolis newspaper to apologize for taking the local team's prodigy. "We're going to tell them," Stoneham said, "that you're the answer to what the Giants have got to have."

Mays remained silent.

"It's unusual, I know," Stoneham said, "but — is something the matter?"

Mays finally found his voice, high-pitched and earnest: "Mr. Stoneham, I know it's unusual, but what if — "

"What if what?"

"What if I don't make it?"

Stoneham pointed to a folder on his desk, stuffed with papers. Mays saw his name on the cover.

"You think we just picked your name out of a hat?" Stoneham demanded.

"You think we brought you up because somebody saw your name in a headline one day in Louisville or Columbus or Milwaukee or Kansas City? You think nobody's been watching you? You think managers haven't been up nights doing progress reports, that our own scouts haven't checked you out time and again? You think all of this is something somebody dreamed up in the middle of the night two days ago?"

Mays stood there, unsettled by the barrage.

The owner pushed a buzzer beneath his desk and spoke into the intercom:

"Ask Frank to come in here." He looked at Mays. "Got luggage?"

"No, sir. It's still back in Minneapolis. They're sending it on."

Stoneham nodded and pushed the buzzer again. "Ask Brannick to save out seventy, eighty dollars," he said, referring to the team's dapper traveling secretary, Eddie Brannick. Then to Mays: "Buy yourself a couple things — underwear, shirts, socks — until your stuff gets here."

The door opened, and Frank Forbes, a black fight promoter hired by the Giants to be Mays's chaperone, walked through. "Here he is," Stoneham said. "Take him with you." He extended his hand. "Good luck, Willie."

"Thank you, Mr. Stoneham. I hope I can get into a few games, get a few chances to help. I hope you won't be sorry."

"I won't be sorry." Stoneham turned away, then suddenly turned back.

"Get in a few games? Get a few chances to help? Don't you know you're starting tonight?"

Mays's mouth went dry. "Starting? Where?"

Stoneham glared at him, then laughed. "Center field!" he barked.

"Where else?" He looked at Forbes. "Get him out of here, Frank."

The Giants were already in Philadelphia, where they would begin a three-game series that night at Shibe Park. Forbes and Mays hustled to Pennsylvania Station, boarded a train, and sat in a Pullman parlor car. Mays had seen the opulent coaches in the movies, the ubiquitous Negro porter fawning over white passengers. But now Mays was the passenger, and the swivel armchairs were layered with meaning. His father, Willie Howard Mays, Sr., had been a Pullman porter, making beds in the sleeping cars chugging out of Birmingham. The train's quiet rhythm lulled the white passengers to sleep, and the elder Mays, wearing a white jacket, would listen to the sound of the whistle at night, signaling which engineer was driving the train. "He'd lay his hand on that rope," he said, "and it was like an autograph."

Now his son sat in a Pullman car, heading south on an eighty-five-mile trip that the young man could not have envisioned even a month earlier, with the clicking of the wheels saying to Willie: You're a Giant. You're a Giant. You're a Giant. You're a Giant...