August 13, 1995, 30 years ago: Mickey Mantle dies. The most iconic and popular (if, by his own admission, not the greatest) baseball player of his generation was just 63.
Born in the same calendar year in which he announced his retirement, I never got to see him play. But I did get to see him a few times, including in uniform on some Old-Timers Days.
He was born on October 20, 1931 in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, and grew up in nearby Commerce. He debuted with the New York Yankees in 1951, and was overwhelmed by the big city, falling into bad habits, encouraged by his teammates through what would later be called "toxic masculinity."
He would later say, "Playing baseball was the easy part." It sure looked like it: 20 All-Star Games, 3 American League Most Valuable Player awards, a Triple Crown in 1956, 12 AL Pennants and 7 World Series wins. He hit 536 home runs, both lefthanded and righthanded, as far as anyone had ever seen.
All those World Series appearances made Mantle baseball's 1st "television superstar," and, more so than his contemporaries Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, who had better career statistics, what his Monument Park plaque called him: "The most popular player of his era."
He retired at the start of Spring Training 1969, realizing that the desire to keep playing wasn't worth the physical effort. "Baseball has been very good to me," he said on Mickey Mantle Day, June 8, 1969, with his Number 7 being retired and a Plaque in his honor dedicated, "and playing 18 years in Yankee Stadium for you folks is the greatest thing that could ever happen to a ballplayer."
He spent the next 24 years as a "professional legend." Like his predecessor as the Yankees' center fielder, Joe DiMaggio, the most money he had made as a player was $100,000 a year. Also like DiMaggio, Mantle could make more money than that at a single appearance at a baseball memorabilia convention, signing autographs and telling old stories. (DiMaggio, fiercely guarding his privacy, would sign, but kept his stories to himself.) He also made a lot of money doing TV commercials, often with Mays, with whom, along with DiMaggio, he was constantly compared.
But heavy drinking, to deal with the injuries and other struggles of his life, doomed Mantle. His drinking and womanizing became a poorly-kept secret. A restaurant with his name on it was at 42 Central Park South in Manhattan from 1987 to 2012, and radio "shock jock" Don Imus joked that your meal was free if, after Midnight, you could guess what table Mickey was under. The death of his old running-around buddy Billy Martin on Christmas Day 1989 -- ironically, as the result of someone else's drinking -- shook him.
Mickey later admitted that he was telling the same old stories, and saw how much he had been drinking in them, and realized they weren't funny anymore. He saw that his wife, Merlyn, and their 4 seasons -- Mickey Jr., Billy (named for Martin), Danny and David -- had also become alcoholics. Finally, late in 1993, a doctor told him that his next drink might be his last.
Inspired by his sons' recoveries, Mickey went to rehab at the Betty Ford Center in early 1994, but it was too late: He developed liver cancer, got a transplant, and became an advocate for organ donation. But the cancer spread, and he died on August 13, 1995, at Baylor University Medical Center in his adopted hometown of Dallas. At 63, he was older than Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig lived to be, but while his life was full, it wasn't a full life.
That day, the Yankees went ahead with their game, at home to the Cleveland Indians. WPIX-Channel 11 had no opening montage, just a camera on Mickey's retired Number 7 in Monument Park. Bobby Murcer and a choked-up Phil Rizzuto did their best to share their feelings about their ex-teammate, and then Eddie Layton played "Amazing Grace" on the Stadium organ, while Bob Sheppard asked for a moment of silence, and then a memorial montage was played on the scoreboard.
The first batter of the game? Kenny Lofton, the Indians' center fielder, wearing Number 7. He flew out to Bernie Williams, the Yankees' center fielder. Appropriate. Paul O'Neill hit a home run, David Cone pitched well, and the Yankees won, 4-1.
But as Art LaFleur, playing the ghost of Babe Ruth in the film The Sandlot, pointed out, "Heroes get remembered, but legends never die." Mickey Mantle will always be with us.
Or, as Bob Costas put it, delivering Mantle's eulogy, "In the last year of his life, Mickey Mantle, always so hard on himself, finally came to accept and appreciate the distinction between a role model and a hero. The first, he often was not. The second, he always will be. And, in the end, people got it."
So many of those people were the Baby Boomers, to whom Mantle would forever be a hero. If the death of Elvis Presley, 18 years to the week earlier, was the first sign to that generation that they were no longer young, the death of Mickey Mantle was the first sign that they were now growing old.
