Tony Castro - Mickey Mantle: Americas Prodigal Son

MICKEY MANTLE

OTHER BOOKS BY TONY CASTRO

Chicano Power:
The Emergence of Mexican America

AMERICAS PRODIGAL SON

TONY CASTRO

Copyright 2002 by Potomac Books, Inc.

Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. (formerly Brasseys, Inc.). All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Castro, Tony.
Mickey Mantle: Americas prodigal son / Tony Castro.1st ed.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57488-384-4 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Mantle, Mickey, 1931- 2. Baseball playersUnited States
Biography. 3. New York Yankees (Baseball Team) 1. Title.

GV865.M33C38 2002
796.357092dc21
[B]

2002018417

ISBN 1-57488-531-6 (paper)

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard

Potomac Books, Inc.
22841 Quicksilver Drive
Dulles, Virginia 20166

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

FOR MY OWN HEROES:
RENEE, TREY, and RYAN

PART 1
FATHERS AND SONS

PART 2
HEROES AND REBELS

PART 3
THE KINGDOM AND THE POWER

PART 4
THE AUTUMN OF THE LEGEND

I guess you could say Im what this countrys all about.

Mickey Mantle

If Mickey Mantle hadnt lived, broadcaster Mel Allen once said, he would have been invented. In a sense, then, Mickey Mantle, like most heroes, was a construction; he was not real. He was all that America wanted itself to be, and he was also all that America feared it could never be. The postwar America of the mid-twentieth century was like all societies with the need for heroes, not because they coincidentally made them up on their own but because heroes like Mantle express a deep psychological aspect of human existence. They can be seen as metaphors for the human search of self-knowledge. In his time, Mickey Mantle showed us the path to our own consciousness through the power and spectacle of his baseball heroics, particularly his prodigal home runs, often backlit by the cathedral-like solemnity of Yankee Stadium. In the atomic age of the 1950s, the tape-measure blasts of our national pastime took on the stature of peacetime symbols of Americas newly established military dominance. After all, Hank Greenberg, the first Jewish slugger in the game, said that when he had hit his home runs from the mid-1930s into the 1940s, he had hit them against Hitler. In the 1950s, Mickey Mantle came to reflect the appearance and values of the dominant society in the world. He was the hero of Americas romance with boldness, its celebration of power, a nations Arthurian self-confidence in its strength during a time when we last thought that might did make right.

For most of history, religion has been the main vehicle for reproducing the dominant societys traits, using mythical figures to illustrate moral and societal principles that help form a common social conception of such things as death and gender roles. In the 1950s, as sport itself took on the role in our culture that religion had often played in the past, Mickey Mantle, as the contemporary cultural hero, contributed to American societys necessary business of reproducing itself and its values. Amid the threat of Russian satellites and the unsettling dawn of the computer age, Mantle helped affirm our belief in the power of mankind over technologys invasion of our world. Mickey Mantle gave America hope for such things as life beyond the nuclear threat, reprieve from the Cold War, and a sense that order ruled our lives.

Mickey Mantle was a figure through which an America profoundly affected by nuclear fear, by a dizzying plethora of atomic panaceas and proposals, and by endless speculation on the social and ethical implications of the new reality reconciled the conscious and unconscious aspects of the national psyche. People feared the bomb itself, yes, but such fears were probably overstated by authorities who wanted every new home to be built with fallout shelters. The bomb made midcentury Americans fear more acutely what they already had fearedthat things that had been whole in their lives would now split, and that such splitting could not be controlled. The evolution, or maybe revolution, in technology, race relations, and the very fabric of national culture, of which Americans could whimsically reassure themselves every time they looked at a Norman Rockwell painting on the cover of The Saturday Evening Postall of that was changing; the change affected a nation that naively had believed its world had been made safe when Hitler had been defeated. But as the poet Rolf Humphries noted, in the profession of anxiousness there is an element of fashion. In the 1950s, that fashion was also a last vestige of stabilitypinstripes, the New York Yankees, and baseball. Thus, when Mantle hit a home run, he was not only slugging a tape-measure dinger in the real world but facing an aspect of the unconscious.

When I was playing, Mantle said looking back from retirement, I used to feel like everything was happening to some other guy named Mickey Mantle, like I was just me and this guy called Mickey Mantle was another person. As Mantles close personal friend George Lois put it, Mickey Mantle was the last American hero. He was a walking shrine to an age of innocence and a symbol of a time when all was right with the world.

Even had he not reflected the times, Mantle would have been walking Americana. He failed at what he set out to do, at what his father had groomed him forto be the greatest player who ever played the game. Still, his career was storybook stuff, hewing more to our ideas of myth than any player since Babe Ruth. Mantle himself came to realize that Ruth and Joe DiMaggio represented a state of mind that never existed beyond the abstract. They were a mirage, just as he too would become an icon. A lesson to be reaffirmed, sports-writer Richard Hoffer once suggested about Mantle and perhaps heroes generally, is that we dont mind our heroes flawed, or even doomed. In America, failure is forgiven of the big swingers, in whom even foolishness is flamboyant; the world will always belong to those who swing from the heels.

Ted Williams was a real hitter, Mantle himself once observed. Me, I just got up there and swung for the roof ever time and waited to see what would happen.

The unique relationship between America and baseball must be understood to appreciate fully Mantles place in the equation. This was the age when baseball players were the princes of American sports, along with heavyweight boxers, Derby horses, and the odd galloping ghost of a running back from down south or the occasional lanky basketball player in short shorts. Baseball players were the souls of their citiesStan the Man in St. Louis; The Kid in Boston; Pee Wee, the Duke, Jackie, and Furillo in Brooklyn; and of course, the incomparable Willie Mays for Giants fans. As 1950s historian Jacques Barzun was aptly to observe, Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.

Long before baseball Ruth and DiMaggio, long before baseball became an industry of multinational owners and millionaire players, Walt Whitman wrote, Well, its our game. Thats the chief fact in connection with it: Americas game. It has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere. It belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our Constitutions laws, is just as important in the sum total of our historic life. Baseball is, to be sure, an American cultural declaration of independence. It has come to express the nations characterperhaps never more so than during the intense, anticommunist, postWorld War II period, when a preoccupation with defining the national conscience might be expected, as well as with defining the national self in a tradition that is as culturally middle of the road as baseball. As American studies authority Gerald Early puts it, I think there are only three things America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilizationthe Constitution, jazz music, and baseball.