COMMENTARY : For Mantle, Pain Has Always Been There

There was more surgery for Mickey Mantle Thursday, seven hours of surgery this time to give him a new liver and save his life. But there always was surgery for Mantle, right from the start, from the second game of his first World Series, before he even turned 20. There was always pain after that. It drew people to him as much as his talent, as much talent for baseball as any player ever had. The wounded heroes are the ones for whom people care the most deeply in the end. Mickey Mantle always was wounded.

It all started on the afternoon of Oct. 6, 1951, at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees were playing the Giants in the Series. It was Mantle’s rookie season. He was in right field because Joe DiMaggio was playing his last season in center. DiMaggio had been slowed all season by a sore Achilles’ tendon. Mantle, who was the fastest thing anyone had ever seen on a ball field, had gotten used to playing all of his position and about half of DiMaggio’s.

“Mickey covered for me that year,” DiMaggio told me last spring in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., one morning before spring training began. “He knew it and I knew it, even if neither one of us ever said anything about it.”

And in the fifth inning of Game 2, Mantle’s first Series ended and his long career of pain began. Willie Mays, also a rookie that season, hit a short fly ball to right-center field, between Mantle and DiMaggio. Mays ran for first and DiMaggio and Mantle ran for the ball. It was a moment involving three of the greatest ballplayers of them all, a moment that would alter the rest of Mantle’s career and his life.

Mays and Mantle and DiMaggio, all running now at Yankee Stadium. Nobody running faster than Mantle.

He thought it was his ball, because it had been his ball all season. But this was the World Series. The man next to him was still DiMaggio. Mantle, running hard, running like the wind, running with his head down, heard DiMaggio call for the ball at the last second.

Mantle tried to stop, but his right shoe landed on a sprinkler head.

“The next thing I heard was Mickey screaming,” DiMaggio told me that day in Florida. “You never heard a scream like that.”

In one of Mantle’s books, “All My Octobers,” he described the moment this way: “There was a sound like a tire blowing out and my right knee collapsed.”

Two pages later in that book, Mickey Mantle says something that everyone knows about him by now: “I wouldn’t play another game the rest of my career without hurting.”

DiMaggio told him not to move, they were bringing a stretcher. His father, Mutt Mantle, was at the game. They went to Lenox Hill Hospital from the Stadium in a taxi. The Yankees’ team physician in those days was Dr. Sidney Gaynor. He was also the director of orthopedic surgery at Lenox Hill.

While doctors at the Baylor University Medical Center performed transplant surgery to save Mantle’s life Thursday, people at Lenox Hill went through files and microfilm and came up with an index card that was Mantle’s admittance form for the first surgery.

His father signed the admittance card. Mutt Mantle’s occupation was listed as miner. Which he was. The address he gave was for the old Henry Hudson Hotel on East 57th Street.

Mickey Mantle’s father listed his son’s injury this way: fracture.

“It didn’t even say anything about a knee,” a woman at Lenox Hill said, looking at a piece of Mantle’s record from 40 years ago. “Just fracture .”

Dr. Gaynor repaired the torn ligaments in Mantle’s right knee. There would be four more knee operations for Mantle across the 17 seasons he would play in the big leagues after that. By the end of his career, the cartilage in both knees was all but gone.

So there was nothing new for him Thursday. It was just another hospital, 44 years from the first hospital on East 77th Street, New York City. Seven more hours of surgery for No. 7. One more season of pain for Mickey Mantle.