COMMENTARY : He’ll Always Be ‘The Mick’

So we think of Mickey Mantle who was every kid’s 1950s idea of what a ballplayer should be, the hero Mickey with his cap bill rolled just so, the socks and pinstripes perfect where they met on his muscled calf, Mickey daring a pitcher to come with his best stuff because from either side of the plate, better than any man who ever lived, Mickey could take it deep or lay down a bunt and be at first before anyone touched the ball, a player of whom Casey Stengel said, “Mickey had it in his body to be great.”

We hear the name with its wonderful rhythms speaking of power and grace. Say the name aloud, Mickey Mantle, and you hear a memory. The memory is a full-page photograph torn from SPORT magazine and taped to a bedroom wall in 1956. It’s Mantle at bat left-handed, his right knee coming toward his left. The bat is ready, its barrel tilted toward the pitcher.

Say the name aloud: Mickey Mantle. A golden boy from Oklahoma, handsome as sunrise, who once walked out of a ballpark with a blonde on his arm and told a rookie, “Stick around, kid. My legs might get tired.”

Strong, certain, perfect. And now, all these years later, he is in a hospital, frail and uncertain and imperfect in the ways most of us are imperfect. He is 63 and even with a new liver is in desperate trouble: The odds favor death when a man under attack by hepatitis comes late to a doctor who finds a cancerous liver. How melancholy to hear his wife make a joke of Mantle’s emaciation; she told him his stomach hasn’t been so small since he was 20. How much it hurts to be reminded of what he used to be when he was Mickey Mantle young and strong and certain.

He came to Yankee Stadium as a kid born the year before Babe Ruth called his shot in the World Series. He came to the patch of outfield grass consecrated by Joe DiMaggio. His father, the inelegantly named Mutt, had named the boy for the great catcher Mickey Cochrane; he taught the Mick to hit from both sides and raised him to be the ballplayer Mutt never was.

“All I had was natural ability,” Mickey once said, meaning he almost never knew why anything happened the way it did but he was glad when it worked out so often, as on a day of a hangover when he was roused from the bench and ordered to pinch hit. Somehow he hit a high fastball out of the park, and on returning to the bench told his buddies, “The tough part was making it around the bases,” which they understood to be as true as it was funny, for even early on the kid from Oklahoma found buddies who taught him the kind of night-running that caused Stengel to speak of players as “whisker slick,” a term Mantle and his brothers in vodka, Billy Martin and Whitey Ford, liked so much they began calling each other Slick.

In time the incorrigible rascal Martin--”A mouse studying to be a rat,” in Red Smith’s phrase--would be traded from the Yankees after a nightclub brawl and years later would say with a laugh, “They said I was a bad influence on Mickey and Whitey. Now they’re both in the Hall of Fame, and I’m not. Who was bad for who?” And then on Christmas Day 1989, after drinking all day, Billy Martin died in the wreck of a truck on his way home, the bills for his life having come due.

Mickey Mantle never expected to pay. Or, to say it more precisely: Mickey Mantle never expected to be around when the bill collector came looking for him. He lived with a sense of approaching death. Because his father, grandfather and two uncles had died of lymphatic cancer, all before the age of 42, Mantle came to believe he would be dead soon.

Unable, or afraid, to confront his fears and share them with his wife and children, he lived a hollow life that seemed to be what Hemingway had in mind when he said, “Whatever makes you feel good is good.” Which, for Mickey Mantle, came down to baseball, women and booze, a combination first revealed by a Yankee teammate, Jim Bouton, whose book, “Ball Four,” praised Mantle for his boyish charm and warmth to his teammates while suggesting he might have had an even more spectacular career if he had slept more and bellied up to the bar less.

To the inevitable cries of outrage, Bouton referred critics to a television commercial in which Mantle and Ford debate a beer’s attributes--more taste? less filling?--with one Hall of Famer saying, “I only drink on special occasions,” the other answering, “Yeah, like after every game.”

All of it so much boys-will-be-boys fun until a year ago when Mantle’s weary, worn and woeful face showed up on a magazine under the headline, “I Was Killing Myself,” a confession to alcoholism. All those good times he had as an American hero, too bad, he said, that he didn’t remember most of them.

On that bedroom wall in 1956 was another photograph, a picture of Marilyn Monroe, whose name, so much like Mickey Mantle’s, came with its own soft suggestions, no harsh consonants, hers a suggestion of silky whispers and hers, like his, in the end misleading.

Not long before her death at 36, perhaps by barbiturates, perhaps done intentionally, she wrote in her dressing room notebook, “What am I afraid of? Why am I so afraid? Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I am afraid and I should not be and I must not be.”

Always part of her, fear moved in Marilyn’s nights just as it did for Mickey, who once had a dream in which he could hear the public-address announcer saying, “Now batting, Number 7, Mickey Mantle,” only Mantle was outside the stadium, the doors locked, the fences and gates locked, Casey and Billy and Whitey all looking for him, waiting, and he can’t get in. A recurring dream, night after night, a dream of failure, of banishment, maybe even of death.

Today he is in a hospital, a man who inspired us with his work, who brooded over too many drinks that he would soon be dead. By getting off the booze, too late but off it nevertheless, he has done the brave thing of confronting the life he created. And give him this: Mickey Mantle has taken responsibility, he has sought to blame no one else, and he has asked forgiveness from his loved ones. Such is the stuff of real heroes.