‘A Hero All His Life’ : New Book Details Mantle’s Decades-Long Alcoholism, Portrays Him as a Cheating Husband, Neglectful Father

As a genuine American sports legend, Mickey Mantle was always accorded star treatment.

When cops realized whom they had just pulled over for drunk driving, they inevitably closed their ticket books and drove the New York Yankee slugger home.

When he drunkenly barreled his car into a telephone pole, nearly decapitating his wife Merlyn, the whole affair was hushed up. Not a word made the papers.

But now, a little more than a year after Mantle’s death, a new book has been published that lays bare Mantle’s shortcomings, which seem every bit as titanic as his tape measure home runs.

It details his decades-long alcoholism, but it also portrays him as a cheating husband, a neglectful father, and a man whose crude, juvenile behavior persisted well into his 50s.

For good measure, it also reveals him to have been the victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of a half-sister and a bed-wetter until he joined the Yankees.

Who is it that has authored this dismantling of one of our most enduringly popular athletes? A sportswriter intent on making a reputation for himself? A former teammate, a la Jim Bouton, who first dented Mantle’s reputation with his 1970 “Ball Four”?

No. The writer this time is the Mantle family, Merlyn and her three surviving sons, Mickey Jr., David and Danny.

And they receive a considerable assist from the Mick himself, whose confessional journal, written while he was undergoing alcohol rehab in 1994, provides the opening chapter of “A Hero All His Life.”

If the title seems ironic given the book’s content, it is not meant to be.

As damaging as the memoir may be to Mantle’s heroic stature, it is nonetheless affectionate about its central character, who was magnanimous toward teammates and rivals, touchingly humble, and often kind-hearted.

During an interview last week in Washington, one stop in their national book tour, Merlyn and Danny Mantle said they did not want to sully Mantle, only to illustrate the ugly effects of alcoholism.

The Mick, they say, would have approved. Toward the end of his life, it was Mantle who would jerk a thumb at his once-broad chest and say, “Here’s a role model. Don’t be like me.”

“A Hero All His Life” is convincing on that score. The book is inadvertently a caution against investing too much admiration in any athlete, in confusing achievement and courage on the field with nobility off it.

Not coincidentally, it is being promoted during the World Series season, a time when new sports heroes will undoubtedly be created, a time many baseball seasons ago when the Mick shone brightest.

Merlyn Mantle, a small, bird-like woman with blond hair and the Oklahoma accent she and Mickey shared, insists her husband was a hero, first on the diamond where he played so magnificently for so long on diseased, ceaselessly pained legs and again at the end when he owned up to his many failings and the damage he had done.

“Mick died with dignity,” she said.

He just didn’t live a lot of his life with it, at least away from the ball field.

It is hard to imagine a more irresponsible, self-centered adult than Mantle who, Merlyn writes, “treated marriage as he did most things, a sort of party with added attractions.”

He had many other women and didn’t take much care to hide them from Merlyn.

Her sons sometimes tried to shield her, but she knew.

His cruelty emerged in other ways, too. Merlyn writes of his pulling out a chair from under her at a club in New York.

On another occasion in a restaurant, he soaked a napkin in water and threw it in Merlyn’s face.

But she stayed with him until he walked out in 1988. (They remained married until his death.)

“I was proud of Mick and what he accomplished,” she said.

“I could always reason why he did what he did, that was part of my disease I guess. Divorce for me was not an option. I couldn’t imagine life without Mick. I adored him.”

As a father, Mantle was barely present when his four sons were young. He missed the births of three of them, twice because of baseball obligations, once because he was off hunting with buddy Billy Martin.

“I wonder what it must be like to have a father who is available most of our life,” second son David wondered.

Mantle’s own father’s devotion to his son is part of baseball lore.

When Mickey was barely 4 years old in Commerce, Okla., Mutt Mantle began pitching balls to him, forcing him to bat first righty and then lefty, a regimen that would eventually produce the greatest switch-hitter in history.

Mickey, though, took no interest in his own sons’ athletics, let alone their schoolwork or careers. (All of them eventually joined their father in businesses that cashed in on his magical name.)

“Mickey Jr. could have been a major league baseball player if my dad had been his dad,” Mantle writes in the book.

But his worst failing regarded his youngest son, Billy, who compounded Hodgkin’s disease with an addiction to drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. He died of heart failure in 1994, only weeks after Mantle got out of the Betty Ford Clinic.

The memoir doesn’t offer insights into why the Mantles were so susceptible to alcohol addiction.

Mickey’s parents did not drink, although Merlyn said alcoholism was in his family. She believes he only took up drink after his beloved father died in 1952, after Mantle’s first season with the Yanks.

“He had looked to his dad for everything and now he was gone,” said Merlyn.

While Mantle drank heavily during his playing days--he was fully capable of hitting home runs after a night of binging--it was after he retired after the 1968 season, when he found his life no longer meaningful, that he became addicted.

“When he stopped hitting home runs, the only time he had any self-esteem was after a drink or two,” Merlyn writes.

She followed him into drink. She never drank alcohol until after she married Mantle. Drinking at first was a way to endure the fraternity-like partying of the players.

Later, as her marriage became acrimonious, she couldn’t do without it.

Their sons all discovered liquor on their own, but found that alcohol lubricated their relations with their father.

“I was scared of him when I was a kid,” said Danny, the third eldest son. “I didn’t really get to know him until we started drinking together. For him, drinking with us was a way to relive his days with Billy (Martin) and Whitey (Ford).”

Mantle sobered up in 1994 after a doctor warned him that his next drink could be his last.

Afterward, Merlyn and Danny said, he softened. He was more able to express pride in his sons and his grandchildren. He also came to appreciate what his drinking had cost him and his family.

“What I did tears my guts out,” he writes, “but I can’t undo it.”

Mantle was 63 when he died of cancer on Aug. 13, 1995.