Bonds Not Necessarily Chip Off His Godfather

If I had to use a single word to describe Barry Bonds, that word would be forbidding. He marches toward home plate expressionless and menacing, armed with his magic maple bat and a tiny cross dangling from one ear. Is he inwardly singing “Onward Christian Soldiers?” I don’t know. Possibly nobody knows.

Bonds looks as if he means to mash the pitcher and the baseball; chances are splendid that he will. Bonds hits homers more frequently than he smiles in public. He essentially ignores the media. His motto might come from a war cry, also forbidding, from American Revolutionary days: Don’t tread on me.

Why, some wonder, can’t Bonds buy a round for the boys (and girls) in the press box, in the manner of his great predecessor, Babe Ruth? Why won’t he throw them good quotes in the style of another great predecessor, Reggie Jackson, the human quote machine? Bonds is as cold and remote, some say, as is his godfather, Willie Mays.

At this point, to use a phrase I learned from Joe DiMaggio, the Doge of San Francisco, I have to say, “Stop right there!” Mays may be remote to strangers, dunces and bigots -- his life has not been easy -- but if you earn Willie’s trust and friendship, you will have won a jewel of extraordinary worth.

Willie and I go back 48 years, to spring training, 1954, when the New York Giants, coming off a fifth-place finish, looked dreary. Mays was far away, finishing an Army stint, but he would be discharged early in March. Meanwhile, the Giants’ establishment was assaulting me with such extravagant descriptions of Mays’ talents that I finally composed a skeptical feature for the late and sainted New York Herald Tribune.

“Willie is 10 feet nine inches tall,” I wrote. “He leaps 15 feet straight up. Nobody can hit a baseball over his head. Willie throws sidearm from the Polo Grounds to Pittsburgh. Willie’s speed is deceptive. The best evidence indicates he is one step faster than electricity....” Creative folk at the Trib illustrated the piece with a cleverly distorted photo that made Mays appear gigantic.

I had my laugh, and then, after a long flight -- prop planes in those days -- Willie walked into the Giants’ camp in Phoenix. The one word for what happened next is sunburst. The Giants weren’t gray anymore.

Manager Leo Durocher, with his sure sense of drama, kept Mays out of that day’s intersquad game until the fifth inning. Willie squirmed and paced in the dugout. When Durocher sent him in to pinch-hit, Willie hit a 420-foot home run. He stayed on to play center field and an inning later ran an Arizona mile toward right, speared a line drive, whirled and doubled the runner at first.

The inning after that a big country boy named Joe Cephus “Cash” Taylor blasted a tremendous wallop to dead center. Mays galloped perhaps 75 feet straight back and caught the ball over his shoulder, a simply amazing catch. “May I point out,” said the late Chub Feeney, the Giants’ general manager, “that Willie doesn’t like airplanes much. He’s playing at this level on zero hours sleep.”

Sal Maglie, the great pressure pitcher said, “Hey, with the kid back, all I gotta do is keep the ball in the ballpark.” As he spoke, Sal smiled. Like Bonds, Maglie did not smile in public every day. So it finally turned out that in my skepticism I had been correct. Willie really was 10 feet 9 inches tall.

After a bit the Giants and the Cleveland Indians flew to Las Vegas for an exhibition and then the Giant group was invited to a big hotel for free food and entertainment. Willie and I sat in a small theater where Robert Merrill burst into “Vesti la giubba,” the gorgeous aria from Pagliacci, where the clown sings of having to make people laugh although his own heart is breaking. Merrill gave it full voice and all his passion. When Merrill was done, Willie turned to me amid the cheering. “You know,” he said, quite moved, “That’s a very nice song.”

Horror awaited us. We drifted into the casino, where Monte Irvin and Whitey Lockman were fighting a one-armed bandit and Maglie, glowering like a movie mafioso, was losing at blackjack, 50 cents a game. Mays moved toward a dice table and after a while I said, “How you doing, Will?”

His eyes sparkled, as they would when he joked, and he said, “I’m just learning the game.” Abruptly a short, thick-shouldered thug of a man said, “Get your friend away from the dice tables.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Get him away from the nice tables. We don’t want him mixing with the white guests.”

“Do you know who is?”

“Yeah. I know who he is. He’s a ..... Get that ... away from the white guests.”

Soon we were shouting. The man using the racial epithet was armed. At length I said slowly, “I am now going to reach for my wallet.”

I did and pulled out my press card.

“I want to thank you,” I said, very agitated and still speaking very loudly, “for giving me a great story for the Sunday New York Herald Tribune.”

The thug vanished and hotel executives emerged from the woodwork begging to make me forget what happened and to spend the night. I tramped out to the Giant bus. Mays sat near the front, seeming to sleep. Monte Irvin motioned for me to sit with him in the back.

“It’s not my place to tell you what to do,” Irvin said, “but I want to ask you not to write this story. Willie isn’t Jackie Robinson. He’s a 23-year-old kid without much formal education. If you write what just happened, there could be an explosion and, you know, Willie isn’t up to handling that.”

I said, “What just happened, Monte? I’m not aware of anything just happening.”

Monte punched me in the shoulder and we were men together. I didn’t write the Willie story for many years. Mays, of course, went on to become the prince of ballplayers and we kept in loose touch.

I saw the Catch and the Throw against Vic Wertz when the no-longer-dreary 1954 Giants swept the World Series from the Cleveland Indians. I met Willie’s Dad, “Kitty-Kat Mays,” formally known as William Howard Mays Sr. During the days when many black people routinely voted Republican, in homage to Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Mays was named for William Howard Taft, the fattest president in history. Willie’s true full name is William Howard Mays Jr. His dad was working as a checkout clerk in a Harlem supermarket and he told me he was just as good a ballplayer as his son, except he didn’t have the hands. Willie’s huge hands, Kitty-Kat said, came from his mother.

This is subjective, but the Willie I remember ran down fly balls better than anyone else, hit for average or power depending on what was needed, and threw and ran superbly, all combining into the best baseball player who ever lived. Gil Hodges Jr., son of the noble old Dodger, told me recently, “My dad used to tell me he couldn’t believe how great Willie was.” Willie doesn’t like to say that, but he knows it. I was at some function with him and Willie relaxed and said to me, “You know, nobody knew how great you could play this game baseball till I showed them.” To some that may be arrogance. To me it is something else. Fact.

I visited Mays -- I wanted help on a book I was writing -- not so many years ago. He lives in Atherton, a Northern California village of large homes, tall redwoods and stout eucalyptus trees with peeling bark. The month I visited, the San Jose Mercury News was reporting that the recent sale price average of Atherton homes was $1,669,833.

“Come in,” Willie said, at the door. “It’s been a while.”

He led me down a corridor lined with autographed photos of presidents and a miscellany of celebrities. The first President Bush had written, “To Willie Mays, from his longtime and steadfast fan.” Old George had played some varsity first base at Yale. If you knew the game, and Old George did, watching Willie play it made you humble.

We talked a bit about beginnings, growing up poor in racist Alabama. Willie asked if I had ever had, as my main meal of the day, a sugar sandwich. He said his best sport was football, not baseball, and that when he was 16 he could throw a jump pass 60 yards. He had wanted to ride a football scholarship to a good college, but none was offered. There was no place in all the terrain of white academia for a great young quarterback who happened to be black.

So it was baseball. Word of Mays’ talent spread and, more or less to appease liberal ticket buyers, both the Yankees and the Red Sox scouted him. They each turned him down. That’s like the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony turning down Heifetz because he was Jewish. A parallel rap worked against Mays. He was not as white as Williams or DiMaggio.

After the Giants signed Willie he played at Trenton and then Minneapolis in the American Assn. Here is a bit of scout Hank DeBerry’s scouting report, filed on May 10, 1951: “Sensational.... He has made the most spectacular catches.... Runs ands throws with the very best.... This player is the best prospect in America. It was a banner day for the Giants when this kid Mays was signed.”

In Atherton we moved to the Catch. Willie remembers that first game of the 1954 Series: “It’s the eighth inning, Cleveland has Larry Doby on second and I’m playing shallow because I don’t want Doby scoring on a single. One run could be the ballgame. The ballgame could be the Series.

“Wertz hits it. Solid sound. I learned a lot from the sound of the ball on the bat. I’m going back, a long way back, but there is never any doubt in my mind. I am going to catch this ball.”

“I didn’t think you would,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter what you think,” Willie said, quite pleasantly. Lest he offend, he poured me a bit of vintage scotch. “Catching it wasn’t the problem. The problem was Doby on second. On a deep fly to center at the Polo Grounds, a runner could score all the way from second. I’ve done that myself more than once. So if I make the catch -- which I will -- and Larry scored from second, they still get the run that puts them ahead. All the time I’m running back, I’m thinking, ‘Willie, you’ve got to get this ball back to the infield.’

“I run 50, 75 yards, right to the warning track, and I take the ball a little toward my left shoulder. Because I want all my momentum to go into the throw.”

Mays looked at me intently. “Are you following this? To keep my momentum working for me, I have to turn very hard and throw the ball from exactly the point that I caught it. That’s what I did. All the while I was running back I was planning my throw [which would travel 330 feet.] Then the sportswriters wrote, I made the throw by instinct.”

Do I have to explain a bit? Perhaps. What Willie is saying, if you know how to listen, is that Michael Jordan did not come out of a rain forest shooting jumpers, Jim Brown didn’t learn to run in the Belgian Congo and, instinct hell, Willie Mays knows how to think. How much American history, I wondered, has been etched by bigotry. So now we have Bonds. He can’t run with his godfather or throw with him, but he can hit like a tornado. And the mostly white reporters who dismissed his godfather as a simpleton are still there.

On a recent Christmas, Willie sent me an autographed picture of the catch, saying, at last, that he knew what I had done in Las Vegas five decades ago.

“How did you know, Will?”

“Maybe you told Monte. Maybe Monte told Leo. Maybe Leo told me.”

The picture hangs in my small Hall of Fame, where the Catskill Mountains and the Shawangunks intersect. Willie’s picture gleams there along with books signed to me by Jack Dempsey, Jackie Robinson and Robert Frost. Mays inscribed it, “To my friend, Roger. Thanks.”

So that is the sullen Willie Mays. My own Hall of Fame is smaller than the one at Cooperstown, but more exclusive. No, Pete Rose will never enter, nor will A. Bartlett Giammati. What about the godfather’s kid, Barry Bonds, the forbidding slugger? Take a breath and let me answer you in, oh say, 48 years.

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Roger Kahn, the author of “The Boys of Summer” and other baseball books, writes periodically for The Times.

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The “Say Hey” Saga

Some of the highlights of Willie Mays’ major league career:

1951 -- Broke in with the New York Giants and was named the National League rookie of the year after batting .274 with 20 home runs and 68 runs batted in for the league champions.

1954 -- After missing one season and most of another due to military service, returned to lead the Giants to another pennant and win MVP honors with 41 home runs, 110 RBIs and a .345 batting average. His catch on Vic Wertz’s long drive to center field in the Polo Grounds is arguably the most famous defensive play in World Series history, as he led the Giants to a four-game sweep.

1955 -- Became seventh player to hit 50 home runs in a season. His 51 home runs and 127 RBIs would each wind up as the second-best of his career.

1958 -- In Giants’ first season in San Francisco, hits .347 to finish second in the league.

1961 -- Hits four home runs in a game against Milwaukee on May 1, finishes season with 40 home runs, 123 RBIs.

1962 -- Leads Giants to the World Series for the third time, with a league-leading 49 home runs and 141 RBIs. His game-winning home run in the season finale got the Giants into a tie for first with the Dodgers, whom they defeated in a playoff.

1965 -- Won second MVP award, leading the league with a career-high 52 home runs and a .645 slugging average. Hit the 500th home run of his career on Sept. 13 at the Astrodome in Houston.

1968 -- Named MVP of the All-Star game and wins the last of his 12 consecutive Gold Glove awards.

1969 -- Hit the 600th home run of his career as a pinch-hitter against San Diego on Sept. 22.

1972 -- In the twilight of his career, returns to New York in a trade to the Mets.

1973 -- Plays in the World Series for Mets against Oakland in his final season.

1979 -- Elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.

Milestones

Some of Willie Mays’ milestones, and standing on the all-time lists:

* Home runs: 660 (third all-time, led league four times, hit 390 over a 10-year span from 1957-68 to lead the major leagues).

* Runs batted in: 1,903 (eighth all-time, led league five times).

* Stolen bases: 338 (led league four times, first player to accumulate 300 home runs and 300 stolen bases).

* Batting average: .302 (led league once).

* Total bases: 6,066 (third all-time).

* Hits: 3,283 (10th all-time).

* Runs: 2,062 (fifth all-time).

* Putouts: 7,095 (only outfielder with more than 7,000).

* Gold Glove awards: 12.

* All-Star games: 24

Career Statistics

*--* Year Team AB R H HR BI Avg 1951 Giants 464 59 127 20 68 274 1952 Giants 127 17 30 4 23 236 1954 Giants 565 119 195 41 110 345 1955 Giants 580 123 185 51 127 319 1956 Giants 578 101 171 36 84 296 1957 Giants 585 112 195 35 97 333 1958 Giants 600 121 208 29 96 347 1959 Giants 575 125 180 34 104 313 1960 Giants 595 107 190 29 103 319 1961 Giants 572 129 176 40 123 308 1962 Giants 621 130 189 49 141 304 1963 Giants 596 115 187 38 103 314 1964 Giants 578 121 171 47 111 296 1965 Giants 558 118 177 52 112 317 1966 Giants 552 99 159 37 103 288 1967 Giants 486 83 129 22 70 263 1968 Giants 498 84 144 23 79 289 1969 Giants 403 64 114 13 58 283 1970 Giants 478 94 139 28 83 291 1971 Giants 417 82 113 18 61 271 1972 Giants 49 8 9 0 3 184 1972 Mets 195 27 52 8 19 267 1973 Mets 209 24 44 6 25 211

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*--* Totals 10,881 2,062 3,283 660 1,903 302

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