Willie Mays obituary

In America’s golden age, the 1950s, when baseball was still the national pastime and New York was the unofficial center of the world, the city had three baseball teams, each blessed with an excellent center fielder. Brooklyn’s Dodgers, lovable losers for decades until Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s apartheid, had Duke Snider. The dynastic Yankees, the team of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, boasted Mickey Mantle. And just across the Bronx River from Yankee Stadium, the Giants had Willie Mays.

Mays, who has died aged 93, was the first black superstar of the post-Robinson era of integration, and while debates persist over whether he or Mantle was the greatest of the three, or even bigger than the legendary Ty Cobb, he was. without a doubt baseball’s most exciting player.

In the first game of the 1954 World Series, at the Polo Grounds in New York, his over the shoulder catch of a 130-yard Vic Wertz drive, in which he sprinted the last ten yards without tracking the ball, then spun around and returned the ball to the infield before a run could score, is still remembered as “The Catch”.

His skills transcended party support. In the movie Manhattan, the typical New Yorker, Woody Allen, lies on his couch and thinks about why life is worth living. “Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony,” he begins. In Play It Again Sam, Diane asks Keaton what Allen was thinking about while they were making love. “Willie Mays,” he answers. “Do you always think about baseball players?” “It keeps me going.” “Yes, I was wondering why you keep saying ‘slide!’ called out.” Allen once said the greatest moment of his life was when he caught a ball hit by Mays during a celebrity softball game. Frank Sinatra told Mays, “If I played baseball like you, I’d be the happiest man in the world.”

Mays, who was nicknamed “Say Hey Kid” because he greeted everyone with “hey,” played the game with exuberance that belied the more serious nature of his path to the big leagues, which required more than just “natural talent ‘. Earlier in the year of The Catch, Denis Brogan of The Guardian, in the wake of a US Supreme Court ruling banning segregation, compared Mays to two other Robinsons, the dancer Bill “Bojangles” and the boxer Sugar Ray, in this sense that they all showed “tangible and undeniable evidence of skill in the tough world of sports and entertainment, where no boundaries are excluded and only merit counts.”

Willie Mays was born in Westfield, Alabama, a segregated company town, next to the Fairfield Steel Mill outside Birmingham. His father, William, was known as “Cat” when he played for the factory baseball team in the Birmingham industrial league. Mays’ mother, Annie Satterwhite, left when Willie was three, and he was raised by two women, Sarah and Earnestine, whom he described as his “aunts.” The future Say Hey Kid, called “Buck” by those who knew him, was a three-sport star at Fairfield Industrial high school while already playing professionally for the Negro minor league side Chattanooga Choo-Choos. At the age of 17, he signed with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro National League, with whom he won the 1948 Negro World Series.

In 1950, the Giants signed him with a $4,000 bonus and sent him to their farm team in Trenton, New Jersey. He started the 1951 season with their best minor league team, the Minneapolis Millers, but after 35 games hitting a remarkable .477, he was promoted to New York. Mays worried he wasn’t ready for the big leagues until Giants manager Leo “the Lip” Durocher told him to “stop costing the team money with long-distance calls.” He started slowly, giving up just one hit in his first 25 at-bats (a home run off future Hall of Famer Warren Spahn). But the persistent Durocher, who called Mays ‘Mr Leo’, realized Mays needed encouragement and stayed with him.

He was named National League rookie of the year despite only playing part of the season. The Giants won the pennant in a playoff against the Dodgers; Mays was on deck when Glasgow native Bobby Thomson’s home run sent them to the World Series. They lost the resulting “Subway Series” to the Yankees.

Mays played for Army teams for most of the next two years after being drafted during the Korean War. When he returned in 1954, he hit 41 home runs, batted .345 and won the league’s Most Valuable Player trophy as the Giants defeated the favored Indians in the World Series. In 1955, he briefly chased Ruth’s record of 60 home runs in a season, finishing with 51. After the season, Durocher announced his retirement. Mays asked what he would do without the help of “Mr. Leo.” “Willie Mays doesn’t need anyone’s help,” Durocher replied.

Mays was revered in Harlem. After day games, he would show up to play stickball with kids on the street. Runs were scored based on how far you hit a small rubber ball with a broomstick, measured against the grids on the street. Mays regularly covered six sewers.

That was lost when owner Horace Stoneham moved the Giants after the 1957 season and accompanied the Dodgers to Los Angeles. For the next decade they were perennial contenders, but never winners.

In 1965, Mays won his second MVP award; he also hit his 500th home run. Although he continued to play as hard as ever, his career began to be measured more in milestones: his 600th home run in 1968, his 3,000th hit in 1970. He was named to the All-Star game for 20 consecutive seasons.

Before the 1972 season, he asked Stoneham for a ten-year contract to keep him with the team after his playing career. Instead, he was signed to a two-year contract and, after a slow start to his season, was traded to the Mets, the new National League team in New York. In August 1973, he hit his 660th home run, but went without for the rest of the year; he announced his retirement in September before playing his final game in the Mets’ loss to Oakland in the final game of the World Series. He would remain with the Mets as hitting coach.

In 1979, his first eligibility, Mays was elected to the Hall of Fame, selected on 95% of the vote. Snider, who finished second in the voting, noted that “Willie really deserves to be alone.” That year, Mays took a job as a greeter at an Atlantic City casino, after which baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned him from the game because authorities did not approve of any connection to gambling. When Peter Ueberroth succeeded Kuhn in 1985, he reinstated Mays, who by then was a special assistant to the Giants. In 1993, he signed a lifetime contract with the team.

Mays died of heart failure in Palo Alto, California, a day after canceling an appearance at MLB’s annual tribute to Negro League baseball at Rickwood Field, in Birmingham. He is survived by his son Michael from his first marriage to Margherite Chapman, which ended in divorce. His second wife, Mae Allen, predeceased him in 2013.