Willie Mays

In the mid-'60s, whites weren't ready for the best baseball player to be black, and blacks weren't ready for him to be black like Mays.

By Joan Walsh

Jul 13, 1999 | Willie Howard Mays Jr. was best known for his high, boyish voice; his huge wide-palmed hands, branching out at the wrists like mini baseball gloves; the oversize cap that flew off his head as he rounded the bases or roamed the outfield; and his trademark basket catch -- maybe, most of all, The Catch, the one that robbed the Cleveland Indians' Vic Wertz of extra bases in the first game of the 1954 World Series.

The Catch will make the 20th century highlight shows as Mays' legacy. Maybe it's the black-and-white film that makes it so breathtaking today -- the field looks so vast, the fence so menacing, the outfielder so small and speedy, like a character in a grainy old silent movie viewed on fast-forward. But it was equally stunning in person. Writer Arnold Hano immortalized it in his book "A Day in the Bleachers." Hano watched as Mays chased the ball, "turned full around, head down, running as hard as he could ... I thought then: it will beat him to the wall."

But it didn't. With his back to home plate, Mays caught the ball over his left shoulder, and "then whirled and threw, like some olden statue of a Greek javelin hurler, his head twisted away to the left as his right arm swept out and around ... And as he turned, or as he threw -- I could not tell which, the two motions were welded into one -- off came the cap, and then Mays himself continued to spin around after the gigantic effort of returning the ball whence it came, and he went down flat on his belly, and out of sight." The Catch helped the Giants win the World Series in four games, their first series win since 1933, and their last to date.

Typically, the opinionated and sometimes ornery Mays himself insists that wasn't his best catch: "The catch off Bobby Morgan in Brooklyn was the best catch I ever made," Mays told Salon People, referring to a diving, backhanded grab of the Brooklyn Dodger's line drive in September 1951 at Ebbetts Field. The impact stunned him briefly. "Jackie Robinson and [Giants manager] Leo Durocher were the first people I saw when I opened my eyes," Mays recalls. That difference of opinion about The Catch is telling: Even a star as huge as Mays couldn't control what fans revered about him, and at a certain point he had to give up.

Now, at 68, Mays says he doesn't much care how he's remembered. But others do. When baseball luminaries were polled after New York Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio died to see who had inherited the title of "greatest living player," St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson asked incredulously: "You're assuming DiMaggio was the greatest living ballplayer?" Gibson believed Mays was the best even while DiMaggio was alive, and he has a lot of company. And while Mays insists he's never cared about the title, his failure to secure it until DiMaggio's death seemed a little strange to me, a holdover from a time when baseball wasn't ready for its Ruths and Gehrigs and DiMaggios to give way to the Robinsons and the Mayses and the Aarons.

My gut feeling, eccentric and ill-substantiated as it may be, is that Mays never got the full acclaim he deserved, because he was the best in baseball when much of white America wasn't ready for its best player to be black, and some of black America wasn't ready for him to be black like Mays. I grew up in New York in the 1960s listening to white kids argue that the Yankees' Mickey Mantle was better than Mays, one circumstance in which whites are decidedly disadvantaged. And I've wondered if that accounts for Mays' ambivalent relationship with fame. He is known for his kindness to friends, but he can be cantankerous and contemptuous to strangers and fans, and even longtime friends and admirers describe him occasionally as "bitter."

Some people scoff at the notion that Mays never got sufficient credit. "People are going to ask what you've been smoking if you try to say Willie Mays didn't get enough acclaim," San Francisco Giants president (and lifelong Mays fan) Peter Magowan told me when I ran that idea by him. "He was the highest-paid player in baseball in his day. Fans loved him."

But Giants manager Dusty Baker agreed with me. Talking about Mays' difficult relationship with the media, and with the baseball establishment for a time in the early '80s, Baker offers: "What people don't understand is what he went through. You'll just never know. He played in a time when the world wasn't as open-minded as it is now. And to this day, he's never gotten what a Ruth or a Cobb or Lou Gehrig have. You ever see a Willie Mays movie? Me, either. So he's had reason to be bitter. Whole bunch of us had reason."

As baseball gathers in Boston Tuesday for its annual family reunion, the All-Star Game, it's worth looking back at the 20-time All-Star, Willie Mays, who is now, officially, the "greatest living baseball player" -- much better late than never.

Next Page: He wound up National League Rookie of the Year

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