Willie Mays was a teenager when he was acknowledged as a baseball phenom, a designation he quickly outgrew as if it were a pair of hand-me-down spikes.
He evolved into a first-rate ballplayer in his own right — a Negro League star, then a minor league superstar.
But it was soon apparent no superlative could hold him.
He was barely 20 years old when the Giants summoned him from their top farm team on May 25, 1951. The center fielder had caught their eye. But it was the possibility of the man that intrigued them most.
So it is that Mays, who died on Tuesday at 93 years old, is remembered — not as something so pedestrian as a slugging right-hander, a block of data on the back of a baseball card or a Hall of Famer in repose, but as an ideal.
No one combined his magnificent power, dazzling speed, supernatural arm, preternatural intuition and flair for melodrama. To say nothing of the sheer weight of his exuberance.
He was a do-it-all athlete who could hit one over the roof in the first inning, run like a deer into deepest center field to snag a howling drive in the fourth, and steal second base in an explosive cloud of dust in a tie game in the ninth.
Later Mays might charm the hard-bitten New York press with his effervescent innocence and cherubic smile, then go home to his Harlem boardinghouse and play stickball in the street with the neighborhood kids.
“If he could cook,” said Leo Durocher, Mays’ first big league manager, “I’d marry him.”
The ideal that was Mays had practical application from the get-go. He awakened the ’51 Giants, who rallied from 13 games behind to win the pennant over the Brooklyn Dodgers on Bobby Thomson’s epic home run. It was their first pennant in 14 years. Mays was voted Rookie of the Year.
He spent most of the 1952 season, and all of ’53, in the Army. When he returned to the Giants in 1954, he was voted Most Valuable Player and led them to a World Series victory. It took them 56 years to win another.
And so on, and so forth, with game-winning play after historic hit after milestone home run. But with Mays it wasn’t so much about what he did (though that was worth the price of two admissions), or the fact he played every game as if it was his first. It was more about what he might do next.
“You used to think if the score was 5-0,” Reggie Jackson once said, “he’d hit a five-run homer.”
People were drawn to the notion that a game could be played so magnificently and with such dynamism. Inevitably, anticipation trumped reality. The process became more gratifying than the result. So it happened that the most joyous ballplayer most people have ever seen spent the balance of his career, and the rest of his life, trying to live up to the preposterous expectations he inspired as the Say Hey Kid.
It wasn’t an experience to be …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
