NYAT’s Official Review of Jane Leavy’s Mickey Mantle: The Last Boy

I recently had the pleasure of reading Jane Leavy’s latest work, Mickey Mantle: The Last Boy.  Although this is certainly not the first book written about or by Mickey Mantle, I found Leavy’s work to be rather insightful, particularly for someone like me, who is several generations removed from the days in which The Mick roamed centerfield for the Yankees.

Mind you, Leavy’s work is not a traditional biography or biopic of Mantle. Her work is an attempt to not simply understand who the really Mickey Mantle was, but how he came to become the Mickey Mantle that we remember.  More importantly, she attempts to ascertain what it was that may have contributed to this distinction.

As you might be able to deduce from the title, Mantle was the last of his generation, a boy in a man’s world, playing a boy’s game yet also being asked to be a man at the same time.  Like many of his teammates, be it Billy Martin or Whitey Ford, it was easy to remain a boy in a man’s world, but even easier when you were Mickey Mantle and your potential for baseball greatness outweighed your need to mature into an adult.  At his core, Mickey Mantle was really just ballplayer who felt most secure on the baseball field and most vulnerable when he was not there.  Tormented by several factors, including the young death of his father, instances of child molestation from a former babysitter, and his consistent bouts with injuries, he turned to the psychologically numbing effects of alcohol.  His affection for liquor became his greatest and most public vice, as it stuck with him for almost his entire adult life.

Yet despite the fact that he displayed the traits of a degenerate alcoholic and displayed questionable behavior off of the field, this did not change the way that a generation of Mickey Mantle worshipers viewed and still view him.  For those of Leavy’s generation, Mickey Mantle was more than a phenomenal baseball player.  He was an idol to and an inspiration to an entire generation of baseball fans.  In their recollection, no one could run faster than him, hit the ball harder than him, and have the impact on a game that he could have.  His feats are remembered and retold as though they were of biblical proportions, be it his massive home run hit as a rookie during an exhibition game at USC or his “tape measure” shot off of the façade of Yankee Stadium.  Despite attempts by physicists to disprove the magnitude of these feats, a generation of memories remains accepted as fact.  However, his pure talent has never been debated and modern scientific examination of performance has given merit to these recollections.  He possessed a proportionally perfect body and his musculature was rare among baseball players. 

It is this nearly unquantifiable talent and the memories of an entire generation that has given him his superhero-like status.  Yet a great deal of what has contributed to his legendary status is time that he didn’t spend playing baseball, when his fragile body gave out on him numerous times during his career.  It was his Achilles heel, the only true villain to his talent next to his off of the field vices.  While Mantle may have been blessed with a superior musculature, he was blessed with a rather average joint structure, a structure unable to withstand forces placed on it by his muscles.  Quite simply, he swung so hard that at times he pulled his muscles right off of the bones.  In addition, he suffered a career altering injury during his first World Series of 1951.  Willie Mays, his longtime cross-city rival, hit a pop fly to right field.  While charging towards the ball, Mantle, who was in right field, pulled up short after Joe DiMaggio called him off.  Mantle’s foot got caught on a drain, causing a traumatic knee injury which was determined years later to be a torn ACL.  Yet, due to the primitive methods of medical evaluation and methods of treatment available at the time, his knee never fully recovered and his legs were never the same.    These injuries created an almost JFK-like aura around Mantle, with a generation of Mantle idolizers still wondering what could have been.  His talent was never fulfilled to its potential and the intrigue of what could have been his contributes to his legacy.

Yet the point that Leavy drives home is that what people remember of Mantle and who Mantle actually was were two very distinct things.  People have recollections of his accomplishments, some of which even Mantle said have been recalled either inaccurately or simply never took place.  And even those like Leavy, who had an opportunity to interact with him, still, have trouble making the distinction.  During interview she conducted with him in Atlantic City, Mantle became intoxicated, attempted to make sexual advances on her, and then passed out in her laptop, leaving her in tears.  She realized that he was still indeed very much a boy in 1983, one who was never given a reason to grow up, especially if he was to continue to be remembered as something that he was not.

But even to this day, Leavy herself still has difficulty making the distinction between her Mickey Mantle and the real Mickey Mantle.  During a celebrity golf tournament taking place in somewhat chilly weather, Leavy recalls Mantle literally giving her the sweater off of his back.  She held onto the sweater as a keepsake, yet later discovered that the size on it read “large,” which she recognized as most likely too small to have been Mickey Mantle’s actual sweater.  In reality, Mickey never gave her the sweater off of his back, but she needed to see it that way.

Mickey kept up his boyish ways until about 1993, when he finally went into rehab for alcohol addiction.  His son had recently passed away in a tragedy and it made a great impression on him.  Upon completing rehab, he finally left his boyhood behind.  For the first time in his life, he seemed to embrace his role as a husband and a father and began to feel comfortable off of the baseball field.  However, by the time Mantle gave up his drinking ways, the damage was done.  He was diagnosed with liver cancer in 1995 and desperately needed a new liver.  Despite surviving a transplant, the cancer had already spread past his liver and it took his life the following August.

His death left a generation of fans in mourning, such as my father.  My father, like Leavy, grew up worshipping Mickey Mantle.  He did his due diligence to pass on the legend of The Mick to me.  A few years before Mantle became ill, I remember asking my dad if he would be sad on the day Mickey Mantle died, to which he replied an absolute yes.  When word came down that he was dying, it certainly took a toll on him.  His childhood hero was nearing the end of his life.  After he finally passed away, my mother decided to invest in a gift for him that he would enjoy for the rest of his life – an autographed, framed painting of The Mick.  When we presented it to him for his birthday that year, his jaw dropped, as if brought back to his childhood again.  It now sits right above his desk, the main spectacle of his home study.

Although Leavy’s work was really my first venture into the life of Mickey Mantle, I can honestly say that it did a great deal help me appreciate what it was that made him the legend that he is.  And while the book may present accurate accounts of Mickey Mantle’s life off of the baseball field, it also reinforces the idea that there is very little that can bring down Mickey Mantle.  He may have been an alcoholic, a degenerate, and a lost boy in a man’s world, but there is no doubt in my mind that Mickey will remain the man that Leavy, my father, and the rest of their generation chooses to remember him as, a great ball player with unfulfilled potential and the unmatched hero of their childhood.