The Last Boy

The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, is not a typical sports biography, and for that Jane Leavy is to be commended. This is one of the best books I've read about the curse of excellence and the drawbacks of stardom, and is a clear-eyed example of how it's never a good idea to meet your heroes.

Leavy incorporates herself into the book, describing her childhood and a grandmother who lived blocks from Yankee Stadium during Mantle's golden years. She also interpolates, at the beginning of each section, an interview she did with Mantle in Atlantic City in 1983, when he took a job with a casino, which got him temporarily banned from baseball. He ends up making a drunken pass at her, and both sides of his personality--hero and lout--are on full display.

Unlike most baseball biographies, Leavy does not get bogged down in a game-by-game recitation of a career. She focuses on twenty important days in Mantle's career. She does touch on his hardscrabble upbringing in Oklahoma mining country, where his father worked the mines, breathing in the lead dust. The famous story of how Mantle, not doing well in the minor leagues, was ready to quit and his father drove to shame him into continuing is told here. Mantle's father would die at age 39.

Much of Mantle's story is familiar to baseball fans, such as how he played hurt almost his entire career. He suffered from osteomyelitis, which kept him out of the Army, and in the World Series of his rookie year he pulled up to avoid running into Joe DiMaggio (on a soft liner hit by Willie Mays, of all people) and stepped on a drain, ripping apart his knee. He still remained one of the fastest players in all of baseball. Many fans also know that in the great season of 1961, when he and Roger Maris, "the M&M Boys," chased Ruth's record, Mantle gave way due to injury. What I didn't know was that the injury stemmed from a shot given to him by a Dr. Feelgood for a venereal disease.

And that's where Mantle's story becomes so fascinating. The man was a hero to so many, an ideal really, like Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, but he led such a dissolute private life. He ended up an alcoholic, and was a rampant womanizer. He married his childhood sweetheart, but treated her abominably, but never divorced her, even while basically living with other women. He seemed to be tormented by his stance as a hero, as evidenced by some of the things he signed on baseballs. One he signed "I fucked Marilyn Monroe" solid for $6,700.

Leavy is very thorough. She spends an entire fascinating chapter about a home run Mantle hit in Washington in 1953, which was the first to be described as a "tape measure" home run--a sportswriter walked it off and estimated it to travel over 600 feet. Like Stanley looking for Livingstone she tracks down the man who was the boy who found the ball, and uses some physicists and satellite photography to estimate how far the ball did travel.

There's also a lot of talk about the comparison between Mantle and Mays. The latter, due to a longer playing career, ended up with higher lifetime stats, but Leavy argues persuasively that Mantle was better, among the best of all time. Mantle certainly regretted the abuse he gave his body. In a discussion with Bob Costas he said, "I know I had as much ability as Willie. And I had probably more all-around ability than Stan or Ted. The difference is none of them have to look back and wonder how good they could have been."

Mantle's greatness as a player, and his generosity as a teammate, shines through in Leavy's prose. And though the subtitle sounds like hyperbole, I don't think it is--Mantle really was the last of a certain type of sports hero, before tell-all books and sportswriters ceased to practice omerta about player's indiscretions. In her introduction I think she says it best: "Mickey Mantle was the Last Boy venerated by the last generation of Baby Boomer boys, whose unshakable bond with their hero is the obdurate refusal to grow up. Maintaining the fond illusions of adolescence is the ultimate Boomer entitlement. He inspired awe without envy--except perhaps for what he got away with. Pain inoculated him against jealousy and judgment."