A Conversation With

TONY CASTRO

             Dennis Mukai artwork, William Orozco Photography

New York Times bestselling author Tony Castro talks about his new book Maris & Mantle: Two Yankees, Immortality and the Age of Camelot, and the role of teammates Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle in defining the 1960s in America. Publisher Triumph Books calls Maris & Mantle, "the never before told story of the profound and compelling friendship between the two New York legends." Tony was interviewed by Ashley Chase.

 

What brought you to this subject? And what compelled you to write a book on it?

Roger Maris, pure and simple. And the chance coincidence that I happened to sit in on a Harvard symposium on the Age of John F. Kennedy when Presidential historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. remarked that the early 1960s in America were possibly defined as much by Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle as they were by President Kennedy himself. And, of course I had written extensively about Mantle, and this seemed like the perfect place to write a book harkening back to a golden age in baseball and in America and what Schlesinger had said about Maris, Mantle, and JFK being a pop cultural troika defining that era.

What is this book about?

On one level it’s about America’s obsession with the home run not only in baseball but also in politics, entertainment, and pop culture. Sportswriter and author Richard Hoffer once suggested about Mantle and perhaps heroes altogether, that we don’t mind our heroes flawed, or even doomed.  In America, failure is forgiven of the big swingers, in whom even foolishness is flamboyant — and that, yes, the world will always belong to those who swing from the heels. And maybe that’s why Mantle once said, “I guess you could say I’m what this country’s all about.”

You’re known for your Mickey Mantle Trilogy. What do you call it now with this new book?

First, you must know this: I never intended to write a trilogy. If you’ve read the books, you know that I met Mickey in 1970 when I was a young reporter just out of college. I was working at the Dallas Times Herald, and Mantle was in his third year in retirement in Dallas, playing golf almost every day. I was a scratch golfer myself working on an afternoon newspaper where my hours —  6 a.m. to 2 p.m. —  allowed me to get in a full 18 holes in the afternoon. One day we hooked up over hamburgers and beer at some Turtle Creek restaurant. It was a hoot, and I was often driving Mickey home to North Dallas and then driving Merlyn back to pick up Mickey’s El Dorado at whatever golf course where he had left it.

Why would you have to drive Mickey Mantle home? Did he drink a lot?

Did he ever! He had been drinking heavily since his rookie season in 1951, and  by 1970 Mantle had become a broken down drunk who was out of the news picture in Dallas. He had pretty much trashed his name there. He was unfriendly, obnoxious and unkind in dealing with the local sportswriters who were not as forgiving as New York writers had been. Dallas was also a football town, and Mantle was old news. It was six or seven years since his last big season, and he was still a couple of years away from his Hall of Fame induction that would put him back in the news cycle. Mickey said it best. “No one gives a damn about me anymore,” he often whined. Mind you, I wasn’t a sportswriter in Dallas I had quickly moved into a beat reporting on civil rights, minorities and politics, and this Is what I did in my reporting career. So, while I was keeping a notebook on my time with Mantle, it wasn’t with the intention of writing a book.

And they knew you were a reporter?

Mickey didn’t care. Merlyn, though, was often asking if I planned to write about them and finally just asked that, if I write about this time in their lives, that I do so after they were no longer around. But, honestly, at the time my professional interest was politics. It was on politics that I won a fellowship in Washington in 1971, and I wrote a civil rights history in 1974, and then was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard in 1976. But baseball did provide an entrée, much as it did with writers like my late friend David Halberstam who specialized in politics and public policy but also wrote about sports. And over the years I kept touching base with Mantle. At his Hall of Fame induction, at Yankee Stadium, then on the memorabilia circuit in Los Angeles. By coincidence when I came to work in L.A., the literary agent I signed with — Mike Hamilburg — was the son of Mitchell Hamilburg, a big name agent and baseball fan who had produced Safe at Home! That was the 1962 baseball comedy that capitalized on Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris’ fame after their chase of Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1961. Mike knew of my Mantle connection, so when Mickey died in 1995, he suggested that I take a shot at writing a new biography of Mantle.

All that material, and you hadn’t thought about writing a book about Mickey Mantle before this?

I knew that someday I would. But then Mike said, “Write it now. Write it all.” In 2000 I showed him a manuscript of over 2,500 type-written pages. He laughed so hard I thought he was going to choke to death. He said that was around 800,000 words, and that no publisher would buy a baseball biography of much more than 100,000 words, something between 300 and 400 typewritten pages. So we began editing it down. It seemed impossible and like cutting off a leg or testicle. Mike finally auctioned a manuscript of 600 pages, which we still had to cut down to 400 pages for publication. The reason I tell you this story is that there was a lot of material — like on the Mantle-DiMaggio, Mantle-Maris and Mantle-Stengel relationships — that was left out of that first book. There was also new material that kept coming in. And, that’s how the books DiMag & Mick and The Best There Ever Was — came to be, as well at this new book, Maris & Mantle: Two Yankees, Immortality and the Age of Camelot. Don’t get me wrong. There was more that went into those subsequent books than just picking up what was left out of Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son. The game’s new analytics and sabermetrics, for instance. They change the way you look at Mantle’s 1957 season, which had long been under-appreciated. There were also new interviews with Bob Cerv, Ted Williams, Roger Maris and numerous others that I didn’t have access to until after the first Mantle book was out. Not to mention Holly Brooke (seen in the photo with Mantle in 1951), Mickey’s New York girlfriend with whom I spoke to almost every day from 2006 until her death in 2017. I also had a couple of long conversations with Merlyn that led me to reconsider things like Mickey’s place among baseball’s greats.

You must have a lot of material on Holly Brooke and Mickey. Enough for a book?

Wow. That’s something Mike Hamilburg would have asked. He died in 2016, and I miss him.