Mantle Book Bonus: How I Met Mickey

Mickey Mantle spent his retirement enjoying golf, especially the 19th hole.

My late friend Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican writer and diplomat, used to say that the only way you can come to know someone is by making sure you have figuratively closed off all doors to what you have known of them in the past. This becomes almost impossible for someone like Mickey Mantle whose life transcends decades and has become a national institution, as if his image has been carved into our Olympus of pop culture.

I first met Mickey in 1970, the year after his retirement and shortly after he had returned to Dallas from a frustrating season as a coach of the New York Yankees. Mickey had lived in Dallas since the late 1950s, and only earlier that year I had joined the reporting staff of the Dallas Times Herald right out of college. One of the first things I did upon going to work at the Times Herald was to check the Mickey Mantle files at the newspaper's morgue. I was stunned to see the scarcity of any Mantle clips since his retirement. No lifestyle pieces, no Mick-in-retirement articles. You would have thought Mantle didn't reside in Dallas. A couple of national pieces had been written about Mickey in retirement, but nothing locally. I lobbied for an assignment to interview Mantle, which came my way because no one else was interested. Heck, my editors themselves weren't interested.

When I first contacted Mantle, I started getting a sense of why no one was writing about him. Even after I explained that his home telephone number had been in our City Desk files, Mickey seemed miffed. I remember his contradictory words as something that might have come from Yogi Berra.  "Well," Mickey said over the phone, "I only gave out that number so that I could be reached whenever someone needed to talk to me."

Mickey was close to an hour late to our lunch interview. As I write in Mantle: The Best There Ever Was, he had wanted to meet at a trendy burger restaurant in the Turtle Creek section of North Dallas. When he finally arrived, Mickey apologized in a matter-of-fact manner. He said, "There was a screw-up on our tee time this morning."  

I was immediately blown away. Not because I was finally meeting my boyhood hero, face to face, but because as I saw him -- slightly red-eyed, smiling crookedly, slurring some of his words -- I thought to myself: my God, it's like meeting my father. They both were heroes, and they both were drinkers. And not happy drunks either. Of course, I didn't tell Mickey he reminded me of my father. Nor did I tell my father that he reminded me of Mickey. But from experience, I had an understanding of how to deal with Mantle. An interview, a formal question and answer interview, was out of the question. Instead, over charbroiled cheeseburgers and beers, Mickey rambled in a disjointed exercise of free association for which I wasn't prepared.
 
We talked for close to two hours that afternoon, and I remember being panic-stricken the longer we talked because I feared that I actually had little to use in a traditional story about Mickey in retirement. He would clam up when the conversation turned to things he was doing now. A bowling alley bearing Mickey's name in Dallas had closed down, and then re-opened, and Mickey was unclear as to what the status of it was. He didn't want to talk about his investments, and he was equally evasive on questions about his life with his sons. There was one comment I wrote several times in my notebook: "We're doing a lot more things together now, that's for sure."  

My time with Mickey might have ended that afternoon had we not started talking about the one thing that eventually got him to open up -- golf. READ MORE IN THE BOOK