When I was a child, my mother used to tell me stories of a heroic warrior who had gone off to fight a war in a faraway land and died in battle with an arrow shot into his heel. She would tell this story in such lengthy detail that i used to fall asleep before she got to the part about the warrior's tragic death.
Perhaps that's why I used to think she was telling me the story of my father going off to World War II. He had been seriously wounded and returned home to live a long life. So even as a child, I had come to realize that the warrior in my mother's stories wasn't dad. Who was it then? My mom said she didn't know — that it had just been a story her grandmother used to tell year when she was a child.
Imagine my surprise then when in elementary school I'd attended a children's story event at the public library and there I'd heard a librarian talk about s story from Greek mythology that sounded exactly like the one my mother used to tell me.
Of course, it was the story of Achilles going off to the Trojan War from Homer's The Iliad. The irony was that The Iliad had been a story that survived for centuries in the oral tradition of that time — and that my mother had been orally told, not read, the story as a child, and she had passed it on to me the same way.
I've had this story on my mind since the publication of Mantle: The Best There Ever Was in 2019 and now the recent release of the book as a paperback. It's not a traditional biography. I'd written my cradle-to-the-grave Mantle biography two decades ago. Instead. my new book focuses more on a retelling of sorts of the Achilles story, since I've long had an image in my mind of Mickey Mantle as a heroic figure with tremendous flaws — a very real man with human frailties and a foreboding sense of doom ending his tragic life too soon.
Ultimately, i owe understanding and appreciating Mantle in that perspective to two women — my mom, of course, who first told me the story of Achilles; and my friend Patricia Casado's late mother Lucy with whom I used to have long talks into the wee hours of the night at her Hollywood restaurant about the work of mythology expert Joseph Campbell and his theories from his classic The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The post-war America of the mid-twentieth century was like all societies with the need for heroes not because they coincidentally made them up on their own but because heroes like Mantle express a deep psychological aspect of human existence. They can be seen as a metaphor for the human search of self-knowledge.
Sportswriter 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 the world will always belong to those who swing from the heels.
Perhaps it is all too simple in the modern age of multi-millionaire athletes to dismiss the references to sports greats such as Mantle as “heroes” in the context of our common humanity, with rare figures being held in esteem for what the Greeks would call 'arete,' or special talent, and less in the religious or spiritual context that hero theorists Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung proposed.
On the other hand, as great people pass on, our memories tend to mold them into the collective image of the archetypal hero, interpreting their lives in a more spiritual way as a reflection of society's need for men and women a touch above ordinary, able to live on the plane of existence of basic right and wrong, good and evil, heaven and hell.
“The view of Mantle as a Homeric hero is correct, I think,” Stephen F. Austin University scholar Bryan M. Davis, a specialist on heroes in pop culture, said in an interview discussing Mantle as a heroic figure. “He reminds me much more of Achilles or Hector -- heroes we revere for their ability to overcome the shortcomings of simply being human but finally having to succumb to those weaknesses — rather than an archetypal hero such as Moses or King Arthur.
"But the religion of baseball tends to deify its greats. Perhaps, in a thousand years, another civilization will look back and remember the hero Mantle, who slew the demon baseballs with a mere stick and led the people in ritual song every seventh inning.”
