BASEBALL LEGEND MICKEY MANTLE, who lived in fear of dying young of the Hodgkins disease that killed several members of his family, tried to reach out to comfort former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the early 1990s when he learned she had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
Mickey’s longtime friend Pat Summerall, the former New York Giants football player and sports analyst, told Mantle biographer Tony Castro that he tried to connect the legendary slugger with the widow of President John F. Kennedy.
“But I think that by the time Mickey and the rest of the world were aware Mrs. Kennedy’s was sick that her condition had worsened and she was only seeing family,” Summerall told Castro, whose new book Mantle: The Best That Ever Was will be released April 12 by Rowman & Littlefield.
“Mickey was saddened by the news about Mrs. Kennedy. Hodgkins disease had caused such devastation and tragedy in his family that he felt he understood its impact better than most people.
Summerall said he had personally delivered a note from Mantle to a doorman at Mrs. Kennedy’s Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan.
The former First Lady was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1993 after her physician noticed a swollen lymph node and tests confirmed the disease. She began chemotherapy treatment in January 1994 but discontinued it four months later when she learned that the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma had spread to her brain and spinal cord and seriously infected her liver. She died at home in her sleep on May 19, 1994, at the age of 63.
Mantle died a year later, also at age 63, of cancer that ravaged his body just months after a liver transplant, all amid a national whirlwind of attention as America prayed in hopes a transplant might save the life of a sports hero who had been the most glamorous, gifted and star-crossed athlete of the '50's and early '60's.
He had outlived the family curse of Hodgkin's disease, which had contributed to the death by heart attack of his 36-year-old son Billy, and the early deaths of his father, at 39, his grandfather and two uncles. Mantle’s oldest of four sons, Mickey Jr. died at age 47 in 2000 of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
