The Mick

In the very northeast corner of Oklahoma you'll find the community of Commerce, Oklahoma. It's population is 2,500 and it sits adjacent to Miami, Oklahoma, population 12,000. Miami is the home of two significant things: Heisman Trophy winner, Steve Owens and 14 gambling casinos. A very dear friend and his wife are citizens of Miami.
Commerce, on the other hand, is the boyhood home of Mickey Mantle. Three years ago my buddy and I were driving around looking at the sights when I saw the sign, 'Commerce, Oklahoma'. "Hey, this is the home of Mickey Mantle", I said. Everyone knows this, don't they? Being in love with baseball I asked my buddy where the MM museum was located. "Ain't one", he said. And he was right. There was a skimmed baseball diamond with no grass and a rickety old backstop. A white sign, one foot by two feet, read 'Mickey Mantle Field' in black letters. How sad that one of the greats couldn't have a better legacy. After all, he's 'The Mick'.
I won't go into the sordid details of the Mickey's life. He died of cancer most likely brought on by cirrhosis of the liver. His wife, Merlyn, along with their four sons were alcoholics but were rehabilitated as was Mantle during the last two years of his life. Two of the boys are dead; one from alcoholism and the other from Hodgkins Disease. Mickey Mantle was not a role model. Mantle was a womanizer and alcoholic and this is as far as I want to go on the subject. It's almost unimaginable that he's been dead for fifteen years already.
Mickey, toward the end of his life, used a line first uttered by the great Detroit Lion quarterback, Bobby Layne; "If I'd known I was going to live this long I'd have taken better care of myself". Sad but true.
The Mick came into my life in 1951 just as he was beginning his career. I was completely enthralled with baseball and baseball players. In a couple of years the Baseball Game of the Week(Yes, there was only one then) was on TV hosted by Dizzy Dean and Buddy Blattner. I told you I loved baseball.

My first glove was a Nellie Fox. It didn't have a leather string tying the fingers together. I slept with it and I still have it. I've kept every glove but one(sold it to my best friend) I've used from that original onto Little League, Babe Ruth, high school and college. There is nothing like the smell of oil being rubbed into a glove to make it soft and pliable. Holding a baseball glove and then putting your fingers inside is an experience unexplainable to those who never will. If I close my eyes and bring the glove to my nose then take a whiff and inhale deeply, I can remember how I robbed Pat Ahlstrom of a sure double in a grade school softball game by making a fantastic over the shoulder catch in the centerfield gap. Even though it took place in 1958 I want to believe that Pat has never forgiven me. The smell of the glove reminds me how, as a catcher in college, I shifted my weight to the right, snagged a potential wild pitch then threw out the base runner at second. He was from Knox College and had never been tagged out on the base paths----until my throw. The brain is flooded with these thoughts and many more; many too numerous to mention. The nice thing about baseball memories is we players rarely, if ever, recall errors, only successes. This is the way it should be and this is, once again, why I love baseball

I love the feel of a brand new, shiny baseball. The seams stick out just so and you know, by doing a throwing motion and snapping the wrist at the proper time, you are The Man. If you then place your two longest fingers on the right side of the ball with thumb underneath, well, a curve ball that breaks to the outside of home plate better than Sandy Koufax ever did can be easily done in your mind. Can you see it? I can.

When we were kids we tried to emulate baseball players mannerisms. One of my classmates, Sweat Culver, a Hall of Fame baseball coach at Creighton Prep in Omaha was a master of these impersonations. He had The Mick down to a science. He'd take off running, both arms tucked together near the armpits, then pull up lame, the way Mickey did if he'd strained a muscle. Mickey Mantle wasn't my hero. Henry Aaron had that distinction. None of us knew about Mantle's philandering and alcohol problems. We didn't have a twenty-hour news cycle then and sports writers protected the players 'for the good of the game'. When I was age ten everybody knew the name Mantle. I'd be willing to wager the great percentage of our American population today, woman and children included, know his name and who he was.

On June 8, 1969 a friend and I had some time to kill before a flight to Europe. We decided to head out to Yankee Stadium to watch a game. What a thrill. Little did we know it was Mickey Mantle Day; the day they retired his number and placed his plaque in center field alongside that of Joe DiMaggio. To Mantle's credit and out of respect he made sure his bust was installed below that of Joltin' Joe.

Commerce, Oklahoma 2010 is different from what I witnessed three years ago. There's a beautiful community baseball field named after Mickey with his name on the center field scoreboard and it gave me a good feeling knowing MJ Hawkeye could have his picture taken alongside the life-sized statue of the great baseball Hall of Fame player, Mickey Mantle.