Guest Columnist
As a boy in the late 1950s, I loved to watch baseball during the lazy days of summer. I watched the Game-of-the-Week (on CBS I think) announced by Dizzy Dean and Peewee Reese. My favorite team was the New York Yankees and I idolized their great center fielder Mickey Mantle. I was a switch-hitter because Mickey was. This was the stuff of dreams.
I had a connection to Mickey through my mother. When I was just a year old in 1949, 17-year-old Mickey came to play for the Independence Yankees in the Class D Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri (KOM) League. This was my mother's hometown that I visited every summer. Ten years later, I could talk to the locals who would regale me with stories of Mickey's early baseball career.
I have a lot of boyhood memories about him and Jane Leavy's 2010 bestseller "The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood" reminded me of them and more, but I'd like to focus this article on three environmental factors which made a big difference in his shortened life: injuries, alcoholism and retirement.
I have a theory about elite athletes like Mickey – they have so much inherent athletic ability in terms of strength and speed that it cannot be contained in the human body. Literally, their athletic ability is so great that they rip their bodies apart. It doesn't happen to many people and even most athletes, but the truly great are plagued with this. Bo Jackson was another.
Certainly Mickey's devastating right knee injury (a triad of torn ACL, LCL and meniscus) at the age of 20 in the second game of the 1951 World Series hastened his decline and subsequent injuries. The knee was not surgically repaired until two seasons later and then only partially – the critical ACL tear was not discovered. Such was the state of orthopedic surgery and sports medicine six decades ago.
Mantle would play for another seventeen years in incredible pain and tear his body apart from a variety of injuries. In his 18 year career as a Yankee, he would lose nearly three seasons to injury. By his own admission, he should have retired four years earlier than he actually did following the 1968 season.
Exactly why Mantle turned to alcohol (and women) as solace is anybody's guess. It was probably a combination of factors: pain, enablers, social morays, killing time, life of the party, immaturity, etc. His father's death at 39 certainly contributed to his recklessness. Regardless, there was a hole in his soul that he filled with abuse. Just two years before his death at 63 in 1995, he entered the Betty Ford Clinic, under protest, to address his addiction. Denial is a common trait among the addicted. It was far too late to reverse the long-term cirrhosis that destroyed his liver.
I saw a lot of alcohol abuse in my Air Force career and early-on tended to ignore it. Drinking was part of the devil-may-care attitude of fighter pilots. There is a tendency to ignore significant drinking if someone can perform – the myth that if you can handle your liquor, it's okay. Not so. No one could play with a hangover as effectively as Mantle (albeit not to peak capability), but the long term effects were devastating. In his last interview weeks before his death, Mantle admitted that he had wasted his talent. After an alcohol-related aircraft accident in the early 1980s, my attitude changed – don't ignore or discount the disease of alcoholism; it destroys people and those they love.
Mickey Mantle only knew one thing – the game of baseball. His professional career began when he was still a boy, and never progressed beyond that. When he wasn't on the field, he was the life of the party, someone always filling his half-empty glass. When his playing days were over, the only thing he knew was ‘how to be Mickey Mantle.' He traded on his name in retirement for nearly three decades. He was a good-looking country boy playing in the Big Apple for the best-known sports franchise in history.
What are the lessons here? Most of us don't have to worry about the significant injuries that Mantle had to deal with. We do have to be on guard against alcoholism and substance abuse… in ourselves and those around us. And we do have to prepare ourselves for retirement, not only financially but with interests as well. Early on, our profession is literally our identity; we need another identity when work is done. And lastly, even the heroes of our youth have clay feet. Mickey Mantle was only human after all.