by Barry Stagg
July 1995 Mickey Mantle
Mickey Mantle lies in a Dallas, Texas hospital with a new liver and all the contrition that cancer and a bottom of the ninth reprieve can generate. Mantle is the biggest and the best of the baseball heroes of those magical twenty years after the end of World War Two. In an era where weary war veterans prospered in a booming, rich America, Mantle was the wildly successful and wildly carefree symbol of a time that could never end and a generation that, having outlived the war, could never grow old. The Mick is old now and the possessor of a body broken down with age and abuse. Still he is a bright poetic symbol of time and people and dreams of immortality that powered the first wave of baby boomers into school and sports and business and celebrity. Mickey Mantle was endless summer with danger around every drunken joyride and euphoric relief for having survived these careening, hurtling midnight speed trips. Mickey Mantle meant playing baseball on a warm evening with the Yankees on the New York radio station in the cozy darkness with two thousand miles between Yankee Stadium and the transistor radio and the distance seeming like no more than one of the Mick's five hundred foot home runs.
This man cannot ever succumb to the mortal perils that befall mere worshipping fans. He cannot die for the want of a healthy organ. His life is more than the sum of some clinical sadness on a hospital chart in a dying alcoholic's room. His life is the stuff of legend and fable and saga and parable.
In the sad hangover days of 1995 the issue of a liver transplant for an alcoholic celebrity gathers hysterical volume while the sounds of Mantle's booming bat resonate lower and lower like dying echoes in the gathering dusk. The man, the flawed, irresponsible, mortal man has replaced the media titan who grinned and slugged his way through 18 seasons in the Bronx temple to professional baseball built on the feats of his predecessor in place and substance, Babe Ruth. Mickey is a true icon, a symbol and a beacon in the dwindling middle age of his young fans growing old along with him and the dreams that he projected. He has the same aura of reckless youth and early demise that an earlier age saw in the wild poet Byron: "So, we'll go no more a-roving. So late into the night. Though the heart be still as loving. And the moon be still as bright." Byron had a short career, dying at age thirty-six with not a thing left undone in 1824. There are few if any reports on the Mick's study of the works of Byron but a wealth of evidence that they trampled the same flowers and roamed the same pastures on their respective tours.
The great thing about writing eulogies such as this is that the man is not even dead. He still has the mortal capacity to write his legend even larger on the world stage that takes so few to its bosom and casts down so many of we dreary ordinaries into a lifetime of plain obscurity. Live on Mr. Mantle and live to tell of the great battle for the reins of immortality you have fought on behalf of generations born to electronic perpetuity and instant glances into the future. Live on to tell us of your battle royal for the key to eternity and your lifelong salute to the sleeping dead millions of the last war who stand as mute mental reminders to us all that life is so precious and so wickedly snuffed out by banal evil masquerading as righteousness. Tell us how you came out of your adolescent war years to bloom like a magic giant on the television stage of the fifties sharing space and time and sentiment with Kerouac and Dean and Kennedy. Live to recall the desperate years of booze and pain and lost time and sad descent into ordinariness and that early baseball death called retirement. Tell us over and over about the New York years of Mantle, Mays and Snider and the hormone driven innocence of a world in a mad rush to live life while there was still time. Just keep breathing and living and tending that fraying circuit cable connecting us to the power-plant that was 1956 and eternity. Stick to this mortal coil some more and come back to us again in stories of perfect strokes and speed and reckless dissipation and exuberance and eternal youth. Stick around, Mickey Mantle.
Until next month, be proud, be prosperous.