#Warm memories of Mickey Mantle, 25 years after Yankees’ great’s death

This was early in the final summer of his life, June 2003, and my father was gazing through the glass at a display case inside the Yogi Berra Museum in Montclair, N.J. He wasn’t yet aware of the surprise I’d been able to arrange for him yet — for the moment he was simply trapped in a haze of memory, his eyes glazed a bit, the smile real.

“This man,” he said, looking at a blown-up black-and-white photo of a Yankee wearing No. 7 in pinstripes, “hit the ball farther than anyone who’s ever lived. Think about that.”

It was then that there was a tap on his shoulder.

“And to think,” Yogi Berra told my startled father, “they named him after you.”

My father, Mickey, wasn’t one to be intimidated by famous people. He’d once been asked to bring his trumpet and join Tony Bennett’s road band. But he was speechless now, as he extended his hand and shook Yogi’s, and Yogi — who’d been down this road a time or two in his day — took it in stride.

“If Mick was your hero,” Yogi told him, “you weren’t alone. Because he was our hero, too.”

Twenty-five years ago Thursday, Mickey Mantle died, not long after he’d received a liver transplant in Dallas, not long after the cancer started to savage him, not long after he’d stood before a bank of microphones after spending the better part of a lifetime of too many last calls and too many rounds on the house and declared to the world in a moment of courage that still staggers all these years later:

“For the kids out there, this is a role model — don’t be like me.”

He wanted to warn of the dangers of alcohol, of hubris, of betraying your own body in the name of good times, and seeing the gaunt man saying those words did have an impact, and in precisely the way Mantle wanted.

But the other truth is this: From the time he was 20 years old, he was the role model, the only person millions of kids wanted to be like. He was fast, he was strong, he was handsome. He didn’t hit baseballs, he obliterated them.

My father never thought he’d ever have a baseball hero to match Joe DiMaggio. Then he bought a ticket for a game between the Yankees and the Kansas City A’s on the night of Wednesday, May 22, 1963. The Yankees fell behind 7-0. They scored six in the seventh, one in the eighth. One personal code my father followed like a secular rosary: You didn’t leave a baseball game until it was over.

So it was right around 11:15 at night when Mantle swung at a Bill Fischer fastball leading off the 11th inning. He had a perfect view: upper deck, behind the plate. And what he saw was the closest a baseball player ever came to hitting a ball out of the old Stadium, interrupted in its flight only by the frieze that topped the old baseball basilica.

“I will never forget the sound,” my father said, and sounds were always important to him as a musician: the way Sinatra wrapped his voice around a note, the way Buddy Rich attacked his drum kit. And the way the ball exploded off Mickey Mantle’s bat. My father was only four months younger than Mantle.

“Too old to have new baseball heroes,” he would tell me. “But that changed my mind.”

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His teammates would later insist that constant stream of people who wanted to tell Mantle how much he meant to them would cause some problems, because he never believed himself worthy of their devotion. But of course that didn’t matter. Baseball is the most visceral of all sports. It is generational. It is why I wanted my old man to meet Yogi Berra.

And why hundreds of people, without tickets, flocked to 161st Street and River Avenue on the morning of Aug. 13, 1995. They wanted — needed — to gather. To share in collective grief, and collective memory. Old men cried, as much for vanished youth as a perished idol.

In his eulogy a few days later, Bob Costas said, “He was a presence in our lives — a fragile hero to whom we had an emotional attachment so strong and lasting that it defied logic. Mickey often said he didn’t understand it, this enduring connection and affection, the men now in their 40s and 50s, otherwise perfectly sensible, who went dry in the mouth and stammered like schoolboys in the presence of Mickey Mantle.”

And there, a few years later, dry in the mouth, stammering like a schoolboy, was Mickey Vaccaro. He recovered. He told Yogi, “You were pretty damn good yourself, you know.”

“Maybe,” Yogi said. “But I wasn’t Mickey. Nobody was.”