The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood

Summary: A biography of the life of Mickey Mantle, covering his family roots, baseball career, and post-career life, including his injuries, alcoholism, affairs, and something of a redemption at the end of his life.

Every summer, I read at least one baseball book, and so when I received this book as a gift earlier this year, I knew what my book would be this year, not that I would need much persuading. Mickey Mantle was one of my childhood heroes, even though, as an Indians fan, he played for the hated Yankees. We all followed the rivalry between him and Roger Maris to see if either could break Ruth’s record of 60 home runs. We all tried to switch hit when we played baseball, something most of us did very badly. We debated, as this show more book explores, whether Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays was the better player.

I was also pleased to see this was written by Jane Leavy. I had thoroughly enjoyed her biography of another childhood hero, Sandy Koufax. Mantle, it turns out was a far more complicated person, a mix of the great and the tragic and the tawdry wrapped into a single individual.

She tells Mantle’s story around twenty key dates in his life, which sometimes involves some back and forth between the key date and events prior and following. She begins with his family, and the powerful influence of his father, Mutt, who did not want his son to spend his life in the mines, taught him to bat from both sides, and guided him just long enough for him to get a contract with the Yankees before he died at an early age from the cancer that seemed to run through the family. Long enough to push him to the edge of greatness, but not long enough to help him deal with that greatness.

We learn of Mantle the athlete and his incredible speed and power and the tantalizing “what ifs” of just how great he could have been. In his first season with the Yankees, in 1951, running for a fly ball in the World Series, he caught a cleat in a drain in the outfield left uncovered, and blew out his right knee before there was such a thing as ACL surgery. He was never the same, and part of the story was how he could play at such a high level despite the physical problems that multiplied over the years. Leavy chronicles in detail the home run out of Griffith stadium in 1953 and enlists physicists and witnesses to figure out how far it actually traveled. She even includes analyses of his swings from both sides of the plate, and the near perfect form Mantle had at his best. She recounts his last at bat.

One of the great “what ifs” has to do with how Mantle lived off the field, something sportswriters in the Fifties and Sixties kept hush-hush, at least until a Yankee brawl at the Copacabana. Mantle was a high-functioning alcoholic in these years, at some points even hitting home runs when he wasn’t completely sober. Only in the Sixties, did this begin to tell on his body, combined with his injuries. She also doesn’t shy away from his womanizing and the complicated relationship he and Merlyn Mantle had throughout his life,

After baseball, he was unable to find something to do with his life. He was troubled by thoughts of an early death, which ran in his family. The drinking and affairs continue. He doesn’t listen to the few who try to warn him. “Sudden” Sam McDowell, former Indians fastballer and a reformed alcoholic tried to organize an intervention, only to have it aborted after a “friend” tips off Mantle. He tried and failed at a number of ventures, went into the memorabilia business with one of his lovers, and even was banned from baseball for a period because of an association with an Atlantic City casino, where he was paid simply to appear so guests could say they met Mantle.

It is in this context that Leavy met Mantle in 1983 for an interview that shattered her own image of Mantle. She unfolds this weekend encounter through the course of the book, from his gentlemanly effort to get her a sweater to keep her warm on the golf course, to his drunken efforts to pick her up that end with him slumping over asleep in her lap.

The book ends with Mantle experiencing a sort of redemption. Late in life, he began the work of facing his inner demons, including childhood incidents of sexual abuse that might have influenced his sexual proclivities. With serious liver problems looming, he checks into the Betty Ford Clinic and manages to stay sober for the rest of his life. He makes efforts to reconcile with his sons and make amends with others. He experiences what seems like a genuine death bed conversion as former teammate Bobby Richardson ministers to him.

I’m not sure Mantle really was the last boy. The image in part is one of America losing its illusions in the late Sixties. But the truth is that athletes continue to reach the peak of their physical powers long before they mature as people, and while they can perform on the field, they are unprepared for the hangers-on, the fast lifestyle, and the sudden affluence that comes their way. Like others with power, they often have no one to hold up a mirror to help them see their true selves, no one who will tell them what they do not want to hear. Certainly Mantle bore responsibility for this, and more and more toward the end of his life he acknowledged it. What the “last boy” title fails to capture is that our culture of adulation towards sports heroes still celebrates the physical gifts of youth while failing to affirm the character qualities of maturity that distinguish men and women from boys and girls. Perhaps the most tragic figure in this story is neither Mickey nor his boys, but Mutt, who pushed his boy to succeed, and only realized when he was dying that no one had prepared him to handle success. show less

I think the most interesting thing about Jane Leavy's book is the play between Mickey Mantle, the real person, and Mickey Mantle, the hero, and how that play involves us, his admirers. Mantle was Jane Leavy's hero when she was a child. She is a year older than me, so I can relate to the time of her childhood. Mantle was everybody's hero. To us as kids, in the early 60s, he really was that "All American" character -- he had that big, innocent looking smile that just said everything was great! He played a game for a living, everybody loved him, and he was a winner. Even if you weren't a Yankees fan, you still loved Mantle. And on top of all the rest he had that storybook bashful modesty. Who wouldn't want to be Mickey Mantle?

Well, it show more turns out, Mickey Mantle probably didn't especially want to be Mickey Mantle. Leavy's title refers to "the end of America's childhood". We believed in Mickey, and that was pretty much what made Mickey. We believed he was that perfect hero, and we (his admirers, the press, his teammates, . . . . everyone who influenced his popular image) made him the perfect hero.

But of course, our belief was naive, especially so in Mickey's case. We're accustomed now to the fall of heroes -- we've been through Watergate, presidential infidelities, the OJ trial, Pete Rose's gambling, the Tiger Woods revelations, . . . . So, at the "end of America's childhood" Leavy, like the rest of us, is ready for the real Mickey Mantle. And Leavy presents him in full color -- his self-destructive alcoholism, his almost equally self-destructive disregard for his health in general, his paranoia about an early death, and maybe most of all his really astonishingly crude disrespect for women. Mantle has been described as a "sex addict", but that doesn't begin to tell the story of his verbal disrespect for virtually every woman in his life (there's no mention in Leavy's book of anything like violent abuse of women, except through his nonchalant sexual encounters and invasive attempts themselves). Mickey, by then deep into his declining years, even hit clumsily on Leavy as she interviewed him.

Leavy resists the temptation to over-analyze Mantle. It would be easy to do -- he's a sitting duck. His modesty seems to have been truly a matter of his thinking that he just wasn't anybody to be admired. He knew he wasn't Mickey Mantle the hero. And he reacted sometimes with loathing toward the public that admired him. Incidents in his childhood support common etiologies of adult sexual disturbances. But, in a way, I think Leavy gives the real Mickey the respect due someone who is at fault for many things, but probably not for the burden we put on him as the creators of Mickey the hero.

At the end, she likes him, just as most of the people in his life did. Even his wife, so thoroughly the victim of his infidelity and his array of humiliations, never wanted a divorce. To the end, she wanted to be "Mickey Mantle's wife." And the real Mickey had some tremendously positive virtues -- he had an anonymous, spontaneous generosity toward his friends and toward total strangers. He realized his influence, and he knew that just a word from him, from Mickey the hero, could mean so much to anyone struggling, anyone in need of a little confidence.

The most interesting part of the story of Mickey Mantle, I think, is how we (his admirers) made Mickey the hero out of Mickey the real person. Among those close to him, who knew the real person, it was almost a conspiracy -- rewriting the quotes to make him more articulate, withholding the truth about his sexual indiscretions and his alcoholism, painting him as even more heroic for playing through debilitating though self-inflicted pain. And those who didn't know him but admired him anyway, like us kids, no doubt turned a deaf ear to anything that would diminish him. We just wanted so badly to have someone we wanted to be. show less

One of the first books I remember reading was a kid's biography of Mickey Mantle, probably written in the late 1950s. The Dodgers and Giants had left New York, and the Yankees were for a few years the only game in town. My father stuck with Duke Snider and the Dodgers, but I switched to the Yankees. I mostly identified with Yogi Berra, perhaps because he was Italian-American and read comic books like me, but what boy who loved baseball didn't admire Mickey Mantle in those days? I remember sitting in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium so I could watch him play center (Yogi was in left field). Who knew all the pain he played through in those days? Until I read this book, I didn't realize how excruciating his emotional pain must have been, show more more so than the hurting knee and shoulder, or how much pain he inflicted on his wife and children. This is a shocking book, and a complex one. If you value your idols, maybe you should pass it by. If you want to understand an iconic athlete as a human being, read it, it's a masterpiece. show less

I was a teen growing up in Chicago during the 60's and I got to see Mickey Mantle play live a couple of times. Perhaps my fondest sports memory is seeing Mantle and Maris hit back-to-back HR's during the '61 Homer Race season. They were each awesome shots to the deepest parts of center and right-center field. It sucked the energy out of the White Sox fans in attendance at the old Comiskey Park that day but it was a joyous moment for this Yankee fan. I can still see Mantle's trademark jog around the bases and whether it's a real memory, or a compendium of countless video highlights, or a little of both, doesn't really matter to me.

And that is what is missing from this book. There's little joy, no real awe at the records, at the shots. Oh show more sure, the numbers are there, and moments are described but they didn't convey to me the thrill and emotion of the moment. Instead the story here is dominated by the circumstances of his birth and early years, the numerous injuries, Mantle's ineptness as a husband and father, his crude language and behavior, the drunkeness, his declining health, his attempts at redemption, rehab, etc. Even a moment like the HR hit out of Griffith Stadium is diminished by a very lengthy and very boring description of the author's attempt to quantify precisely the exact distance the ball traveled. The conclusion after 18 pages - it was less than what was reported at the time but for a lot of reasons cannot be precisely defined. The 18 pages include the author's attempts to contact the gentleman who as a young boy had retrieved the ball (this is a Mantle bio, remember?). Equally off-putting was the frequent references to interviews the author conducted with Mantle over one weekend at Atlantic City in 1983. Little new is revealed that hasn't been told before, but apparently it is the one occasion when she spent the most time with him.

But perhaps the comments above are a bit nit-picking. There is one central criticism I have of this bio. I have read a number of other bios and I enjoy them when they are well done, e.g. McCullough's book on Truman, Goodwin on Lincoln. These men were heroes. What they did and what they said had tremendous impact on the world. To best understand them and their influences it is essential to study them in depth from cradle to grave. My impression is that the baseball years were covered in less than half of "The Last Boy". I believe that Leavy erred when she approached the Mantle story in the same way as Presidential biographers, forgetting that Mickey Mantle as great a ballplayer as he was, and acknowledging the many awe-inspiring moments he delivered on the field, was in the end, just a ball player. show less

Like Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mantle was an icon for Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. But while Marilyn died at the peak of her career, Mickey had to make a life for himself after baseball.
This incisive biography delves into the man and the demons that tormented him. His celebrity came to be his undoing, giving him tacit permission to routinely engage in unconscionable behavior without being condemned by his adoring entourage.
The author's extensive interviews with Mantle's friends and family reveal secrets which the ball player kept until near the end of his life. When he finally gave up alcohol, it was too late for him.

Meticulously reported and elegantly written, The Last Boy is a baseball tapestry that weaves together episodes from the author's weekend with The Mick in Atlantic City, where she interviewed her hero in 1983, after he was banned from baseball, with reminiscences from friends and family of the boy from Commerce, Oklahoma, who would lead the Yankees to seven world championships, be voted the American League's Most Valuable Player three times, win the Triple Crown in 1956, and duel teammate Roger Maris for Babe Ruth's home run crown in the summer of 1961 - the same boy who would never grow up.

This is a tough one to review. Mantle was a complex character. He was an incredible baseball talent, whose impressive stats would have even been better if he hadn't played most of his career injured. He could be good-hearted and generous, but could be horribly crude and offensive. He was, in some ways, quite humble, but could be extremely selfish and thoughtless. He was a womanizer. He seemed to have no respect for women. Of course, his drinking was legendary.

He was also a childhood hero of the author. Trying to do him justice and be honest about him was a tough job for a writer. She opted for a somewhat non-traditional format focusing on key events in Mantle's life, rather than a simple chronological biographical narrative, which I show more found a little hard to follow at times. I think the audio format didn't help, because I couldn't just "look back" when I got confused. One minute we're at Billy Martin's funeral, and a bit later we're back at a point where he's still among the living.

My audio book download was billed as an "enhanced" audio book. I'm not sure what the "enhanced" part was. Were the interludes read by the author, where she described her meeting with Mantle, in the original book? I'd need to see the print copy.

I was feeling rather disgusted with Mantle and mostly unsympathetic. Then Leavy explored the issue of the abuse he apparently suffered as a child. I thought she handled that delicate subject pretty well. In a society where the role of "victim" often seems reserved for females, I find it important to discuss the reality that boys -- "even Mickey Mantle!", it appears -- can be victims and that women/teenage girls can be perpetrators. Leavy makes a good case that Mantle showed a number of classic symptoms associated with survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

Leavy also explores the significance of Mantle's relationship with his overbearing father; how he spent his life in a futile attempt to be what he thought his father wanted him to be.

This was a complex book about a complex man. Leavy doesn't attempt to excuse or justify Mantle's behavior based on his personal baggage, but she does try to understand it. I think the book is at least moderately successful in that regard. Unfortunately, the confusion generated by Leavy's "key events" format makes it difficult for me to recommend the book. I wish she had put her feelings for Mantle aside and written a chronological biography. show less