Baseball legend Willie Mays Jr. passed away in June of this year at age 93, but Scribner published his authorized biography in 2010. Former journalist James S. Hirsch wrote the weighty volume, at 640 pages, the hardback version, but it’s relevant due to the characteristics and skills of its subject.
The book’s succinct title encompasses its thesis: “Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend.” Through 36 compelling chapters that also serve as a timeline, the author gives us a detailed look at how a sharecropper’s son from a mill town near Birmingham, Alabama, became arguably one of the best baseball players to play the game.
The way he lived and his tenacity aided his success. He “represented the quintessential American Dream,” Hirsch wrote in the prologue. “He was the poor Depression-era black kid from the segregated South who overcame insuperable odds to reach the pinnacle of society, and he succeeded by hewing to the country’s most cherished values—hard work, clean living, and perseverance.”
We learn that the name Mays’s father was given, William Howard Mays Sr., was the due to William Howard Taft, a Republican—“the party of Emancipation”—occupying the White House during the year of Mays Sr.’s birth, 1911. Thus, Mays Jr.’s parents believed the name made enough of a significant statement that they passed it onto their son.
We also learn that Mays Jr. acquired some of his baseball skills through heredity. Willie Mays Sr. earned the nickname “Cat” because he was so fast while playing on the mill-organized baseball teams. “Even before Willie [Jr.] could walk, Cat gave him a two-foot-long stick and a rubber ball, and the future home run champion, sitting on his diapered butt, whacked the ball and crawled after it,” the author shares in the first chapter, “Alabama Roots.”
From corn fields and cow pastures that served as baseball fields, Mays Jr. eventually played professionally in major league stadiums across the country during his 23-season career. But while sports fans may know the overriding aspects about Mays’s life, such as his 660-career home runs or the fact that he was chosen to play in 24 All Star games (two All Star games were held some years), they most likely would not be aware that he was the highest-paid player in 1960.
Even the most diehard baseball fans may not know about his generosity or his trustworthiness. Hirsch writes in the chapter “Willie Mays Doesn’t Need Help from Anyone”: “His generosity became almost as storied as his play. … Mays sent clothes back to his boyhood pals and money to his half-siblings; in 1952, when he was barnstorming through the South and was called to his draft board in Birmingham, his teammate and former manager Piper Davis entrusted him with money to deliver to his wife. When Davis finally returned to Birmingham, he discovered Mays had given her more money than Davis had handed over.”
Mays made it so big in baseball that he had opportunities to meet such noteworthy figures as Queen Elizabeth and President Gerald Ford, and he became a cultural icon—so much so that cartoonist Charles Shultz often mentioned him in the “Peanuts” comic strip.
However, in a quote shared in the book’s 25th chapter “Youth Is Served,” Mays is adamant about the two things that meant the most to him. “Get me talking about kids and you’ve got me talking about one of my two favorite subjects. Baseball is the other.”
“Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend” ends with Mays visiting Fairfield, Alabama, part of the metropolitan Birmingham area, to make a $50,000 donation in baseball equipment to the Say Hey! Foundation, and to donate to a ball field, named in his honor in the mid-1980s, that needed repairs. At that time, he was 78 years old and intent on trying to give back as much as possible to the community that “made me.”
The author shared more of Mays’s thoughts about the people who watched out for him as he was growing up: “They’re the ones who said, ‘Willie, you cannot have any drugs, you cannot smoke, we’re gonna send you home at ten o’clock,’ and they did. And I appreciate that.”
