Mickey and Willie
Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden Age
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3.7 • 11 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Acclaimed sportswriter Allen Barra exposes the uncanny parallels--and lifelong friendship--between two of the greatest baseball players ever to take the field.
Culturally, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were light-years apart. Yet they were nearly the same age and almost the same size, and they came to New York at the same time. They possessed virtually the same talents and played the same position. They were both products of generations of baseball-playing families, for whom the game was the only escape from a lifetime of brutal manual labor. Both were nearly crushed by the weight of the outsized expectations placed on them, first by their families and later by America. Both lived secret lives far different from those their fans knew. What their fans also didn't know was that the two men shared a close personal friendship--and that each was the only man who could truly understand the other's experience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these elegant and touching fan notes, acclaimed sportswriter Barra carries us back to baseball's golden days, when two giants Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays dominated the game through their skill and prodigious talent. Giving a fast-paced, season-by-season account of the lives of these players, whose careers developed along parallel lines and sometimes intersected, Barra recreates the excitement, the adoration, and the adulation that Mantle and Mays inspired in their fans as well as the occasional disappointments. Barra notes the many similarities in the players' lives: both hailed from the South and both were talented all-around athletes who played football, baseball, and basketball; both had fathers who encouraged them, though Mays's let his son follow his talents to center field naturally, while Mantle's groomed his son for center field from the start. Alike as they were, the differences were stark: Mays came from a broken home and Mantle from a large, close-knit family. Barra pulls no punches as he candidly portrays Mantle's struggles with alcohol and Mays's anxiety attacks off the field. Mantle will go down in the record books for his home run of 563 feet on April 17, 1953 famously the first home run ever officially measured (a "tape measure" home run) for distance; Mays would gain his celebrity for "the catch," a stunning grab 460 feet from home plate in the 1954 World Series. Drawing on his conversations with Mantle and Mays, Barra offers illuminating insights into their views of success and failure as well as into the ways that we often create larger-than-life heroes out of individuals who sometimes cannot carry the burdens of our dreams and hopes.
