Free The Last Boy by Jane Leavy Page A

said it was their first conversation of the year.
    Click.
    Now his teammates come running from the bullpen, their spikes churning up an urgent trail in the warning track dirt. The backup catchers, Charlie Silvera and Ralph Houk, are first to reach him. “The only time Houk and I got our picture in the paper,” Silvera said.
    Mantle lies curled in an almost fetal position. “He was going full speed,” Houk said. “He was about to get the ball.”
    “Joe more or less ran him off it,” Silvera said.
    They told him not to move, as if he could. “He was kinda moaning,” relief pitcher Bob Kuzava said. “The trainers, they wanted him to stay still because they didn’t know what happened. They tried to immobilize him so he isn’t gonna injure himself anymore.”
    Click.
    It looked like he’d been shot. He wasn’t sure he hadn’t been. “I was running so fast, my knee just went right out the front of my leg,” he told me, trying and failing to reproduce the sound of rupturing flesh and broken promise.
    It was so sudden, so painful, so shocking that he soiled himself. “Shit my pants,” he told me, and dared me to write it.
    “Must be like giving birth,” he told his friend Mike Klepfer years later.
    Newsweek reported, some spectators thought he’d had a heart attack. “He lay like he’s dead,” Jerry Coleman said. “Seemed like he was there twenty minutes before they finally got around to getting him out of there.”
    Five Yankees carried him off on a stretcher, three on one side, two on the other, like pallbearers. Mutt was waiting in the dugout.
    A pool photographer was allowed in the trainer’s room, an exception to the “off-limits” norm. Still in uniform, his sanitary socks dirty with exertion, a towel demurely draped across his waist, he props himself up on his elbow, looking in blank disbelief at what used to be his right leg; surely it no longer felt like his own.
    Sidney Gaynor, the team physician, stands impassively at his side, checking the ice pack fixed to his leg. Gaynor initially diagnosed the injury as a torn muscle on the inside of his knee. A day later, he called it a torn ligament. Over time, it would be variously described (by Mantle and a legion of reporters) as torn cartilage, torn ligaments, torn tendons, and a combination of all of the above.
    Later, in the locker room, Mutt squatted by his son’s side as he struggled to put on his argyle socks and his wing-tip shoes, glancing up at an inquiring photographer from beneath an errant forelock. Mantle never looked that young again.
    The Yankees sent him back to his father’s hotel, his leg splinted and tightly wrapped. “Come all the way up here, and you bung your knee,” chided one of Mutt’s Okie pals.
    “Thought you fainted,” Mutt said. Mantle wasn’t sure he hadn’t.
    “Naah,” he replied with youthful bravado. “I felt like fainting my first game in the Yankee Stadium.”
    “Yanks’ Joy over Triumph Is Tempered by Loss of Mantle for Remaining Games,” the New York Times declared the next morning. It was the first time he appeared on the front page of the paper of record.
    On October 5, 1951, a game was won and a fate was sealed. The drain in right center field became a baseball landmark. On opening day of the 1952 season, Mantle would make a pilgrimage to the spot “where he had come to grief,” as Arthur Daley put it in the Times. “I couldn’t find it,” he told the columnist, grinning and shuddering at a memory. Daley wrote, “He still could not fully comprehend or remember.”
    More than fate was at play. When Howard Berk, the Yankees’ vice president for administration from 1967 to 1973, reviewed plans for the Stadium’s renovation in the early 1970s, architects told him that a groundskeeper had forgotten to put the rubber cover on the right field drain. “Not the first time a groundskeeper forgot to put something on the field that endangered a player,” Berk said.
    DiMaggio chose Willie Mays Night