Free The Last Boy by Jane Leavy Page B

at Shea Stadium in 1973 to offer his account: “I said, ‘Go ahead, Mickey. You take it.’ I called out to him as we converged…Luckily, I was close enough to make the catch.”
    Mantle never blamed DiMaggio publicly. “He had his own opinion, but he never said it,” Merlyn told me. “He ruined his career.”
    The morning after, his knee was so swollen he couldn’t walk. Mutt took him to Lenox Hill Hospital for X-rays. “I couldn’t put any weight on my leg,” Mantle told me. “So I put my arm around his shoulder. Now, this guy’s as big as me, maybe a little bigger. When I jumped out, I put all my weight on him and he just crumpled over on the sidewalk. His whole back was eaten up. I didn’t know it. But my mom told me later he hadn’t slept in a bed because he couldn’t lie down for, like, six months. And no one had ever told me about it. They never did call me.
    “So when he crumpled over, we went to the hospital and we watched the rest of the Series together. That’s when they told me when I got home I’d better take him and have him looked at because he’s sicker than I think he is.”
    “Hodgkin’s disease,” was the diagnosis.
    Mutt’s illness was not disclosed. His distress was said to be profound. The Times reported: “Mantle’s father became so upset when his son slipped that he too required hospitalization.”
    They watched the last four games of the Series on a small black-and-white TV with rabbit ears. Mutt seized the opportunity to point out things Mickey might have done better. Pain became a teachable moment. The Yankees won their eighteenth world championship. Mutt was sent home to die.
    Mantle’s knee was slow to heal. The front office decided to send him to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for a second opinion. The verdict came on October 22: no surgery needed. Go home and rest.
    In less than twenty-four hours, all the supporting structures of his life imploded. His father had only months to live; his potential was irrevocably circumscribed; his knee and his heart were never the same. A wire service reporter filed a prescient deadline dispatch: “His mind is already shackled with the thought that the knee might pop out whenever subjected to strain.”
    That October afternoon was the last time Mantle set foot on a baseball field without pain. He would play the next seventeen years struggling to be as good as he could be, knowing he would never be as good as he might have become.

3
October 23, 1951
Undermined
1.
    That the earth would give way beneath his feet was a grim irony for Mickey Mantle. Growing up in Commerce, Oklahoma, in the dead center of the Tri-State Mining District, fatalism was an inheritance. It percolated up from the tainted, unstable earth. That forgotten corner where Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas meet was hardly the Oklahoma of Rodgers and Hammerstein. A century of mining lead and zinc from the ancient bedrock had left the ground as hollowed out as the faces of the men who worked it.
    The lead went into munitions used to fight the Hun in World Wars I and II, into lead-based paints and pigments, into sinkers for fishing rods and weights for balancing tires. It was also crucial to the manufacture of lead-acid storage batteries. Zinc was needed to galvanize steel, to cure rubber, and to line sinks and washstands. It was an essential ingredient in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
    Two blocks west of the front door of Mantle’s boyhood home was a hulking, ashen heap of mineral detritus disgorged from the abandoned Turkey Fat Mine, where the first shaft was sunk in Commerce. Three blocks from the house he purchased for his parents with his first World Series check was a crater twenty to thirty feet deep, an insidious reminder of how easily life could give way. That house at 317 South River Street, with the family’s first telephone, was where he went to recuperate when doctors at Johns Hopkins told him he could go home. By the time he arrived, Mutt had gone back to