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

In his 1970 book Ball Four, Jim Bouton may have been the first to openly suggest that Mickey Mantle did not live the life of a choirboy. Of his old teammate's many injuries, Bouton wrote, "I often wondered, though, if he might have healed quicker if he'd been sleeping more and loosening up with the boys at the bar less. I guess we'll never know" (Bouton, Ball Four [New York: World, 1970], 33). Bouton was vilified for his treatment of Mantle, a hero beloved by a generation of fans. Forty years later, his words seem sympathetic.

Mickey Mantle was a great baseball player, surely one of the best who ever played the game. While suiting up for the New York Yankees during one of the game's more romanticized eras, he was loved beyond his extraordinary talents. Joe DiMaggio, Mantle's predecessor as Yankee center fielder, was a revered player, but a distant figure off the field. Ted Williams, up in Boston, had no peer as a hitter, but battled his fans and the media his entire career. Willie Mays was a joy to watch, but his seemingly effortless greatness (and his skin color) made him difficult for many Americans to personally relate to. To a generation of New Yorkers, Mickey Mantle was the man they wanted to be, or wanted their son to be-a handsome, aw-shucks good old boy, who heroically struggled through severe injuries and ailments just to get on the field, but still hit the ball further and, for a time, ran faster than anyone had ever seen.

Alone among the all-time greats of the game, Mantle's legacy is dominated by a "what-might-have-been" story. Despite the 536 home runs, three Most Valuable Player Awards, a Triple Crown, twelve American League pennants, and seven World Series titles, there is a persistent belief that it could have been more, that it should have been more. He suffered a terrible knee injury as a nineteen-year-old in the 1951 World Series, and, many believe, he was never the same player again. He should have hit 700 home runs, or 800. He should have won more awards, won more World Series titles, hit more breathtaking home runs. Though he played more games than any other Yankee in history (through 2010), it seemed that he was always in the hospital.

It is no longer a surprise to learn that Mantle led somewhat of a double life-hero by day, and, in the words of Howard Cosell, "drunken whoremaster" by night (140). Jane Leavy, in her engaging book, attempts to explain how these two Mantles could inhabit the same body. Leavy grew up in the Bronx idolizing Mantle-the great player and hero. She frames Mantle's life with chapters that retell a 1983 weekend she spent, as a young Washington Post reporter, accompanying the long-retired 51-year-old Mantle as he went about his duties as a greeter for an Atlantic City casino. Those "duties" mostly involved golfing and drinking with the customers. On this weekend, surely typical, Mantle was a pathetic drunk, eventually making an awkward pass at Leavy in the hotel bar before falling asleep in her lap. Leavy kept this painful experience to herself for more than two decades before deciding to devote a few years trying to reconcile her childhood hero with the man she had met. "Which Mantle would I discover?" Leavy asks in her preface (xii).

Her book does not take the form of a traditional biography. Instead, Leavy focuses on twenty days in Mantle's life (though some of the "days" encompass several days, or an entire season) that help define the Mantle legend or were otherwise turning points in his life. In her April 17, 1953, entry, Leavy explores Mantle's most famous tape-measure home run, a blow that traveled completely out of Washington's Griffith Stadium. Leavy tells...