He Come to Win

(See Cover)

Hunched on the eastern shoulder of Manhattan, the grimy crest of Coogan's Bluff glowers across the Harlem River toward The Bronx. All day, traffic snarls past its littered slopes. Torn newspapers rustle in the limp breeze that swirls along the dirty asphalt of Eighth Avenue; street urchins scuffle in the dust and cadge quarters under the rusty shade of the elevated tracks.

Crowning this dismal landscape, a great, curved, steel-and-stone shrine called the Polo Grounds beckons to the faithful all summer long. By the tens of thousands they respond. They are a special, indestructible breed called Giant fans. Unprotestingly, they submit to the nerve-jangling rites of entrance: the steaming subway ride or the stuffy taxi crawling across Harlem, the foul-tempered guards who herd them through turnstiles at the gate. Inside, the vast stands sprawl in the sun, the carefully tended ball field is green and trim, ready for the game.

At this inviting sight, the hearts of Giant fans quicken and their eyes gleam. In the big world outside, the pitchers are throwing bean balls, and there seems to be little but trouble. But inside the small, noisy world of the Polo Grounds, all is well. The Giants are winning. They are taking ball games at a better than two-to-one clip, and they have battered the second-place Brooklyn Dodgers into a temporary state of slack-jawed apprehension. This week they were on top of the National League with a handsome six-game lead after Sunday's games. If asked to explain this happy state of affairs in one word, the Giant fan is at no loss. The word is "Willie."

A Boy in a Hurry. Willie Howard Mays Jr., a cinnamon-tinted young man from Fairfield, Ala., on the edge of Birmingham, has fielded, batted and laughed the long-lackluster New York Giants into a state of combative enterprise. A husky (180 lbs., 5 ft. 11 in), smooth-muscled athlete with a broad, guileless face, he plays baseball with a boy's glee, a pro's sureness and a champion's flair. On the ball diamond, he is in a hurry; he never walks when there is room to run, even if only from bench to field or field to shower room. In the broad domain of centerfield, Mays covers ground with limber-legged speed to pull down balls tagged with the promise of extra bases. He throws from center with a zip and an aim that have brought chagrin to the National League's brashest baserunners. "He's thrown men out at first like he was a shortstop," says the Giants' captain and shortstop, Alvin Dark. "He nails 'em at home like he was throwing from second."

At the plate, Willie stands, with comfortable authority, in the classic legs-astraddle pose (weight about equally divided between both legs, feet about a yard apart). His big bat (35 in., 34 oz.) is currently connecting for a hit one out of three times (a .331 clip). A "spray hitter," apt to send the ball to any field, he rarely tries to place his shots but swings for the fences. "When you tag 'em good," says Willie Mays, "they'll go over the roof in any park."

Willie Mays is only 23, and he is playing only his third season (and first full one) in the major leagues. There are other major leaguers, even centerfielders, who stand above him in the statistics (e.g., Brooklyn's Duke Snider, who is fielding as flawlessly as Mays and is batting .359 to Willie's .331). But with his showman's manner and his in-the-clutch timing, Willie Mays is baseball's sensation of the season. To the scandal of some sentimentalists, he is already being talked of as the equal or even the better of the great Tris Speaker and Joe DiMaggio. He has hit 33 home runs in 89 games--a pace which puts him six games ahead of Babe Ruth's majestic record of 60 homers, and there are some impetuous enough to suggest that Willie is the one to climb that Everest of baseball some day.

Stealing Ball Games. "I don't need to tell you where we are now," said a Giant executive. "And I can't help believing Willie is the reason." Added one of Willie's opponents, Chicago Cubs' Pitcher Hal Jeffcoat: "He's out there all the time, stealing your ball game. He makes the kind of plays that win ball games, and he'll do it every day."

One player does not make a winning team in the intricate, machine-tooled, split-second game that big-league baseball has become. But even Willie Mays' teammates seem to feel that his presence works some special charm that makes the club better in the field and at bat. To support the feeling, they point to the record.

Only three years ago, substantially the same Giant team as today's started the season like bushers. A converted outfielder named Whitey Lockman was learning to play first base. On third, another converted outfielder, Henry Thompson, was booting oftener than a cavalryman's cobbler. Such seasoned pitchers as Sal Maglie and Larry Jansen were giving away runs as if they were CARE packages.

In one dismal stretch the Giants lost 11 in a row. It was a test of fire for loyal followers, and many a diehard, headed for Coogan's Bluff, was heard to mutter lamely that he was going out to the ballpark, only because he needed a sunbath. The lard-encased Manhattan saloonkeeper, Toots Shor, once spoke the agony of all Giant fans in one gloomy flirtation with apostasy. "I been wonderin' lately," he told a friend. "I'm raising my kids to be Giant fans. I don't know whether I'm doing the right thing."

Then the Giants called up Willie Mays, who was hitting a fancy .477 for the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association, the Giants' No. 1 farm team. Willie had already made himself so popular in Minneapolis that the Giants' President Stoneham felt obliged to publish ads in the local Minneapolis newspapers to apologize for taking the young man away. But in his first days as a Giant, 20-year-old Willie was a flop. The rookie got only one lonesome hit in his first 26 times at bat.

Once, after a night game, Willie burst into tears. "Boss," he sobbed to Manager Leo Durocher, "you better bench me or send me back to the Millers. I'm hurtin' the team." Tough-minded, tough-tongued Leo knew better. He put his arm across Willie's shoulders. "Son," he said, "you're not going anywhere but here. Just keep swinging, because you're my centerfielder, even if you don't get a hit for the rest of the season."

"Wait Till Next Year." From then on, Willie was on fire. Up against Boston's Speedballer Warren Spahn for the first time in the Polo Grounds, he teed off on a three-and-one pitch and lofted it over the leftfield roof for a homer. His batting average started to climb. In the field he could do no wrong, did much that was phenomenal. He had an unconscious knack for doing the spectacular, an uncanny instinct for anticipating batters and baserunners. Once, when he dove out from under his cap (Mays frequently loses his cap) to catch a sinking line drive, he reached back, caught his cap in one hand and the ball in the other. Against the Dodgers one day, he raced into right center after a long fly, snagged it with a prodigious stretch, spun completely around, off balance, and rifled a perfect strike to the plate to throw out the Dodgers' speedy Billy Cox. Around big-league locker rooms, that play is still referred to as "The Throw."

Willie's personal bonfire soon ignited all the Giants. The pitchers began throwing like winners, and Outfielder Don Mueller pieced out a 19-game hitting streak. The infield tightened into one of the best in the league. It was perilously late in the season--the Giants were 13 1/2 out of the lead on Aug. 11. But in a wild and breathless finish, they tied the Dodgers on the last day of the season, beat them in the playoff for the pennant, with Bobby Thomson's last-ditch "Home Run Heard 'Round the World." When they lost the World Series to the Yankees, the Giants comforted themselves with thoughts of next year.

But the Giants had to play through without Willie; his draft number came up. Mays applied for a deferment on the ground that he was the principal support of his mother and a passel of nine half-brothers and sisters back in Alabama; it was not granted. He flunked his pre-induction aptitude test. But the Army prevailed nonetheless. With Mays gone, the Giants finished 1952 in second place, 4 1/2 games behind the Dodgers.

A Style of His Own. The Giants' sad showing in Willie's absence, and their winning performance when he got back, established him as a big-leaguer with a promising future. "A natural-born ballplayer," said Leo Durocher. In the case of Mays, Durocher was close to the literal truth. Willie's father, Willie Sr., was called "Kitty Cat" for his lithe grace as outfielder and lead-off hitter for the Black Barons of the Negro National League, until he quit the game in 1948 (at the age of 37). Willie was only 14 months old when Willie Sr. began teaching him the game. Every afternoon the father would come home from the steel mill where he worked, get out a rubber ball and roll it across the floor to Willie. "I'd roll it 30 or 40 times, until I got tired," he remembers. "Willie never got tired. As soon as I stopped rolling the ball, he'd start to holler."

By the time Willie was three, father and son were playing catch. At six, Willie was so anxious to get ahead with his baseball that he could not wait for the old man to come home. Afternoons, on the ball diamond across the street, he played a strenuous and lonely game: he would toss a ball in the air and run it down, or hit out a fungo, then tear around the bases and slide ferociously into home.

At Fairfield Industrial High School, Willie picked up the nickname "Buckduck," and specialized in a course in cleaning and pressing. There was no baseball team, but Willie at 14 was already good enough to play with steel-mill clubs and independent semipros. When Willie was 16, Kitty Cat called up his old friend, Lorenzo ("Piper") Davis, manager of the Black Barons, and got the boy a tryout. Three games later, young Buckduck Mays was the Barons' regular centerfielder.

Even then, Willie had a style of his own. The long hours of rolling a rubber ball with his father had taught him the spectacular "breadbasket" catch that still thrills fans in the Polo Grounds. With his hands held low, the big glove deceptively casual somewhere around his belt, he grabbed fly balls and got them away fast--flinging them in with a whipping sidearm motion.

"What You Gonna Do?" But Willie was something less than a whiz at the plate. Piper promised him a $5 monthly bonus for hitting more than .300, and Willie never collected. "Trouble was," says Piper, "he stood a little too close and stuck that left shoulder around in front of him like he was peekin' at the pitcher. He kept thinkin' for a while that all the pitchers were trying to hit him, but he was just crowdin'."

Off the ball field, Willie had a passion for pool and a form of five-card rummy called "Dime Tonk." One night he played pool so intensely that he missed the Barons' bus when the team left for a doubleheader in St. Louis. "A mile or so out of town," says Piper, "here comes a taxi pulling up alongside, honkin' its horn, and Willie jumps out, screamin' like a bird: 'What you gonna do? You gonna leave me? I'm a pro ballplayer here. You can't leave me.' "

Willie was dead right. He was indeed a pro ballplayer, and the big-league scouts soon had their eyes on him. In the spring of 1950, agents of the Chicago White Sox and the Boston Braves were waiting for his class to graduate from Fairfield High so that they could make him an offer. While they waited, a couple of hustling Giant scouts, Ed Montague and Bill Harris, came to Birmingham to take a look at the Barons' first baseman. That night Montague telephoned New York. "That first baseman won't do," he reported. "But I saw a young kid of an outfielder that I can't believe. He can run, hit to either field, and he has a real good arm. Don't ask any questions. You've got to get this boy."

Wily Jack Schwartz, chief assistant to Carl Hubbell, the pitcher who now runs the Giants' farm system, was convinced. He told Montague to go get Willie. "Don't leave without signing him," ordered Schwartz. The Braves had already made a "win and if" offer to the Barons' manager--$7,500 for Willie's contract, $7,500 more if he made good. Montague promptly upped the ante to a flat $10,000 for the Barons. After Willie's graduation, Montague offered him a personal bonus of $5,000. Willie signed on as a New York Giant.

Ground Broken. Young, impressionable, little-tutored in the ways of the world, Willie Mays might not have been a wise gamble had he come along a few years before. But by the time the Giants signed him, the ground was well broken for Negroes in the majors. The Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson had been the pioneers, and the New York Giants, by the time Mays signed his contract, had already taken on Hank Thompson, Monte Irvin and a Cuban catcher named Rafael Noble.* Willie Mays was able to meet the test strictly on his merits as a ballplayer.

Willie started with the Giants' farm club in Trentom, N.J. in the Class B Inter-State League. By the next spring (1951), he was up to Triple A ball in Minneapolis. Willie was working overtime on his hitting. He collected pictures of his favorite ballplayer, Joe DiMaggio. He studied Joe's stance in the batter's box, patterned his swing after the Yankee Clipper's. Mays began to connect almost every other time at bat.

In the field, however, Willie was content to be just Willie. DiMag, with his effortless ground-eating lope, made the hard ones look easy. Willie, with his jackrabbit sprint and his flashy, breadbasket catch, made even the high, arcing flies that fielders call "cans of corn" look hard. Willie could break a batter's heart with astonishing, acrobatic saves. Everything he did in the field he did instinctively well.

"God gave Willie the instincts of a ballplayer," explains Leo Durocher. "All I had to do was add a little practical advice about wearing his pants higher to give the pitchers a smaller strike zone. Otherwise, I let Willie's instincts alone. Hit the kid a fly with a couple of men on and he'll peg to the right base without thinking. Maybe I'll tell him where to play for this or that batter, or when to wait out a pitcher. That's all. Hell, I learn about baseball just by watching the kid."

Chalk & Flour. The day their prize outfielder was separated from the Army, the Giants had a savvy scout named Frank Forbes, 61, waiting at the gate to take him in tow. An oldtime Negro athlete (baseball, basketball and boxing), Forbes is the professional godfather to the Giants' Negro ballplayers. With his other charges safely married, Forbes's main preoccupation is Willie.

"When I first .met Willie," says Forbes, "I thought he was the most open, decent, down-to-earth guy I'd ever seen--completely unspoiled and completely natural. I was worried to death about the kind of people he might get mixed up with. He'd have to live in Harlem, and believe me, that can be a bad place, full of people just waiting to part an innocent youngster from his money. Somebody had to see to it that Willie wasn't exploited, sift the chalk from the flour, figure out who was in a racket and who was representing a decent organization."

Forbes arranged to rent a room foi Willie from a friend, Mrs. David Goosby, whose five-room Harlem apartment is little more than a Willie Mays throw from the Polo Grounds. Mrs. Goosby treats Willie a little like a son, occasionally gives him a motherly talk "about taking care of himself." "Not that he needs it often," says Mrs. Goosby. "Willie's a good boy. About all I have to lecture him on besides eating properly is his habit of reading comic books. That boy spends hours, I swear, with those comics."

Willie's eating is hardly a problem. He puts away two big meals a day: fruit, bacon and eggs, hash-brown potatoes and milk for breakfast, steaks or chops and the fixings for dinner. Evenings, after a game or a trip to the movies (preferably westerns), Willie raids the icebox for the makings of a sandwich. Then he usually plays his records for a while. He has a big collection of pop records (leaning to sentimental ballads, Nat "King" Cole or Billy Eckstine variety), and he takes a portable record player and a stack of records along when the team goes on the road.

On the nights that he steps out, Willie outfits himself from a big wardrobe; his closet bulges with expensively tailored sport coats, sharp slacks and monogrammed shirts, but very few ties. Willie hates ties, wears them only for such special events as his increasingly frequent TV and banquet appearances. "He's not flashy," says Mrs. Goosby, "but my, is he fussy. He won't wear anything that's the slightest bit wrinkled or spotted."

A Simple Question. Two or three nights a week, when the Giants are at home, the star centerfielder of the big leagues scoots down the block from the Goosby apartment to play a fast game of stickball with a band of tenor twelve-year-old boys. Capering and joking with the kids, Mays coaches their play, urges them in his high, giggle-edged voice: "Throw harder! Harder!"

Currently the darling of the sportswriters, Mays has been widely depicted in print as a high-spirited chatterbox, a dugout wit and locker room clown. On the field he often does crackle like an old Ford magneto, kids in a boy-and-father way with Manager Durocher. But off the field Mays curbs his tongue and his curiosity. "When Willie wants to know something," says Guardian Forbes, with considered understatement, "he'll ask a simple question. All he wants is a simple answer. Then he don't see any reason for chewing it up any further. Willie isn't loquacious."

With occasional eloquent and/or exotic exceptions (perhaps the dean of them all: Dizzy Dean), ballplayers generally are a reticent lot, given less to the clubhouse high jinks than the sports pages suggest, given more to the somber dollars-and-cents business of winning ball games than the hero worshipers like to believe. The high-riding New York Giants of 1954 cling in curt, almost surly fashion to the stereotype--they get together in clubhouse and ballpark not to win friends but to win ball games. Even on the crest, as they were while clouting the Brooklyns six straight in a pair of recent series, the Giants were in no mood for skylarking.

In the visitors' locker room at Ebbets Field, the Giants sulked away a long afternoon while they waited to start the last of the series with the archenemy. Outside, a thin rain drenched Brooklyn. "Do you think those bums'll call it off?" muttered Hank Thompson as he riffled through his fan mail. "Hell, no. Anything for a lousy dollar." He slouched over for a rubdown from the trainer. Off in a corner, Willie Mays and his road-trip roommate, Monte Irvin, laughed apathetically over a joke. Across the room, a group of players carried on a silent gin-rummy game. Conversation, what there was of it, was dominated by an unimaginative profanity. Soon someone cussed out the clubhouse boy and sent him for sandwiches. Outside, a bunch of hopeful boys clustered about the dressing-room window and pleaded for autographs. No one offered an autograph, but one Giant raised his glass of beer and showered it on the kids. Hungry for a pennant, the Giants were suffering from the mean-spirited myopia that shrinks the ballplayer's world to the confines of a ballpark and welcomes no outsiders.

Leo's Kind of Club. "This is my kind of ball club," explained Manager Durocher. "They're nice guys, every one of them--away from the field. But here, they'll cut your heart out to win. Hell, I'm a nice guy myself when I'm out to dinner. But even if I'm pitching pennies, I want to beat the cursing life out of you. If I lose a big ball game, sure, I'll shake your hand afterwards, but I'm bleeding inside." He snorted. "Good sportsmanship is so much sheep dip. Good sports get that way because they have so much practice losing."

Leo the Lip was willing, however, to talk about his team at length. The Giants lead the league, said he, because they have "strength through the middle." There is Westrum, a solid, dependable catcher; a stable of pitchers with "just enough age" (Maglie, Hearn and Grissom) and "just enough youth" (Antonelli, Gomez and Liddle); a steady, seasoned shortstop (Alvin Dark) teamed up with scrappy Davey Williams at second. And in centerfield--Durocher paused to savor the name--amazing Willie Mays. "Look at the kid," says Leo. "He come to win."

With his youth and his talent, a long and greater career may lie ahead of Willie Mays--perhaps even the fulfillment of some of the rashest claims already made for him. Opposing National Leaguers can be found who call him the best around in the field; the doubts about his fitness for lasting remembrance focus on his batting. "In the field I don't think you can beat him," says Veteran Pitcher Warren Spahn (now of the Milwaukee Braves). "At bat, he may not be as good as he looks. He makes mistakes and goes for bad pitches."

But while the fame and plaudits last, the bouncing boy from Fairfield is wisely and modestly cashing in on them. The Giants pay him perhaps $17,500 a year, making Willie Mays one of the biggest major-league bargains since Cincinnati drafted Christy Mathewson for $100 after the 1900 season. To swell that comparative pittance (the Boston Red Sox' Ted Williams gets a reported $100,000; Brooklyn's Robinson $40,000). Mays, through his agent, now endorses Chesterfields (he seldom smokes). Coca-Cola (he drinks it by the case), Red Man chewing tobacco (he chews nothing but gum) and Rollfast bikes (he drives a chartreuse Lincoln convertible). TV producers compete for him and are glad to pay $500 for each selfconscious, carefully coached Mays appearance on a TV panel or quiz show. Journalists bedevil him for the rudiments of a biography or a morning's column. "It's got so Willie can't get into a shower without some reporter or photographer trying to get in with him," complained a fellow Giant.

It makes Willie Mays just a little nervous and uncomfortable. But it has not wiped the gaping smile off his face, weakened his throwing arm, impaired his batting eye or deterred him from the one thing that is Willie May's version of the pursuit of happiness--the winning of ball games.

* Negroes are now on the rosters of seven of the National League clubs (all but Philadelphia), as follows: Brooklyn, five; Chicago, two; Cincinnati, two; Milwaukee, four; New York, four; Pittsburgh, one; St. Louis, one. Only three of the American League clubs have Negro players: Cleveland, four; Philadelphia Athletics and Chicago White Sox, one each.

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