In 1959, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev visited San Francisco and members of the Worldwide Longshoreman’s Union greeted him with cheers, newspaperman Frank Coniff quipped: “That is the damndest metropolis. They cheer Khruschev and boo Willie Mays.”
It was the peak of the Chilly Warfare and, for Coniff and plenty of of his readers, there was no higher image of America than Mays. At the moment, Mays was a 28-year-old centerfielder for the San Francisco Giants and the very best ballplayer on the planet, and he was often booed by followers of his personal crew.
A decade earlier than that, Mays was enjoying for the Birmingham Black Barons, a Negro League crew close to his hometown of Westfield, Alabama, whereas nonetheless in highschool.
Mays, who died on June 18, 2024, on the age of 93, was not solely the best baseball participant of the final 80 years, and fairly probably ever, however he was an enormously vital determine in American sports activities, tradition and historical past.
His journey from the segregated Deep South of his childhood to being honored by President Barack Obama with the Presidential Medal of Freedom spans a lot of America’s racial historical past within the twentieth and early twenty first century.
In 2009, Mays traveled to the All-Star Sport, during which he had performed a file 24 occasions (from 1959-1962 there have been two All-Star Video games a yr), on Air Power One, the place he advised a rapt and smiling President Obama how a lot it meant to him after “rising up in Birmingham” to see an African American elected president.
Mays repeated a number of occasions how proud he was of Obama. The president responded, “If it hadn’t been for people such as you and Jackie (Robinson), I’m unsure I might have ever acquired elected to the White Home.”
‘Racism and racial epithets’
Mays started his profession with the New York Giants in 1951, 4 years after Jackie Robinson performed his first sport with the Brooklyn Dodgers. He grew to become often called the “Say Hey Child” due to his youth, exuberant fashion of play and behavior of greeting folks with the phrase, “Say Hey.”
In these years, the mixing of the Nationwide and American Leagues was nonetheless in its earliest levels. There was a casual rule limiting every crew to not more than three non-white gamers. Many groups, together with the Yankees and the Pink Sox, have been nonetheless fully white.
Though the Giants performed on the northern fringe of Harlem, the place Mays lived early in his profession and was broadly beloved, when the crew traveled to extra southern cities and through spring coaching in Florida, Mays was topic to the identical racism and racial epithets as Robinson.
The centrality of baseball to American tradition throughout this era made Mays much more important. This was nonetheless a time when baseball gamers have been by far essentially the most acknowledged athletes within the U.S. and when a lot of the nation tuned in to the World Collection each fall.
By the late Fifties, Mays was, together with Mickey Mantle, essentially the most well-known ballplayer in America. For many years it has not been uncommon for African American athletes to be broadly admired, however Mays was the primary.
Mays’s enchantment to all followers was not simply as a consequence of how good a participant he was, but in addition the panache with which he performed the sport, wowing followers with basket catches and daring base working, in addition to a public persona that was outgoing and pleasant.
Representing … with a ‘regal stature’
Robinson was a trailblazer and a singular determine in American historical past, however Mays’s affect on the tradition was broader and at the very least as vital.
Frank Guridy, a professor of African American and African Diaspora Research at Columbia College, summed this up: “Mays was this Black mega-superstar on this nation who was one way or the other capable of transcend his background as any person from the Jim Crow South to turn into interesting to white America. He was capable of be Black and characterize the Black intervention within the sport, whereas sustaining a regal stature that’s interesting to all folks.”
Throughout the Nineteen Sixties, when Mays was the very best and most well-known baseball participant on the planet, he was criticized by some for not being radical or outspoken sufficient. That criticism appears a bit unfair now.
In contrast to many different nice African American athletes of the period, like Invoice Russell, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, Wilt Chamberlain, Jim Brown or Robinson, Mays was a product of the Deep South and, on some stage, carried that trauma with him.
It’s usually ignored that, for the final decade or so of his profession, he was deeply revered by nearly all African American baseball gamers due to his capability and his function as an early trailblazer.
As the very best participant, with essentially the most seniority, on the San Francisco Giants within the Nineteen Sixties, he set a tone and saved the peace in what was then by far essentially the most numerous clubhouse in baseball.
As a result of Mays performed in San Francisco for the Giants from 1958 till he was traded to the Mets, and again to New York, through the 1972 season, his off-the-field actions didn’t at all times obtain the eye they deserved. Nonetheless, for many years he labored with youth in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Level group, a largely African American neighborhood the place Candlestick Park was situated.
Transcending racist historical past
Mays, who performed his final sport through the 1973 World Collection, was a baseball star on the very finish of the interval when baseball was a massively vital cultural establishment, and at a time when baseball led the nation on civil rights and integration.
His extraordinary statistical accomplishments converse for themselves, however the grace, pleasure, vitality and mind with which he performed the sport allowed him to separate himself from different nice gamers of his, or any, period.
Mays’s loss of life just isn’t solely a loss for baseball, however for all of America. Willie Mays is a reminder of what America can produce and the way there’s at all times hope that the nation can transcend its ugly racial historical past and embrace a swish, proficient and proud African American man as a uniquely vital nationwide hero.
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