Say Hey Hey, The Kid Has Left The Picture
By Richard Burroughs...
Willie was really him-but in a time so long ago that it's a hymn sung by the negro congregation at a Baptist church. In this era when Michael Jordan is retro, Clyde Frasier is classic, and young dudes at the deli call me a triple OG, Willie Mays, and his greatness roamed a land that time forgot.
He broke into Major League Baseball in 1951, winning Rookie of The Year, then got drafted by the army to fight in the Korean War for most of the '52 and the entire '53 season, returning to baseball in 1954 to win league MVP.
Mays capped off the '54 campaign with his famous over-the-shoulder basket catch, better known as just"The Catch," to help the New York Giants defeat the Cleveland Indians in the last World Series broadcast in black & white.
His last season was as a gimpy clubhouse sage on the 1973 NY Mets pennant team. That last season was two years before Sony released the Betamax VCR system in 1975. Mays was born in 1932 during the thickest part of the Great Depression. He began life with Franklin D. Roosevelt defeating Groover Cleveland for the presidency when a bottle of Coca-Cola was a nickel, and Adolph Hitler first gained German citizenship.
I typed those historical references to contextualize the 93 years on earth for Willie Mays and why his greatness can get lost in the sauce since his playing days are not recent, and his highlight reel is in low light. He's too frequently left out of the conversation of great Black athletes. How we understand history has been distilled into a binary of pre-internet and post-internet, with all things falling along that continuum. In that binary of pre and post-internet, Mays is prehistoric.
We live our lives today with tomorrow sitting in the passenger seat, sans a seatbelt, annoyingly changing the car stereo during a road trip. But tomorrow used to be the car ahead of us that we could never quite catch up to, while yesterday was in the passenger seat, guiding our path with the experience of life. Yet somewhere along the way, yesterday has been relegated to the third row of a behemoth SUV because today and tomorrow are uncomfortable with its history.
Willie Mays reminded people of that uncomfortable American history that today and tomorrow yearn to ignore. His mere existence brushed back the persistent, revisionist energy like a high & tight fastball. Mays was great at baseball in an era when life was far from great for Black people. He was a living testament to the repulsiveness of American history that many White people today bend over backward to cover up and obscure with book bans, legislation, and court decisions.
The persistent, fragility-stained whitewashing is now easier to conduct with his passing, yet Mays' underappreciation lies in his lack of storylines.
I'm not gonna spit out all his stats because my moms ain't name me Google, but if you're reading this, know that he was doing it big while also dealing with the foulness of the times. When the Giants bounced from the Polo Grounds in Washington Heights and relocated to San Francisco, Mays struggled to find a house because he was Black. That started a local brouhaha, smacking political pie in the face of then-mayor George Christopher, who convinced the Giants to leave New York for San Francisco, only for the team's star to get denied housing and publicly embarrassed because of his skin color.
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| Willie Mays' House in San Francisco 1957 |
He eventually bought the house that was initially denied to him, moved in, and then had a Coke bottle with a message thrown through his window, so the family moved out. I had my own experiences with White people not wanting Black people on the block when I was growing up in Jersey City. The resulting race fight, and beatdown, handed out by my father and his friends to the local racists, who were led by a schmuck named Meatball, was epic. But Mays was a sports star in the 1950s, so he had to absorb that devil energy and move on to preserve his career, life, and limb.
Every crease on May's 93-year-old face was proof of concept that America's racist nature has real-life victims. His death is a late-inning disconnection from the early and mid-20th century African American ballplayers who achieved greatness in the face of repulsive racism in every aspect of American life and what they overcame to achieve sports immortality.
His greatness is understood but still undervalued, similar to how LeBron James has a crazy salary, but he's still underpaid.
I recently wrote a feature piece about the Brooklyn Cyclones for BK Reader, and the research for that article drove home how baseball has lost relevancy. Since Mays didn't break the color line or the home run record or die young, he's primarily thought about in a baseball context, and most people don't think about baseball when there's no narrative or storyline.
Modern baseball has lost its relevancy, so baseball from the 1950s and 60s, the heyday for the Say Hey kid, is ancient for many people. Mays' career started so far back he was selected to 24 All-Star games over 22 seasons. That's because he played in the brief era (1959-1962), when it was two all-star games each season.
Willie died on Tuesday, two days before the San Franciso Giants and St. Louis Cardinals will play a historic game on Thursday at Rickwood Field. It's the oldest professional ballpark in the United States still in operation and the former home to the Birmingham Black Barons. But when people think of the Negro Leagues, they think first of Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell and Smokey Joe Williams, not Willie Mays.
In a big way, baseball is driven by statistics, so from a historical perspective, not holding any significant records is a major drawback for Willie Mays. No hitting streak record, Iron Man record, or stolen base record, yet pound for pound, Willie Mays was likely the best player to put spikes on in the major leagues. He was the ultimate 5 Tools guy, who was GREAT with all five tools over an extensive career.
Say Hey was all baseball and great at baseball, but his lack of narrative obscures his greatness because, especially today, our respect for sports legends is driven by narratives.
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