The Last Boy, Jane Leavy

The Last Boy, Jane Leavy

What is it about Mickey Mantle that still captivates?  Is it his blond good looks and smile that charm both man and woman?  Is it is backcountry aw shucks manners and education that made him so innocent that he fell for all the hucksters and nare-do-wells that roam the streets looking for suckers.  Certainly people loved his prodigious home run power and his electric speed, but despite an amazing record it is an unfulfilled record because he was hurt in high school, in the pros and throughout life.  Is he the ultimate tragic figure – living and succeeding through pain on one level, turning his back on his wife with the women along the road, suffering from Alcoholism made worse by his good friend Billy Martin?  He died young, he died a mystery in many ways.  His one great love was his father – Mutt who pushed him to be a ball player from the moment he placed a glove in the crib and he was unrelenting.  The miner died at 40 and the Mick was never able to show his father his true success, nor was he able to reach out and get his firm directions.

Perhaps like the historic heroes we can always wonder about what he could have done if he had not been hurt so much, partied so much, lack direction and drive.  It is a story that is both frustrating and nostalgic.  And in the end the tragic figure dies too young, too flawed, and we all feel like we lost something of our own youth.

Audible.com summary:

Jane Leavy, the acclaimed author of the New York Times best seller Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, returns with a biography of an American original: number 7, Mickey Mantle. Drawing on more than 500 interviews with friends and family, teammates, and opponents, she delivers the definitive account of Mantle's life, mining the mythology of The Mick for the true story of a luminous and illustrious talent with an achingly damaged soul. Meticulously reported and elegantly written, The Last Boy is a baseball tapestry that weaves together episodes from the author's weekend with The Mick in Atlantic City, where she interviewed her hero in 1983, after he was banned from baseball, with reminiscences from friends and family of the boy from Commerce, Oklahoma, who would lead the Yankees to seven world championships, be voted the American League's Most Valuable Player three times, win the Triple Crown in 1956, and duel teammate Roger Maris for Babe Ruth's home run crown in the summer of 1961 - the same boy who would never grow up. As she did so memorably in her biography of Sandy Koufax, Jane Leavy transcends the hyperbole of hero worship to reveal the man behind the coast-to-coast smile, who grappled with a wrenching childhood, crippling injuries, and a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. In The Last Boy she chronicles her search to find out more about the person he was and, given what she discovers, to explain his mystifying hold on a generation of baseball fans, who were seduced by that lopsided, gap-toothed grin. It is an uncommon biography, with literary overtones: not only a portrait of an icon, but an investigation of memory itself. "I believe in memory, not memorabilia," Leavy writes in her preface. But in The Last Boy, she discovers that what we remember of our heroes - and even what they remember of themselves - is only where the story begins.