January 23, 2022

By Patrick Kennedy

Canadian Baseball Network

The late, great New York Yankees centre-fielder Mickey Mantle, the hero of my youth, would’ve turned 90 years old last October.

That realization jarred my senses with this blunt reminder: I’m getting up there myself. When the birth year of a childhood baseball hero sits only a decade shy of triple-digit status, that’s one stark reality check.

The Mantle milestone also dusted off a mothballed memory of an afternoon in Edmonton that yours truly spent with the iconic No. 7. I arrived on cloud nine and stayed there throughout.

The event was a 1985 press conference that preceded an evening celebrity dinner. The special guests included Crazy Canuck downhill skier Steve Podborski, Olympic boxing silver medallist Willie deWit, and headliner Mantle.

Me? I was a pea-green journalism grad employed in my first newspaper job, the Fort Saskatchewan Record, a not-too-august weekly located 30 kilometres northeast of Edmonton. More on that afternoon “presser” in a moment.

Mickey’s 2021 birthday — he came up well short of 90 when cancer struck him out at age 63 — also conjured a memory of a photograph I snapped that day of Mantle and one other fellow. A household dragnet turned up the matted 10-by-12-inch black-and-white photo. I found it in our furnace room inside a box of yellowing clippings that lay next to a baseball autographed by Hall of Fame pitcher “Bullet” Bob Feller. I texted the photo to the “other fellow” in the “Two Sluggers” photo: ex-pugilist deWit.

These days it’s Judge deWit. In 2017, following 20-plus years as a highly regarded Calgary defence attorney — retired pro boxers might require the services of a criminal lawyer, they don’t become one — Grande Prairie’s favourite son was appointed a Justice of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta.

As for the photo I sent west, it turns out Judge Willie already has one, and remarkably similar, too: black and white, same pose, but from a slightly different angle and taken a nanosecond before or after my shutter clicked that afternoon 37 years ago. The photograph shares space in his judge’s chambers with numerous other snapshots and mementoes.

“I wasn’t a big baseball fan, but I certainly knew about Mickey Mantle,” deWit, 60, recalls via mobile phone on a recent half-hour drive home from court to Cochrane, where the grandfather of five lives with longtime wife Suzan. “He was an athlete whose fame transcended all sports.

“I sat beside (Mantle) at the dinner,” he continues. “He gave me some good advice to remember as my (professional) boxing career moved forward. He told me to watch out for the hangers-on and to always believe in myself.”

At the time, deWit, a Grande Prairie native who copped gold at the ’82 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, had already commenced his pro career. He retired from the “sweet science” three years later with an enviable win-loss-tie record of 20-1-1.

This wasn’t The Mick’s only time in Edmonton. Far from it. He’d been there a few times. On one occasion, not long after he retired in 1968, Mantle took some futile swings against the mesmerizing offerings of underhand hurler Eddie Feigner of King and his Court fame. The dinner in ’85 marked the “Commerce Comet’s” final visit to the Alberta capital.

“Those old stars from the ‘50s and ‘60s, they had this presence about them,” deWit notes. “Some took it seriously, but Mantle, arguably one of the most famous athletes ever, came across as this nice, normal, friendly guy.

“It was even his idea for the ‘Two Sluggers’ photo,” deWit adds. “Mickey put his hands up before I did.”

Though that press conference remains an indelible memory, journalistically speaking these were not my finest hours as a reporter. More like Amateur Hour. I shamelessly hung around the famous switch-hitter like a neck brace. An albatross with a notepad. Mostly, I listened and scribbled down quotes to questions the then-53-year-old Mantle had answered thousands of times in the past.

He told tales about Whitey and Billy and Yogi and “Ol’ Case,” of course, and he had especially touching words for his ailing teammate Roger Maris, who would die later that year from cancer at age 51. Periodically, I’d slip in a question. I asked Mantle, who won seven World Series titles with the Yankees, if the championship ring (1962) on his left hand carried any significance. He smiled and smirked. “Ah jus’ grabbed one outta the drawer,” he replied in that folksy, familiar Oklahoma drawl.

Two things were in my favour that afternoon. First, I wasn’t on deadline like the majority of media present. I could afford to linger, particularly if The Mick opted to linger. Which leads us to the second thing: an open bar. At this point in his life, Mantle, it would come out years later, was drinking like a camel at the oasis, although the public and his fans were unaware as to the extent of his addiction.

A decade after the Edmonton press conference, Mantle, then a greeter at the Manhattan restaurant that bore his name, acknowledged his losing battle with the bottle. He travelled to California and entered the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs to undergo treatment. He emerged a humbled hero, albeit a dying one. Doctors warned that without a new liver, the Hall of Famer had only weeks to live. Mantle received a new liver, but it didn’t save his life. His cancer had spread. He died a month later, on Aug. 13, 1995.

Mantle’s transplant surgery caused a stir and rekindled the discussion over whether an alcoholic, even a beloved boozer once idolized by millions, merits a new liver. To his credit, a chastened Mantle used what time he had left to promote the donation of organs and renounce his hard-living ways. The form reversal prompted one doctor to say, “This may become Mickey’s ultimate home run.”

One last tidbit about that afternoon in Edmonton. During a brief, private moment, I asked Mantle if he’d sign a baseball for my older brother Ted’s approaching 50th birthday. No. 7 happily complied.

Not long after the ballplayer’s death, I asked my brother if he still had the Mantle ball.

“You know Mickey won’t be signing any more of them,” I pointed out. “That ball could put one of your kids through college.”

Brother Ted gave me a sheepish glance before coming clean. Right after receiving the ball, he stuffed it inside a sock, put it in a dresser drawer and forgot about it. Years went by before one day, curious for another look, he retrieved the ball and stared at it in disbelief. Mantle’s personalized inscription had faded away to almost nothing. All that remained of the baseball great’s penmanship was a tiny smudge of blue ink.