Review by Choice Review
Baseball is a game of numbers, and the numbers reveal Mays as one of the three or four greatest players who ever lived. Those numbers--660 home runs, .302 batting average, 3,283 hits--translate as Cooperstown, class of 1979. But "Say Hey" Willie was much more than numbers. His incomparable talent for hitting, base running, and fielding was at times almost secondary to the joy he took in the game and communicated to the millions of people who saw him play in person or on television. Hirsch (former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal) recounts Mays's career from his 1951 explosion on the Major League scene through his glory years in the 1950s and 1960s to his decline and retirement in 1973. This is an "authorized biography," and the author had Mays's full cooperation. Though Hirsch details Mays's childhood in Alabama and his life off the diamond, the book is really about baseball, which is fitting for a player for whom the game was everything. In the time of Brown v. Board of Education and the battle for civil rights, Mays mostly remained silent. But he spoke for equality with the quality of his professionalism. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers; professionals. R. W. Roberts Purdue University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
A long time ago in America, there was a beautiful game called baseball. This was before 30 major-league teams were scattered in a blurry variety of divisions; before 162-game seasons and extended playoffs and fans who watched World Series games in thick down jackets; before the D.H. came to the American League; before AstroTurf on baseball fields and aluminum bats on sandlots; before complete games by pitchers were a rarity; before ballparks were named for corporations instead of individuals; and long, long before the innocence of the game was permanently stained by the filthy deception of steroids. In that vanished time, there was a ballplayer named Willie Mays. He came to a Manhattan ballpark named the Polo Grounds in 1951, when he was 20, to play for the New York Giants. Within a few months, he showed that he had the potential to become one of the greatest players ever to walk on the green grass of the major leagues. He could hit, he could run, he could catch, he could throw. And he brought to the playing of baseball a mysterious, almost magical quality that has disappeared from the professional game. Willie Mays brought us joy. All of us. Even those of us who from birth were fanatical acolytes of the secular church of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Dodgers were in my DNA. My father was an immigrant from Belfast and didn't become truly American until he got baseball. Pm sure that passionate embrace was true of millions of other immigrants, and was swiftly passed to their American children. My father took me to my first ballgame at Ebbets Field in 1946. I went with my own friends one June day in 1947, just before my 12th birthday, and saw Jackie Robinson in his first brave season, saw him get hit by a pitch, then steal second, then drive the pitcher nuts with his jittery feints, and then score on a single. And heard the gigantic roar from all the Brooklyn tribes. Bed-Stuy was joined at last with Bensonhurst and Park Slope, Flatbush and Bay Ridge. For Robinson and the team president, Branch Rickey, had done more than simply integrate baseball. They had integrated the stands. From the box seats to the bleachers, we were consumed by love of the Dodgers. The phrase "Dem Bums" was uttered with deep affection. All those old passions rose in me again when reading James S. Hirsch's fine new book, "Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend." Above all, I remembered Mays getting a thunderous round of applause when he first came to bat in games at Ebbets Field (the only other visiting player to hear such cheers was Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals). Even the most fanatical Dodger fans wanted Mays to go 3 for 4, steal two bases and make one astounding catch in center field, as long as the Dodgers won, 6-4. Here I must plead guilty to nostalgia, but not to sentimentality, which is always a lie about the past. Like millions of others, I was there. And I remember the joy of watching a young man named Mays play the game for everything it was worth. To all of us then, it was worth a lot. "By the time he retired," Hirsch writes, "he was an American icon whose athletic brilliance and stylistic bravado contributed to the assimilation of blacks during the turbulent civil rights era, a distinctive figure of ambition, sacrifice and triumph who became a lasting cultural touchstone for a nation in search of heroes." In his long, fascinating account, Hirsch tells the full story of Mays's baseball life. He was born in 1931 in a mainly black mill town outside Birmingham, Ala, where he was raised by his father, Willie Mays Sr. (known as Cat), and his mother's two younger sisters. His mother, Annie Satterwhite, never married his father, but the strapped Depression household was full of feminine warmth. Beyond that small community, the world could be ominous with danger. In Alabama, there were still living Americans who had been born into slavery. The Ku Klux Klan, the most enduring of American terrorist organizations, remained the ultimate enforcer of the iron rules of segregation. When Willie was 7, the family moved to Fairfield, a nearby town that was biracial. By then, the boy had discovered baseball, and he was tutored by Cat, who played semipro ball. Young Willie learned to hit and run and slide and catch and throw. The full curriculum. Most important, he learned the rules of the game. They were at once a challenge and a comfort. "Willie Mays," Hirsch writes, "always recalled his childhood as a joyous, sunlit time surrounded by loving friends and family who encouraged his dreams and sheltered him from hardship." IN great detail, Hirsch - the author of "Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter" - tells the story of the rise of the teenage Mays, who first starred in high school sports (including basketball and football) and then, even before graduation, joined the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro leagues. Older players guided him in baseball and in life. In 1950, he was signed by the New York Giants for $4,000 and assigned to a minor-league team in Trenton; in 1951, he moved to the triple-A Minneapolis Millers. He was hitting .477 in the first 35 games when the Giants called him up. The Giants' owner, Horace Stoneham, assigned a boxing promoter named Frank Forbes as the kid's personal guardian, charged with warding off all temptation and finding him a place to live in Harlem. But his baseball guardian was the Giants' manager, Leo Durocher. Hirsch gives us a delightfully raffish portrait of the man Mays would call Mr. Leo for all the years to come. Mr. Leo's desire to win, at all costs. His baseball intelligence. And his marvelous gift for obscenity (the one Durocher characteristic Mays did not adopt). With his nerves pulsing steadily, Mays started off poorly, going 1 for 26 (the one hit was a home run off the great Warren Spahn). Then he started to hit, and the career had begun. That rookie year, he was in the ondeck circle during the playoff game with the Dodgers, trembling with stress, when Bobby Thomson hit "the shot heard round the world." Before he was done, Mays would hit 660 home runs of his own. Most of the book concentrates on basebau. It's full of recalled moments, including the amazing catch of Vic Wertz's drive in the 1954 World Series (and the even more amazing throw that followed). The baseball brilliance is here, along with the slumps and the sporadic collapses from exhaustion. The career of Willie Mays, Hirsch reminds us, underlines the fact that even the best hitters fail seven times out of 10. We are also told about the various strategies Mays adopted to retain some privacy in the face of immense public celebrity. We are reminded of the failure of Mays's first marriage and the success of his second. We learn about his money problems, in those years before free agency created baseball millionaires, and about his generosity, especially to kids. We learn again how Mays and other black players had to endure racism in those early years. We get a better sense of his reluctance to plunge publicly into the civil rights movement, owing to a combination of modesty and caution (he was attacked for that caution by Jackie Robinson). In his own fashion, Mays seemed to be saying that he challenged virulent racism in the way he lived and by the way he played the game. FOR me, starting on Page 269, Hirsch reveals a story I never knew: what happened after the Giants and the Dodgers left New York at the end of the 1957 season. Like many others, including my father, I erased baseball from my life that year. I wouldn't read about it. I didn't watch a single game on television. I was embarrassed and embittered by the childish naïveté that had fueled my passion. Like most Giant and Dodger fans, I could never root for the Yankees. So I never saw Mays play for San Francisco. Not an inning. Hirsch fills in those blanks, causing me even more regret. I missed the great years of Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson and Henry Aaron. I missed seeing Mays battle the winds that made Candlestick Park the worst stadium in baseball (probably costing him a hundred career home runs). I didn't see another baseball game until the Mets arrived in the tottering shell of the Polo Grounds in 1962, before Shea Stadium was ready. I went to the park to see them play the Pittsburgh Pirates, but all I could see was Willie Mays. I waited for Shea. In this book, Hirsch evokes a time now gone, one he himself didn't experience. He was born in 1962, and never saw Mays play. But he has studied the films and videos. He has drawn on newspaper and magazine articles from that era, and previous books about Mays (most notably Charles Einstein's "Willie's Time," published in 1979). He has interviewed many people, including Mays, who has "authorized" this biography. The result: Hirsch has given us a book as valuable for the young as it is for the old. The young should know that there was once a time when Willie Mays lived among the people who came to the ballpark. That on Harlem summer days he would join the kids playing stickball on St. Nicholas Place in Sugar Hill and hold a broom-handle bat in his large hands, wait for the pink rubber spaldeen to be pitched, and routinely hit it four sewers. The book explains what that sentence means. Above all, the story of Willie Mays reminds us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy. Even Dodger fanatics wanted Mays to go 3 for 4 and make one astounding catch, as long as the Dodgers won. Mays seemed to be saying that he challenged racism in the way he lived and by the way he played the game. Pete Hamill, the author of more than 20 books, is a distinguished writer in residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 21, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Hall of Fame center fielder Willie Mays has never been well served by books. The joie de vivre that Mays brought to the baseball diamond, first in New York and then in San Francisco, after the Giants moved cross country in 1958, doesn't translate well to the static page. Motion defined Mays on the field fidgeting in the batter's box, at full gallop in the outfield or on the basepaths and most of the writers who have attempted to make sense of his genius have fallen woefully short. Hirsch, however, in this thorough, engaging biography, comes as close as anyone has to capturing the unbridled excitement that fans felt when they watched number 24 in action. He does it by relying primarily on first-person testimony from the players, managers, and everyday fans who remember what it felt like when Mays delivered yet another towering home run or made one of countless unbelievable plays in the field (his glove was famously described by sportswriter Jim Murray as being the place where triples go to die ). Life for Mays off the field wasn't nearly as rosy as it was on, and Hirsch tells the story of the lukewarm (and, at times, overtly racist) reception San Franciscans gave the Giants' star when the team arrived in California; he reviews the criticism Mays received for not being more active in civil rights; and he reflects on the somewhat grumpy, bitter side of Mays' life after baseball. Most of all, though, this is the story of the man who many fans regard as the greatest all-round baseball player who ever lived, and in telling that story, Hirsch comes very close indeed to capturing the magic of both Mays and the game he played. Former Cincinnati first baseman Ted Kluszewski may have said it best: I'm not sure what the hell charisma is, but I get the feeling it's Willie Mays. --Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The legendary outfielder remains an idol in this starstruck authorized biography. Journalist Hirsch (Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter) makes Mays "the savior" of the floundering Giants franchise, celebrates his "supernatural" power, speed, and fielding chops and his godlike physique; toasts his "innocence and joy," abstemious lifestyle, and kindness to children; and credits him with stopping a San Francisco race riot with a public service announcement. Hirsch is more restrained about his subject's darker side, his financial difficulties and his often cold and prickly personality. He barely mentions Mays's use of amphetamines, which he does not connect to the athlete's frenetic on-field demeanor and recurrent collapses and hospitalizations for "exhaustion." Hirsch is more incisive on the racial tensions roiling a fast-integrating baseball during Mays's career, and on the shift to a faster, more aggressive style of play that Mays helped inaugurate. The author is at his best probing the strategy and mechanics behind Mays's feats of fielding and baserunning; his detailed exegeses of individual plays, including an epic account of the over-the-shoulder catch in the 1954 World Series, reveal just how much art and science went into being Willie Mays. In Hirsch's admiring portrait, Mays is certainly awe inspiring, but also remote and a bit impersonal. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Although this is an authorized biography, Hirsch (former reporter, New York Times; Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter) performs his task admirably, producing a strong, even important work. Hirsch portrays Mays as a baseball genius and an artist, albeit with imperfections making him capable of mistakes on the diamond and missteps in his personal relationships. Hirsch deftly interweaves biography and baseball tales with historical context, showing changes in the national scene, particularly involving race. Hyperbole only occasionally mars his judgement of Mays, whose feats were truly remarkable. The graceful centerfielder was certainly among the game's most brilliant players, even after nearly two years of military service, returning to the New York Giants for their World Series championship run in 1954. Hirsch's analysis of Mays is astute, with repeated references to startling defensive plays-"The Catch" in the 1954 series being simply the most famous example-and heads-up running on the base paths, and, of course, masterstrokes at the plate. Verdict Hirsch's biography deserves a place alongside the work by top chroniclers Roger Angell, Bill James, Roger Kahn, and Robert Creamer. Highly recommended for all baseball fans.-R.C. Cottrell, California State Univ., Chico (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An admiringat times even worshipfulportrait of one of baseball's greatest players, whose on-field exploits were astonishing but whose inner life remains largely hidden. On the first page, former New York Times and Wall Street Journal reporter Hirsch (Cheating Destiny: Living with Diabetes, America's Biggest Epidemic, 2006, etc.)who wrote a bestselling biography of boxer Rubin Carter (Hurricane, 2000)compares the body of Willie Mays to "Michelangelo's finest work" and notes later that his "best catches seemed to be guided by some divine spirit." Fans of Mays will no doubt applaud such effusions, but they signal that celebration is higher on the author's agenda than critical analysis. Mays's Hall of Fame career was indeed marvelous. Born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1931, he endured the Jim Crow South, thrived on the baseball field and then left for greener outfields. Hirsch discusses how he learned baseball's fundamentals from his father, mastered his unique "basket catch" (in the Army), got the nickname "Say Hey Kid," rocketed through the minors, debuted with the New York Giants in 1951 and quickly became baseball's dominant star and its most exciting playerfor decades (he played into his 40s, ending his career with the Mets). The author attends well to those most celebrated Willie moments: "The Throw," "The Catch," the four-homer day, the bare-handed catches, the daring base running, the dramatic hits, the peacemaking during base-brawls. But he also portrays a man who had difficulty with personal relationships and with intimacya failed first marriage, a need for pampering managers. Other black athletesmost notably Jackie Robinsonchided Mays for lassitude during the civil-rights movement, and others wondered why he did not support Curt Flood's lawsuit. But Hirsch remains an apologist, and Mays's 40 years of retirement are relegated to a 30-page epilogue. Well-researched and fluid, but tendentious and tunnel-visioned. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
