MEETING THE MICK

  This is a picture of  no ordinary sports biography.  It is a book about one of baseball’s greatest heroes, my hero.  Fifty seven years ago today my father Dale Thompson gave it  to me on my 8th birthday (May 7, 1964.)   Since I was his oldest son, I was his first child to inherit his lifelong love of the game of baseball.  It was just a book, but it was the book which kindled  my fifty-seven-year love affair with baseball.

  

I would sit by my father’s side and listen his stories about baseball.  They were funny and fascinating -  about the old days of baseball when the greats and the also rans played just for the sport of the game and a little walking around money.  My daddy played the game in school and as a semi-pro catcher and junk ball pitcher during World War II and its aftermath. 

I remembering reading it all the way through as much as my third grade vocabulary could comprehend.   I didn’t understand all of it, but I knew that it was written by my hero and the hero to millions of boys across the country.  His name was Mickey Mantle and it seems like he hit a homerun every time we watched him on Saturday afternoons on CBS’ affiliate channel WMAZ 13 out of Macon, Georgia.

Now, we all know the dangers of hero worship.  Many tend to forget that our heroes have faults just like we all do.      To quote Mantle's teammate, Yogi Berra, "If the world was perfect, it wouldn't be."  Young kids didn’t see how much pain he was in from a serious knee injury earlier in his career.  We didn’t know how much he drank.  We didn’t know all of the foolish things he and his fellow teammates did on their nights in the city and how he handled the pressure of being just Mickey Mantle. His baseball cards were the holy grail.  No self-respecting kid would ever put a Mickey Mantle card on the spokes of their bicycle tires, not even if they were dupes - Jim Gentile and Wayne Causey cards were put on our spokes. 

As the 1960s came to end, so did the baseball career of Mickey Mantle.  The idolic  worship of our hero never waned, not one iota.  The book had a special place on the bookshelf in my bedroom in our new house on Brookwood Drive.  As I entered high school, I began to put away and even give away my childish hoard of pieces of cardboard with pictures of baseball players on them.  This special book remained along another book, the Fireside Book of Baseball, a gift from my father on another day.  

Once I got out of high school, I started collecting again and  returned to the years of my youth, possibly to remind me that I was not as old as I was getting to be.  Another sixteen years went by and my baseball card collection was approaching thirty thousand or more.

It was in November of 1990 when my best friend David Gay and I noticed that there was going to be a card show at the Waverly Hotel in Atlanta.  The special guest at the show on the Friday after Thanksgiving was none other than Mickey Mantle.  

It was my chance, the chance of a life time, not only to get Mickey Mantle’s autograph, but to actually meet my hero up close and in person.  Earlier in the year, I met my favorite football player Johnny Unitas ( I was born on his 23rd birthday) and got him to sign five things for $35.00.  Mantle was charging $35.00 for one signature.  I had enough money to get a dozen things signed, but the tickets were extremely limited and I didn’t want to destroy another old kid’s dream of meeting the Mick.  

    David and I took along with a young kid, Trey Hall.  Trey was like I once was, a kid fascinated with the game.  I remember his mind's oohs and aahs when I spoke of Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, and the fact the the New York Yankees, Boston Braves, and St. Louis Cardinals played baseball games in Dublin back in the day when his grandfathers were kids.

I got my ticket and stood in my place in a long line.  As I approached my hero, I handed my heirloom book to Mantle’s assistant.  As I stood in line, I began to rehearse in my mind what I was going to say to the great Mickey Mantle.  I was a thirty-four-year-old lawyer, but I was as nervous as a teenager on his first date.  

Mantle took the book and looked at me.  I said “Mickey, my father gave me this book on my 8th birthday."  Mickey signed and looked up and with his drawling Oklahoman country boy smile replied, “Hell son, I was ten years old when I wrote that damn book.”  

    We laughed.  I thought he might have already had a few beers, but I didn’t care.  The great Mickey Mantle had talked to me, signed my book, and shook my hand.  With a toddler son at home and a challenging legal career ahead of me, I was sitting on the top of the world.

 

As I turn 65 years old  today, I hold this book in my wrinkled hands and weep.  Mickey and Daddy are playing ball somewhere on a sandy field on a bright sunny day in Heaven.  Daddy is throwing junk and Mickey is belting every third pitch into the clouds.

    I think of the day my Daddy gave me the book and that magical day a half a life time ago  when Mickey Mantle inscribed his name in my book just as he had inscribed the quality of his own courage in the minds and souls of millions of his fans who still adore him to this day.