MET HIM FOR ABOUT FIVE SECONDS

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

A lot of tributes have come through in the 40 hours or so since San Francisco baseball legend Willie Mays passed away Tuesday at age 93. He was arguably the greatest player in the game for the second half of the 20th Century, and probably in the top five greatest of all time. And my encounter with him was only because I remembered to bring my 1961 baseball picture card of him with me to an exhibition game the San Francisco Giants were playing against the Cleveland Indians (now the Cleveland Guardians) in 1962 in Tucson, Arizona, where I lived from age 7 to 15.

I was an avid card collector back then, having (still) almost the full sets of 1960 and 1961 cards. I had cards of all the Giants players of that time period, but can’t remember if I brought all those cards to the game or not. I didn’t even think to bring my Indians player cards, maybe it was oversight, but there were no future Hall of Fame players on that team, whereas the Giants had five.

The game itself held little in my memory, can’t even remember who won. The only thing I remember during the game was standing a few feet away from Willie McCovey, another of their future Hall of Famers, and saying, “Hey Willie!” I had his attention, then I said, “You got time for an autograph?” He shook his head no, and that was that. I felt silly, and not helped along too much by my dad laughing at my humiliation. To be fair, my dad would help me get the Big Name Willie’s autograph after the game.

The game ended, and I continued my pursuit of anyone, even stopping one Indians’ player to ask him to sign my program, but before the player (Vic Power was his name) could do anything, an usher shooed me away. So we waited near the Giants team bus, but because I was still under five feet tall then, all the Giants looked like, well, Giants, and I was too shy to look up at their faces. I managed to get next to one of their main pitchers, Mike McCormick, who played for them from 1956-62 and again from 1967-70. He was talking to a woman, but was happy to oblige, and signed my 1961 card. He was quite a handsome guy, but his picture cards often had him in poses that made him look like he was in pain. The important thing was he signed, it was legible, and remains on that card 62 years later. McCormick died in June 2020 at age 81.

The other signature would be more of a chore, as there were probably 40 to 50 kids trailing after Willie Mays, who, apparently from what I’ve read since his passing, was going through a divorce at this particular time. He shook off the kids and got directly on the team bus, and autograph seekers had to pass whatever items they wanted autographed to the open window next to where he was sitting about six feet above me, all the while he’s flirting with some young woman, asking her for her phone number, etc. He paid little attention to what he was signing, but my dad made sure that my 1961 card got into his hands. Amazing how organised things were that the card was returned to me still intact and with no creases or bends in it, which would have lowered the value. My dad wondered, since he really was distracted, could he have gotten away with handing Mays a blank check. I didn’t really get the joke there until a few years later.

To be fair, Mays had every reason to be arrogant. He loved playing the game, but there was that stigma of the fans of all ages cosying up to him, wanting to shake his hand or get an autograph, and that had to be less fun as time went on. It’s nice to think that even though he was part of the team that moved from Manhattan to San Francisco in 1958, he wound up really liking San Francisco and stayed in the Bay Area most of the rest of his life except for the two years in 1972-73 that he returned to New York to play for the New York Mets.

As for my card with the autograph, well, it’s barely visible, because he was signing the various objects without really looking at them. This resulted in his signature being on the backside of the card, which had a dark green background to begin with, and his name is buried in the middle of his list of career statistics. Oh well, an autograph is an autograph, and it’s unmistakably his. RIP to the greatest player of my lifetime.

June 20th, 2024



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