Willie Mays was a teenager when he was acknowledged as a baseball phenom, a designation he quickly outgrew as if it were a pair of hand-me-down spikes. He evolved into a first-rate ballplayer in his own right — a Negro League star, then a minor league superstar. But it was soon apparent no superlative could hold him.
He was barely 20 years old when the Giants summoned him from their top farm team on May 25, 1951. The center fielder had caught their eye. But it was the possibility of the man that intrigued them most.
So it is that Mays, who died on Tuesday at 93 years old , is remembered — not as something so pedestrian as a slugging right-hander, a block of data on the back of a baseball card or a Hall of Famer in repose, but as an ideal. No one combined his magnificent power, dazzling speed, supernatural arm, preternatural intuition and flair for melodrama. To say nothing of the sheer weight of his exuberance.
He was a do-it-all athlete who could hit one over the roof in the first inning, run like a deer into deepest center field to snag a howling drive in the fourth, and steal second base in an explosive cloud of dust in a tie game in the ninth. Later Mays might charm the hard-bitten New York press with his effervescent innocence and cherubic smile, then go home to his Harlem boardinghouse and play stickball in the street with the neighborhood kids. “If he could cook,” said Leo Durocher, Mays’ first big league manager, “I’d marry him.
” The ideal that was May.