Willie Mays: A Remembrance

The baseball great was my idol. I was lucky enough to have met him as a kid.

Willie Mays died today. I heard the news from the announcers of the New York Yankees-Baltimore Orioles game. When I heard it, it felt like getting punched in the chest. But not hard. More like a pressure, gentle and sorrowful.

photo credit: Baseball Collection

I grew up a San Francisco Giants fan. I worshipped Willie Mays. I adored him. As a Little Leaguer, I imitated his closed stance, not that it did me any good.

I grew up in Los Angeles but before we moved there, we lived Oakland. I was born in San Francisco. That’s where I became a Giants fan. That’s where I discovered Willie Mays.

Somehow my father, a doctor, got to know Mays, probably through his network of Black doctor friends in the Bay Area.

Today, tomorrow and in the days to follow, a lot will be written about Mays as a baseball star. A lot of people think he was the greatest all round players ever, including Ruth and Gehrig and Mantle.

This is my Willie Mays story. My stories.

Photo credit: rick

It was around 1965, the peak of his astonishing career. The Giants were in L.A. to play the Dodgers. My dad took me and my brother, Keith, to the Ambassador Hotel to meet Mays. It was a Saturday, late morning or afternoon. The game was that night so Mays was still at the hotel.

We entered his room. It was a very large room, bathed in sunlight from the windows whose curtains were opened. Or so I remember. There, laying on a king-sized bed dresser in a bathrobe, was Willie Mays. It was if I’d gone to Heaven and was beholding God himself. I was 11, maybe 12 years old.

After being introduced, my brother and I stepped aside as my dad pulled up a chair and soon was engrossed in conversation with Mays.

The television was tuned into the NBC Game of the Week, one of the few opportunities in those days to see a live baseball broadcast. Nowadays, you can watch a game any day of the week. In those days, only Dodgers-Giants games were broadcast in L.A. and the weekly nationally broadcast game.

I watched the game on the screen but kept looking away at Mays, as if it were all a dream that might evaporate if I let him out of my sight.

What was strange too was the casualness of it all. My dad and Mays talking like neighbors over a fence.


The game went to a commercial break. When it returned, the announcer, Curt Gowdy, started talking about the game that would be shown the next week.

“The San Francisco Giants and the great Willie Mays will be playing —“ I don’t remember their upcoming opponent. I only remember being astonished that they were talking about Mays and yet he was utterly oblivious to it. It was almost incomprehensible to me.

Later, Mays would come by our house when the Giants were in town. He played basketball with me and my friends. Mays, dressed nattily in a shirt and tie, kept asking for the ball and, man, he could shoot! Another timed we played catch in someone’s backyard. At one point - as a joke, I only understood later - he threw me a slow, sweeping curveball that I couldn’t handle and he laughed when I dropped it. A few years later he gave me one of his gloves which somehow got lost by my parents when they moved while I was away in college. He also gave me my first set of golf clubs. I still have the driver with its tiny wooden club head.

Shooting hoops with Willie Mays. I’m the skinny kid at the far right.

When I go to Yankees games, I sometimes take the subway up to 157th Street in Manhattan instead of going directly to Yankees Stadium in the Bronx. That way I can walk down and across 155th Street to Yankees Stadium past the site of the Polo Grounds, now a huge public housing project. Mays played his first six seasons (he missed one year in the military) for the New York Giants who played there. It was there during the 1954 World Series that he made what some consider the greatest catch ever when he turned his back to home plate and ran full out to catch a mammoth  center field by the Cleveland Indians’ Vic Wertz.

When I pass the Polo Grounds site, I always stop and gaze at the towering buildings and the baseball diamond below and try to imagine being there in 1951 for Thomson’s home run or Mays’s catch in ‘54 or just a regular game on a warm summer day, watching Willie Mays play baseball. I think of that route past the old Polo Grounds as The Pilgrimage Walk.



In late 2021, I was writing a story about the 70th anniversary of the fabled Bobby Thomson home run in that led the Giants to a dramatic come-from-behind win over their arch rival Brooklyn Dodgers. It’s considered one of the greatest moments in sports history.

Mays, then a rookie, had been on deck when Thomson homered, so I was hoping to get his recollections of that moment.

Mays’s assistant emailed me that he was unable to talk to me. He was 90 years old then and I’d read his health wasn’t great. His aide said only that he had other obligations and wasn’t available to talk.

At the end of her message, she added, “He remembers your father and the fact that he “messed around” with “you kids.” What memories and reflections YOU must have!!”

And I always will.

photo credit: Baseball Collection