Is Matt Kemp the New Mickey Mantle?

The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood
by Jane Leavy

Reviewed by Joe Mathews

The Last Boy, by Jane LeavyJane Leavy’s The Last Boy is a book for Yankees fans, New Yorkers, and people old enough to remember a ballplayer whose career began in 1951 and ended in 1968. Despite its title, it has little to say about adolescence or the United States.

But that does not mean the book is useless. As I read it, I became convinced that The Last Boy should be mandatory reading for Major League Baseball center fielders who live a high-flying celebrity lifestyle and whose performance has so far failed to live up to their talent.

Which means there is at least one person in Los Angeles who really should read this book.

Matt Kemp, pick up a copy.

Kemp, the Dodger center fielder, probably has as much in common with Mantle as anyone alive. They played the same position. They each grew up in Oklahoma (Mantle in the now-defunct mining town of Commerce; Kemp in Midwest City, just outside Oklahoma City). Each was blessed with the rare combination of running speed and hitting power.

And both, for all their successes (and the career of Kemp, just 26, is still young), frustrated fans for not making the most of their physical gifts. Both faced, and denied, the allegation that a celebrity lifestyle had distracted them from a full on-field flowering.

Mantle drank to excess and carried on affairs with countless women, among them Angie Dickinson and Doris Day, according to The Last Boy. Kemp’s known record of behavior is considerably cleaner, though his relationship with the pop star Rihanna has been offered as one explanation for an otherwise inexplicable decline in his hitting during the 2010 season. Dodger coaches and management have complained publicly that Kemp does not spend enough time working at his craft and does not show sufficient respect for teammates and staff. Kemp, instead of taking such criticisms to heart, had his agent lash out at critics.

The Last Boy is a cautionary tale of what can happen when even the most talented athlete is less than fully committed to success. Mantle drinks more and more, eventually playing games hungover. He endures physical pain because of lingering injuries that he doesn’t rehabilitate. His love of the fast life alienates him from his wife and sons, all of whom eventually battle their own substance abuse demons. By the end of his life, an older, regretful Mantle – a Hall of Famer and hero to Baby Boomer boys – has a liver transplant and advises young people not to be like him.

There is much for Matt Kemp to ponder here.

For the rest of us, The Last Boy is a bit too much like Mantle’s career: full of awe-inspiring moments but ultimately underwhelming. Leavy, the author of a much better book about the Dodger great Sandy Koufax, had enviable access to Mantle’s family, friends and records. But she never figured out what kind of book she was writing.

The best parts of the book are the chapters written as straight biography, where Leavy’s reporting shines. Other sections of the book are painstaking autopsies of particular Mantle actions – notably his longest and most jaw-dropping home runs and his most debilitating injuries. And in the book’s weakest chapters, Leavy departs the narrative to offer a memoir of her family’s connections to the Bronx and a time she interviewed Mantle in the early 1980s.

Leavy never explains why someone like this reader – a baseball fan in his mid-30s born years after Mantle played his final game – should care about a ballplayer as self-destructive and distant as Mantle.

Leavy suggests that Mantle somehow represents the end of American childhood. She is imprecise about what she means by this, though her argument seems to be at once personal and national. Mantle was the last figure of an era, she says, when athletes were permitted to be boys, instead of grown-up professionals. And, as an American icon, she writes, he represented a boundless time of optimism, when the country’s promise seem unlimited.

Those are some big claims, and the Mickey Mantle in this book isn’t nearly strong enough a figure to support them. Vietnam surely was more responsible than Mantle’s bad knees and barroom elbow for the end of the country’s post-war optimism. And anyone who watches ESPN knows that our best athletes behave as childishly as they ever did. Among these are the great, big kid who stands in center field at Chavez Ravine and whose best days, like those of the country’s, may still lie ahead.

Buy the Book: Skylight, Powell’s, Amazon, Borders.

Excerpt: “I told him about the time my grandmother’s ample cleavage failed to conceal my Sammy Esposito glove from the serious-looking men in yarmulkes guarding the entrance to Yom Kippur services at the Concourse Plaza. ‘We got thrown out,’ I said. ‘They thought I was being disrespectful. I thought they were being disrespectful.’

Mickey laughed. ‘Your grandmother must have loved you very much.’

Our common history in the old stomping grounds established, he asked me, ‘What was that tall building? You could see it over the center field fence?’

‘The Bronx County Courthouse.'”

Further Reading: Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy by Jane Leavy and Ball Four by Jim Bouton

Joe Mathews, a fourth-generation Californian and a Zócalo contributing editor, writes about his home state and its politics, media, labor, and real estate. He is co-author, with Mark Paul, of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It.

*Photo of Matt Kemp courtesy Malingering.



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