It might have been 1962. Perhaps 1963. It was a simpler time. And I wore, to paraphrase Billy Joel, a much younger man’s clothes.
My family lived in a small, suburban town in the San Francisco Bay Area called Castro Valley. And we were baseball fans.
Football was catching on, and a few people liked the NBA at the time. But in the early 1960s, Americans were obsessed with baseball.
We carried transistor radios to hear the ballgame announcers, and we tore into the local newspaper the next day to read the box scores. In my case, the local paper was the San Francisco Chronicle, which oddly printed its sports section on green paper. Everyone called the sports section “The Green Sheet.”
My Dad was, for a short time, anyway, a bat boy for the Oakland Oaks, a Triple-A baseball team. A good deal of my youth was spent on baseball diamonds. And a major source of entertainment was a long drive over to Candlestick Park to watch the San Francisco Giants.
The team had moved to California in 1958, when I was two years old. And they were a powerhouse. Willie McCovey, a gentle giant, played first base. Orlando Cepeda was at xxx. Juan Marichal intimidated hitters with his massive leg kick and powerful fastball.
But Willie Mays was the man. Mays, to this former Toronto Star baseball writer and unabashed Giants fan the greatest all-around player to grace a deep green baseball field, patrolled in centre field. He hit massive home runs. He ran down fly balls mere mortals had no chance of catching. He dashed around the bases so hard his cap would fall off and float onto the brown infield dirt.
His reputation, however, didn’t always match his on-field exploits. Some fans called him aloof, even distant or cold.
But a six-year-old or seven-year-old kid doesn’t know that. He only knows the Willie Mays of prodigious power and the Willie Mays of blinding speed and the Willie Mays who turns backwards and runs down a fly ball over his head in the World Series.
So, when my Dad (like Mays, born in 1931) found out Mays was coming to our small, dusty little corner of the Bay Area to open a new supermarket (and that right there tells you how much simpler a time it was), we had no choice but to make the trek.
I had a Giants uniform of my own at the time, and either my Dad or I decided I should wear it to the market. We waited patiently in line, perhaps in the cereal or frozen food section, for our turn to approach the great man, who was sitting at the front of the store at a table with a stack of pens.
Finally, it was my turn. My Dad and I walked to the table to see the man I worshipped with all my sporting heart.
A Willie Mays bobblehead.
He looked over at me. And this man, this allegedly aloof and cold and distant man, smiled a smile as big as the Golden Gate Bridge.
“Hey, what’s your name?”
“Jimmy.”
I think he complimented me on my uniform. I don’t recall. But I do remember (perhaps through the recollections of my Dad, who has told the story 723 times) what happened next.
Mays turned to his assistant. Then he said something I will never, ever, ever forget.
“Hey, this kid looks great. Don’t you think he looks great? You play baseball, right?
“Yes, sir,” I stammered.
“I think we need to invite him down to spring training,” Mays said. “Hey, Jimmy, you want to come to spring training next year?”
You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me. The greatest (at worst tied with Mickey Mantle) player in the nation’s most popular game was talking to me like an old friend, and inviting me to play at spring training.
My heart soared out the window of that supermarket and didn’t return to earth for a month.
Mays could’ve said nothing and just signed a photo or a baseball. Instead, the most famous man in the world to a small, little boy in a baggy, off-white baseball uniform with black and orange trim talked to a young, highly impressionable fan and left an indelible impression of kindness that has stuck with me for 60-plus years.
As I’m writing this, I’m looking at a beat-up, busted, 20-times glued back together bobblehead doll of Willie that I got as a kid one day. It’s been moved from house to house, and finally from California to Toronto in 1981 when I came to Canada to marry a young woman I had met on a train in Europe two years prior.
It’s been sitting on a shelf, and sometimes in a cardboard box, for the 43 years I’ve lived in Toronto. But it’s never been forgotten. Our oldest son, who I started taking to his own baseball games and to Blue Jays games more than 30 years ago, said something about it just recently.
“Dad, that Willie Mays bobblehead is so cool.”
Yes, it is, son. Yes, it is.
Willie Mays died on June 18, 2024; the day I said goodbye to my Dad and flew home to Toronto after a four-day visit to California for Father’s Day.
