Mantle: The Best There Ever Was

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Review "Castro expertly reveals the flawed yet glorious life of New York Yankee Mickey Mantle... Informative and entertaining, Castro's biography is certain to please Yankee and Mantle fans alike." Publishers Weekly "Mantle's life story has been told many times, but it's never received as loving a treatment as this one." Booklist "An American literary stylistic masterpiece... Tony Castro paints Mickey Mantle with the pinstripe magic of Garcia Marquez phantasmagoria and realism..." Tom Wolfe "Tony Castro scores a perfect 10 for #7 with his new bio of my childhood hero Mickey Mantle for whom I took subways with my brothers from Brooklyn to the Bronx in my childhood years when the Yankees were tbe only team in town. I've read many other books on The Mick in the years since but Castro has smacked a grand slam here, the best I ever read about 'The Best There Ever Was.'" Denis Hamill Former Columnist New York Daily New s"If you wish to fully understand the complicated life of Mickey Mantle, Tony Castro has written an extraordinary book. There has been a library of books written on Mantle, but none will explain him the way this book does. For you millions of Mantle lovers,this book is "The Best There Ever Was." Don't you dare miss it." Peter Golenbock, author of Dynasty, The Bronx Zoo, and 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel " In this warm, intimate, and often startling book, Tony Castro relies on his own long relationship with Mickey Mantle, a great deal of research, and a remarkable series of interviews with the woman the Yankees star loved before, and during, his long marriage, to give us an unforgettable portrait of a man whose talent and accomplishments were matched only by the demons he couldn't escape. Mantle: The Best There Ever Was presents an American sports hero in all his glory, and all his torment." Ron Rapoport, author of Let's Play Two: The Legend of Mr. Cub, The Life of Ernie Banks "The secret love life of Mickey Mantle, the New York Yankee's fabled baseball home-run hitter and 20th Century American icon, was a scoop that veteran journalist Tony Castro swore to keep secret -- until now. Whether you're a baseball fan or not, Castro's book will take you into a world of myth, magic, and reckless heroism of a bygone era that comes brilliantly alive in this wild, intimate, and astonishing book. " Rex Weiner, author of Woodstock Census: Nationwide Survey of the Sixties Generation and The (Original) Adventures of Ford Fairlane "Tony Castro is the definitive expert on Mickey Mantle... He knew Mickey as his boyhood idol, later played golf with his retired hero, drank with him and drove him home when he was passed out. Heck, how could he not write about him better than anyone else!" Pete Rose "Tony Castro's powerful, touching song of praise and lament for Mickey Mantle defines the the forces that made the Oklahoma miner's son an American icon." Dave Kindred, The Sporting News "A terrific insight into the life and tribulations of a true American icon. An extremely well-researched book with stories that that only someone who really knew Mickey would know." Tom Catal, Mickey Mantle Museum "... the best biography ever written of the Yankee legend." The New York Times From the Author My late friend Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican writer and diplomat, used to say that the only way you can come to know someone is by making sure you have figuratively closed off all doors to what you have known of them in the past. This becomes almost impossible for someone like Mantle whose life transcends decades and has become a national institution, as if his image has been carved into our Olympus of pop culture.I first met Mickey Mantle in 1970, the year after his retirement and shortly after he had returned to Dallas from a frustrating season as a coach of the New York Yankees. Mickey had lived in Dallas since the late 1950s, and only earlier that year I had joined the reporting staff of the Dallas Times Herald right out of college. One of the first things I did upon going to work at the Times Herald was to check the Mickey Mantle files at the newspaper's morgue. I was stunned to see the scarcity of any Mantle clips since his retirement. No lifestyle pieces, no Mick-in-retirement articles. You would have thought Mantle didn't reside in Dallas. A couple of national pieces had been written about Mickey in retirement, but nothing locally. I lobbied for an assignment to interview Mantle, which came my way because no one else was interested. Heck, my editors themselves weren't interested.When I first contacted Mantle, I started getting a sense of why no one was writing about him. Even after I explained that his home telephone number had been in our City Desk files, Mickey seemed miffed. I remember his words as something that might have come from Yogi Berra. "Well," Mickey said over the phone, "I only gave out that number so that I could be reached whenever someone needed to talk to me."Mickey was close to an hour late to our lunch interview. As I write in the book, he had wanted to meet at a trendy burger shop in the Turtle Creek section of North Dallas. When he finally arrived, Mickey apologized in a matter-of-fact manner. He said, "There was a screw-up on our tee time this morning." I was immediately blown away. Not because I was finally meeting my boyhood hero, face to face, but because as I saw him --slightly red-eyed, smiling crookedly, slurring some of his words -- I thought to myself, my God, it's like meeting my father. They both were heroes, and they both were drinkers. And not happy drunks either. Of course, I didn't tell Mickey he reminded me of my father. Nor did I tell my father that he reminded me of Mickey. But from experience, I had an understanding of how to deal with Mantle. An interview, a formal question and answer interview, was out of the question. Instead, over charbroiled cheeseburgers and beers, Mickey rambled in a disjointed exercise of free association for which I wasn't prepared. We talked for close to two hours that afternoon, and I remember being panic-stricken the longer we talked because I feared that I actually had little to use in a traditional story about Mickey in retirement. He would clam up when the conversation turned to things he was doing now. A bowling alley bearing Mickey's name in Dallas had closed down, and then re-opened, and Mickey was unclear as to what the status of it was. He didn't want to talk about his investments, and he was equally evasive on questions about his life with his sons. There was one comment I wrote several times in my notebook: "We're doing a lot more things together now, that's for sure." My time with Mickey might have ended that afternoon had we not started talking about the one thing that eventually got him to open up -- golf. About the Author Tony Castro, whom The New York Times has called the definitive biographer of Mickey Mantle, is a Harvard and Baylor-educated historian and author of seven books. Mantle: The Best There Ever Was is the finale of his Mickey Mantle Trilogy that includes Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son (2002) and DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers (2016).His other books include Gehrig & The Babe: The Friendship and the Feud (2018) and Hemingway: Spain, The Bullfights and A Final Rite of Passage (2016). He is currently working on a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte.Tony is also the author of the landmark civil rights history Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America (1974), which Publishers Weekly acclaimed as "brilliant... a valuable contribution to the understanding of our time."His poignant coming-of-age memoir The Prince of South Waco: American Dreams and Great Expectations (2013) was hailed by distinguished Texas editor and educator Tony Pederson for its "startling and frequently disturbing insights into growing up Hispanic and talented in Texas in the 1950s and 1960s. He lays bare the tortured and sometimes heartbreaking soul of his youth and life as a young adult."As a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, Tony studied under Homeric scholar and translator Robert Fitzgerald, Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, and French history scholars Laurence Wylie and Stanley Hoffman.Tony lives in Los Angeles with his wife Renee LaSalle and Jeter, their black Labrador retriever. Their two grown sons, Trey and Ryan, also reside in Southern California. Book Description An intimate and illuminating biography of a complex baseball legend. --This text refers to the paperback edition. From the Inside Flap In 1970, an unhappy, often drunk, faded baseball hero Mickey Mantle was adjusting poorly to his discontentment in retirement in football-crazed Texas where his bad temper and ill-manners had alienated both sportswriters and sports fans whose darlings in this post-Sixties disco age were the new "America's Team," the Dallas Cowboys.It was against that backdrop that Mantle met a young Dallas newspaperman, Tony Castro, a recent college graduate who could play golf often and whose hard-drinking father's frequent carousing had groomed him well to dealing with profane, mean alcoholics who needed looking after as well as driving home to sleep off their drunken stupors. He even had a pretty young bride who sadly reminded Mantle of his tragic first love.In this time of reckoning to his premature demise from stardom and fame, Mantle opened up to his young friend during drunken rounds on the golf, on drives along dusty Texas roads, and even on a visit to the home of a Santeria priestess. Castro also got to know Merlyn, whom Castro often drove to recover Mickey's El Dorado wherever he might have abandoned it.Eventually Castro, who otherwise reported on civil rights and politics, wrote his best-selling classic Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son (Brasseys, 2002), which The New York Times has called the best biography ever written about The Mick. Castro assumed Merlyn hadn't liked it. He was wrong. She had, she told him when they spoke several years later. "Why didn't you say it," she said in her only criticism, "that Mickey was greater than Joe DiMaggio and that his accomplishments, when you consider different eras and that Mickey played his entire career on only one healthy leg, were right up there with Babe Ruth? All these new ways of looking at statistics in baseball are pointing to that. Look it up. That day is coming. And now that's on you. You have to be Mickey's voice from the grave." Mantle: The Best There Ever Was is now that book. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Read more