The Mick

[Bart]

While looking for some baseball stats, I found this shot of Mickey Mantle at the plate. He exemplified power.

 

[Don Wassall]

Mickey Mantle was my idol as a boy. I think he was the last white athlete who was truly idolized by lots of boys. After JFK's assassination the permanent Cultural Revolution was launched to wipe out everything good and wholesome in America and replace it with cynicism, guiltand self-loathing. In fact, the concept of "idolizing" someone is all but extinct in our jaded society, though the dittoheads seem to still be infatuated with the semi-moron in the White House.

 

[White Shogun]

though the dittoheads seem to still be infatuated with the semi-moron in the White House.

Not to hijack the thread, but...

I received an email suggesting we boycott CITGO because Chavez' wants to overthrow the US government. I responded by pointing out that CITGO has sold gas and heating oil at discount to poor areas of the US, and that maybe Chavez is merely following the Bush doctrine by launching a 'pre-emptive strike', or that he wants a 'regime change' in the US.

 

[sport historian]

A while ago, I posted on another thread the fact that Mickey Mantle was the last white man to be the America's No.1 pro athlete in both performance and popularity. As Don says, Mantle was idolized by boys in those days. You would have to have been a boy at the time to know how big a star Mantle was.

After 1965, things really changed. When Jim Bouton's book, Ball Four, came out in 1970, a big theme of the book was it's somewhat unflattering depiction of Mickey Mantle. The age of cynicism had arrived. The interesting thing about Joe Namath is that he was an athlete that cynics liked.

 

[Tired old White]

I read an interesting story about Babe Ruth. Tow sports reporters were on a train playing cards. A laughing naked woman ran by followed by a laughing naked Babe Ruth with a jug of booze. One sports writer looked at the other and said " Did you see anything?" the other replied "nope". They viewed their job as reporting on what baseball players did on the field. their private lives were just that, private. Now we have a double standard. The non-whites are left alone unless they actually get arrested for crime and thw whites are expected to be perfect both on and off the field of play.

 

[jaxvid]

Billy Crystal Finds Way To Talk About Loving Mickey Mantle At Charity Golf Event
May 4, 2006 | The Onion

MYRTLE BEACH, SCâ€â€￾Actor and avid New York Yankees fan Billy Crystal found a way to talk about how much he loves Mickey Mantle at a charity golf event for Parkinson's disease, an ailment that had nothing to do with the slugger's eventual passing. "Seeing that little white ball disappear over the horizon reminds me of the way Mickey used to hit 'emâ€â€￾I mean Mickey Mantle, of course. And that reminds me of the time my father first took me to Yankee Stadium to watch Mickey play," Crystal said to the gallery, mimicking Mantle's swing with his putter, and forcing a 14-minute stoppage in play. "So we get to Yankee Stadium, and it's the greenest thing I have ever seenâ€â€￾greener than all the grass at this golf course. And there in the batter's box is the great Mickey Mantleâ€â€￾young, athletic, handsome, everything that I wanted to be. Anyway, I look at my father, my father looks at me, and the Mick hits one out." Crystal then gathered himself and sank his three-foot putt, but was delayed on the following hole because, in the group ahead of him, Bob Costas was reportedly in the middle of telling the same anecdote.