Mantle Deserves Fresh Count

When Mickey Mantle underwent a liver transplant, the hero worship of the ‘60s collided with the cynicism of the ‘90s.

Although I saw the Yankees’ Hall of Fame center fielder play dozens of times, I never figured him for a folk hero whose charisma would span several generations. Nor do I see him now as a broken-down drunk who got what he deserved.

What I saw Tuesday, when Mantle held his first news conference since surgery June 8, was a likable 63-year-old man trying to get well. Though pale, thin and weak and needing help to reach a podium, he looked remarkably well for someone lucky to be alive.

Mantle, estimating he has received 20,000 get-well cards, said, “The ones you read, it almost makes you cry.”

He’s also received knocks from some who accused him, wrongfully, of jumping to the head of the liver donor line, or of not deserving a new liver as much as a non-alcoholic. Many, including some journalists, chided the public for holding out its heart to an alcoholic, or for giving Mantle its sympathy but drug addict Darryl Strawberry its scorn.

Enough of this vindictiveness already. Mantle’s illness should not be a morality play.

Do you walk into the hospital room of a relative dying of lung cancer and say, “Tsk. Tsk. You got what you deserved. I kept telling you that pack-a-day cigarette habit would be the death of you.”

Or, do you wish that relative had a second chance? A transplant represents a second chance to live, and for Mantle also a second chance to continue his recovery of alcoholism and address the grief it has caused him and his family.

“I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to make up,” Mantle said at the Baylor University Medical Center, where he was treated and where 65 percent of liver transplant patients have lived at least 10 years.

“I want to start giving something back. It seems to me all I’ve done is take.”

His drinking and failure to rehabilitate knee injuries caused his career, which included 536 home runs, prematurely to decline and end in 1968. His drinking contributed to the alcoholism of two sons, one of whom died from Hodgkin’s disease.”I was like a drinking buddy with them, and now that’s changed.

Mantle alluded to having not cared enough about others when he said he would be useless as an organ donor except, “A lot of people say they’d like to have my heart because it’s never been used.”

Mantle didn’t come off as guiltridden and remorseful as much as a man whose perspective on life had been jolted upright.

“Yogi was gonna come to my funeral because he was afraid I wouldn’t come to his,” Mantle joked of Berra.

Mantle’s ability was especially wasted during 16 All-Star Games, in which he hit .233 with two homers.

“I can barely remember some of them,” he lamented. “Me, Don Drysdale and Harvey Kuenn, it was like a party day. Some guys like Willie Mays and Ted Williams, they were there to win the game.”

Mantle stretched the truth to dramatize his attitude toward the midsummer classics. He said he flew in from Dallas the day of the 1967 game in Anaheim, Calif., and showed up in the dugout as manager Hank Bauer needed a pinch hitter.

“Ed Runge called me out on three or four pitches,” Mantle said.

“I got dressed and caught the same plane back to Dallas. I got back to the clubhouse where we play golf and some of the guys said, ‘Darn, Mick, didn’t you just strike out?”’

Mantle just got a new count in life. Why begrudge him that?