Willie Mays, the greatest all-around baseball player to live, turns 80, and he's worth remembering

By Mike Lupica
The Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/
Sunday, May 8th 2011, 4:00 AM

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - MAY 06: Willie Mays speaks at a ceremony for his 80th birthday before the San Francisco Giants against the Colorado Rockies at AT&T Park on May 6, 2011 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

Willie Mays, the greatest all-around baseball player who ever lived, turned 80 on Friday. It is a big landmark birthday, worth celebrating, for a player who did everything you could on a ballfield, and did it all at 5-11 and 180 pounds.

This is a time in sports when the past matters less and less, when the present is all that matters, in real time, when you think that the only relevant history in modern sports is being written as if it is a tweet on Twitter, in 140 characters or less.

There was a time when we thought of journalism as history in a hurry. Now it is a few keystrokes and the send button. You see it in the young, who don't want to hear about Michael Jordan anymore, the greatest basketball player ever, because his best was in the '90s, so he is not right there for them the way Kobe and LeBron and Kevin Durant are.

So even at a time when there aren't nearly enough baseball stars, nearly enough people you want to watch these days, all those who never saw Willie Mays don't want to hear about an old Giant - a baseball giant in every sense of the word - who played his last game nearly 40 years ago.

All this time after he played his last game, you feel obligated to tell people about Willie Mays.

Once the only proper way to describe the combination of talent and star power in sports, the elusive combination that the late great Boston columnist George Frazier used to describe as "duende," was to say it this way: That guy has some Willie Mays in him, the same way you used to say that this singer or that had some Elvis in him.

Only one guy got to be Elvis. And only one ballplayer in this world got to be Willie Mays, who hit 660 home runs and Lord knows how many he would have hit if he hadn't had to play so much of his prime in the wind and cold of Candlestick Park, where summer always felt like winter, not to mention giving up nearly two years of his career to the military.

He hit them at 5-11 and 180 and that was about the same size that Hank Aaron was as he hit enough home runs to pass Babe Ruth and become the de facto home run king of baseball. Barry Bonds, Willie Mays' godson, later passed Aaron, but did it with help from a needle. Maybe now Bonds wishes he had done it differently, the way his godfather did, and the other true greats of the past.

It is funny how Bonds, who just got convicted of a felony for obstruction of justice on grand jury testimony about his use of baseball drugs, is linked forever to both Aaron and Mays. The great Henry Aaron, more than ever, is the conscience of baseball. Willie Howard Mays, 80 on Friday, the Say Hey Kid, is still its soul.

I didn't see him in person until he was past 40. Only saw him on television as a kid in all the years when he was still something to see, hitting home runs through the wind of Candlestick Point and making his basket catches and having his cap fly off and running the bases. There was no satellite television in those days. You couldn't watch Willie Mays even late at night if you wanted to. You had to wait for the Game of the Week. When he did make it to one of those Saturday afternoons, it was like a baseball holiday.

So was the 1962 World Series, when his Giants nearly beat the Yankees, when Willie Mays stayed on third base in the bottom of the ninth of Game 7 as Willie McCovey lined one to Bobby Richardson at second base. So that great moment was nearly 50 years ago on Mays.

So he didn't win a World Series after 1954, when he made the most famous catch in Series history, off Vic Wertz at the Polo Grounds, ran that ball down in deep center, what even now feels like a mile from home plate, then stopped and turned on a dime and threw the ball back toward the infield. And he wouldn't win a World Series in '73 with the Mets, when he stumbled around in the outfield after coming home to New York, and the Mets lost in seven to the Oakland A's.

That was why it was such a fine thing to see him celebrate last year's World Series Giants the way he did, and be celebrated along with them. He ended up with a World Series ring and now has that to go along with the statue of him outside the Giants' fancy ballpark in downtown San Francisco.

Of course the real monuments to Willie Mays are the memories burned into the heart and imagination of anybody who ever saw him play baseball the way he did, for as long as he did. He was as big as there ever was, and unlike modern players, his body never got bigger as he went.

Happy Birthday to Willie Mays. If you ever saw him play, you know: He was the one who was history in a hurry.


Photo: Michael Macor / The San Francisco Chronicle

Even the Willie Mays statue at AT&T Park was made part of the celebration for the legendary Giants' 80th birthday party.