I learned about the death of Willie Mays last night while watching the Panthers game, and with the news a piece of my childhood died.
Willie Mays was my boyhood idol. He made me a lover of baseball (a game that I, a small nearsighted southpaw, was terrible at) and of the San Francisco Giants (an apostate in a family of Phillies fans). He made me, a small-town Jersey boy, pine for California. My dream, never realized, was to watch him play in the winsomely named Candlestick Park.
You can debate his merits as baseball’s GOAT – he excelled in every one of the five essentials: fielding, throwing, running the bases, hitting, and hitting for power – but his love for the game, and the enthusiasm with which he played it, had no equals. You could not NOT watch when he came to the plate, or got on base, or roamed centerfield in search of a fly ball. He played a boy’s game with a boyish joy, one that has all but vanished today.
