Merlyn mantle biography of michael

American baseball player (1931–1995)

Baseball player

Mickey Charles Mantle (October 20, 1931 – August 13, 1995), nicknamed "the Mick" and "the Commerce Comet", was an American professional baseball player who played his entire Major League Baseball (MLB) career (1951–1968) with the New York Yankees, primarily as a center fielder. Mantle is regarded by many as being one of the best players and sluggers of all time. He was an American League (AL) Most Valuable Player three times and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974.

Born in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, Mantle was raised by his father to become a baseball player and was trained early on to become a switch hitter. Despite a career plagued with injuries, beginning with his knee injury in the 1951 World Series, he became one of the greatest offensive threats in baseball history, and was able to hit for both average and power. He is the only player to hit 150 home runs from both sides of the plate. Mantle hit 536 career home runs while batting .300 or more ten times; he is 16th all-time i

American writer

Merlyn Mantle (née Johnson; January 28, 1932 – August 10, 2009) was an American author and widow of New York YankeesoutfielderMickey Mantle.

Early life

Mantle was born in Cardin in Ottawa County in far northeastern Oklahoma. She was the first of two daughters born to Giles and Reba Johnson. She had a sister, Pat, who was three years her junior.

While attending high school, she met Mickey Mantle two years before his debut in Major League Baseball. Mickey was a baseball player at Commerce High School, while Merlyn was a cheerleader at the rivaling Picher High School. Their first date took place at a movie theater along the famed Route 66 in Miami, Oklahoma.

Marriage and family

On December 23, 1951, Merlyn married Mantle, following his rookie season with the New York Yankees. The couple had four sons: Mickey, Jr. ((1953-04-12)April 12, 1953 – December 20, 2000), David (born (1955-12-26)December 26, 1955), Billy ((1957-12-05)December 5, 1957 – March 12, 1994), and Danny (born (1960-03-19)March 19, 1960). They remained married for 43 years, until Mantle's death in 1995, although they were estranged during his final years. Mantle died of liver cancer on August 13, 1995. Their son, Billy, was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, but died of a heart attack in 1994, aged 36. Another son, Mickey Jr., died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2000, aged 47.

Merlyn Mantle was treated for alcoholism at the Betty Ford Clinic, a problem which also afflicted her husband and three of her sons. In an interview with the New York Daily News shortly after her husband's death in 1995, Merlyn Mantle spoke of the negative impact that alcohol had over her family's life: "I was in there partying and doing the same thing as Mick

As a genuine American sports legend, Mickey Mantle was always accorded star treatment. When cops realized whom they had just pulled over for drunk driving, they inevitably closed their ticket books and drove the Yankee slugger home. When he drunkenly barreled his car into a telephone pole, nearly decapitating his wife Merlyn, the whole affair was hushed up. Not a word made the papers.

But now, a little more than a year after Mantle’s death, a new book has been published that lays bare Mantle’s shortcomings, which seem every bit as titanic as his tape measure home runs. It details his decades-long alcoholism, but it also portrays him as a cheating husband, a neglectful father, and a man whose crude, juvenile behavior persisted well into his 50s. For good measure, it also reveals him to have been the victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of a half-sister and a bed-wetter until he joined the Yankees.

Who is it that has authored this dismantling of one of our most enduringly popular athletes? A sportswriter intent on making a reputation for himself? A former teammate, a la Jim Bouton, who first dented Mantle’s reputation with his 1970 “Ball Four”?

No. The writer this time is the Mantle family, Merlyn and her three surviving sons, Mickey Jr., David and Danny. And they receive a considerable assist from the Mick himself, whose confessional journal, written while he was undergoing alcohol rehab in 1994, provides the opening chapter of “A Hero All His Life.”

If the title seems ironic given the book’s content, it is not meant to be. As damaging as the memoir may be to Mantle’s heroic stature, it is nonetheless affectionate about its central character, who was magnanimous toward teammates and rivals, touchingly humble, and often kind-hearted. During an interview last week at the Carleton Hotel in Washington, one stop in their national book tour, Merlyn and Danny Mantle said that they did not want to sully Mantle