LEO DUROCHER, MONTE IRVIN AND WILLIE MAYS

Neither Leo Durocher, known as “The Lip” and “Lippy” — among countless other nicknames, none too kind — nor Monford Merrill Irvin, Monte to his friends, were Willie Mays’ father.

And they did not claim to be.

But they took care of him.

Cat Mays, a talented baseball player with the Negro team representing the local steel plant in Westfield, Alabama — a black company town near Fairfield — was his dad.

“They called him ‘Cat’ because he could run like a cat, very quick,” recalled Mays some years ago.

Cat opened Willie’s world to baseball at an early age, playing catch with his son by the time he was five.

At 10, Willie was sitting on the bench of his father’s games in the Birmingham Industrial League, games which attracted as many as 6,000 fans a night, on occasion.

Mays’ professional baseball career began in 1948, while he was still in high school; he played briefly with the Chattanooga Choo-Choos, a Negro minor league team during the summer.

Later that year, he joined the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League.

Piper Davis, manager of the Barons, had been a teammate of Cat’s on the industrial team and decided to give young Mays a chance to play, after seeing him when the Black Barons were on road trips in Chattanooga and Atlanta.

This did not sit well with E.J. Oliver, principal of Mays’ high school.

He threatened to suspend Mays for playing professional ball; Willie was seventeen years old.

That’s how it was, then.

Davis and Cat must have been pretty good salesmen.

They convinced Oliver that Willie would still be able to concentrate on his schoolwork, and the parties compromised.

Mays would play only home games for the Black Barons, but in return he would be allowed to play football for Fairfield Industrial High School, where his coach, Jim McWilliams said of the quarterback, fullback and punter, [Mays] was “the greatest forward passer I ever saw.”

McWilliams may have been thinking about the game in which Mays, a senior, threw 5 touchdown passes in a 55–0 whitewashing of public high school rival, Parker of Birmingham.

Comparisons were made to the legendary Harry Gilmer in a local paper.

(Harry Gilmer the “jump-pass king,” was a Birmingham native who played and coached in the NFL, following a College-Hall-of-Fame career at Alabama in the mid-1940s).

Leo “The Lip,” “Lippy,” “Swamper,” & “The All-American Out”*** Durocher was a very colorful character to say the least, a ballplayer and manager who courted controversy and often found himself smack, dab in the middle of its swirling vortex.

Little pleased him more.

[*** — “The All-American Out,” was a moniker bestowed on Durocher, a slick fielder but just a .247 lifetime hitter with 24 HRs over an eighteen-year year playing career, by Babe Ruth, a Yankee teammate in 1928, but not necessarily a fan.]

Durocher knew his baseball, and he knew that Willie Mays was destined for greatness very early on.

Some felt that Durocher coddled Mays and it’s true that his celebrated truculence with opponents and umpires represented the flip side to the paternal attitude he was only too happy to exhibit toward his star center fielder.

Mays referred to Durocher as, “Mr. Leo,” and acknowledged him then — and now — as a father figure.

“He always made sure I knew what suit to buy and how to dress,” Mays said. “He’d never holler at me. If he had something to say, he’d talk soft.

When we were in California, I’d stay at his house, and when we went on the road, his kid was my roommate.

Chris Durocher, he was about 7. We’d go on the road, and Leo would say, ‘You got him,’ so for two weeks, I can’t go nowhere, can’t do nothing.

I think that was Leo’s way of looking after me.”

Willie, still a little wet behind the ears, was no fool however; he figured out a way to pocket some coin, courtesy of this unique arrangement.

He ate at restaurants where the black players were welcome, and of course, took Chris with him.

When Chris reported to his father that he’d been on a steady regime of soul food, Durocher told Mays that he wanted his kid to be able to eat steak.

“And I said, ‘Well give me some steak money then,’” Mays quipped.

“And Leo would whip out four or five hundred and stick it in my pocket.

And we’d go somewhere, and I’d ask Chris, ‘You want a steak?’ and he’d say, ‘No, I’ll eat what you eat.’

I never told Leo.”

And why would he, when he knew Mr. Leo touted him as the best all-around player he had ever seen?

(“In ’51 and ’54, he carried us on his back, all by himself,” Durocher said. “Best player I ever saw…by far).

Further, it would be nothing other than a fool’s errand to spar verbally or even engage, in an effort to make a point, with a man nicknamed, “The Lip.”

To wit, a few Durocher-isms:

“Buy a steak for a player on another club after the game, but don’t even speak to him on the field. Get out there and beat them to death.”

“Give me some scratching, diving, hungry ballplayers who come to kill you.”

“How you play the game is for college ball. When you’re playing for money, winning is the only thing that matters.”

“I don’t care if the guy [Jackie Robinson] is yellow or black,or if he has stripes like a God-damn zebra. I’m the manager of this team and I say he plays.”

“If I were playing third base and my mother were rounding third with the run that was going to beat us, I’d trip her. Oh, I’d pick her up and brush her off and say, ‘Sorry Mom,’ but nobody beats me.”

“Win any way you can as long as you can get away with it.”

“Nice guys finish last.”

It is not unreasonable to assume that Durocher loved his mother; it is also well-documented that he loved Mays and winning even more.

When he joined the New York Giants in 1949, Monte Irvin became one of the first African-American players in the major leagues.

Born February 25, 1919 in Haleburg, Alabama, he grew up in Orange, New Jersey and in high school was a four-sport star who set a state record in the javelin throw.

He was offered a football scholarship to attend the University of Michigan, but he couldn’t accept because he didn’t have enough money to move to Ann Arbor.

Irvin instead attended Lincoln University (PA) where he starred on the gridiron, but when he found out that he could not remain on his athletic scholarship and pursue pre-dentistry studies, his frustration mounted and he allowed himself to become the subject of the affections of Negro league recruiters.

He began with the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League in 1938, where Larry Doby, the first player to break the color barrier in the American League, was his one-time double play partner.

After hitting .422 and .396 in 1940 and 1941 respectively, Irvin asked for a raise before the ’42 season began.

Denied, he jumped to the Mexican League where he won a Triple Crown; he had a .397 batting average and swatted 20 HRs with 79 RBI in 63 games.

After WWII, Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey wanted to sign Irvin but Eagles co-owner and business manager Effa Manley — apparently retaining Irvin’s rights — would not let him go without compensation.

Rickey had already obtained Jackie Robinson without paying his Negro league clubs for his rights.

Manley, the first and only woman inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame — in 2006 posthumously — was not about to be fleeced.

Recalled Irvin,

“…from a purely business standpoint, Mrs. Manley felt that Branch Rickey was obligated to compensate her for my contract. That position probably delayed my entry into the major leagues…Mrs. Manley told Rickey that he had taken Don Newcombe for no money but she wasn’t going to let him take me without some compensation. Furthermore, if he tried to do it, she would sue and fight him in court…Rickey contacted her to say he was no longer interested…the Giants picked up my contract.”

He had been a five-time Negro League All-Star, and in 1946 Irvin led the Eagles to the pennant; batted .401 to win his second batting title; and was instrumental in leading his team to victory over the Kansas City Monarchs in a seven-game Negro League World Series, batting .462 with three HRs.

The New York Giants bought Irvin’s contract for $5,000 in 1949.

He debuted with the Giants on July 8, 1949 as a pinch hitter.

Sent back in 1950 to Jersey City of the International League where he had killed it before — hitting .373 in his inaugural stint — he was called up after batting .510 with 10 HRs in eighteen games.

That wrapped it up for Monte in the minor leagues.

He batted .299 for the Giants that season, playing first base and the outfield.

It was Monte Irvin in 1951 who sparked the Giants’ miraculous comeback against the Dodgers in the pennant race.

On August 11, 1951, the second-place New York Giants trailed their rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers by thirteen games.

From that point until the season’s end, the Giants won 39 of their final 47 games, an incredible .830 clip.

The 154-game regular season ended in a dead heat — both teams with records of 96–58 — necessitating a three-game playoff series to determine the National League champion and a trip to the World Series.

Irvin hit .312 with 24 HRs and a league-best 121 RBI and teamed with Hank Thompson and Willie Mays to form the first all-black outfield in the major leagues.

He finished third in the NL MVP voting and was the Giants’ best clutch hitter.

The 1951 National League tie-breaker series — a best-of-three playoff — is most famous for the walk-off home run hit by Bobby Thomson in the deciding game, known as the “Shot Heard ’Round The World.”

Irvin popped out in the bottom of the ninth before Thomson hit the shot.

(Mays was on deck to follow Thomson, and by his own admission, terrified at the prospect of having to bat in such a dramatic, pressure-packed situation).

[Playful Sidebar:

Attending the game that day was the motley quartet of comic actor Jackie Gleason, New York restaurateur Toots Shor, FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover, and fabled crooner, “Ol’ Blue Eyes,” Frank Sinatra, who was given four tickets by Durocher.

The group had been drinking all day, and just before Thomson hit his home run, Gleason unceremoniously hurled in the lap of Sinatra, a Giants fan.

Said Sinatra later,

“The fans are going wild and Thomson comes to bat. Then Gleason throws up all over me! Here’s one of the all-time games and I don’t even get to see Bobby hit that homer! Only Gleason, a Brooklyn fan, would get sick at a time like that!”]

In the ’51 World Series against the Yankees, which the Giants lost in six games, Monte Irvin went 11–24, batting .458.

During that season, Durocher in his infinite wisdom asked Irvin to serve as a mentor to Mays, who had been called up to the big club in May.

Mr. Leo…always thinking…

Recalled ‘The Say Hey Kid’:

“In my time, when I was coming up, you had to have some kind of guidance. And Monte was like my brother…I couldn’t go anywhere without him, especially on the road…It was just a treat to be around him.

I didn’t understand life in New York until I met Monte. He knew everything about what was going on and he protected me dearly.”

To which Irvin later replied, “I did that for two years and in the third year he started showing me around.”

Willie Mays is not only the greatest living ballplayer, he may be the greatest baseball player who ever lived.

And he’d be the first to tell you, that without Mr. Leo and Monte Irvin, it may not have turned out that way.

[This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in November 2020.]