MERLYN JOHNSON MANTLE AND RAFAEL EDWARD CRUZ

What the late Merlyn Louise Johnson Mantle and the ‘up-and-taking-nourishment’ Rafael Edward Cruz, might possibly have in common in any world, is a vexing, if not mystifying question.

A woman from a bygone era, no longer with us.

A man from the present; with us, but not really with us.

A woman who married her high school sweetheart at nineteen and had four boys — two of whom she outlived.

A man who tries to be a “good dad,” but falls embarrassingly and woefully short in the “good judgment” department.

A private woman, dutiful — the wife of an iconic American sports hero, a luminous and transcendent star in the galaxy of our national pastime.

A man who is a public figure — a United States Senator, with one presidential run under his belt, before turning 50.

A woman who was so in love with her husband that she could never divorce him, despite his well-documented hard-drinking ways and rampant philandering.

A man who appears to be very much in love with himself and his status.

Could two human beings be any less alike?

And why should their names appear in the same text?

Merlyn and Mickey Mantle met in 1949 when he was a star athlete at Commerce (OK) High School and she was a cheerleader/majorette at archrival Picher High School.

In her 1996 memoir, “A Hero All His Life,” she wrote, “I developed an instant crush on Mickey Mantle, and by our second or third date, I was in love with him and always would be.”

‘Always’ is a long time, but she meant it.

And she’d be sorely tested.

After Mantle’s rookie year with the Yankees in 1951, they married.

For 18 seasons Mickey Mantle symbolized athletic brilliance, carving out a niche for himself as perhaps the greatest switch-hitter in baseball history.

Compiling a .298 lifetime batting average while amassing 536 HRs and 1,509 RBI, he led the Bronx Bombers to seven World Series titles and was named an All-Star in 16 of his 18 big league campaigns.

He was a three-time AL MVP and in 1956 he won the AL Triple Crown.

He and his pal, Whitey Ford, headlined the Baseball Hall of Fame Class of 1974, Mantle as a first-ballot inductee.

His injuries and the pain he endured while playing — and while sitting — only served to enhance is mythical stature.

His drinking and womanizing assumed epic proportion as well.

“It took me a long time to admit that Mick was an alcoholic,” Merlyn conceded in a 2001 New York Times interview.

She too, became an alcoholic.

And cancer ravaged generations of the family.

One of the Mantle’s four sons, Billy, had Hodgkin’s lymphoma for half his life and died of a heart attack in 1994 at age 36.

Another, Mickey Jr., died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2000, at 47.

Mantle’s father, Elven Clark “Mutt” Mantle, died of Hodgkin’s Disease at 40, during Mickey’s rookie season with the Yankees.

Two of his brothers died of cancer.

‘The Mick’ himself died of cancer on August 13, 1995, two months shy of his 65th birthday and two months after receiving a liver transplant.

“If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”

— -Mickey Mantle

Merlyn and Mickey Mantle were separated for the last six years of their 44-year marriage.

She never wanted a public life.

“Mick was the star of the family. I was just happy keeping my home and my kids and being the wife, and that’s what I did.”

But ‘being the wife’ meant enduring quiet humiliation, as her husband’s affairs — both dalliances and long-term relationships — became widely known.

Asked why she never divorced him, her reply was characteristic of her and her view of their relationship.

“I adored Mick. I thought I couldn’t live without him. In many ways, he was very good to me, very generous. I never wanted a divorce, and he never asked for one.”

Mantle himself conceded later on, “I couldn’t go on the way I was living, drunk and sick and depressed, covering up with lies, trying to remember where I was going or where I had been.”

“And in 1988, I did one of the hardest and dumbest things I ever did — I walked out on Merlyn.”

She experienced tragedy and heartache but through it all, demonstrated a strength and courage that defined her.

And an enormous heart.

A heart that contained a complex blend of emotions: love and anger, gratitude and bitterness, all directed toward a man who gave her joyful years and troubled ones, whose memory elicits smiles and tears.

“I miss him a lot,” Merlyn said. “How can you have somebody in your life 46 years and not miss him?”

Upon her death due to pneumonia in 2009 while suffering from Alzheimer’s, I was reminded of how badly I felt for her.

I don’t feel badly for Rafael Edward Cruz.

Because unlike Merlyn Mantle — real as the day was long — Ted Cruz is a faker.

A phony.

A charlatan.

A fraud.

And he’s a liar, too.

Don’t let his sterling educational pedigree fool you, either.

Doesn’t matter.

He’s a world-class dope.

Cruz drew national ire after he attempted to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election, objecting to the certification of the results in both Arizona and Pennsylvania.

“Democracy is in crisis,” he baselessly proclaimed because, “recent polling shows that 39% of Americans believe the election that just occurred was rigged.”

Really?

Congress voted overwhelmingly against Cruz’s objections in both cases.

His net approval rating dropped 6 percentage points in the days following the Capitol riots and his personal objections.

But this was a spit in the bucket compared to the beating he took for attempting to slip out of Texas to vacation in Cancun with his family, during a killer winter storm that left much of the state without power or water in below-freezing temperatures for days.

According to a polling conducted between February 18–28, Cruz’s net approval rating dropped from +6 to -5 in the weeks following his ill-advised vacation excursion.

Which ended up lasting for 10 hours, as he feverishly backpedaled.

His behavior enraged Texans across the state, including his congressional colleague, GOP Rep. Michael McCaul, who remarked, “Look, when a crisis hits my state, I’m there. I’m not going to go on some vacation.”

For Cruz’s part, in another unfathomable case of exercising poor judgment — or showing that he lives in a bubble and simply doesn’t care — he made a feeble stab at embracing the scandal, when he recently spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Florida.

“Orlando is awesome,” he said, smiling vapidly. “It’s not as nice as Cancun, but it’s nice.”

Whether or not Cruz should keep his day job is open to question, but what is certain is that, a comedian, he is not.

The coup de grace may have come a day or two ago when Cruz slammed California Governor Gavin Newsom’s criticism of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s new order to reverse a coronavirus mandate to wear masks, and open the state “100%.”

Newsom’s description of the act as “absolutely reckless,” prompted Cruz to take aim at him with this:

“I will say there is a reason Gavin Newsom is unhappy because every year we see thousands and thousands of Californians fleeing California and coming to Texas and the fact that we’re open for business and they’re shut down is only going to accelerate that phenomenon.”

Cruz called Abbott’s decision “great news” and noted that Texans are ready and “eager to get back to work.”

His argument is that residents can be smart, safe and practice social distancing without destroying millions of jobs and keeping millions of kids home from school.

“I think as we look across the country, the lockdowns have proven to be a serious mistake and they hurt millions of people, they destroyed lives, they destroyed small businesses,” Cruz said.

Following the science, Newsom is of the mind that wearing a mask is the “most important and powerful thing we can do in order to mitigate the spread of this disease.”

Without lockdowns, how many more than the 28.8M cases/infections and 518K deaths — and counting — would there be?

Perhaps former Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) encapsulated it best when he said about Cruz, “There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.”

And when describing him as “Lucifer in the flesh,” he added, “I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”

In any case, as badly as I feel about Merlyn Mantle, I feel sorry for Ted Cruz.

I pity the fool.

On many, many levels.

[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in March 2021.]