Stan Musial (46 page)

After years of visibly growing weaker, Pope John Paul II died on April 2, 2005, at the age of eighty-four.

“
They remained friends until Dad died,” Helen Piszek said. “I’m glad Dad died first because I think he would have been devastated.”

For Musial, the long friendships, the international and domestic rambles, were also coming to a close.

B
OB COSTAS
had dreaded Mickey Mantle’s funeral, although he had known it was coming. Mantle was his boyhood hero; Costas carried the 1958 Mantle bubble gum card in his wallet as a statement of devotion.

A longtime resident of St. Louis, Costas had entertained Mantle in his home, along with Stan Musial and other baseball people. He’d seen the good side of Mantle and, on occasion, the bad.

Now Costas had been asked to speak at Mantle’s funeral on a hot August day in 1995 at the Lovers Lane Methodist Church in Dallas. He would not try to hide his adulation of the flawed, golden star.

Afraid he would lose his composure, Costas avoided even a glance at the Mantle family in the front row. They had gone through many tortured years in public, through Mantle’s drinking and his escapades, until, in his final years, he had willed himself into sobriety. Then he had been brought down by liver cancer a few months short of sixty-four. Costas could feel the sadness in the church. Just when the Mick had gotten control of his life, it was all over.

Adept at public speaking, Costas could deliver his address while shifting his gaze around the room, the journalist, the observer.

“I had come in through the back, and I hadn’t seen everybody who was there,” Costas recalled years later. “I was looking over the audience, making an inventory, to see who is here.”

Even as he spoke about his hero, Costas made a discovery that touched him.

“Against the wall, to my left, sitting by himself, about halfway back, against one of the windows with the light streaming in, there sits Stan Musial,” Costas recalled.

“In that split second, it became clear: Here’s what happened today. A man, what, seventy-four years old, who has had prostate cancer, got up this morning in St. Louis and said, ‘It’s the right thing to do.’ ”

For some reason, the sight of Musial—the church man, the family man, the disciplined man, the polar opposite of Mantle—distracted Costas, almost made him lose his composure.

“Think of all the people who were more directly associated with Mickey,” Costas continued. “Nobody would have marked Stan as absent. He didn’t stay overnight. He got on a plane. He showed up. Then he flew back to St. Louis. There is some old-school code in that, or maybe it’s the decency that not many people have in their nature, but Stan Musial does.”

Costas knew the respect Mantle had for the greatest players, for Williams and DiMaggio and Musial, and knew that Mantle was honest enough with himself to recognize they had marshaled their talents better than he had.

In their presence, Costas had seen Mantle restrain his surly side, his Rabelaisian excesses, out of respect for who they were.

Williams and DiMaggio, both getting on, were not present in this church in Dallas, and nobody expected them to be. But one of the lodge brothers from the forties had flown a long way to pay his respects.

“I don’t think Stan is overly sitting around ruminating about this stuff,” Costas said later, “but I think he understood what it would mean to Mickey’s family, to Mickey himself while he’s lying there in a casket, that it would have meant something for Stan to be there, that he hauled his ass out of bed and went to Dallas.”

Somebody as fundamentally Catholic as Musial would also see his journey as a way to bring a tangible blessing to the Mantle family. Prayers might mean more in person. Normally private and lighthearted, Musial made himself available to reporters who wanted to talk about Mantle.

“He was a lovable guy,” Musial told them. “Everybody loved Mickey.” He added, “He hit more long home runs than anybody I ever saw. He could really powder that ball, you know?”

Musial recalled how, after the Cardinals beat the Yankees in the 1964
World Series, Mantle had come to Musial’s restaurant to congratulate the winners, a classy thing to do.

Few people in the church knew that Musial had been Mantle’s favorite player back in Oklahoma, when he listened to Cardinal games on the radio like everybody else in the southwest.

When Mantle was fourteen his father drove them up to St. Louis to see a game. Mickey happened to spot Musial in a hotel, but Mutt would not allow his son to ask Musial for an autograph.

The two players had something else in common—zinc. Mutt Mantle had died of Hodgkin’s disease at thirty-nine after working in the mines. Lukasz Musial had ruined his body inhaling the poisonous air of Donora. It is not clear if the two players had ever discussed this bond, but there Musial was, an outpatient himself, in a church in Dallas.

They had seen each other for the last time in the spring of 1995. “He came to town and wanted me to have breakfast with him,” Musial said, “which we did. We had a real nice chat, a nice talk, just he and I. We talked a lot about baseball and a lot of other things.

“He told me that one of his sons just passed away shortly before. And he told me at that time he wasn’t drinking anymore, and that he went to the Betty Ford Center. And I told him how proud we are of him. And I told him one other thing. I said, ‘Mickey, we love you.’ You know, he was a great idol.”

Years later, Costas was still touched by Musial’s gesture.

Musial’s presence in his field of vision, Costas decided, was a gift from “one of the better angels of our nature.”

“We’re all messed up in one way or another,” Costas added, “but this was just a moment of grace, what a decent thing for a person to do.”

Costas thought about Musial for a moment, and added, “And he probably knew it at some level.”

O
N LABOR
Day 1998, giddy baseball pilgrims gathered in St. Louis to root for home runs by the two modern sluggers, the Cardinal and the Cub. How innocent it all seemed that summer.

Before the game, the fans clustered at the statue of Stan the Man, the one with the big beam, the one he hated. I was covering the McGwire-Sosa frolics, heard some commotion by the statue, and wandered over.

At the base of the statue, an elderly gent was wearing a tomato-can-red jacket, a garment only a highly secure individual could wear.

Above him were Ford Frick’s words: “Here stands baseball’s perfect warrior. Here stands baseball’s perfect knight.”

The perfect knight himself was noodling away on a harmonica, playing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Unprotected, without phalanxes of security guards, Musial looked as comfortable as an old bluesman playing for his buddies in front of a Delta country store. There was a merry twinkle in those gimlet eyes that had once launched 3,630 hits.

Grandfathers smiled to themselves, entertaining memories of the lithe young man springing out of his corkscrew stance. Keepers of the flame, they nudged their grandchildren, as if to say,
You should have seen him back then
.

The bronze statue loomed over them, suggesting the brute power of the old Soviet Union, its oversized locomotives, its massive parades, as if honoring the People’s Hero of the Autumn Harvest, who wielded a bat instead of a scythe.

Musial had disliked the statue from the beginning. The legs were too thick, for one thing, making him look like one of those Clydesdales out at the Busch estate rather than the limber youth who had been labeled the “Donora Greyhound.”

The statue was originally supposed to have been based upon a painting by Amadee Wohlschlaeger, himself a St. Louis icon known by his first name. The original was titled “The Boy and the Man … Baseball’s Bond,” but the boy in the painting never made it to the statue, and the man became bunchy, inflexible. The mayor of St. Louis, Raymond Tucker, chose the sculptor, Carl Mose, a highly reputable artist based at Washington University in St. Louis, and the statue emerged from the artistic vision of Mose, which, come to think of it, is how art happens. But statues of hero-athletes fall into a different category. At least, people have been arguing about reality versus impression ever since. How bad is that?

Ten feet five inches tall, on a marble pedestal eight and a half feet high, the People’s Hero looked awkward, off balance, not coiled like a gymnast, which the perfect knight had been in his childhood. It was almost as if Mose did not believe anybody would really twist himself into a human corkscrew, so he had brought the body back toward middle ground, with thicker muscles, as if to justify all those home runs in Stan Musial’s resumé.

“
I saw the sculptor when he was working on it,” Musial said in 1976. “I told him I never looked that broad. He said it had to be that broad because it was going to be against the backdrop of a big ballpark. He missed the stance, but what kind of man would I have been if I’d complained. The writers were generous to put it up. The sculptor did his best. Look, there’s a statue of me in St. Louis while I’m still alive.”

Thirty years after the statue was unveiled, Musial would call the statue “a
great, great honor”—a message to young people.

“This is sort of an example,” he once said. “They can excel in school, in business, in anything. It can happen to them.”

However, Musial reserved the right to critique the statue. In the revised version of his autobiography, he addressed his youngest child, who had come along too late to remember seeing him play.

“
I’ll say this, Jeannie. I didn’t hit the way that guy in the statue does,” Musial wrote.

Everybody in St. Louis used the statue as a meeting point; so did
Musial, sometimes. He was the life of the party, the unpaid greeter, playing his harmonica for love, but on another level—never underestimate Stanley—he deftly understood it was to his advantage to put himself out in public, the man of the people.

His legs were going, but he would hobble out in front of the fans and say: “If I had known what it would do to my legs, I wouldn’t have hit so many triples.”

They loved to laugh at his old lines, the way listeners back in the days of radio loved to hear Jack Benny wheedle nickels from his friends, the way people laughed at Lucille Ball’s wide-mouthed terror when Ricky said she had some ’splainin’ to do. Musial fans knew all of Stanley’s lines, knew his batting stance, and wanted to hear them and see it all over again.

On this humid Labor Day in 1998, Musial had cared enough to come out and greet the fans, who were celebrating a new age, a new body type—the beefy boys. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa had muscles unimagined back in Stan the Man’s day, when men did not lift weights because, everybody knew, it might render them musclebound.

In old age, dwarfed by his statue, the man was still whippet-lean, with no trace of bulk under the tomato-can-red jacket, no bulge from the weight room, no muscles from some laboratory.

It was getting to be game time. Musial coiled his aging body into that iconic stance, peered over his right shoulder at a phantom pitcher, and unleashed a double into a mythical corner, inspecting his imaginary hit as the crowd responded with pitty-pat applause. He liked it so much he did it again, giggling, proud of himself. The fans parted lovingly.

STARTING IN
1998, there were two statues of Stanley at the Cardinals’ ballpark, as the Cardinals unveiled ten statues by Harry Weber, two-thirds human size, capturing the essence of ten great St. Louis ballplayers—George Sisler of the Browns; Cool Papa Bell, the old Negro League star; and eight Cardinals: Rogers Hornsby, Dizzy Dean, Ozzie Smith, Red Schoendienst, Bob Gibson, Enos Slaughter, Lou Brock, and Musial. (McGwire was in storage, indefinitely; Pujols was a statue waiting to be commissioned.)

On sweet summer nights, people congregated at Eighth and Clark, milling around these vital statues, which I likened to ancient Xian terracotta warriors, guarding the Chinese emperor forever. Smacking a double into the corner, pouncing from the batter’s box, Stanley was forever young, and heartland America had made his statues a gathering point.

O
LD AGE
is not a lot of laughs, particularly in public.

It is particularly difficult for athletes who are remembered—who remember themselves—as magical creatures who can run and jump and perform prodigious acts with their bodies.

For the fans, a random meeting with a favorite old athlete produces a mixture of joy and despair:
Hey, didn’t you used to be …?
says one.
Daddy, why is he limping?
murmurs another. The millions who loved Stan Musial now saw him need a subtle hand from friends, then a cane, eventually a wheelchair.

His first illness was a gastric ulcer in 1983. Then in 1989, after ignoring symptoms for a year, he needed surgery for prostate cancer. With the ensuing pain and inconvenience and weight loss, Musial became depressed and stayed away from the public for many months.

He had always seemed so effortless in swinging his way through life, but now he was working hard at being Stan the Man, as if aware he might not go on forever.

He had enjoyed better second and third and fourth acts than most great athletes ever do, but once in a while he could voice regret.

“
I wish I could have gotten a college education,” Musial said in 1996. “There’s something about a college education that gives you a broad look at things, to kind of make you complete.”

Musial was beloved in his chosen hometown, but in his later years he probably shortchanged himself: Aside from the dueling Musial statues outside the ballpark, there was no secular place where one could worship
Musial. He never got around to creating a Musial foundation, never established a Musial collection at a prestigious university or library. Asked where any possible Musial archives might be displayed, friends and associates would say,
Well, Lil saved a lot of stuff in the house
.