Tony Castro's America

Mickey Mantle and Homer's Achilles

 

When I was a child, my mother used to tell me stories of a heroic warrior who had gone off to fight a war in a faraway land and died in battle with an arrow shot into his heel. She would tell this story in such lengthy detail that i used to fall asleep before she got to the part about the warrior's tragic death.

Perhaps that's why I used to think she was telling me the story of my father going off to World War II. He had been seriously wounded and returned home to live a long life. So even as a child, I had come to realize that the warrior in my mother's stories wasn't dad. Who was it then? My mom said she didn't know — that it had just been a story her grandmother used to tell year when she was a child.

Imagine my surprise then when in elementary school I'd attended a children's story event at the public library and there I'd heard a librarian talk about s story from Greek mythology that sounded exactly like the one my mother used to tell me.

Mantle Book Bonus: How I Met Mickey

Mickey Mantle spent his retirement enjoying golf, especially the 19th hole.

My late friend Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican writer and diplomat, used to say that the only way you can come to know someone is by making sure you have figuratively closed off all doors to what you have known of them in the past. This becomes almost impossible for someone like Mickey Mantle whose life transcends decades and has become a national institution, as if his image has been carved into our Olympus of pop culture.

I first met Mickey in 1970, the year after his retirement and shortly after he had returned to Dallas from a frustrating season as a coach of the New York Yankees. Mickey had lived in Dallas since the late 1950s, and only earlier that year I had joined the reporting staff of the Dallas Times Herald right out of college. One of the first things I did upon going to work at the Times Herald was to check the Mickey Mantle files at the newspaper's morgue. I was stunned to see the scarcity of any Mantle clips since his retirement. No lifestyle pieces, no Mick-in-retirement articles. You would have thought Mantle didn't reside in Dallas. A couple of national pieces had been written about Mickey in retirement, but nothing locally. I lobbied for an assignment to interview Mantle, which came my way because no one else was interested. Heck, my editors themselves weren't interested.

When I first contacted Mantle, I started getting a sense of why no one was writing about him. Even after I explained that his home telephone number had been in our City Desk files, Mickey seemed miffed. I remember his contradictory words as something that might have come from Yogi Berra.  "Well," Mickey said over the phone, "I only gave out that number so that I could be reached whenever someone needed to talk to me."

Mickey was close to an hour late to our lunch interview. As I write in Mantle: The Best There Ever Was, he had wanted to meet at a trendy burger restaurant in the Turtle Creek section of North Dallas. When he finally arrived, Mickey apologized in a matter-of-fact manner. He said, "There was a screw-up on our tee time this morning."  

I was immediately blown away. Not because I was finally meeting my boyhood hero, face to face, but because as I saw him -- slightly red-eyed, smiling crookedly, slurring some of his words -- I thought to myself: my God, it's like meeting my father. They both were heroes, and they both were drinkers. And not happy drunks either. Of course, I didn't tell Mickey he reminded me of my father. Nor did I tell my father that he reminded me of Mickey. But from experience, I had an understanding of how to deal with Mantle. An interview, a formal question and answer interview, was out of the question. Instead, over charbroiled cheeseburgers and beers, Mickey rambled in a disjointed exercise of free association for which I wasn't prepared.
 
We talked for close to two hours that afternoon, and I remember being panic-stricken the longer we talked because I feared that I actually had little to use in a traditional story about Mickey in retirement. He would clam up when the conversation turned to things he was doing now. A bowling alley bearing Mickey's name in Dallas had closed down, and then re-opened, and Mickey was unclear as to what the status of it was. He didn't want to talk about his investments, and he was equally evasive on questions about his life with his sons. There was one comment I wrote several times in my notebook: "We're doing a lot more things together now, that's for sure."  

My time with Mickey might have ended that afternoon had we not started talking about the one thing that eventually got him to open up -- golf. READ MORE IN THE BOOK

America's go-to authority about all things Mantle

Celebrated book editor and  columnist Bob Vickrey has just sent out this kind promo to his extensive email contact list:

 

"My friend and former Baylor journalism colleague Tony Castro has just released his new book Maris & Mantle from Triumph Books this week. Tony has written extensively about Mickey Mantle in recent years, and has been able to offer unique insights into the famous Yankee slugger's life as the result of his extensive research and their long friendship. Tony has now become the country's go-to authority about all things regarding Mickey Mantle.

 

"Maris & Mantle is a compelling read that offers an inside look at their relationship both on and off the field. This is one terrific dual biography."

 

MARIS & MANTLE: Two Yankees, Immortality and the Age of Camelot is the first, epic and true story of the Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle friendship forever intertwined in baseball history thanks to the unforgettable 1961 season, when the two Yankee icons spurred each other to new heights in pursuit of Babe Ruth's home run record. History has largely overlooked the bond between the two men not as titans of their sport, but as people.

 

http://marismantle.com

 

 Bob Vickrey is a writer whose columns appear in several Southwestern newspapers including the Houston Chronicle and Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He is a member of the Board of Contributors for the Waco Tribune-Herald and is a regular contributor to the Boryana Books website.

'Maris & Mantle' Author-Signed Books Now Available

With the Covid Delta variant now making public book store signings so iffy, here's a no-contact safe way of getting your author-signed copy of the soon-to-be-released MARIS & MANTLE dual biography. @TriumphBooks #MarisMantle http://tonycastrobooks.com

Remembering Michael Jackson

The following appeared as a column in the Los Angeles Daily News June 26, 2009, a day after Michael Jackson's death at his home.

Almost two decades ago, an actress friend and I posed as a grieving couple at a gravesite at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, all just to catch a peak of a fellow mourner.

In May 1990 Michael Jackson attended the burial of his much-loved grandmother.

I was being wooed, as it were, to write an unauthorized biography about the world’s most mysterious man since the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, and I had insisted on at least getting a glimpse of the subject, if even from a distance, before I signed on.

As it turned out, I would have a face-to-face meeting with Michael Jackson himself, if only for a fleeting moment.

Michael was among the Jackson family members getting out of a limousine to attend the burial of his grandmother Martha Bridges, and his path to her gravesite took him directly past where we were standing, which we had known it would when we chose to stand there. When he was inches away, he slowed almost to a stop for a split-second and looked at us.

My friend, a gorgeous blonde from a popular TV show, could have that affect on people, which is why I had asked her to join me.

Michael was dressed in black except for a dark maroon shirt, sporting a black fedora under which his trademark black curls dangled over his forehead as if icicles of death. As he neared the tree shade approaching his grandmother's gravesite, he removed his sunglasses. He wasn’t wearing the surgical mask that had become a part of his wardrobe, and for an instant our faces couldn’t have been more than a foot apart.

'Mantle The Best's Starred Review from Booklist

"Mantle’s life story has been told many times, but it’s never received as loving a treatment as this one."

Saving Anne Frank

For two years, Anne Frank’s family hid in Amsterdam before being caught. Anne's diary was a testament to the horrors of the Nazi regime. She died of typhus at age 15 at Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany.

AS A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD schoolboy I grew up wanting to save Anne Frank.

Allow me to clarify that.

As a young man, the son of a World War II army veteran, I grew up wanting to save Anne Frank.

I’m still not clear, I fear.

As the son of a World War II decorated veteran who told me stories of the horror he saw at Nazi concentration camps, I grew up wishing there was some way I could go back in time and save the six million Jews killed in the Hitler holocaust. And when I read The Diary of A Young Girl.  I wasn’t sure if I’d fallen in love with young Anne and wished I could save this damsel in distress or whether I simply wanted to save mankind.

Audiobook of 'Mantle: The Best There Ever Was'

Audiobook coming for MANTLE THE BEST THERE EVER WAS #MantleTheBest https://tantor.com/mantle-tony-castro.html …

Short Synopsis
In Mantle: The Best There Ever Was, Mickey Mantle biographer Tony Castro brings to life the man who is arguably not only the greatest ballplayer of his time but also the greatest ballplayer of all time.

Full Synopsis
In Mantle: The Best There Ever Was, Mickey Mantle biographer Tony Castro brings to life the man who is arguably not only the greatest ballplayer of his time but also the greatest ballplayer of all time. Castro offers illuminating new insight into Mantle's extraordinary career, including the head-turning conclusion based on the evolution of analytics that the beloved Yankee switch-hitting slugger may ultimately win acclaim as having fulfilled the weighty expectations once placed on him: of being greater than even Babe Ruth. Mantle himself believed he would one day be the one to break Ruth's single season home run record.

Mantle: The Best There Ever Was completes Castro's Mickey Mantle Trilogy that includes Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son, which the New York Times has called the best biography ever written about the Hall of Fame icon, and DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers. Its publication comes on the eve of the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mantle's death.

The iconic Mickey Mantle photo comes to life

 

The iconic Mickey Mantle rookie photo comes to life. http://mickeymantle.live

Author Corner: The Tony Castro Interview

Best-selling author Tony Castro's latest book is Mantle: The Best There Ever Was (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). The softcover edition of his acclaimed 2016 dual biography DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers (Lyons Press) was recently released, and his acclaimed biography of Ernest Hemingway will be out in September. NPR named Looking for Hemingway one of the best books of 2016. He was interviewed by Kerri Ladshaw.

Where are you from?

I grew up in Waco, Texas, in the heart of the Bible Belt in mid 20th century America, bilingual, bi-cultural, and religiously bi-polar.

Religiously bi-polar?! What in the world does that mean?

I was both Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic. But I quoted too much Protestant scripture for a good Catholic, and I knew too many saints and too much Latin for an acceptable Baptist.