I was nine or ten, listening to a Yankee game on the radio, when it started to rain and the game was delayed.  A year or two earlier, in 1964, the great Mickey Mantle had his last great year as the Yankees won the pennant right at the end of the season.  1964 was my first season as a Yankee fan and it would be the Yankees’ last pennant for the rest of my childhood.  

I remember watching the celebration on TV, black and white, the guys in their grey baseball undershirts dousing each other with champagne.  Joe Pepitone describing how earlier in the year, before he went on a tear and finally fulfilled his potential (for about the only time in his career) he had been ‘fustrated’.  Mantle poured champagne over him as he was being interviewed.  Everybody laughed.  Mantle later hit a couple of dramatic home runs, a total of three in the World Series to break Babe Ruth’s career record, and the Yankees lost in a dramatic game seven to Bob Gibson and the Cardinals.  David Halberstam wrote a great book about the 1964 season called October 1964, well worth a read if you’re interested in baseball, history and how the world changes.

Mantle was the hero of many boys in New York in those days and I would always take his side in the eternal argument against those who idolized Willie Mays and insisted Say Hey was a better ball player.   Sure Mays was a first ballot Hall of Famer, unquestionably one of the very best ever to play the game, a five tool guy who could do everything on a baseball field and make it look easy.   Mantle’s skills were the equal of Mays’, we’d argue, and he was doing it all on one leg.  Before Mantle got hurt he was faster than Mays, we’d say.  The argument for the Mantle guys was the mythic hero tragedy centering on Mantle’s limitless potential, his heroism in overcoming his disabilities  playing through pain, doing it all on one leg, on crutches, with the clock ticking, a career-ending injury always one play away.   It was a tragic position: imagine what Mantle could do if he had Mays’ health!  In the end their career stats, corrected for longevity, would be virtually identical with Mantle having a slight edge in a couple of categories (slightly better base stealing percentage, for example), Mays in a couple of others.   It was the kind of vehement, futile, idealistic argument kids love to have.

Unbeknownst to us, Mantle was getting drunk virtually every night during his playing days while Willie took care of himself.  The Mick would get shit-faced and fall down, get into fights, wind up in bed with a woman he didn’t recall meeting, was sneaked back into the Yankee hotel by teammates, the loyal press corps helping cover up most of his alcoholic episodes.   We didn’t learn until years after his star-crossed yet magnificent career that he had been his own worst enemy.  

Haunted by his father, Mutt Mantle’s, early death, and the early deaths of his uncles, he believed he was cursed to lead a short life, so why not have as much fun as he could getting shit-faced every night?  The irrefutable logic of the bottle, I suppose. Toward the end of his career, as his skills diminished by the day, he played on a series of very bad Yankee teams.  For one of the few times in their history the Yankees were a second division team, finishing last at least once during my childhood.

One day in 1965 or ’66, (could have been ’67 or ’68), there was a rain delay.   I listened to Rizzuto and Bill White (I think it was White– though it’s unlikely, now that I think about it– White was probably still playing, he played first base on that great 1964 Cardinals team.  Must have been Joe Garagiola) as they stalled, trying to keep fans tuned in during the delay.   Not long afterwards radio networks would cut away from the stadium during rain delays and return to regular programming, but in those days they killed time telling baseball stories and talking about how it looked like it might be clearing up, how the ground crew was about to take off the tarp, until it started raining harder again.  During this particular delay Mickey Mantle came into the broadcast booth and was greeted happily by the broadcasters.  

This was a rare treat, you rarely heard players on the radio, and never during a game.  But there was The Mick, loose and happy as could be, larger than life, talking with his Spavinaw, Oklahoma twang.   The subject of a recent fight on the field between two baseball teams came up.

“You ever been in a fight on the field, Mick?” asked one of the broadcasters.

“Well, I’m not really much of a fighter, you know,” Mick said in his aw shucks way. He was one of the strongest men in baseball, with muscles like few other players, and this disclaimer struck me as a great aw shucks statement.  “There was one time in Detroit that we got into it on the field, somebody got hit and people ran out of the dugouts.  When this happens I look for a friend on the other team, and so I found Norm Cash, me and Norm are buddies, and we kind of held each other and pretended to fight.  I kind of had Norm in a headlock and he says to me “hey, Mick, ever see a picture of your wife naked?” And I say “no.’  And he says “wanna buy some?””  

“We’re going to break for a commercial,” said one of the broadcasters (almost certainly not Rizzuto) quickly.  When they returned there was no sign of Mantle, nor even more than a passing mention of his visit to the broadcast booth.

Dave Isay, creator of StoryCorps, a hugely successful oral history project that lets people interview each other about things that are important in their lives, received a million dollar TED prize in 2015 to expand this work.   His 2007 book of transcriptions from StoryCorps interviews, Listening is An Act of Love, was a New York Times bestseller, as were his other books on the subject.   Listen to Isay speak– though he has always been deliberate in keeping his voice out of the recordings of people he gives the mic to– and you will be convinced: really listening to someone is an act of respect, and hearing what they have to say gives them a rare gift.   Isay reports that has seen powerless, invisible people literally straighten their spines, infused with confidence in the face of the rare gift of finally being really listened to.  They shine as they are given the chance to speak, be recorded, and then edit what they have to say into a form that can be heard by anyone in the world.  Their interviews, mundane and extraordinary, full of candor and flashes of off the cuff poetry, all worth hearing, are cataloged in the American Folk Life Center of the Library of Congress.

A preacher in a violent neighborhood in Boston, trying to bring street kids into church, has a revelation one night after a boy who was shot ran to the church. He died 150 yards from the church, struggling to reach it.  Even though the lights were out, said the preacher, and nobody was home.  The preacher realized that if a dying kid runs to the church, the church needed to come at least half way to meet them.  The preacher began to walk the dangerous streets with a group every Friday night from 10 pm until 2 a.m.   Eventually the kids on the corners began talking to him and he discovered what he had suspected from the start, these were not violent monsters, just kids trying to survive.  He said he spoke to some of the brightest, wisest, most creative people he’d ever met, these kids trying to make it on the streets.   His initiative of listening to kids has spread to many cities, changes lives and won him awards.

We do not listen.   We have many good reasons: we are very busy, life is very stressful, we pretty much know what people are going to say, we can’t pay attention to everything, we have to tune out a lot of complete bullshit vying loudly for our attention in a nonstop attempt to sell us things we don’t need, the world is brutal and unfair, nobody fucking listens to us.  Fair enough.

Riding on the A train last night a very thin, artistic looking, slightly grimy young woman let an equally attenuated and dirty looking young man sit in the one seat that was left.  He sat gratefully and she stood over him talking almost without cease.  When the two seats next to me became available the woman moved with alarming quickness to claim them and the man slid in next to her.  The young man was next to me, clutching a nylon bag in his lap, the sharp corner of which protruded dangerously.  “I’m sorry,” he said, when I was first poked by it, but he seemed unable to make the slight adjustment that would have prevented it happening again.  I quickly learned to avoid it.

“I don’t like everybody constantly judging me,” said the haggard looking woman with a good deal of feeling, “I’m so sick of people telling me what they think I should do, people who don’t know anything about me or my life.  I purposely don’t confide in people, and I haven’t told you half of what I am thinking, even though we are very close.  You are about the closest person to me, I would say, but I will never tell you certain things.  I just can’t stand the way people look at me,” she added crossly.   I didn’t look at her, but not because I cared if she could stand it or not.  

The man, speaking with a heavy French or Italian accent, did his best to find out what was bothering the woman, but she was not having it.  “You know, if you don’t tell people what is wrong, what can they do to try to make it better?” he asked.  She had a quick, angry answer to this useless question.

Listening to their conversation,  I was slightly annoyed to be hearing it but also slightly fascinated.  It was like reading a grim but engaging short story about two desperate characters, trying hopelessly to connect but clearly being sucked down a tragic alley ending in rat poison and a decomposing body that would not be found for days. 

Listening carefully is not always the answer to the world’s lack of respect, but it can be.