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In November 1979, less than four months after he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, Willie Mays was banned from Major League Baseball. He was 48, six years into retirement, but he was still one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet. He still appeared on talk shows and network sitcoms. He still got mobbed in restaurants. Kids who weren’t alive to watch him play still practiced his basket catch in the backyard and memorized his iconic numbers: the 660 career home runs; the .301 lifetime batting average; the 12 Gold Gloves in center field; the 24 All-Star game appearances (a feat possible only because M.L.B. hosted two All-Star games per year from 1959 to 1962, and Mays played in all of them).
But he was also deep in debt, which was nothing new for Mays, except now he was no longer being paid like a superstar. For much of the 1960s, Mays was baseball’s highest-paid player; in 1970, his salary was $135,000, or about $1.1 million today. And he always parted easily with his money. He gave it away to kids in his neighborhood after stickball games in the street. He lent it to friends he knew would never pay him back. He paid his housekeeper’s income taxes on top of her salary, even as he was in arrears to the I.R.S. himself. He also liked nice things: cars, clothes, furniture, houses. After his first marriage ended in (costly) divorce, he bought a multilevel home built into the side of a steep slope overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, then added a spiral staircase running from the living room to the garage level so he could get to his convertible without going outside.
In the fall of 1979, Mays was making $50,000 a year as a good-will ambassador for the New York Mets, the last team he played for, when the Bally’s Park Place Casino Hotel in Atlantic City offered him a 10-year contract for $100,000 per year to spend 10 days a month at the casino as a celebrity greeter. Sign autographs, take pictures, tell stories, play golf with the high rollers. Be Willie Mays. Mays didn’t gamble, or drink, and even in retirement being Willie Mays depleted him, but he was always good at it, and he needed the money.
Today Major League Baseball has a lucrative partnership deal with FanDuel, the sports-betting platform, but in 1979, the baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn insisted that the entire sport would be tarnished by any kind of paid arrangement between a gambling operation and a baseball legend. Kuhn forced Mays to choose between Bally’s and the Mets, and if he chose Bally’s, he would have to accept banishment from M.L.B. — no employment of any kind, no appearances on the field at Giants games, or the World Series, or the Hall of Fame. If he wanted to attend a game, he’d have to buy a ticket. Choosing Bally’s was a rare act of defiance for Mays, a peacemaker by temperament who hated causing a fuss. But he felt disrespected by Kuhn. “They had no cause to go and dump me like that,” he told a Washington Post reporter who visited him at Bally’s in 1980, a year into the job. “Baseball needs people like me.”
Bally’s put Mays’s picture on its poker chips — along with his jersey number, 24, but no mention of the Giants or any other trademarked imagery — and his casino handlers packed his schedule, making sure to get their money’s worth out of him. Invariably patrons would bring up “the Catch” — Mays’s game-saving over-the-shoulder grab at the Polo Grounds during Game 1 of the 1954 World Series — and he always said the same thing: that he had made several better catches before TV cameras were commonplace, that he knew he had it all the way (notice how he taps his thigh with his glove as he’s sprinting back for the ball) and that the best part of the Catch wasn’t the catch itself but how fast he spun around and fired the ball back to the infield, preventing the tiebreaking run from advancing past third base.
Mays played so hard on the field and heaped so much pressure on himself to perform like a god that his body sometimes had to remind him he was just a man. At least twice in the middle of his career, he collapsed during games from exhaustion and spent the next few days recovering in a hospital bed. It happened again while he was working for Bally’s, onstage in front of 400 kids at a junior high school near Atlantic City. The school principal later told reporters that Mays “just collapsed like a Slinky toy.” This time he was unconscious for 15 minutes before being revived. Everyone thought he was dead. He was rushed to a hospital but then discharged just two hours later, and by the weekend, he was back to posing for photos and regaling gamblers.
Mays got some company in exile in 1983, when the Yankee legend Mickey Mantle accepted a similar job at Claridge Hotel and Casino, prompting Kuhn to ban him too. Twice Mays petitioned Kuhn to reconsider his banishment, but the commissioner didn’t budge. When Kuhn stepped down in 1984, though, his successor, Peter Ueberroth, moved quickly to end what had become an embarrassment for M.L.B., lifting the ban during spring training in 1985. Mays and Mantle, the new commissioner declared, were “exceptions to the current guidelines.” They were, he said, “more a part of baseball than perhaps anyone else.” The time had come to resume treating them like it.
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Devin Gordon is a writer based in Massachusetts. He is the author of ‘‘So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets, the Best Worst Team in Sports.’’
