Michael is a digital sports strategist for Bay Area News Group. The Denver-area native went to Arizona State's Cronkite School of Journalism and worked several years in Phoenix before coming to Northern California, mostly for the fish tacos.
Willie Mays of the San Francisco Giants greets fellow teammates from the San Francisco Giants 1962 World Series team prior to a game against the New York Yankees before a Major League Baseball game at AT&T Park June 24, 2007 in San Francisco, California. Willie Mays was a teenager when he was acknowledged as a baseball phenom, a designation he quickly outgrew as if it were a pair of hand-me-down spikes.
He was a do-it-all athlete who could hit one over the roof in the first inning, run like a deer into deepest center field to snag a howling drive in the fourth, and steal second base in an explosive cloud of dust in a tie game in the ninth. And so on, and so forth, with game-winning play after historic hit after milestone home run. But with Mays it wasn’t so much about what he did , or the fact he played every game as if it was his first. It was more about what he might do next.People were drawn to the notion that a game could be played so magnificently and with such dynamism. Inevitably, anticipation trumped reality. The process became more gratifying than the result.
In 1958 the Giants moved to San Francisco, where fans gave younger Giants players the unconditional adoration New Yorkers had reserved for Mays. There was no stickball in the streets of San Francisco; when Mays bought a home in a white neighborhood, a brick was thrown through his front window. Flood painted an incomplete picture. Mays acted as a buffer between the Giants’ black and Latin players and the Southern-bred insensitivity of manager Alvin Dark. He was a patriarch to a generation of minority stars, from Orlando Cepeda, to Willie McCovey, to Jim Ray Hart, to Bobby Bonds.
“Mays,” it was written in Sports Illustrated shortly after his 3,000th career hit, “has had to live up to an image of ebullient heroism incurred when he was 20.”SF Giants, from one generation to the next, remember Willie Mays: ‘One of the true icons of the game’Willie Mays draws tribute at Oakland Coliseum — site of his final hit
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