Willie Mays turns 90 and reminds us of the immortal joy he brought to baseball

The last time I saw Willie Mays was at the funeral for former Giants owner Peter Magowan in 2019. Some of the biggest names in Bay Area sports history were there, including former Giant Barry Bonds and 49ers legend Joe Montana. Some of the richest and most powerful people in San Francisco were there as well.

But all of them – all of us – in attendance that day stopped and fell silent when the biggest guest of all made his entrance. The richest of the rich and the most famous athletes of recent years all became like kids again at the sight of Willie Mays.

We knew we were in the presence of the greatest living baseball player, and more.

Willie Mays, the oldest person enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and a Black man whose fame preceded America’s civil rights movement, celebrates his 90th birthday on May 6. The Giants plan to wish him happy birthday Friday at Oracle Park.

If there are more significant Americans still living and whose excellence and cultural significance trace back to 1950s America, they’re on a pretty short list. Sidney Poitier is 94, and he became the first Black man nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award in 1958. But that was four years after Mays was the Most Valuable Player of the National League in 1954.

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In that seminal year of Mays’ career, he made the most celebrated play in baseball history, a sprinting over-the-shoulder catch that defied description, in the 1954 World Series.

Mays also towers over Northern California history as the unquestioned star of the San Francisco Giants when the franchise relocated from New York in 1958. People from Fresno to Sacramento to the Oregon border adopted the Giants as their team in large part because of Mays.

That love was passed down through the generations and Mays has endured and outlived many of his old teammates and the fans who first began following the Giants on the west coast.

Iconic No. 24

His back to me in his crisp home whites with his iconic 24 gave me goosebumps as an 8-year-old kid at my first big league game.

My late father Reynaldo Bretón, who, to my teeth-gnashing consternation, was a Los Angeles Dodgers fan, spoke with reverence of Mays on our drive to the now-demolished Candlestick Park on that day in 1971.

Mays, I was told, had an unbelievable talent for hitting a baseball and catching one at full gallop in ways that seemed impossible for any human. Mays, I came to understand, wasn’t just any human.

I didn’t know it by the time I saw Mays live that he was already 40, past his prime and very near the end of his storied career. I wouldn’t know until years later that Mays was raised in Depression-era Alabama, in the fury of Jim Crow and when Black men were kept out of the big leagues by rigidly enforced racial barriers.

I learned much later that Mays was part of that first generation of Black men who broke baseball’s color barrier more than a decade before the Civil Rights Act.

Mays was known by America before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Mays became the highest paid player in baseball in 1966, the year after Malcolm X was assassinated and two years before MLK would be.

Respect that transcends race and time

Black players were the minority on his team and in his sport. Mays commanded a level of respect that transcended race and time. In his life, he has seen rights fought for and won, and, now the sad resurgence of attacks on voting rights.

Even though Mays has never been overtly political, his presence in 2021 is a reminder that the people whose communities experienced the worst of American discrimination are still living.

Willie Mays was discriminated against. Willie Mays was segregated. Willie Mays was racially abused. Simply because he never let that define him, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Many writers now are declaring Mays the greatest baseball player who ever lived. That’s how he was introduced to me on a sunny Sunday in 1971.

I felt electric shocks go up my back as I saw Mays standing in the infield, his back to the stands where I sat with my dad. I asked if I could get closer and my dad let me walk to the first row of seats, just above the camera well where news photographers worked.

In my excitement, I jumped down into the camera well and a news photographer barked at me. It would not be the last time that happened. I climbed back to the first row and, despite being embarrassed by the scolding, I couldn’t take my eyes off Mays.

The Giants lost the first game of a double header to the Philadelphia Phillies 1-0. My dad wanted to leave after the first game but I begged him to stay. We did. The second game went into extra innings. In the 12th inning, the great Willie Mays hit a home run to win it.

I can still him see him rounding the bases in late afternoon, just before dusk. It was my first live baseball experience and nothing has ever topped it.

I could say that my first time at the ballpark ended with a Willie Mays walk-off. What could be better than that? Years, later, I looked up the box score for the game: It was June 6, 1971.

An era and its players fade into memories

My dad has been gone for more than 12 years now. Candlestick Park is gone. Many of the old Giants are gone, including Mays’ great teammate Willie McCovey.

Those of us who remember seeing Mays play live are getting up in years. We are long separated from our youth and our childlike ability to be moved by the utter joy and amazement that Mays’ talent could inspire.

Many are paying tribute to him now at this milestone age, recognizing his legacy, the loss of his great teammates from another era, and the treasure he was and is. The New York Times’ ode to Mays noted that he “avoids all funerals, if possible, but they are, of course, inevitable.”

As a young boy, I saw him as a player in the autumn of his career. As an adult, I mourned with him at a funeral. I watched grown men return to their young baseball fan selves in awe of him, still.

It’s such a blessing that Mays is still here.