
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, August 15, 1995                   TAG: 9508150040
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MICKEY MANTLE

AMERICA last week took note, as did we, of the passing at age 53 of Jerry Garcia, an entertainer whose life and death came to symbolize more about our culture - good and bad - than is to be found within the strict confines of his career as a popular musician.

Now, America is taking note of the passing Sunday at age 63 of another entertainer, baseball great Mickey Mantle. Like Garcia, Mantle came to symbolize more than is to be found strictly in his career as a professional athlete.

The Grateful Dead's Garcia was a hero to a subculture; the New York Yankees' Mantle, to mainstream culture. Mantle was a half-generation older than Garcia, but it was a critical half-generation. Mantle arrived in in the '50s, not the '60s; he arrived when America had yet to lose its national innocence.

Or so, at least, it seemed. Certainly, America was more self-confident than now about its economic supremacy, its ability to solve domestic social problems, its role as world leader.

Demographics, too, fed innocence. Older baby-boomers - the population bulge that continues to skew the national culture - were still children when Mantle was in his baseball prime. Baseball was in its prime, too, still the sport of Everyman. More than one preadolescent Mantle fan in the '50s and early '60s, we suspect, became a Garcia fan in the late '60s and early '70s.

Mantle fit the times. He joined the Yankees in 1951, a fresh-faced 19, a country kid from rural Oklahoma who could do it all - fly around the bases, play center field superbly, hit longer home runs than anyone else. That was in line with the myth of American invincibility, with the post-World War II notion that American determination, however naive, could save the world.

But just as that idea has required subsequent revision, so has the picture of Mantle as unsullied hero.

Though a great player, Mantle was not peerless even in his own day. Willie Mays, for one, hit more home runs and stole more bases, and played an even more superb center field. Yet Mantle became the icon: Middle-class America, just getting used to the idea of desegregation, was unlikely to put a black hero on quite so high a pedestal.

For that, don't blame Mantle. In his later years, though, he did blame himself for the drinking and partying that he said cut short his career. (The cancer that ended his life came to light after a transplant for his severely damaged liver.)

America, Mantle said, did not deserve him as a hero. But Mantle was in the entertainment industry, baseball division. It was America that insisted on hero worship. Mantle's judgment was too harsh on himself, and too light on the society that idolized him.

by CNB