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A Style of His Own. The Giants' sad showing in Willie's absence, and their winning performance when he got back, established him as a big-leaguer with a promising future. "A natural-born ballplayer," said Leo Durocher. In the case of Mays, Durocher was close to the literal truth. Willie's father, Willie Sr., was called "Kitty Cat" for his lithe grace as outfielder and lead-off hitter for the Black Barons of the Negro National League, until he quit the game in 1948 (at the age of 37). Willie was only 14 months old when Willie Sr. began teaching him the game. Every afternoon the father would come home from the steel mill where he worked, get out a rubber ball and roll it across the floor to Willie. "I'd roll it 30 or 40 times, until I got tired," he remembers. "Willie never got tired. As soon as I stopped rolling the ball, he'd start to holler."
By the time Willie was three, father and son were playing catch. At six, Willie was so anxious to get ahead with his baseball that he could not wait for the old man to come home. Afternoons, on the ball diamond across the street, he played a strenuous and lonely game: he would toss a ball in the air and run it down, or hit out a fungo, then tear around the bases and slide ferociously into home.
At Fairfield Industrial High School, Willie picked up the nickname "Buckduck," and specialized in a course in cleaning and pressing. There was no baseball team, but Willie at 14 was already good enough to play with steel-mill clubs and independent semipros. When Willie was 16, Kitty Cat called up his old friend, Lorenzo ("Piper") Davis, manager of the Black Barons, and got the boy a tryout. Three games later, young Buckduck Mays was the Barons' regular centerfielder.
Even then, Willie had a style of his own. The long hours of rolling a rubber ball with his father had taught him the spectacular "breadbasket" catch that still thrills fans in the Polo Grounds. With his hands held low, the big glove deceptively casual somewhere around his belt, he grabbed fly balls and got them away fast—flinging them in with a whipping sidearm motion.
"What You Gonna Do?" But Willie was something less than a whiz at the plate. Piper promised him a $5 monthly bonus for hitting more than .300, and Willie never collected. "Trouble was," says Piper, "he stood a little too close and stuck that left shoulder around in front of him like he was peekin' at the pitcher. He kept thinkin' for a while that all the pitchers were trying to hit him, but he was just crowdin'."
Off the ball field, Willie had a passion for pool and a form of five-card rummy called "Dime Tonk." One night he played pool so intensely that he missed the Barons' bus when the team left for a doubleheader in St. Louis. "A mile or so out of town," says Piper, "here comes a taxi pulling up alongside, honkin' its horn, and Willie jumps out, screamin' like a bird: 'What you gonna do? You gonna leave me? I'm a pro ballplayer here. You can't leave me.' "