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Currently the darling of the sportswriters, Mays has been widely depicted in print as a high-spirited chatterbox, a dugout wit and locker room clown. On the field he often does crackle like an old Ford magneto, kids in a boy-and-father way with Manager Durocher. But off the field Mays curbs his tongue and his curiosity. "When Willie wants to know something," says Guardian Forbes, with considered understatement, "he'll ask a simple question. All he wants is a simple answer. Then he don't see any reason for chewing it up any further. Willie isn't loquacious."
With occasional eloquent and/or exotic exceptions (perhaps the dean of them all: Dizzy Dean), ballplayers generally are a reticent lot, given less to the clubhouse high jinks than the sports pages suggest, given more to the somber dollars-and-cents business of winning ball games than the hero worshipers like to believe. The high-riding New York Giants of 1954 cling in curt, almost surly fashion to the stereotype—they get together in clubhouse and ballpark not to win friends but to win ball games. Even on the crest, as they were while clouting the Brooklyns six straight in a pair of recent series, the Giants were in no mood for skylarking.
In the visitors' locker room at Ebbets Field, the Giants sulked away a long afternoon while they waited to start the last of the series with the archenemy. Outside, a thin rain drenched Brooklyn. "Do you think those bums'll call it off?" muttered Hank Thompson as he riffled through his fan mail. "Hell, no. Anything for a lousy dollar." He slouched over for a rubdown from the trainer. Off in a corner, Willie Mays and his road-trip roommate, Monte Irvin, laughed apathetically over a joke. Across the room, a group of players carried on a silent gin-rummy game. Conversation, what there was of it, was dominated by an unimaginative profanity. Soon someone cussed out the clubhouse boy and sent him for sandwiches. Outside, a bunch of hopeful boys clustered about the dressing-room window and pleaded for autographs. No one offered an autograph, but one Giant raised his glass of beer and showered it on the kids. Hungry for a pennant, the Giants were suffering from the mean-spirited myopia that shrinks the ballplayer's world to the confines of a ballpark and welcomes no outsiders.
Leo's Kind of Club. "This is my kind of ball club," explained Manager Durocher. "They're nice guys, every one of them—away from the field. But here, they'll cut your heart out to win. Hell, I'm a nice guy myself when I'm out to dinner. But even if I'm pitching pennies, I want to beat the cursing life out of you. If I lose a big ball game, sure, I'll shake your hand afterwards, but I'm bleeding inside." He snorted. "Good sportsmanship is so much sheep dip. Good sports get that way because they have so much practice losing."