BEFORE: Muhammad Ali and Jackie Robinson carry over from "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali" as the Jock Doc Block continues. I'd like to extend my thanks to HBO and HBO Max for keeping these documentaries available and not just deleting them after a few months. I hate when I program a Doc Block a few months in advance and then by the time I get there, some films are no longer available on Netflix or Hulu or wherever and I have to pay for them on YouTube or iTunes. I think I'll have to rent tomorrow's film, but at least HBO Max is helping to minimize the financial damage. I can pay $1.99 or $2.99 to rent a film once in a while, but as long as the vast majority of my chain is still covered by my monthly cable bill, I should be OK.
Working a double-feature at the theater tonight, by myself - "Renfield" and "The Pope's Exorcist", so that should leave me plenty of time to write this review. Really, what I should be doing is looking for another job, because the theater's probably going to be closed for two months during the summer, and my other boss is deep in debt and running out of money. Unless something changes, I may need a full-time gig really soon - but I don't feel right doing any job-hunting while working at the theater, I'm on a shared computer there and I'm always afraid the management will check the browser's history. I'm not sure if Chrome displays that to only my profile when I'm signed in, or if the admin can discover what sites all the employees visit. Better to do my job-hunting at home, I'm thinking.
Anyway, they had a screening of "Say Hey, Willie Mays" last October at the theater where I work. I didn't recognize any of the stars who attended, except for Bob Costas and producer Colin Hanks. Still have the photos on my phone. So that's what put this particular documentary on my radar, and it took me about 6 months to program it.
THE PLOT: Archival footage, contemporary interviews and reflection on Willie Mays and his trailblazing influence in and outside baseball too.
AFTER: I used to pay more attention to historical events, and here's a case where I really should have been looking at Wikipedia for key anniversaries in April - this documentary is all about Willie Mays and other baseball players who started out in the Negro Leagues. The first, of course, to cross over to the MLB was Jackie Robinson, and he started for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. So, accidentally, I missed that by ONE DAY - yesterday was the 76th anniversary of Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball.
So there, I've worked in more Black History to my Jock Doc Block - tonight's film points out that once Robinson crossed over, the MLB teams started the process of recruiting the top black players, and ultimately that decimated the ranks while also removing the need for the Negro Leagues, so that's kind of a double-edged sword. Integration meant that the best players could earn major-league salaries and of course, removing the race restrictions was a positive move for civil rights, but the teams in the Negro League were black-owned minority businesses, and were no longer viable once all the best players were gone. Willie Mays was still in high-school when Jackie Robinson got hired by the Dodgers, so he played for the Chattanooga Choo-Choos and then the Birmingham Barons, because he couldn't get signed by a major-league team until he graduated.
When Willie joined the NY Giants in 1951, they were playing at the Polo Grounds, in upper Manhattan - actually it was the FOURTH building called the Polo Grounds, where the Yankees played from 1913-1922 and the Mets played from 1962-1963. After Shea Stadium opened they demolished the Polo Grounds and built public housing on that site.
Sorry, I'm getting off the track here...
Willie joined the NY Giants in 1951, then got drafted in 1952 to serve in the Korean War. Unlike Muhammad Ali, he served in the Army, but he didn't go to Korea, most of his time was spent playing on military baseball teams - see, this proves the point I made yesterday about Ali, if he had served, the U.S. military would never have let him die in Vietnam, they probably just wanted him to box for the Army in promotional matches. Whoops, getting off the track again.... Anyway, Willie Mays learned his famous "basket catch" while playing ball at Fort Eustis, and came back to the Giants' spring training camp in 1954.
In 1954, the Giants won the National League pennant and then beat the Indians in the World Series, sweeping them in four games. The over-the-shoulder running-while-not-looking play known as "The Catch" is still talked about today as one of the best defensive plays of all time, Mays ran at full speed toward the center field wall and somehow caught the impossible long drive and relayed it immediately to the infield, preventing two runners from scoring and preserving a tie game, then Mays scored the winning run off a Dusty Rhodes homer, two innings later.
The Giants moved out to San Francisco in 1958, and Mays was the highest-paid player in baseball by 1959, but then when the team moved from Seals Stadium to Candlestick Park in 1960, it was literally a whole new ball-game, because of the tricky winds at the new stadium. They expected the new field to be home-run friendly, but Mays had to learn to hit homers all over again to outsmart the Bay Area wind currents. Mays also had to learn how to win over the crowds in San Francisco, who all seemed to prefer their home-town idol center-fielder, Joe Dimaggio. But Mays eventually hit enough homers, including a four-homer game in 1961, to become the Frisco fans' new favorite.
Mays' game-winning homer in the Giants' last game of the 1962 season forced a tie with the L.A. Dodgers (the OTHER team that moved from NYC to Cali) and in the three-game playoff series, the Giants took the lead in Game 3 and Mays caught the final out to allow the Giants to advance to the World Series against the Yankees. That series went to seven games, and the Yankees ended up winning (spoiler alert) but the S.F. fans knew that it was Willie's playing that had got the team that far. Mays never made it back to the World Series, but he did get named "Player of the Decade" for the 1960's.
Willie stayed with the Giants through 1972, then got traded to the NY Mets for 2 years, but spent a lot of that time on the disabled list and decided to retire after the 1973 season. (Apologies if I've screwed up any details of Mays' career, I'm sure there are much more obsessive baseball fans out there who will spot my mistakes...). He ended up with career stats of 660 home runs, 3,283 hits and 1,903 RBI. 338 stolen bases kind of sounds like a lot, too. Willie was apparently well-known for how fast he could get from first to third. When he retired, he held the National League records for career runs scored (2,062) and was second in league history in games played (2,992). He made the Hall of Fame in 1979, the first year he was eligible, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
Here's what DIDN'T get mentioned in the film - Willie Mays stayed with the Mets after 1973, working as a hitting instructor. But in 1979 he also took a job as a greeter and special assistant at the Bally's Park Place casino in Atlantic City. But he broke baseball's rules by working at a casino (being even close to sports betting was still taboo for players back then) so he quit the Mets job and also got banned from baseball. But, the new commissioner allowed him to return in 1985 - so I guess it wasn't worth mentioning, except by me. So he went back to the Giants and took a new job as special assistant to the general manager.
Though he didn't openly discuss racial issues, Willie did his part to advance race relations by appearing on TV shows like "Bewitched" and "The Donna Reed Show", as if being a black man interacting with white people on TV comedies was the most normal thing to do. That's how it BECOMES a normal thing, it takes people doing it when it's not normal.
The film also shows Mays championing the cause of Barry Bonds to be eligible for the Hall of Fame, but conveniently doesn't mention WHY Mays had to take this up as a personal cause. Obviously Mays was close friends with Bobby Bonds and became something like a second father to Barry, but you may recall that Barry Bonds was accused many times of taking steroids, and then faced charges of perjury and obstruction during the government's investigation into BALCO, the steroid manufacturer. Bonds' conviction got overturned, but he never got enough votes to become elected to Cooperstown, and this film just kind of glosses over all of that. I guess that all belongs in a separate documentary...
Also starring Willie Mays (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Larry Baer, Dusty Baker, Barry Bonds, Willie Brown, Todd Boyd (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), Orlando Cepeda, Bob Costas (last seen in "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists"), Faye Davis, Harry Edwards, Tito Fuentes, Willliam Greason, Reggie Jackson (last seen in "Summer of Sam"), Jordan Keith, Juan Marichal, Michael Mays, Jon Miller, Vin Scully (last heard in "Secret in Their Eyes"), John Shea, Roger Smith, Ozzie Virgil, Gerald Watkins, and the voice of Jeffrey Wright (last seen in "No Time to Die")
with archive footage of Felipe Alou, Matty Alou, Arthur Ashe (last seen in "Venus and Serena"), Yogi Berra (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Bobby Bonds, Jim Brown (last seen in "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali"), Martin Luther King (ditto), Richard Nixon (ditto), Bill Russell (ditto), John Carlos, Joe Dimaggio, Leo Durocher, Herman Franks, Michael Jordan (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Paul Lynde (last seen in "How Sweet It Is!"), Elizabeth Montgomery (last seen in "Mr. Warmth - The Don Rickles Project"), Agnes Moorehead (ditto), Barack Obama (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), Donna Reed (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Branch Rickey, Babe Ruth, Tommie Smith, Warren Spahn, Horace Stoneham, Ed Sullivan (last seen in "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"), Bobby Thomson, Dick York.
RATING: 6 out of 10 Gold Glove Awards
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