In my family, and, we always presume, in every family in the reasonable world, there was one unalterable truth from which the entire meaning of sport began:
Willie Mays is the greatest baseball player who ever lived, period, stop, underline, underline.
My brothers and all my friends grew up on it. We live it. We don’t question it. I will never question that. If there is a secular church of Bay Area sports, it is based on the sacred certainty that the greatest player who ever lived spent most of his career with the Giants – we have to watch him! – and then came back here to stay after retiring. We saw him in Mike Murphy’s old office in the Giants clubhouse. We can hear him laughing. We had to stay close to him…until the sad news of Mays’ death at age 93 arrived on Wednesday.
The greatest that ever was – underline, underline – is gone. Greatness remains.
Mickey cloak? No, even he admitted that Mays was better. Henrique Arão? Good thought, still wrong. Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig? The greatest players of MLB’s segregated years, yes, but not of all time, thank you very much. Barry Bonds? The greatest of his time, but not of all times. And may. It will always be May.
Growing up in the Bay Area, I know my experience is similar to that of kids and adults from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s who grew up everywhere from San Francisco to Oakland to Palo Alto to Richmond to Burlingame to Fremont to Gilroy to Rookie, we loved Willie McCovey, we cherished Joe Montana, we were impressed by Jerry Rice, we were thrilled by Rick Barry, we were fascinated by Reggie Jackson, and we rooted for Ken Stabler.
But Mays was separate and unique, and we all understood that the Bay Area had special rights and obligations because of that. Or, as I figured it out: When major league baseball branched to the West Coast in 1958, Southern California went with the Dodgers and Northern California went with Mays.
Yes, we did well there.
GO DEEPER
Giants react to Willie Mays’ death: ‘The things he did we’ll never see again’
It would be an exaggeration to say that Mays made the Bay Area a major professional sports area. The 49ers had been here for more than a decade before the Giants came to town, and in many ways, the ensuing 49ers dynasty was the modern establishment of everything the Bay Area considers a sports town.
And sometimes Mays seemed too big to fully understand or fit into the Bay Area or any region. McCovey, Orlando Cepeda and Juan Marichal were beloved here because they started their major league journeys here.
Mays was always bigger than all that. He was the grainy historical highlight chasing Vic Wertz’s deep, deep ball in the 1954 World Series. He was part of the team that caught the Dodgers and was on deck for Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” — I heard a recording of “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” about a thousand times in my house growing up. Even so, it seemed like a relic from another time, another realm, another existence.
May was a mini-deity and you don’t have gods. You’re just grateful they’re here. It meant a lot to be in the Bay Area and know that Willie was here too.
Flowers adorn the Willie Mays statue outside Oracle Park in San Francisco on Tuesday. The Hall of Famer played 21 seasons with the Giants, 15 in the Bay Area. (Jeff Chiu/AP)
And he made the number 24 a sacred number, enshrined by none other than Rick Barry, who chose to wear it for the Warriors in honor of Mays. Which made every kid in the Bay Area fight to wear that number, and if you wore the number 24 and weren’t good enough to do it, you’d definitely hear about it.
We all try to get the basket too, of course. We did this so often on my little league team that my rather tough coach allowed each of us to try it once, since we were going to do it anyway, and each of us could keep doing it until someone fell. . I think it lasted two training sessions and we all understood. What, did any of us really think we were Willie Mays? No, we didn’t. But it was fun to try.
I was too young to see Willie in his prime – I was born in 1965, his last MVP season, which my older brothers always noticed. Yes, in my family we mark important milestones with May’s achievements. But my parents were happy to show me off to their friends when I was a kid, because I could recite the entire Giants starting lineup (I have vague memories of yelling “Fuentes, Mays, McCovey!” more than a few times).
I’m pretty sure my dad took us to Candlestick in the early ’70s, almost specifically to make sure we saw Mays. All I remember is the end of one game when Mays attacked a sinking liner and ran directly into the tunnel to the clubhouse in right field. The referees, naturally, signaled that Mays hit the target and the game was over. I remember players on the other team complaining that the ball fell to the ground, which was probably true. And I remember my dad or my brother laughing and saying, “What are they going to do, tell Willie he needs to go back?”
GO DEEPER
MLB world reacts to Willie Mays’ death
Another moment I can’t forget, many decades later: At an on-field celebration by the large group of Giants Hall of Famers, the great Monte Irvin – a mentor to Willie – was struggling to sit in his chair. Concerned, Mays stood up, dismissed the staff, adjusted Irvin’s chair and carefully helped him into his seat, then walked around Irvin to make sure he was comfortable for the rest of the ceremony. One immortal caring for another.
I have never felt more connected to Willie than I did in that moment. I’ve never seen him seem more human, more understanding of vulnerability and kinder. (The same thing I felt about Bonds when, at a later ceremony, he fidgeted around Mays to make sure he was okay.) And Mays reminded me of someone.
From then on, I couldn’t help but think of Willie when I thought of my father, and my father when I thought of Willie. Maybe this seems silly now, but they were both born in 1931, so there was an automatic connection for me. My dad talked like Willie, had the same skeptical eyes as Willie, tilted his head like Willie when he couldn’t hear everything, liked his friends like Willie, quietly watched over everyone like Willie, and loved baseball, probably almost as much as Willie.
My father died earlier this year and my brothers and I miss him terribly. But he and my mom saw Willie Mays play hundreds of times. He had a great life and raised children who grew up understanding an eternal truth of sports that I have never believed in more than I do now. 2024 was a difficult year; We lost so much, so much, so much. But we get hurt because we receive too much. We got decades from Willie Mays and we’ll never lose that.
GO DEEPER
The Baseball 100: No. 1, Willie Mays
(Photo by Willie Mays in 1956, two years before the Giants moved to San Francisco: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images)
