Bob Costas: Mickey Mantle let his guard down one late night

[Music] tell about the few nights mickey mantle spent at your home in st louis well mickey um was in st louis to do a charity event at my request and he stayed at our home in in st louis um he's you know disarmingly uh vulnerable you know um he's a giant icon but a person who who had regrets and and obvious demons and we invited stan musial and his wife lil over for dinner because we thought mickey should be around people he knew it was a wonderful evening lots of stories and laughter and everything and after stan and lil had left and kids had gone to bed and everybody except me and mickey was either had left or had gone to sleep and mickey and i are sitting talking well past midnight and he just says something that in that oklahoma twang was really eloquent in its own way he said you know i was should have been as good a player as stan nobody had more power than me before i got hurt nobody could run faster than me but stan was a better player than me because he's a better man than me because he got everything out of what god gave him that he could so he doesn't have to live with all the regrets that i live with he admired stan not just as a player but as a person and the life that stan led the long and happy life that stan led died in his early 90s mickey was gone at 63. but a measure of stan's decency stan who no one would have marked absent got on a plane that morning from st louis and unannounced no one knew he was going to be there i'm doing the eulogy i looked out over the the attendees and there was stan musial halfway back by himself just a measure of the quiet decency of the man mickey mantle was too humble and honest to believe that the whole truth about him could be found on a wheaties box or a baseball card i hadn't known bob costas much uh i think i'd only met him once or twice when he gave the eulogy um at mickey mantle's funeral that i that's not i mean i i listened to that so many times i couldn't believe how we wrapped it up in the end uh i'm getting jammed up just thinking about this i had barely known bob but i said to him i just have to tell you you have done great things in the past and you will do great things in the future but the words you spoke of to mickey mantle are that's the best thing i've ever i've ever seen to do and then he did it again for stem usual and that also look at me i'm a mess i'm just thinking about it that this guy can sum up a life of a hero of his like that that's not easy you know at an all-star game in the 1950s all the great black players frank robinson hank aaron willie mays ernie banks were kind of gathered in a corner of the national league clubhouse playing cards no white players anywhere near them when stan just walked up and casually said deal me in that was his way of letting those players know that they were welcome you know it struck me though that um you got choked up in mutual's yeah funeral and not mentals yeah i've come to understand this um stan lived a full life he's 92 93 years old it's sad in the sense that it's a passage and he meant so much to so many people's lives especially in st louis but it's not tragic where there was elements of tragedy to mickey's life but i've learned this about myself what sometimes chokes me up involuntarily isn't stuff that's sad decency chokes me up something about that just saying that choked me up and actually threw me off because what i was gonna ad-lib afterwards i couldn't return to the script wasn't in the script was think of what that meant and hank aaron and willie mays both told me that story years before independently that they remembered it all those years later and what it meant to them think of what that meant not only to those black players but to the other white players in that clubhouse many of them from the still jim crow south to see the most accomplished and most respected among them make that simple gesture that is more likely to choke me up even a little bit now than than if you told me some story that somebody might regard as terribly sad you

Channel: Graham Bensinger

Views: 91,242

Keywords: Graham Bensinger, In Depth with Graham Bensinger, Sports Interview, Feature Interview, Sports Journalism, Bob Costas, Bob Costas interview, Bob Costas Mickey Mantle, Bob Costas St. Louis, Bob Costas Saint Louis, Bob Costas charity, Bob Costas MLB, Bob Costas Stan Musial, Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle, Bob Costas eulogy, Stan Musial eulogy, Mickey Mantle eulogy, Mary Carillo, Mary Carillo Bob Costas, Stan Musial St. Louis

Id: eCD8Y9D6aIo

Length: 5min 27sec (327 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 23 2022