Filial Piety on Willie Mays Night

It is the afternoon of September 25, 1973. I am an eleven-year-old latch-key kid in New York City. I am on the couch in the TV room, watching reruns of Lost in Space or Gilligan’s Island or I Dream of Jeanie. I am definitely not doing my homework.

The phone rings. I answer; it’s my father, calling from work. He informs me, with no small satisfaction, that he has secured tickets to “Willie Mays Night” at Shea Stadium. Am I interested?

Am I interested? Am I interested?!?

Three passions consumed me in 1973. Chess, science fiction, and the New York Mets. I read box scores as if imbibing holy writ. On Sunday, the New York Times sports section would print the batting averages of every player in the major leagues and I would scrutinize the list from top to bottom, noting the rising or falling fortunes of my beloved team’s stalwarts – Bud Harrelson, Cleon Jones, Felix Millan, Jerry Grote. The great pitcher Tom Seaver, of course, was my favorite player. (The day Seaver was traded to the Reds, a little bit of light went out of the world; I don’t think I’ve been the same ever since.)

I was too young to see Willie Mays in his prime. On the contrary, in retrospect, he was my first, stark introduction to how “old age” comes for athletes before anyone else. The San Francisco Giants traded Mays to the Mets as a 41-year-old; by the time I got to see him on a daily basis his knees were busted and he was batting a paltry .211. On September 20, he announced his retirement. “Willie Mays Night” was a curtain call and a grace note.

None of that really mattered to me. Far more important: the Mets were in a pennant race. In late September! WAS I INTERESTED? I grabbed my glove and waited by the front door for my father to come home. We hopped on the subway and made our way to Flushing Meadows.

I am abashed to say I don’t remember much at all about what history tells me was an exhilarating game. Willie Mays didn’t even play. There was a huge ovation; he gave a speech, Jerry Koosman took the mound. As someone who has now lived in the Bay Area for 36 years and seen far more Giants games than I ever did Mets, it would be nice to join the collective mourning by saying I too bore witness to the greatest baseball-player of all time in live action. But I can’t. I barely recall his speech.

The memory of Willie Mays Night that still vibrates, that still rings with a clarity that can never fade, is the sound of my father’s voice on the phone. To this day I can feel the pleasure he felt launching me into the geeky-baseball-nerd stratosphere. My father is the reason I am a sports fan; when he wasn’t writing or reading, he was usually following one of his teams; and that’s when my sister and I got our best chance to get close to him.

These days, when Father’s Day rolls around, I tend to think of my own children more often than I do my father. They are alive and thriving and my relationship to them is the most important thing in my life. My father has been dead for sixteen years; I have put that grieving to rest. I do my Daoist best to live in the moment.

But the past makes the present. I saw a social media alert that Willie Mays had died, and I thought about Willie Mays Night, and I heard the sound of my father’s voice, and I realized that a belated dose of Father’s Day filial piety was in order. Say hey, Dad.