Willie Mays is no Alex Rodriquez

 I was at Yankee Stadium for the 1960s All Star game and saw Willie Mays play in the flesh for the first time. He stole third, running out from under his cap. Going all out in an All-Star game, imagine that. I saw him again in 1962 when he returned to New York City in glory, with his San Francisco Giants in tow, to play the Mets at the Polo Grounds. It was like a coronation.

Mays, indeed, ruled the diamond, and the hearts of millions of Americans, from his kingdom in center field. You and I probably know as much as we care to about New York Yankee slugger Alex Rodriquez, who just passed Willie Mays in career home runs. A history lesson, however, is in order about “The Say Hey Kid," who retired as a player in 1973 and turned 84 earlier this month.

 Willie Mays made his mark in four decades. He got his professional start at age 15 in the gritty industrial leagues of Birmingham, Ala. He even played pickup games with white kids until grownups called the police.

 He graduated to the Negro Leagues in the late 1940s, and made the jump to the minors in Trenton, N.J., where he was the only black player in the league in 1950. He had just turned 19. The next spring, he was called up by the New York Giants, who were the runts of the city’s three-team litter. Mays was the Rookie of the Year. In 1954, his first full season in the Bigs (he was in the army the previous two), he was the league’s MVP, his team won the World Series, and he made the cover of Time magazine. He was 23.

 So how good was Willie Mays at baseball? He could run like Ty Cobb, field like Joe DiMaggio (only better), hit for power like Babe Ruth and make catches and throws that left his peers speechless. He stole bases like a whirlwind. In a game of numbers, he was always better than the box score. Take his over-the-shoulder catch in the 1954 World Series, widely considered to be the greatest ever made; Mays insists that he had it all the way, that he was already thinking about the throw well before the ball nestled in his mitt nearly 500 feet from the home plate. The Greatest Catch of All Time wasn’t even his best.

 Style was another measure of the man. Mays played the game with a flair, joy and aggressiveness that was the great legacy of the Negro Leagues. He understood that baseball was entertainment. He gobbled up fly balls (7,095 of them, more than anyone ever) with his showy “basket catch.”

 For all his talents and high spirits, Mays took the game to heart. When other players were playing cards or nursing hangovers before games, Mays, who didn’t drink or smoke, would be talking to the starting hurler about how he should pitch to the opposing lineup. At times he would collapse from exhaustion and be hospitalized.

 Mays signed his early contracts without bothering to check the amount. Some black players, like Jackie Robinson, felt he should have been more outspoken about racial injustices. Like Robinson, he was called every name in the book from the stands. His response was to play harder. Dodger fans, in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, would applaud him. That’s how good Willie Mays was.

 What Willie Mays did to combat racism is hard to quantify. He was a living rebuke to the notion that whites were superior. In 1954 the city of Birmingham proclaimed a “Willie Mays Day,” but the festivities were called off at the last moment by police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, who would turn fire hoses and dogs on peaceful demonstrators nine years hence. Connor understood what Willie Mays meant for business as usual.

White kids like me could see that Mays was special, someone we wanted to emulate. When my mother noticed that her last-born of five boys suddenly was walking differently, she was perplexed. Then one afternoon all of us were in the living room watching the Giants on TV, and she saw Willie Mays stride to the plate. It became clear to her then.

 David Holahan, a freelance writer from East Haddam, Conn., still has his Willie Mays scrapbook.

Note: This version corrects a typo in the original.