Willie Mays died this summer at the age of 93. If you are a baseball fan, or even if you’re not, you heard of the Say-Hey Kid. Many consider him the best baseball player of all time. He hit 660 home runs, so he could hit for power. He had more than 3,000 hits, so he could just plain hit. He was a great fielder and baserunner. He could do it all.
Except in Las Vegas in 1954.
That year Mays was returning from a stint in the army. It turned out to be a good year for the Giants: They won the World Series, sweeping the Cleveland Indians, as they were known then, in four games. Mays was a big factor in them winning the pennant in the first place: a .345 average, 41 homers, and 110 runs batted in. He was voted National League Most Valuable Player.
Before all that, though, the Giants took a side trip during spring training with their future World Series opponents. They played an exhibition game in Las Vegas on Friday, March 19, 1954, before about 9,000 fans at Cashman Field. Cleveland won, 2 to 1. Two Hall of Famers pitched for the winners, Bob Feller and Early Wynn, and their lineup included the second Black player in modern baseball history, Hall of Famer Larry Doby. Mays went one for three for the Giants.
Giants management didn’t want to stay overnight in Las Vegas. They were concerned about our reputation. But everybody went to the Strip for a dinner, and then they would stay until about 11 p.m. and take a flight to Los Angeles. One of the sportswriters traveling with the team was Roger Kahn, later the author of The Boys of Summer, about the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Kahn met Mays in the Sands showroom, where they enjoyed the singing of opera star Robert Merrill. Then they went into the casino, where Mays watched a crap game. Kahn was nearby and a man took his arm and said, “Get him the hell away from the dice tables. We don’t want him mixing with the white guests.” He then called Mays a name that shouldn’t have been used then or now. When a Giants executive asked what was going on, Kahn replied, “This joker has just given me one helluva story for the Sunday New York Herald Tribune.”
Kahn told Mays’s teammate, fellow Hall of Famer Monte Irvin, what happened. Irvin said he and Mays would go outside and sit on the team bus. As Kahn put it, Irvin didn’t Mays to be shocked or hurt. According to Kahn, a hotel executive and a woman then invited him for a drink. They explained that Las Vegas was really Southern, that it was all right for Mays to be on his own at a slot machine but not mingling with customers who weren’t tolerant. Kahn was unimpressed with the argument and the woman’s attentions. But Monte Irvin asked him not
to write a story that might put 22-year-old Willie Mays in that kind of maelstrom.
Kahn only told the story 15 years later, in a magazine article. Mays made clear that, growing up in Birmingham, he certainly knew about those situations. We tell it now in memory of Mays, and as a reminder that we have come a long way, and still have a long way to go.