As the World Series approaches, fans might take a moment to appreciate an era that has given us baseball players, like the Yankees’ slugger Aaron Judge and the Dodgers’ pitcher-hitter Shohei Ohtani, who will go down in history with Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Mickey Mantle. Some things have changed between the eras. Aaron earned about two million dollars in his career; Ohtani’s current contract is worth seven hundred million. Yet, earlier this year, Ohtani was sued in a business deal gone wrong involving a luxury-housing project in Hawaii. (He moved to dismiss the lawsuit.) Why dabble in business? Ohtani was simply following baseball tradition, in which even the big stars always have side hustles. Just look at Mantle and his crew.
In the early nineteen-nineties, a baseball-card dealer named Alan Rosen arranged for a few dozen members of the 1961 Yankees to appear at Trump Castle, the casino in Atlantic City. A few years later, a Mickey Mantle biographer described a call that Rosen had made to Mantle during the gathering. Mantle didn’t seem to want to sign autographs that day, telling the card dealer, “ ‘Fuck your mother, fuck your show, and fuck Donald Trump!”
“Mickey had a mouth,” Greer Johnson, Mantle’s last girlfriend, said recently, at her house in a gated community near Atlanta, where she lives with her husband, Lem, a retired I.B.M. salesman. Johnson met Mantle in 1983, also in Atlantic City, when he was working as a greeter at the Claridge casino. (The gig, and its hundred-thousand-dollar salary, got Mantle briefly banned from baseball.) She was an elementary-school teacher dating a high roller. In short order, she was dating Mantle and soon became his agent, showing him how to fill out a check and negotiating his business deals, along with those of Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford.
“They were just little boys grown up,” Johnson said. “When somebody would ask for Mickey for an appearance, I’d say, ‘Well, not only can I get you Mickey. I can get you Yogi and Whitey,’ ” she recalled. “I wouldn’t take a fee for them. Shoot, I was making as much as they were.”
Johnson, who has bright eyes and a Georgia drawl, wore a paisley blouse and blue capri pants. She headed downstairs to a room full of glass cases, a few guns—she is an N.R.A. Foundation trustee—and Mantle memorabilia. “I never was a groupie,” she said. “I think that was part of the attraction for Mickey. I would tell him off in a skinny minute if he said something ugly.” A newspaper, she remembered, once called her the most powerful woman in baseball.
“She was also known as the bitch,” Lem, a mustachioed man in an orange shirt, added. “I can tell you a story about Whitey,” he went on, referring to the Yankees’ winningest pitcher of all time. “Whitey was in town, and we met him at a big memorabilia place. He calls Greer over and says, ‘Greer, you know, I was with Mickey the day before he passed. And I have this.’ He gave Greer a little piece of paper. It said ‘Good for One Night with Greer Johnson.’ ”
“My folks really wanted me to eat a doctor or a lawyer.”
Cartoon by Charlie Hankin
“I still have that somewhere,” Johnson said, grimacing. “Whitey was a mess.”
“Yogi was very savvy,” she said, pointing to a picture of the Hall of Fame catcher. “Mickey said everything that Yogi touched would turn to gold.” She elucidated: “Well, he invested in that chocolate drink, Yoo-hoo.”
Johnson moved on to photographs of herself with Hank Aaron (“My dog always barked at him”) and Bob Costas (“He and Billy Crystal tried to one-up each other on baseball stats when they were around Mickey”), and a bat signed by Ted Williams. “Mickey told me a story about when Ted came up to him and asked how did he hit the baseball,” she said. “Did he lean with his left and follow with the right? What were the mechanics? Ted was very analytical. Mickey was, like, ‘I just get up there and hit the ball as hard as I can.’ ”
She picked up an old auction booklet—“The Mickey Mantle Live Auction of the Greer Johnson Collection.” It took place in Manhattan two years after Mantle’s death. The offerings were mostly mundane personal items: signed Amex Platinum Card ($6,500); passport ($8,000); lock of reddish-brown hair ($6,000); tuxedo ($12,000). The public’s interest in such paraphernalia had never made much sense to Mantle.
Joe DiMaggio, Johnson noted, was a different breed in terms of hustle. “I talked to Joe one time,” she said, “and he wanted me to do something. But he would nickel-and-dime you to death. He made his teammates pay him for his signature! He was just different.” No disrespect, she added. Business is business. ♦