The Genius of Willie Mays
We lost the greatest baseball player of all time, Willie Mays, two years ago this summer. This is not only my opinion, but the consensus of most baseball historians. He was the first true “five -tool” player. As I am immersing myself in the world of sports as a part of work with The Academic Coach, I came upon George Will’s obituary for Willie Mays published in the Washington Post on June, 18, 2024. Will states in the obituary a very telling line about the perception of Willie Mays and many great athletes, “In a sense, Mays was too good for his own good. His athleticism and ebullience — e.g., playing stickball with children in Harlem streets — encouraged the perception of him as man-child effortlessly matched against grown men. He was called a ‘natural’.” Will calls out what we often do in describing athletic excellence. We often speak of “athleticism” and “ebullience”. The athlete is only a physical and emotional being.
The beauty of Will’s obituary is that instead limiting his assessment of May’s greatness to physical or emotional attributes. he closes the paragraph with a powerful statement that acknowledges that the true greatness of Mays lay in his intellectual expertise when he writes, “Because Mays made the extraordinary seem routine, his craftsmanship and intelligence were underrated.” In this statement, he challenges historical intellectual deficit model that we have created around athletics. What makes this even more enlightening on Will’s part is that Will, who embodies a common perception of what intelligence looks and sounds like, calling out the intellectual genius of Willie Mays. Like sees like. Will continues with the following paragraph that explains how Mays manifested his intellect on the baseball field.
"Even as a rookie, he would reach second base, decode the opposing catcher’s pitch signs, and tell the Giants’ dugout that, say, the third in each sequence was the actual sign. His base-running “instincts” actually were a meticulously honed craft: Although he played centerfield, he would take pre-game infield practice, reminding himself where infielders should position themselves to cut off throws from outfielders. Then when he got a hit, he could take an extra base if the infielders were out of position. Sometimes early in a game, Mays would intentionally swing at and miss a pitch he could easily have hit, thereby encouraging the pitcher to throw the pitch during a crucial late-inning at bat."
After reading this obituary, I sought out other comments from Will about the intellectual greatest of Mays. In an interview in episode 7 of Ken Burns’ Baseball, he is even more direct in his discussion of Willie Mays and the perception of what made his greatness. Will states that though Mays may not have been the first Black player in the MLB and face the blatant racism faced by Jackie Robinson and the others who broke the color line of baseball, he faced other more insidious racial barriers. The main barrier was an infantilizing view of his excellence. It was all natural ability and youthful enthusiasm.
We continue this same infantilizing view of many of our athletes today. By doing this, we do not model for our young athletes how their athletic excellence is as much an intellectual accomplishment as it is physical and emotional. At The Academic Coach, we understand the damage that this “de-intellectualizing” of athletics has on the academic confidence and performance of our student-athletes. We are committed to dismantling this dangerous mindset and creating a process for athletes to transfer their intellectual gifts from the playing field to the classroom.
(Will’s comments about May start at 1:19:30)
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