Say Hey, Willie Mays — A Straightforward Doc about a Living Legend.
Released in time for the weekend on HBO Max (Crave in Canada) is Say Hey, Willie Mays!, HBO’s new documentary about Willie Mays. I watched it last night and I will now provide, in no order of important, some thoughts on it compiled in a numbered list.
1.
Willie Mays was one hell of a ballplayer and arguably the best ballplayer of all time. They invented the term “five-tool player” to describe Mays, and he was an absolute beast on the field and at the plate, and this documentary offers plenty of evidence of that greatness.
It also illustrates how beloved this man was, particularly in the 60s. There is footage of him guest starring on The Donna Reed Show at a time Black people just weren’t on sitcoms. But there is Willie Mays, having dinner at a restaurant with Donna Reed and another woman, who is completely fawning over him. And no one batted an eye. They just said, “Holy crap, that’s Willie Mays!”
Also, baseball players are famous now, but they aren’t famous across all culture. LeBron James, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods are famous outside of their sport. Willie Mays was famous all over the place. He was arguably one of the most famous Black men in America at the time (the only challengers, in my opinion, are Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali).
Baseball players don’t cross over like that anymore.
2.
As the godson of Willie Mays and the son of Bobby Bonds, one of Mays’ best friends, Barry Bonds is featured prominently.
Bonds is a huge get for this documentary, and he is a necessary figure, both for his personal relationship with Mays and for his time as a San Francisco Giant. And Bonds is fine in it.
However, Bonds’ presence in these kinds of talking head interviews in a documentary about a great figure in baseball’s history is always a little fraught. He’s kind of like the crazy wife in the attic: you can lock him away, and deny he exists, but, just when you think you are moving on, he will show up to light your bed on fire while you are in it.
You can’t deny Barry Bonds. He has such a direct connection to previous generations of great baseball, as well as being one of the best players of all time. You can’t extricate him from it.
Watching Aaron Judge chase down the Maris record this summer was fun, but every time I saw Roger Maris Jr. sitting with Judge’s mom, I kept thinking, “I seem to recall you watching Bonds break this record, too. And Judge didn’t hit more homers than that.” And the quagmire caused by juicing and the Hall of Fame is just a beast no one seems to want to poke. The most famous players of an entire generation of baseball won’t be in the HOF. And I’m not going argue that they should be, but it is notable.
Also, I’m likely not versed enough in Barry Bonds’ interviews from the time when he was playing but it seems to me that he is a far more relaxed man now that he is retired. .He looks healthy. He looks at peace
He’s also back closer to the physicality of when he was a Pirate. He was a stupendous athlete, ran like a gazelle, but SF Giant Bonds’ was far more like a behemoth that hit towering homers.
3.
Being a Black person in America is inherently political and there has long time been criticism that Willie Mays, one of the most famous Black men in America at the height of the Civil Rights movement, did not do enough for the advancement of Black people at the height of it.
The documentary mentions a famous disagreement between Jackie Robinson and Mays about this issue, where Robinson called him out. Barry Bonds and Willie Brown, the first Black mayor of San Francisco, argue that Mays did his own thing in his own way. And I am probably not the person to have an opinion on what he should have done.
But I did think about how beloved Mays was, and to be beloved in America in the 60s (and now) is to be beloved by white America. And perhaps one of the reasons he was so beloved is that he didn’t bring up the injustice and people were able to hold on to him, hug him, and point to him and say, “See, we don’t hate you because we love this one.”
Because of the age we live in, I think a lot more about white privilege, and I realized that political neutrality is another form of privilege.
I hear it all the time from white people, “I’m not political; I don’t vote; I don’t worry about that stuff.” But for BIPOC, their existence is a defiant act, it’s a challenge to white supremacy. They can’t afford to not be political because their rights are being challenged all the time. Their lives are being challenged all the time.
And I’m not here to say that Mays needed to do anything differently, and I don’t expect this documentary to tackle that (they aren’t going to challenge 91-year-old Willie Mays) but it might be interesting if one did. Not Mays’ situation specifically, but the privilege of neutrality, of opting out.
So I was somewhat entertained and interested in this documentary. It's a decently well-made documentary that HBO churns out with all the types of talking heads you might expect.
The format isn’t interrogated, and the subject isn’t challenged or examined in depth. It’s a portrait of a bygone era starring a still-living legend. It’s just not an in-depth one.
And, in this case, I guess that’s fine.
Say Hey, Willie Mays!
Directed by Nelson George
Ed. note — this is not a comment on the playoffs. I had a semi-written pile of ideas about those two Wild Card games, pulling Kevin Gausman early, and that play in centre field.
All I kept thinking was, “Look how they massacred my boy!” and nothing of sense came out beyond that. And I mashed all my bleak feelings down, stopped watching the playoffs for about a week and a half, and joined back up to see the Astros smoosh the Yankees under their heels, and then crush the Phillies in a way that didn’t actually feel like a crushing until you stepped back at and looked at the numbers — have no doubt, the Phillies got their asses kicked.
Also, hurray for Dusty Baker.
This is what I felt like writing instead.
As all of you are probably aware, Twitter is somewhat of a dumpster fire at the moment and may cease to exist soon. I’ve used Twitter to promote my work for 13 of the 15 years I have done this. I don’t even really recall how I promoted my site prior to April 2009.
I have signed up for Substack and started a newsletter (tried to claim “Hum and Chuck” as its name, and discovered it was taken. Thoughts like “Who the hell would?” entered my mind, and turns out it was me in 2020. )
I will provide more info when I am satisfied with and stablilized the move forward.
