Maybe the best things ever said about Willie Mays.

 

On his first major-league hit, a titanic home run off Warren Spahn, over the left field roof of the Polo Grounds:

"The crowd...roared and cheered as though Willie had just won the World Series. It was a weird, tingly thing to be part of, because all the crowd was saying really was, 'Welcome, Willie. We've been waiting for you all our lives.'"

    —Robert Creamer

"I never saw a fucking ball leaving a fucking park so fucking fast in my fucking life."

    —Leo Durocher

On what he represented:

"[Mays] was a new kind of athlete being showcased, a player who, in contrast to most white superstars of the past, was both powerful and fast."

    —David Halberstam

On his hitting ability:

"If there was a machine invented to measure each swing of a bat, it would be proven that Mays swings with more power and bat speed, pitch for pitch, than any other player."

    —Branch Rickey

On his fielding ability:

"Willie can go get it, and Willie can bring it back."

    —Piper Davis!

"Goddammit, can't someone tell that guy this isn't the Little League?"

    —Richie Ashburn (on how far in Mays played)

"The only player I ever saw who could run hard one way and throw hard the other."

    —Umpire Jocko Conlan

"Just safe!"

    —Umpire Art Gore, after a 320-foot throw by Mays almost caught Billy Bruton, the fastest player in the NL, at the plate.

"Oh, my God, that's not human!"

    —Teammate Whitey Lockman reacting to a catch Mays made off Roberto Clemente

"The greatest catch I ever saw in my life."

    —Pee Wee Reese in 1952, after watching Mays rob Dodger Bobby Morgan with a spectacular, backhanded running catch near the 351 sign in Ebbets Field, after which Mays bounced off the ground and tumbled into the base of the wall, leaving himself cut on his elbow, thigh, and knee. (Vin Scully, in the broadcast booth, wondered in Mays were still alive.)

"He turned and ran to a place where no one can go to get the ball, starting where he started when the ball was hit. So it was more than just a great acrobatic play. It was a play that until that play was outside the realm of possibility."

    —Bob Costas, on the 1954 World Series catch

On his running ability:

"Zimmerman exploded on contact. The ball, the glove, the mask, and several pieces of Zimmerman appeared to disassemble in midair, like the cat in a Looney Tunes cartoon."

    —Charles Einstein, after watching a home plate collision between Mays and catcher Jerry Zimmerman.

"I was kind of using his head as a fulcrum or something, and actually kind of ran up one side of him and down the other, and his hand with the ball kept aiming for him but never did touch me."

    —Mays on evading Roy Campanella's tag at home plate.

"You're telling me he did the impossible!

"He did!

"Well, I ain't fixin' to believe it!"

    —Leo Durocher arguing that call with the home plate umpire.

On his personality:

"It just seemed like he could do nothing unostentatiously."

    —Arthur Daley

"Willie's exuberance was his immortality."

    —Roger Kahn

"The secret to Willie Mays is he frivolity in his bloodstream."

    —Branch Rickey

On his genius:

"It was a wonderful game, but for me the big show was Willie Mays."

    —Gen. Douglas MacArthur

"There have been two geniuses: Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare."

    —Tallulah Bankhead

"...why is life worth living?...Well, there are certain things, I guess, that make it worthwhile...for me, I would say, Groucho Marx...and Willie Mays, and the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, and Louie Armstrong's recording of 'Potatohead Blues,' and Swedish movies...Sentimental Education, by Flaubert, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, those incredible apples and pears by Cezanne, the crabs at Sam Woe's..."

    —Woody Allen, in Manhattan

"I saw him his rookie year, one of his first games, and he hit a line drive down the right field line, a triple, and boy, watching him fly around the bases, it was electrifying."

    —Jim Bouton

"When you see someone doing something you admire, the image of that makes a mockery of all forms of bigotry."

    —President Bill Clinton

"Isn't Willie Mays wonderful?"

    —Ethel Barrymore

On what we lost:

"You're Willie Mays of Fairfield, Ala., who is part of the small talk of New York. This shall be your city as long as your talent lasts...Kids forget the squalor of your childhood as they emulate the shambling urgency of your gait. [At the Polo Grounds] Strangers, aching with loneliness, spoke to those who sat along side of them. And they mentioned your name...you brought people together in the bantering argument of sports. You made time pass for the bored with a bright rush. It is a fine accomplishment in a terrible age."

    —Jimmy Cannon