The day Willie Mays made two Hattiesburg boys feel like they made a million dollars

This was the summer of 1962. We were in Texas visiting grandparents and attending our first Major League baseball game. I was 9 and brother Bobby was 8. Willie Mays, the best baseball player in the world, was 31 and in his prime.

This was before the Astrodome and the Astros. The brand new expansion team from Houston, then called the Colt 45s, played their games at Colt Stadium, adjacent to where the Astrodome was built. Our maternal grandfather – we called him Dad – worked on the heavy machinery used to build the Dome. I remember him laughing and saying to us, “Guys, can you believe they actually think they’re going to grow grass in that spot?”

At the time, we couldn’t believe they were going to play baseball indoors. But the opening of the Astrodome was still three years away. We were much more excited to see players like Mays, Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal and Dad’s friend Jim Davenport play in the modest Colt Stadium. It used to be a minor league facility, built on what used to be a swamp, where only about 25,000 people lived, but it seemed to us like a baseball palace and a home to a million well-fed mosquitoes. We’ll find out.

Father and “Peanut” Davenport were friends from Davenport’s days at what was then Mississippi Southern College. “Nuts,” as Dad called him, was from Siluria, Alabama, near Birmingham, but came to Southern when he wasn’t recruited by Alabama or Auburn. At Southern, Davenport quarterbacked the football team to back-to-back wins over Alabama and also to a victory over Georgia. For the Giants, he was a smooth third baseman who years later would be their manager. He and Mays, from the mining community of Westfield, Alabama, also near Birmingham, had become good friends. They would remain that way for a lifetime.

In retrospect, that summer trip to Houston also served as a study in race relations for us, two young boys from then-segregated Hattiesburg. Mays and Davenport were clearly good friends who ate together, played together and enjoyed each other’s company, something we didn’t see in our hometown at the time. They made it look as natural as it is.

Our experience started early that afternoon at the historic old Rice Hotel in downtown Houston, where the Giants were staying. We got there just as most of the Giants were finishing their lunch at the coffee shop. Dad reintroduced us to Davenport, who then introduced us to many of his teammates. The day is mostly a blissful blur, but some things I remember clearly from 62 years ago:

• Shaking hands with Willie “Stretch” McCovey, the slugging first baseman, whose enormous right hand swallowed not only my hand, but my arm, almost up to my elbow. McCovey was another Alabama man, from Mobile. He couldn’t have been nicer.
• Meeting Mays, who was dwarfed by McCovey, and who told us, “Any friend of Nuts is a friend of mine.” He sat back down in his chair and lifted Bobby onto one knee and me onto the other. “You guys are playing ball?” he asked, seeming genuinely interested. We were amazed. Mays told us he had played semi-pro ball in Hattiesburg and Laurel as a young teenager.
• We went to the ballpark that evening where Davenport had given us tickets just behind the Giants dugout on the first base side. That’s not all. He had us on the field for batting practice before the game. Mays and Cepeda took turns hitting balls deep into the left field seats. I had never heard the crack of a bat so loud and so violent.
• Go to the visitors’ clubhouse before the game. Funny, what I remember most about that are the card games and the huge box of chewing tobacco that was right by the door at the entrance to the dugout and the field.
• The mosquitoes. I have never seen such large mosquitoes before or since. In the stands, clerks marched down the aisles wearing bug spray, just as the soda and peanut vendors did.
• The game itself. The score is long forgotten, but Houston led for most of the game until the Giants came from behind. In the ninth inning, the Giants trailed by one run, but loaded the bases against a rookie relief pitcher. Cepeda, nicknamed The Baby Bull, came to the plate and the count went to three balls and a strike. This was in the days before ballplayers lifted weights in earnest, but Cepeda, from Puerto Rico, had broad shoulders, a barrel-chested body and chiseled arms. My father pointed to the stands behind the left field fence and said, “There’s no place to put it. Guys, do you see those pink chairs on the left? That’s where the next pitch will land.’

Yes, and on the day Willie Mays made us feel like a million dollars and Jim Davenport gave us a memory to last a lifetime, Cepeda made our dad look like a genius.