Say what, for the Say Hey kid …
Only a few weeks after being inducted into the Hall of Fame in the summer of 1979, Willie Mays finds himself out of the game.
Banished by commissioner and renown party killer Bowie Kuhn 45 years ago today after taking a position as a greeter for the public relations folks at Bally’s Casino in Atlantic City.
Mays tells Kuhn his 10-year deal with Bally’s prohibits him from gambling in the company’s casinos. Same stuff that he has done for years in Las Vegas, Mays tells Kuhn.
Willie Mays during his 1979 Hall of Fame induction speech
No matter as Kuhn tells Mays, too bad – either cut your ties with Bally’s or cut your ties with Major League Baseball.
At the time, Mays is a part-time coach and goodwill ambassador with the New York Mets.
Mays opts to stay with Bally’s, which reportedly is paying Mays $100,000 annually, and Kuhn opts to ban arguably the greatest all-around player in the game’s history.
Kuhn earlier in 1979 bans another of the game’s icons, Mickey Mantle, for accepting the same type of job as Mays in the same once-taboo gambling industry that, ironically, will nearly 40 years later will become partners with Major League Baseball.
Like Mantle, Mays is being paid six figures by Bally’s for, basically, shaking hands with the high rollers and then playing golf with them.
In the here and now of 1979, though, the ever-rigid Kuhn is not about to bend one of the game’s even more rigid rules about not associating itself or its players – past or present – with gamblers.
Never mind that two of baseball’s more prominent owners – the New York Yankees’ George Steinbrenner and the Pittsburgh Pirates’ John Galbreath – have extensive ties to the gambling-mad industry that is horse racing.
Both Mays and Mantle finally are reinstated in the game in 1985 after Peter Ueberroth replaces Kuhn as commissioner.
“There was literally nothing there,” Ueberroth later tells the Los Angeles Times. “They had played golf at casino-sponsored outing as celebrities. They were on casino billboards, but promoting the golf events, not gambling.
“It wasn’t even a close call,” Ueberroth says of reinstating Mays and Mantle. “No umpire needed.”