 There, right on time, were Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle. My father loved the Yankees and he positively worshiped The Mick, as did I.
To make our dream come true, the players had been booked as guests for $1,500 each, and a simple prank was designed. Posing as caddies, they would approach golfers and offer unwanted advice about stance and swing.
It was a mess. Mickey was so shy, he sat on a bench trying to stay out of the picture. Yogi spoke up, but you couldn’t quite understand anything he said. As his friend Joe Garagiola once observed, "Yogi doesn’t use the wrong words. He just puts words together in ways nobody else would ever do."
While Yogi said something about keeping one’s eye on the ball, the first two players hit their shots and walked off. Normally such foul-ups would drive my father nuts, but on this day he was unrufflable.
He changed the stunt to this: Two caddies confront golfers, and one pulls out a club to show how it’s done. This version was only tried once, but I can report that without warming up, and using a persimmon driver of the period, Mantle hit the ball nearly 300 yards. It just wasn’t very funny.
After that, it was time to employ the emergency routine used with celebrities when all else fails. The premise: Will anyone recognize Mickey and Yogi as caddies? Well, they definitely didn’t recognize Mickey, hiding way over there on the bench. And, sure enough, they didn’t recognize Yogi—even when dad stepped in offering to sell "balls used earlier today by Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra."
Finally, one woman agreed to pay 50 cents for a ball, so dad told her it was "Candid Camera" and "this is Yogi Berra." To which she replied, "Then I’ll give you $3." Dad called Mickey over. "Show her the camera, fellas," he urged. For a second they both looked around, uncertain about exactly where the camera was hidden, but it all worked out and everyone had a good laugh.
I confirmed that day that Mickey and Yogi could be as friendly and unassuming off the field as I had projected in my dreams. Also, that neither had much of a future on television.
I was certain that spending time with my heroes, chatting over a hot dog and soda at lunch, was as good as life for a kid could get. It was. But only because that day, at least briefly, my dad was a kid as well.
(c) Peter Funt. This column originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
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