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The man who wouldn't be Mickey

When Dad gives a little guy a big name, anything short of immortality can seem like a letdown.

By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD
Published July 12, 2005

	[Times photo: Dan McDuffie]
	Mickey Mantle Fortin of Holiday with some of his Mickey Mantle memorabilia, including the body art that holds particular meaning.
	Fortin’s dad, Clarence was a pal of the Mick’s in his heyday.
	[Family photo]
	The home run toddler, Mickey Mantle Fortin at 18 months.
	[Family photo]

AT A GLANCE: The HBO documentary Mantle, about baseball great Mickey Mantle, premieres Wednesday at 9 p.m. Mickey Mantle Fortin was interviewed for the program.

HOLIDAY - His dad, Clarence Fortin, had dreamed of playing pro ball himself, which explains a lot of it.

He was riveted to the TV, beside his pregnant wife, when a blond, lantern-jawed young Yankee named Mickey Mantle homered in the 1952 World Series. Right then he decided what to call his unborn son.

"Tell 'em what your name is," Dad would say.

"Mickey," the boy would reply, hoping it would end there.

"Tell 'em what your full name is."

"Mickey Mantle. Mickey Mantle Fortin."

Then the boy would brace himself for the snickers and the rolled eyes and the subtler signs of derision. On the Little League diamond, when he flubbed the ball or struck out, other kids had only to call his name to communicate contempt.

Hoping to launch his only son's golden baseball career, Dad had bestowed the name like a kind of talisman, just as the Mick's own dad had conferred a little extra magic by naming him after the great player Mickey Cochrane. What better way to win favor with the baseball gods than by christening your boy in honor of one?

Mickey Mantle Fortin, smallish and not stunningly gifted athletically, wanted nothing more than to make his dad proud. Every time he introduced himself or signed on the dotted line, he saw a reminder of how he was coming up short.

After a while, he stopped wondering whether he would ever prove worthy of his heroic name. He wondered instead whether he could ever forgive the man he loved most for giving it to him.

Fortin, now 52, is standing in the baseball memorabilia room of his modest Holiday home, sorting through memories and trying not to get too emotional. He keeps failing. Everything brings back Dad.

Here's a photo of Dad playing golf with Joe DiMaggio. They were buddies. A lot of Yankees frequented Dad's popular restaurant in Naugatuck, Conn.

Here's a signed baseball from Mantle himself to Dad. They were friends, Fortin explains. Dad would pick him up at the airport when Mantle came to Connecticut, looking for liquor and girls.

Here's a record album of Mantle's 1969 retirement ceremony at Yankee Stadium, which he attended with Dad. And here's a lock from Dad's silver-gray hair, which Fortin took from his casket. He misplaced it for years in a copy of The Bronx Zoo, an account of the 1978 Yankees.

"Have you seen my birthmark?" Fortin says, lifting his shirt to display the Yankees tattoo on his upper back.

Tattooed on his right biceps is the number 7, Mantle's number, and the number 13, which refers to the day in August when liver cancer killed Dad, in 1984, and Mantle, exactly 11 years later. Fortin feels the dates mean something, cosmically. He also believes it significant that Mantle wore No. 7, and he, Fortin, batted .377 his senior year in high school. Their destinies are all tangled up somehow, his and Dad's and the Mick's.

Not long ago, he put on a Yankees jersey and gave an interview for the HBO documentary Mantle, which airs Wednesday. He told the producers what he thought they wanted to hear, about how inspiring it was to be part of the Yankee's greatness in his small, borrowed way.

It was true, after a fashion. He didn't think they cared to hear the whole story.

"There were times I cried and wished I could just have a name like ordinary people, and just have my own identity, and not have to carry this cross," he says. "I wondered what possessed him to make me want to go through this. Why couldn't I just be like a normal kid?"

***

At Fortin's Restaurant, where he worked day and night, Dad was everyone's best friend. People talked about his big heart, how he hired people down on their luck and brought poor kids to Yankees games.

He was small, stout and intensely private, a nail-hard World War II veteran who despised any form of whining and flinched from physical affection. He always pulled away when his son tried to embrace him.

The Fortins didn't sit around talking about feelings. It wasn't that kind of family. But there was always baseball. "The Mick hit one tonight," Dad would tell his son.

As a high school freshman in Waterbury, Conn., one day after school, young Fortin stood outside the locker room studying the starting lineup of the baseball team. He couldn't find his name.

That night, he waited in terror for his father to come home. "Well, did you make the team?" were the first words out of his mouth.

He had to tell him. Dad's pained, disappointed look penetrated him like a stiletto. Dad just shook his head and walked out of the room.

His father promptly moved the family to nearby Naugatuck so Fortin could try out for the Greyhounds of Naugatuck High. This time, he made the lineup.

On the day they divvied up the pinstriped jerseys, Fortin lunged for No. 7. Another kid, tough and tall and big, had the same idea. They scuffled. There was no way Fortin was going away with another number. He was Mickey Mantle. He wore it for the next two years.

Fortin stood 5-8 and weighed maybe 155 pounds, so he compensated by playing with maximum aggression. His name made him a natural target. So did the suit and tie Dad made him wear to school.

His dad would drop him off in one of the new Cadillacs he bought every couple of years. Classmates saw Fortin climb out of the big blue DeVille with the snow-white leather interior and thought, "Spoiled rich kid."

One day, Fortin got broken up about a girlfriend who cheated on him and stormed out of the house. His dad rolled up in his Cadillac and ordered him inside.

"Maybe the coach was right about you," he said. "You'll never make it as a ballplayer."

The coach was a local legend who barked like a drill sergeant and badgered his teams to championships.

I've got to be honest with you, the coach had told his father. I know a real ballplayer when I see one, and your kid will never be a real baseball player.

That ripped Fortin in half, and he wept there in the car, before the father who despised tears.

There was no choice but to prove them both wrong. When the coach told him to run, he did 17 laps with a sprained ankle, to show he was tough enough.

With Fortin batting leadoff and playing centerfield, the Naugatuck Greyhounds were spectacular. In his junior and senior years, 1970 and 1971, they went undefeated and took the state championship.

The crowds were large and boisterous. But when he went to the plate, his father's voice somehow always managed to find him, clear and loud, amid the din. Telling him, Don't be anxious, Mick.

His last year as a Greyhound, he made the all-New England All Star team and led the team in batting. "This little streak of greatness," Fortin calls it now, fishing a team plaque from his shelves of memorabilia.

It felt okay to be named Mickey Mantle then.

***

Fortin never made it to the pros. He didn't even try out for his college team at Florida Southern College in Lakeland. He was burned out on baseball by then and eager to know what the world held beyond the diamond. He didn't use his middle name.

He and his dad always seemed to be at loggerheads. Fortin loved the Beatles and the Doors and thought the war in Vietnam was stupid.

"Long-haired bastards," Dad would say, a phrase that encompassed modern musicians, antiwar marchers and anyone else he believed was ruining the country he'd fought for.

In the early 1970s, when Fortin dropped out of college and returned home to work in the family restaurant, his father picked him up at the airport to find him with sideburns, sandals and wild hair. Fortin wanted to look like all the other kids his age.

Dad didn't talk the whole drive home. If Fortin didn't play baseball, Dad had wanted him to attend West Point. Now he looked like every other worthless campus hippie.

"You broke his heart," Fortin's mother, Irene, told him.

One day, Dad disappeared abruptly on a trip to Las Vegas. Fortin was hurt, and when his dad returned he confronted him. What if the plane had crashed and we hadn't said goodbye?

Why would you care? his father replied. You'd just be happy to get my money.

They didn't talk for six months, passing each other with cold stares.

***

Fortin left the family business and sold insurance, and found his name was an asset.

"Tell 'em you had lunch with Mickey Mantle today," he'd say, and no one could forget.

He left Connecticut for Florida in the early 1990s, after an ugly divorce. He was afraid he'd do something stupid if he stayed.

Leaving his two kids behind drove him into a bottle. He thought of running his car into a wall. His daughter still doesn't talk to him.

A year ago, he met a woman online named Ann Randolph. She saw his picture and liked his build. She also saw pain and sadness in his eyes and wanted to help. They fell in love.

"He's got to be the best at everything," she says. When he loses at online chess, for example, "He gets really down on himself. He'll blame himself for 15 minutes over this stupid move he made."

She thinks he must have made a conscious effort, somewhere along the way, not to be his father. She sees it in the way he hugs and kisses his 23-year-old son, Brett.

Fortin named his son after the great Kansas City Royal, George Brett. But no one who meets the boy necessarily needs to know that.

"That was safe," Fortin says. "I didn't call him George Brett. I wouldn't do that to him."

***

Fortin idolized his Yankee namesake right up until the day he met him in the mid 1970s. He spotted Mantle in a Connecticut restaurant. The legend was a few years into his booze-drenched retirement.

"Hey Mick, I'm Mickey Mantle Fortin," he said excitedly. "I'm probably one of the first kids in the country named after you."

The Mick was drunk and belligerent.

"You think I really give a s---, kid?" Mantle said. "You know how many kids in this country are named after me? Don't bother me with that nonsense." That's how Fortin recalls it, at least.

After that, Fortin decided he wouldn't cross the street to shake the man's hand.

But when Mantle died in 1995, he skipped work for a week, shattered. For a while, he'd been trying to write a letter to Mantle, telling him what a curse his name had been, and how the brushoff had crushed him. There was nowhere to send it, now.

***

It would be easy to go to the courthouse, sign some papers and rid himself of the name forever. But he can't, out of respect for his father, and because of what happened in Waterbury Hospital in August 1984.

His dad was dying, just a few days from the end. His mind came and went.

Fortin wanted desperately to hug him. Even as cancer withered him over many months, Clarence Fortin kept pushing his son away.

Now, Fortin stood at his father's bedside and tickled his foot.

"Do you know who this is?"

"Yeah."

"Who is it?"

"It's my Mick."

He apologized to his father for all the ways he'd disappointed him. His dad said no, I'm sorry for all the ways I failed you.

For the first time he could remember, his dad told him he loved him. The disease had wasted his strong arms, but he embraced his son with the strength he had left.

Fortin forgave his dad everything then, even for the six months they didn't talk, even for the name.

They cried together and said goodbye, and didn't say a word about the Yankees, much less No. 7.

-- Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Christopher Goffard can be reached at 727 893-8650 or goffard@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 11, 2005, 19:18:26]