Mantle enacts sombre ritual

Rupert Cornwell on the struggle of a baseball slugger who liked a slug

Few public spectacles are more poignant: the physical disintegration of a great athlete played out before an audience of millions - even when that disintegration is largely self-inflicted. Such, though, is the lot of Mickey Mantle, erstwhile boozer, hellraiser and baseball megastar. Five weeks ago he returned home to convalesce from a liver transplant. Now, it emerges, he is stricken with lung cancer.

Last week the 63-year-old Mantle was quietly readmitted to the same Texas hospital where, on 8 June, he was given a new liver to replace one destroyed by hepatitis, cancer and four decades of heavy drinking. Without it, he would have died in three weeks. But unbeknown to his doctors, the cancer had spread to his lungs. Had it been detected, they say, the transplant would never have gone ahead. That operation appears to have been successful. Now, all America hopes painful chemotherapy needed for the lung cancer will yield a similar result.

In the meantime, a ritual repeats itself in the space of less than two months: of live TV bulletins from Baylor Medical Center in Dallas, interspersed with grainy black and white newsreel clips reminding a younger generation of what Mantle was like in his prime - perhaps the fastest baserunner and certainly the most prolific switch-hitting slugger in baseball history. Mantle hit 536 home runs and won seven World Series during 18 years with the New York Yankees.

Mantle's story, of the Oklahoma farmboy who, after Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, rose to head a third great Yankee dynasty, captivated the country. Five years after his retirement in 1968, at the very first opportunity, he was elected unanimously to baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The private life of "The Mick", however, was anything but a role model.

Inside the game, his drinking was an open secret. It wrecked his marriage, and drove two of his three surviving sons - and finally Mantle himself - to clinics for alcoholics, while his fourth son, Billy Jnr, died last year of a heart attack while being treated for drug abuse. All along Mantle was convinced he would die early, like his own father and grandfather. "If I'd known I would live longer," he once said, "I'd have taken better care of myself."

Hence the predictable complaints that Mantle, who received his new liver just two days after his name was placed on an emergency list, was given special treatment because of his celebrity. And, argued the moralisers, should alcoholics be given a new liver, so they could start all over again?

In fact, by the time of the operation, Mantle had been off the bottle for almost two years, and finding so quickly a liver which matched his own seems to have been pure luck. In any case, any critics were drowned out by the millions more who reckoned a man who had provided so much pleasure to others deserved any special treatment that was going.

And now Mickey Mantle is playing out one of America's favourite roles, of the bad boy made good, the old soak who has seen the folly of his ways and, better late than never, metamorphosed into a model family man.

After a career like his, Mantle hardly needed to make public penance. But he has asked for forgiveness, and as he fights again for his life, he has received it.