The “fun”, however, wrecked his family and consumed his life. Finally in 1993, his sons, who were first partners and then victims of his alcoholic binges, persuaded him to enrol for treatment at the Betty Ford clinic Thereafter he never had another drink But his liver had been irreparably damaged. A transplant in June offered hope, only for cancer to spread to his lungs and beyond.But the Mantle Americans will remember is not the frail, shrivelled old man of the final months, but the glistening athlete of baseball’s golden age. Of him Ted Williams, that immortal hitter of an earlier era, once remarked ungenerously that “Mantle should have been the greatest player who ever played baseball.” Perhaps with his God-given gifts, Mantle could have been even better had he worked at the game. After chronic leg injuries had forced him to give up the game in 1968, over 70,000 turned out at Yankee Stadium the following year to retire his No 7, an honour reserved for only the greatest practitioners of American sport.

Mantle not only replaced the peerless DiMaggio in centre field: in athleticism he surpassed him. But no statistics can capture the strength and hand-eye co-ordination that could send a baseball skimming like a one-iron shot into the bleachers.The power was coupled with a cheetah’s speed, both along the basepaths and in the outfield. Three times he was elected Most Valuable Player, in 1956, 1957 and 1962. In the first of those years he achieved the rare feat of the Triple Crown, with a batting average of .353, 52 homers and 130 runs driven in. On the all-time major league home run list he stands eighth with 536, with 18 coming in 65 World Series games. Whether from the left or the right side, his power was breathtaking. No one could hit a ball as hard; indeed he still holds the record for the longest ever measured home run, at 565 feet.

The 17 years he played in the Bronx encompassed the post-war boom in baseball, when television brought the sport to an audience of millions. Mantle was its undisputed mega-star.
Arguably, he was the greatest switch hitter in baseball history. The 20-year old slugger who began his career in 1951 became the incarnation of the third successive, all- conquering generations of New York Yankees, after Babe Ruth in the 1920s and early 1930s, and Joe DiMaggio in the following decade. From the outset he was legend writ large; the country kid from Oklahoma spotted by Yankee scouts, who came to New York and captured the big city by storm. With his broad grin and infectious laugh, Mantle was engaging enough even before he lifted a bat When he took one in his hands, he was electrifying. But Mantle will be remembered not as an alcoholic who changed his ways too late, but as the greatest baseball player of his time, indeed one of the very greatest of all time.

The closing stages of his life were scarred with illness, pain and personal sadness. By the end he had become a role model in reverse, a scarcely living advertisement for a way of life to be avoided. For Americans of a certain age, Mickey Mantle was and ever will be, quite simply, “the Mick”. As Harold Pinter said, on the publication of his Collected Shorter Poems (1993), “It’s astonish- ing that such a powerful and original poetic voice should have been so neglected.