What did mickey mantle died of

Even before he was born into this world, Mickey Mantle was being prepared for life as a future big-league baseball player. His father, Elvin “Mutt” Mantle, a former semipro player and a lifelong baseball fanatic, proclaimed that if his first child turned out to be a boy, he would name him Mickey, in honor of Mickey Cochrane, who was the best catcher in baseball at the time.

And so, when Mutt’s wife, Lovell, delivered a boy on October 20, 1931, in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, they named the little slugger-to-be Mickey Charles Mantle. What the elder Mantle didn’t know at the time was that Cochrane’s actual first name was Gordon, and Mickey was just a nickname. Years later, the younger Mantle expressed relief that his father had not known Cochrane’s true first name, saying derisively, “I would have hated to be named Gordon.”1

By the time Mickey was 3 years old, the country was mired in the Great Depression. Like so many other able-bodied men, Mutt Mantle found himself unemployed and nearly broke when he moved the family to Commerce, Oklahoma, in 1934. Mutt had been lucky en

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