A conversation about being the son of a man whose name was bigger than any room he ever walked into. Danny Mantle was the youngest of Mickey Mantle's four boys, born in 1960 into a Dallas house where his father was, for half the year, the most famous baseball player in America, and for the other half, a man carrying the weight of his own father's expectations behind him every day of his life. Mickey was not a Pee Wee dad. He did not teach his sons to throw a curve. By Danny's own telling, Mickey was afraid to push them, on account of what his own father Mutt had done to him, and he wanted his boys to have a childhood instead. That choice was a gift, and it was also its own kind of pressure, because the world still expected you to be a Mantle even if your father did not. This session is for the kids in the room who are carrying a name they did not pick, the kids being told they should be following in someone else's footsteps, and the parents trying to figure out where the line is between holding the door open and pushing their child through it.

Growing up Mantle