Between his time as a player and broadcaster, Mike Krukow has been part of the San Francisco Giants for more than 40 years. His first memories of Willie Mays go back even longer.
A day after Mays’ passing, Krukow went on KNBR’s Murph & Markus to talk about Mays with hosts Brian Murphy and Markus Boucher.
Krukow shared a story of his mom, who he said “Loved baseball. And she was a good player.” When Krukow was a kid growing up in Southern California, his mother would reward him with baseball cards. One day while dropping him off, she gave Krukow a pack of cards and had him open them.
“And on this particular day, now I’m seven years old and I’m looking through and she goes ‘Oh.’ And she reaches across and she pulls out a card of Willie Mays. She goes, ‘You don’t need this one. He’s a Giant.’ And she took it. And I didn’t know any better, I was seven years old…And I didn’t think anything of it.”
Krukow then recalled being about 15 when his mom asked him to get her wallet so she could check her Irish Sweepstakes ticket.
“So I go in there and I get her wallet and I look for it. And it was right there, in her wallet. Next to that baseball card. She had kept it.”
Following the 1982 season, Krukow was traded to the Giants. And while Mays was long retired by that point, playing for the franchise that Mays played for was a big deal to his mother.
“She was so excited because she said, ‘You’re gonna get to meet Willie Mays,'” Krukow recalled. “And I did I did and it was in spring training.”
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Krukow then recalled the meeting. After putting a Giants uniform on for the first time, he went to the bathroom to find a mirror to see how it looked.
“And I put on the Giants uniform and it meant a lot to me. When I go to get a cup of coffee and I turn around in the little area where the coffee was and who comes walking out but Willie Mays. And guess what? He had the same uniform that I had on. And that’s when it hit me. That’s when it was like, ‘Oh my God. I’m playing for the same team that Willie Mays played for and starred for. And that just, you know, that started the relationship.
“He was the Say Hey Kid,” Krukow added. “In baseball, when they labeled you ‘The Kid,’ that means you got there way early. You were the kid. And everybody watched the kid. And not many guys got the nickname, The Kid. Gary Carter, Ken Griffey Jr. They were ‘The Kid.’ And they lived up to it. I mean, both Hall of Famers. But this was the Say Hey Kid. But you know, he never grew up. Willie Mays never grew up.”
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