Mickey Mantle once slipped a female reporter a cutesy greeting card during an interview — with the message “Wanna f–k?” written inside.
In a new memoir, Diane Shah — the first female sports columnist for a major daily newspaper and longtime sports reporter — recalls sitting down with the Yankee legend in 1970 while he was a first-base coach for the team.
Shah writes in “A Farewell to Arms, Legs, and Jockstraps: A Sportswriter’s Memoir” that she asked Mantle how long he had been married. “Too long,” he answered.
“Then he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a greeting card. He handed it to me. The front showed a picture of flowers, and I assumed this was a card he intended to give his wife. I opened it. Inside, it said, ‘Wanna f - - k?’ He grinned.”
Shah continues, “I stared at the card. Had he bought this specially for me, or was this something he did all the time? I suddenly felt bad, but I wasn’t sure if it was for me or for him. I closed the card and — without a word — handed it back.”
She also asked the Mick what he did during the offseason and “he had replied that he liked to hunt and fish,” she writes. “I asked what he hunted, thinking maybe deer, grouse?”
Mantle replied with a naughty euphemism for a woman’s genitals.
Shah says she wound up at dinner with Mantle and his pals that night, where the slugger threw back drinks.
“As the evening wore on and Mantle kept drinking, he became tipsy and, at one point, nearly fell off his chair,” she writes. “Later, as we walked along Central Park South, he tripped on the curb at Sixth Avenue and — for one fleeting moment — oh, God — there was my hero, lying in the gutter. Mantle scrambled to his feet. ‘New shoes,’ he mumbled.”
Shah’s book is out Tuesday from Red Lightning Books.