Documentary explores Mays’ life on and off baseball diamond
In more than 30 years of filmmaking, Nelson George has been to a lot of movie premieres.
But the recent advanced screening of the documentary “Say Hey, Willie Mays!” at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco was one of a kind.
“This was very different — this was like a home team screening,” said George, the film’s director. “There are laughs and insight and emotion that you’re not going to get elsewhere. We screened it in New York, and it was fine, but it wasn’t the same as being in the ballpark.”
There was a ballpark feel to the 100-year-old theater for the West Coast premiere of the documentary about the Giants legend, which recently debuted on HBO.
The hundreds of invited Giants fans at the premiere hooted and hollered throughout the showing and at the panel beforehand. While Mays was not in attendance, the crowd was delighted when a surprise guest came on stage: Mays’ godson, Barry Bonds.
But the night and the film was truly about San Francisco’s first baseball star, which felt fitting to longtime Giants clubhouse manager Mike Murphy, who has worked for the Giants from the moment Mays and his teammates arrived out West in 1958.
“It couldn’t have happened to a better person,” Murphy said.
After an initial start with some of Mays’ top highlights from the back half of his career, the documentary weaves Mays’ story chronologically, paced to keep things moving but paint a full picture of each step along the way. There are interviews with Bonds,
Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal, Reggie Jackson, Dusty Baker and more people from in and around baseball.
George interviewed Mays in his home for the film and uses that footage throughout, but also uses over a dozen different points of archival footage of Mays speaking, going back as early as the 1950s. And there is plenty of baseball footage, too.
But Mays’ life outside of the foul lines is also explored, even if there are some touchy subjects. One part that may raise eyebrows is how as the Giants were moving to
San Francisco, Mays was initially prevented from purchasing a house because he was Black.
“No story that’s of a real heroic journey is a straight line of victory,” George said of the choice to dive into the housing issue. “His ability to overcome that and not to let hate fill his heart at all, I think that’s really important. That’s who he is. His ability to continue forward and to love San Francisco and not be turned off by that and to not internalize that around everyone in the city.”
The documentary also touches on criticism Mays received from the Black community, and specifically Jackie Robinson, of how Mays didn’t speak up for the civil rights movement. Mays’ response to Robinson is both shown on the screen and read aloud, and he is defended by several in the film, most notably Bonds.
The 90-minute running time means some parts of Mays’ life are skipped over, like how Mays was once banned from baseball because he took a job as a greeter for an Atlantic City casino. But in fitting with the theme of mentorship — both of those for Mays initially, then of Mays to others — the film concludes with Bonds’ relationship with his godfather and how Mays helped bring Bonds back to San Francisco in 1993 and the push to break the all-time home run record.
That relationship between godfather and godson is as strong as ever. Bonds briefly showed the West Coast premiere crowd a photo of Mays at home, watching the documentary, which Bonds said he has been doing “over and over again.”