Accounts of men sexually harassing women in the workplace have unfortunately ceased to be terribly surprising, but a new one featuring Yankees legend Mickey Mantle has arrived to remind us that men devising new and creepy ways to make women uncomfortable is by no means a recent phenomenon.
In a new memoir, sports reporter Diane Shah — the first female sports columnist for a major daily newspaper — details a strange encounter she had with Mantle while interviewing him back in 1970. According to Page Six, Shah’s memoir reveals that the Yankee star once hit on her with a lewd message in a greeting card.
After asking Mantle how long he had been married and receiving the reply, “Too long,” Shah recalls Mantle reaching inside his jacket and pulling out a greeting card.
“He handed it to me,” Shah writes in the memoir. “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 uck?’ He grinned.”
This unusual approach raises a number of questions, some of which Shah recalls asking herself: “I stared at the card. Had he bought this specially for me, or was this something he did all the time?” Either way, the journalist remembers simply feeling bad, “but I wasn’t sure if it was for me or for him.” Shah writes that she closed the card and handed it back “without a word.”
Naturally, the sexual harassment didn’t stop there. After Mantle revealed he liked to hunt and fish in the offseason, Shah dutifully asked what he liked to hunt, only to receive an answer Page Six only describes as “a naughty euphemism for a woman’s genitals.”
Cringeworthy puns are one thing, but back to the greeting card. Was this a thing that people did? Was slipping someone a sexy greeting card the 1970s version of sliding into their DMs? Did men like Mickey Mantle keep a supply of “Wanna fuck?” cards on them at all times in case they happened to run into a woman they wanted to harass? Had Mantle done this before? Did it usually work? Unfortunately, the Yankee star may have taken those answers with him to the grave. Then again, maybe that’s for the best.
Shah’s book, A Farewell to Arms, Legs, and Jockstraps: A Sportswriter’s Memoir, is out Tuesday from Red Lightning Books.
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