Early Life
Mays was born in Westfield, Alabama, just outside of Bessemer, Alabama. His father, who was named after president William Howard Taft, was a talented baseball player with the Negro team for the local iron plant. His mother, Annie Satterwhite, was a gifted basketball and track star in high school. His parents never married each other. As a baby, Mays was cared for by his mother's younger sisters Sarah and Ernestine. Sarah became the primary female role model in Mays' life. His father exposed him to baseball at an early age, and by the age of five he was playing catch with his father. At age 10, Mays was allowed to sit on the bench of his father's Industrial League games.
Mays played multiple sports at Fairfield Industrial High School, averaging a then-record 17 points a game in basketball and more than 40 yards a punt in football, while also playing quarterback. Mays graduated from Fairfield in 1950.
Read more about this topic: Willie Mays
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)