After hearing he'd recently passed away at 93, I decided to learn more about the great Willie Mays. Hardly knew much beyond his celebrity status as a baseball legend and *real-life status as Barry Bonds' godfather. Thankfully, this profile goes into a lot more depth! Say Hey takes a valiant stab at communicating the enormity of Willie's cultural influence some ~50 years after he retired. It touches on all the "bases" of his life from Fairfield to Birmingham to Harlem to San Francisco, and shares entertaining anecdotes from each stop.
By interviewing icons like Bob Costas, Vin Scully, Dr. Harry Edwards, Jon Miller and Bonds himself, Say Hey also frames his career within the broader American context. It outlines his real and perceived responsibilities - both on and off the diamond - to assess his full impact. Though he took some heat for being soft-spoken during an era of vocal activism and protest, I felt he explained himself rather well: "I can't stand on a soapbox and preach. Martin Luther King Jr and Roy Wilkins are better equipped for that than I am... I've worked for Job Corps and I don't know how many kids groups I've addressed, and will continue to address. In my own way I believe I'm helping, and in my heart my way is just as important as Jackie Robinson's way. I believe understanding is the important thing... because we are all God's children fighting for the same cause."
Such moments of grace and perspective are dotted throughout the movie and juxtapose Willie's everyman kindness alongside his unique athletic talent. By the end we see what Costas means when he shrugs, "Willie Mays was as much about joy as greatness." His life was a fine story and this film does a fine job of telling it.
