I guess everybody knows I’ve been so lucky in my life, he said slowly, at a news conference at the Baylor University Medical Center.

I’ll never be able to pay it all back, but as soon as I get to feeling better I’m sure going to try.

It was a most poignant day for Mantle’s first public appearance since the life-saving, and, in some quarters, controversial, liver transplant he received on June 8a consequence of a lifetime of drinking and carousing.

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As Mantle, 14 times an all-star, spoke about his past troubles and his future hopes, the first players for tonight’s 66th All-Star Game were arriving for early practice at The Ballpark at Arlington, 25 miles away.

Shaky and frail and looking every one of his 63 years, Mantle said with a smile that he would not be able to make the game tonight, but that he’s been watching a lot of baseball on TV.

One of the things I wish I had taken more seriously, he said, was the All-Star Game. It was always like a party day.

Later, he told a story of flying from Dallas to Anaheim, Calif., for one all-star outing that lasted 16 innings, arriving from the airport in time to run out on the field and strike out, then hopping on the same plane back to Dallas to rejoin his friends at the bar.

Mantle’s speech had the tone of both a confessiona continuation of the hard-living story he first revealed in Sports Illustrated last yearand a rebirth. On May 28, when he entered Baylor with a hugely swollen abdomen and bone-crushing pain, doctors immediately surmised that Mantle was dying of not one, but three potentially fatal ailments:liver cancer, cirrhosis, and hepatitis. He had, at most, two weeks to live.

Placed on an emergency list for liver donors, a high-priority situation where the wait is an average of about three days, Mantle was criticized by some who thought his celebrity status ensured preferential treatment in swiftly securing the organ. His doctors and donor agencies have repeatedly stressed that was not the

see MANTLE, page 11

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