This is an opinion column.

It was a delicate step, a tentative step. A step back in time.

A step into his father’s childhood home. For the first time since he was a child.

Micheal Mays had already swashed through the overgrowth — Indiana Jones-like — that blocks the house in Fairfield where young Willie Mays once lived from view. A house that has endured at least one fire, squatters, and ransacking, no doubt. An abandoned once modest middle-class house where no one has likely lived (not legally) in maybe a decade.

The 65-year-old son of the greatest baseball player ever navigated the cluttered walkway and the three cement front steps, then stood for a few on the front porch and peeked through what was once a window to the right of the front door, now a burned-out hole.

He last visited the house in June, the same month, the same month his father died at the age of 93 (“I thought he’d outlive me,” Michael has told me. “Now, I’ve gone from the on-deck circle to the batter’s box.”) two days before Major League Baseball celebrated Mays and other Negro League Stars at Rickwood Field. At the oldest ballpark in America where the 17-year-old kid from Westfield, Alabama, a city that no longer exists, made his pro-ball debut.

Michael Mays pushed on the front door; it was not locked, of course. He stepped inside, gently onto the charred and rotting floor. One step, then two, until he stood in what was once a living room. In what was once a home.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I remember.”

Mays wants to buy the house, as I previously shared. It’s owned now by the City of Fairfield, part of the struggling municipality’s Land Bank. Many city officials didn’t even know of the neglected property’s royal lineage until word surfaced that Ben Yoder of Vestavia Hills submitted a bid for the house where the player he idolized as a youth once lived.

That bid (ahem) stalled, and now Mays and Yoder are in lockstep with an effort to buy and save the home.

Mays grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, of course, and now lives in Savannah Georgia. He’s grown closer and closer to Birmingham since his father’s death and has a unique vision for the Fairfield house, which is just a few blocks away from Willie Mays Park, where a diamond has seen better seasons, too.

He doesn’t want to live in the house; he wants it to lift young lives in and around Fairfield.

He sees it as the “clubhouse” for a new Willie Mays League, a youth baseball developmental program for players transitioning from leagues played on a 60- or 70-foot diamondto a regulation 90-foot diamond.

A clubhouse and more. “Call it a local youth sports resource center,” he says. “It’s where the Mays league will be run from, but at the same time, you can come here and find out about the football program, basketball programs. It’s a community sports center.”

Mays is standing in the front now. So are Yoder and Reggie Tobor, whose firm will oversee the renovation, if the structure can be saved. The ceiling and walls are charred, clearly burned out in spots. But there’s hope. “It’s not as bad as we thought it might be,” Tabor says.

Mays looks around, glancing to his left and right. “I was a kid in this space,” he says.

“Was that your bedroom?” I ask, pointing to a small room just on the other side of a door leading from the front room.

“Bedroom,” he says. “I slept on the couch.”

Soot covered everything, including burned-out chairs, floors, and pots still in the sink of what was the kitchen. It covered pillows, charred lamps, and household remains in the floor. Covered remnants of a home.

“I’m excited, but it’s a lot,” Mays said. “I’m glad to be here in good company. I’m confident we can restore it back to the way it was.”

Mays hopes to officially acquire the house soon. In the meantime, the trio will soon clean the haunting debris surrounding the house, a much-needed first step in re-introducing it to the surrounding, still-proud neighborhood and elevating it to a status befitting its legacy.

“We’ve crossed our ‘T’s, dotted our ‘I’s, and done our due diligence,” Mays says. “Our clean-up day will be the start of a process everyone wants.”

I was raised by good people who encouraged me to be a good man and surround myself with good people. If I did, they said, good things would happen. I am a member of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame, an Edward R. Murrow Award winner, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj.