This is the story of Willie Mays, a North Carolina lumberyard and a sculptor’s dream

On a summer day in 1999, William Behrends was in Wilmington, N.C., a port city on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, when he was driving past a lumberyard and finally found what he had been searching for.

A young worker — about 5-foot-10, 170 pounds — caught his eye, Behrends said. He was the one.

Behrends approached him, he said, and asked, “Would you like to be Willie Mays?”

Such interactions are awkward but necessary for sculptors such as Behrends, who specializes in molding sports trophies and statues. For people in his profession, human models perform a function that photographs can’t replicate.

“A picture tells you very little,” Behrends told The Examiner in a recent phone call from his home in North Carolina. “You think there’s more information there than there is. A sculpture is more than just a representation of a picture.”

Behrends had been looking for someone who fit Mays’ dimensions for weeks, ever since he was tasked with constructing a statue of the greatest San Francisco Giant of all time. The Giants were banking on the sculpture as the cornerstone of their new waterfront ballpark at China Basin.

“I mentioned Willie Mays, and his eyes lit up,” Behrends said about the young lumberyard worker. “He was very nice and cooperative about it. We did some sessions together, and he was very, very useful.”

More than a quarter-century later, the statue Behrends built has become one of the ballpark’s most enduring features — and in the last week, in has also served as a central memorial ground for Mays, who died of heart disease Tuesday at the age of 93.

“It was a surprise and a shock to me,” Behrends said. “He meant so much to American culture, to baseball, to so many people like me who grew up in their formative years watching him play the game. I’m still sort of working through it. It’s just sad.”

Fans have carpeted the base of the statue with flowers, handwritten letters, wreaths, candles and signs mourning the death of the legendary center fielder . More tributes are sure to pour in at the statue before Monday night, when the Giants are scheduled to play their first home game since Mays’ death.

“If you want to honor Willie, that’s where you go,” said Behrends, whose sister sent him pictures of the tributes. “I love that.”

If you’ve been to a game at Oracle Park, chances are good that you’ve uttered the words, “Meet me at Willie Mays.”

That was by design. Behrends said the nine-foot-tall bronze sculpture, which depicts Mays’ iconic swing, stands on a granite pedestal erected not just as a platform where people can take pictures, but also as a bench for fans to sit and wait for their friends.

“We wanted it to be a little crossroads or a meeting point for people,” he said.

Over his more than 50 years as a sculptor, Behrends has built dozens of sports trophies and statues, including the other four statues around Oracle Park that depict Mays’ fellow Giants and Hall of Fame inductees Gaylord Perry, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, and Juan Marichal. (Behrends said he had to find a yoga instructor to model Marichal because that was the only person who could come close to duplicating his abnormally high leg kick .)

But building Mays’ statue hit closer to his heart than almost any other project, he said.

Behrends was born and raised in Wisconsin but spent his summers in Chicago, where he spent countless days watching baseball at Wrigley Field. He made sure to be in the stands whenever the Giants and Willie Mays were in town to play the Cubs.

“Willie Mays was the guy. He was my hero,” he said. “When I played Little League baseball, my batting stance was Willie Mays.”

So it was an emotional moment when Peter Magowan, the late former managing general partner of the Giants — who was central to the team staying in San Francisco and the development of Oracle Park — selected Behrends, among a small number of prospective craftsmen, to sculpt the statue.

“It doesn’t get much better than that,” Behrends said. “You pinch yourself.”

One of the first choices the Giants and Behrends made was that the statue would not depict Mays’ most famous baseball moment — his game-saving over-the-shoulder catch in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series. The problem was that “The Catch” occurred at the Polo Grounds while the Giants were still playing in New York City.

The Giants wanted to immortalize Mays with a moment in San Francisco. They wanted to showcase “who Willie Mays was, and was to the Giants,” Behrends said. “They wanted the symbol of the franchise right at the front of the park.”

Former Giants Vice President Mario Alioto, who worked for the team for more than 30 years, including when Oracle Park was built, said they chose this specific pose of him swinging because it had “movement to it.”

“It’s not just him standing there,” Alioto said. “There’s movement to his swing and you can see him almost stepping towards first base There’s grace in the way he played, and I think that statue shows that.”

Behrends said he also wanted to ensure the statue could be absorbed from all angles and recognizable from a distance.

“I want you to be able to say that’s Willie Mays before you see the number on his back or the image likeness on his face,” Behrends said.

James Hirsch, author of the Mays biography “Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend,” said the statue is “larger than life.”

“The statue embodies Willie,” he said. “What Willie accomplished was beyond the comprehension of so many people what he did on the field, no one has ever seen before or after ... the statue of him is appropriate.”

Behrends said he met Mays a handful of times as he worked on the sculpture, which took him roughly a year to complete. They discussed the statue, baseball and life.

And when Mays saw the finished product, Behrends said, he was overcome with emotion.

“I’m the luckiest man in the world,” Mays said in 2000 during the statue’s unveiling , just days before the Giants played their first game at what was then known as Pacific Bell Park. “I don’t want to talk too long because the tears begin to flow.”