Mickey Mantle Jr., who struggled with the expectations accompanying the son of a baseball icon and the travails that afflicted his family far from the public eye, died Wednesday at a hospital in Dallas. He was 47.

The cause was complications of cancer, his family said.

He had surgery for skin cancer on his neck in August 1998. His father, the Yankees' Hall of Fame center fielder, died of liver cancer in August 1995 at age 63. His brother Billy had Hodgkin's disease, cancer of the lymph system, then died of a heart attack in 1994 at 36.

Mickey Jr., the oldest of the four Mantle sons -- a switch-hitting outfielder like his father -- played amateur baseball in Florida as a teenager. At age 24, he joined the Yankee organization in the low minors. After one season, he moved to the Texas Rangers' farm system, but abruptly quit in the face of overwhelming news media attention.

''It was sick,'' he recalled. ''Not many 24-year-olds walk out of an insurance office and make the major leagues.''

Long after the reporters went away, the son struggled against the alcoholism that engulfed his father and other family members. He joined with his mother, Merlyn, and brothers David and Danny in remembering Mickey Mantle and telling of the troubled family in ''A Hero All His Life'' (HarperCollins, 1996).

''The most repeated stories about Dad and me involves the first time I went to a bar and tasted my first beer,'' he recalled in an interview with The Houston Chronicle last June. ''It wouldn't be worth telling, except that I was 3 years old.''

The Mantle boys would often drink with their father. ''That was the way real men partied,'' Mickey Jr. said. ''Those were years of ignorance, his and ours and society's.''

On his deathbed, Mantle asked his son to enter alcohol rehabilitation. Less than two months later, Mickey Jr. entered the Betty Ford Center in California, where his father had been treated in 1994.

In recent years, he worked in Dallas with his brothers Danny and David at the Mickey Mantle Foundation, which promotes organ donation. His father underwent a liver transplant two months before his death.

In addition to his brothers and his mother, he is survived by a daughter, Mallory.

''It was Mickey Mantle who kept saying what an awful father he was, not his sons,'' Mickey Jr. said. ''I thought he was a great dad. He wasn't what you would call a regular dad. But then he didn't lead what you would call a regular life.''

Mickey E Mantle