The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (53 page)

“It was Milo Hamilton, the broadcaster,
²¹⁰
who really started doing the math and vocalizing that the record was there for him,” Minshew recalled. “And sometimes that created hard feelings. I remember one time Hank and Milo were in a feud and Hank said to me, ‘I can break this record if this guy would just leave me alone.’”

Along the way, on May 17, 1970, at weathered Crosley Field in Cincinnati, came hit number three thousand, a first-inning single off Wayne Simpson, the first time Henry had beaten Mays to a major milestone—Mays would reach three thousand two months later. Henry had become the first black player to record three thousand hits, the first player in baseball history to reach three thousand hits
and
hit five hundred home runs. He had always said he would retire following his three thousandth hit, but by this point his priorities had changed.

Willie would never surrender the stage easily to the man who had always played in his shadow. In Mexico City that day, Mays told the reporter that, yes, Henry would likely break Ruth’s record, but he didn’t stop there. Before walking away, he added halfheartedly, “Maybe I will, too.”

And for years, that’s how it would be. They were not friends, and if Henry’d had his way, they wouldn’t have been rivals, either, because Henry truly seemed to admire Willie. The two men lived the American story with more similarities than differences. Both were black children of the Depression-era South, the defining characteristic for each. Both were unparalleled on the baseball diamond. As they aged, the similarities increased. By 1972, both men had been divorced—Barbara filed in 1970, after seventeen years of marriage, citing mental cruelty. Henry did not contest the filing, saying only that they had “grown apart.” In the smoldering shadow of Robinson, neither man felt appreciated for his position on civil rights. Neither—because of his financial position and inherent conservatism with regard to power—lent enough personal clout to the elimination of the reserve clause, the rule that kept players bound to their teams for life, kept them from the money that would change the game. When Curt Flood took baseball to court, Aaron and Mays were both curiously silent. Allowing players to become free agents, Henry told the Associated Press, would be disastrous for baseball. Mays went a step further, criticizing Flood for being ungrateful to the game.

It was true that Henry Aaron was not uninterested in yapping back and forth in the papers and closed up about Mays to avoid the headaches of he-said/she-said journalism, but there was also something about Willie that wouldn’t allow a real friendship with Henry. Willie wouldn’t, or couldn’t, ever give Henry his due as a great player, and that inability on Mays’s part to acknowledge Henry as an equal was what really burned Henry.

Periodically, Mays would soften, both men apparently recognizing there was little margin for either in fostering a narrative of the two greatest black players, from the same state, no less, at each other’s throats.

“I’ll see how it goes,”
²¹¹
Mays said about pursuing the record along with Henry in February 1972. “But a long time ago I said Hank would pass me, and if I happened to quit within the next year or so or when he does, I’d be happy to present him with the ball that he hits out of the park.”

For years, they had fought for position, but in 1954 and part of 1958 and for the whole pivotal seasons of 1959 and 1969, they fought for pennants, too, their numbers virtually identical, their legacies cemented; they were the difference between New York and London—a can’t-miss either way, just depended on one’s preference. Over those years, Henry had gone out of his way to praise Mays. During the Fred Haney years, when he grudgingly accepted Haney’s decision to play him in center field, Henry would joke about how he would never make an all-star team because he now played the same position as Willie, a self-deprecating comment that underscored Henry’s admiration for Mays and his confidence in himself. In interviews, Henry did not miss an opportunity to say Willie was the best player going, and in later years he would acknowledge Mays’s contribution in easing the way for black players, first through his barnstorming team in the 1950s and later by becoming the first black team captain in baseball history. Mays was the first black player in the history of major-league baseball to be called the greatest player of all time by the mainstream, and Henry often concurred with the opinion. Around 1971, there was the story circulating around baseball about Tal Smith, then a young executive with the Houston Astros. The tale went that Smith kept two autographed baseballs at his home, side by side, one signed by Henry Aaron, the other by Willie Mays. One day, Smith’s house was burglarized and the thief swiped the Aaron ball, while leaving the Mays ball in its place. Henry handled the story deftly. “All that proves,” he said, “is that there’s a crook in Houston who can’t read.”

Willie returned the favor by giving Henry back nothing. When Henry began to soar up the home-run chart, Willie was loath to give even a partial nod to Henry’s ability, choosing instead to blame his own performance on his home turf, Candlestick Park, saying it was a lousy park in which to hit homers and that this was the reason for Henry’s onrush. The disadvantages of Candlestick were especially obvious in comparison to that bandbox Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium, famously dubbed “the Launching Pad.”

The problem wasn’t that Willie was a proud and fiery competitor, but that he didn’t give Henry
anything
, not even an acknowledgment that for the first twelve years of Henry’s career, he played in a symmetrical park, County Stadium, whose dimensions did not favor him, while Mays played the early part of his career at the Polo Grounds, where the foul lines did not even measure three hundred feet. Mays’s comment on the evening of April 27, 1971, in Atlanta, when Henry hit career blast number six hundred, ironically against San Francisco, was a prime example of this attitude. “Hank might just catch Ruth,” Mays said backhandedly after the game. “He’s playing in the right parks.”

Willie never hit well in Milwaukee, for power or for average. From 1953 until 1965, Mays hit in County Stadium as a visiting player in his prime years and tallied a .289 average with thirty home runs in 199 games. Yet in his 2010 authorized biography of Mays, the author James S. Hirsch wrote, “Mays believes he would have hit eight hundred homers if he had not gone into the military and played in parks like Aaron’s.” That was what burned Henry: Willie couldn’t stop slapping him in the face.

Mays did lose two years to the army, and certainly at twenty-one and twenty-two, he would have had a better-than-average opportunity to record the fifty-five home runs he would fall short of to surpass Ruth. So much of why the relationship between Mays and Aaron was perceived, often rightly, as tense, if not acrimonious, stemmed from their personalities—the self-centered Mays and the diplomatic Aaron.

After years of being asked about his own feats, Mays almost certainly must have resented at some level being asked now more about Henry. Take the end of spring training, when, during an interview session, Henry was asked about his chances to catch Ruth. “I think I can make it if I stay healthy and if I have a strong man batting behind me, so they won’t pitch around me.”

When the scribes asked Mays the same question, Willie’s response said it all: “Well, he has to catch me first.”

M
AYBE
M
AYS DIDN’T
mean to sound like a jealous rival. Maybe it was simply Willie’s professional nod to the cruelty and unpredictability of the fates, for it was true that to reach the top shelf, everything had to go right: You had to play in the right park at the right time, you had to avoid missing time, and you couldn’t get hurt. Ted Williams might have been the one to beat Ruth, had the Splinter not missed nearly five years to war, and played in a park, Fenway Park, where the right-field power alley was a cavernous 380 feet. Williams was generally considered the best hitter who ever lived, but he hadn’t reached three thousand hits. Neither, for that matter, had Ruth or Gehrig. Maybe it wasn’t jealousy, but it sounded that way. It sounded as though Willie couldn’t accept the truth: Mays had the memories and the prose, but statistically, Henry had the numbers.

And that wasn’t all there was. For his generation, Mays exemplified the rare combination of physical, athletic genius and a showman’s gift for timing. What went less reported and, as the years passed, became an uncomfortable, common lament was just how cruel and self-absorbed Mays could be.

The veracity of one story would never be completely ascertained because Henry would refuse to discuss the details, but Reese Schonfeld never forgot it, and he believes every word of it to be true. Schonfeld would make his career in the television business, becoming a business associate of Ted Turner during the early years of the rise of cable television.

But in the summer of 1957, Schonfeld was just a kid, twenty-five years old, in Boston, excited to be sent to the Polo Grounds to interview the hottest player on the hottest team in baseball, Henry Aaron, and getting paid fifty dollars for the assignment.

“It’s July 1957,
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I’m working for United Press/Movietone news, and I’m up at the Polo Grounds, on assignment from WBZ Boston to interview Milwaukee Braves manager, Fred Haney, left-hander Warren Spahn, and the new phenom, Hank Aaron. WBZ wanted the interviews to promote the upcoming Jimmy Fund baseball game between the Braves and the Red Sox. The Jimmy Fund had been created by the Braves when they were still the Boston Braves, and they returned to Boston every year to help raise money for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the name of ‘Jimmy,’ a pseudonym for a twelve-year old boy who was a patient there. It was Aaron’s first appearance in the game, and his potential for greatness was apparent to all. The Boston fans wanted to see him in action.

“The Braves were playing the Giants in a twi-night double-header. We arrived about five p.m., set up our camera in foul territory, just off third base. Haney emerged from the dugout, did the interview, plugged the Jimmy Fund, and then sent out Warren Spahn. Spahn told us how much he missed the fans in Boston and looked forward to seeing them shortly. All good PR. Then out came Aaron. Aaron was different. The Boston fans had never seen Aaron. WBZ had asked me to talk to him about baseball, particularly about his wrists, supposed to be ‘the quickest wrists in all of baseball.’

“As we changed film for the new interview, Willie Mays came trotting in from center field, where he had been shagging flies, and knelt just on the fair side of the foul line. Dusk was falling, we had no electrician, and I had to finish the interview before the light faded entirely.

As we focused on Aaron, the cameraman measuring the distance between the lens and his subject, Mays started ragging on Aaron: ‘How much they paying you, Hank? They ain’t payin’ you at all, Hank? Don’t you know we all get paid for this? You ruin it for the rest of us, Hank! You just fall off the turnip truck?’

“Aaron is getting more and more agitated. Fred Haney trots out and explains to Aaron: ‘It’s the Jimmy Fund—it’s charity. It’s okay.’ We begin the interview then to get a better shot of his wrists; we move the tripod. Now Mays lays it on thick: ‘You showin’ ’em how you swing? We get paid three to four hundred dollars for this. You one dumb nigger!’ And he laughs. Finally we were done. Aaron shakes his head, I thank him, but half angry, half bewildered, he spits at my feet.

“When he gets back in the dugout, Haney tries to calm him down. It doesn’t work. Mays has gotten into Aaron’s head. Haney recognizes it and takes Hank out of the lineup. He plays not at all in the first game; in the second game he pinch-hits and walks. Willie had harassed Hank right out of the batting order. The
New York Times
cites the Mays-Aaron ‘years of friendship.’ I wouldn’t bet on it.”

If the idea that Henry Aaron, leading candidate for National League Most Valuable Player and one of the toughest, most focused clutch players in the history of the game, could be psyched out of the lineup by pregame chatter, even from Willie Mays, sounded apocryphal, it was. On July 21, 1957, just as Schonfeld recalled, the Giants and Braves did play a twi-night doubleheader at the Polo Grounds. In the first game, the Braves behind Spahn held a 4–3 lead into the bottom of the ninth, but the Giants rallied for two runs off Don McMahon and won, 5–4. Mays went one for three with a double and a run scored. Schonfeld’s memory fails him in that Henry
did
play in the first game, walking as a pinch hitter in the eighth. Dick Cole pinchran for Henry.

Henry did not play in the nightcap, a 7–4 Braves win, but it seems apparent that his absence had nothing to do with Mays. Four days earlier, in a 6–2 win in Philadelphia, Henry went on a rampage, a perfect day: three for three with a mammoth home run off Harvey Haddix, two batted in and two walks, one intentional. In that game, he injured his ankle. He missed the next three games and wouldn’t start again until July 23 in Milwaukee against the Phillies. The ankle injury, and not Mays’s banter, is the more likely explanation for why Haney would scratch Henry before a doubleheader in the middle of a pennant race. It also explained why Henry, second only to Bruton as the fastest man on the Braves, would be removed for a pinch runner in a tight ball game. Clearly, he had attempted to return to the lineup too early and couldn’t run.