The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (55 page)

T
HE RECORD WAS
going to be broken on his watch, Bob Hope thought, and on whatever night it occurred, it had to be a moment that would be remembered for all the right reasons. The first game of the home stand, Monday night, April 8, against the Los Angeles Dodgers, would be the first test of Bob Hope’s expectations and preparations. Henry’s father, Herbert, would throw out the first ball. Maynard Jackson and Jimmy Carter would be there. The team had arranged for Pearl Bailey, one of Henry’s favorite vocalists, to sing the national anthem. The actor Sammy Davis, Jr., who had been periodically involved in trying to put together a movie deal for a biopic of Henry’s life, would try to attend. Everything would be perfect. Hope believed that the night the record fell was not going to be just something that baseball fans remembered but that it would be a demarcating line in American history, another seminal moment signaling that whatever America was, it would no longer be from that day forward. That was why the naked people frightened him so much. They were the unpredictable variable. They were the one thing that could turn a seminal moment in America into a sideshow.

T
HE ENTIRE WINTER
reminded Henry of what he wasn’t able to do in 1973. On September 1, Henry stood at 706 home runs. There was nothing else to that season for the Braves, who epitomized the word
mediocre
. They had reached the .500 mark just once during those 162 games, when Henry broke a 1–1 tie in the sixth on April 12 in San Diego with career home run number 675, this one off willowy left-hander Fred Norman. The Braves won the game 3–2 and their record was 3–3, after which they would lose seven straight, and by that time, the competitive portion of the season was effectively over. The rest of the year was focused more on Henry and Calvin Wardlaw and Carla Koplin and hate mail than on winning the National League West flag.

At certain points, his stoicism would lapse, and Henry would then reveal just how sick of it all he had gotten. In the great pantheon of the game, only Ruth had hit seven hundred home runs, and during the challenge march came another drumbeat: There was only one Ruth. Baseball people, the crusty old-timers like Bob Broeg in St. Louis, made a point that Henry may have produced numbers but that Ruth was bigger than the game, the universe, life itself. Henry had played more games than Ruth, had come to bat a gazillion more times, and would have had to hit 250 homers in a season to outhomer every team in the league, as Ruth had done in 1921, and therefore Henry was not the man Ruth was. The comparisons were endless, and to Henry, they were insidious in their obvious insinuations that he was not worthy of the record.

The exact date Henry’s imperturbability seemed closest to cracking was July 17, 1973. Nine days earlier, at Shea, he had single-handedly trashed the Mets—two for three, two homers—crushing the big left-hander George Stone. Stone was built like a house, six-three and 210 pounds. He and Henry had been teammates for six years in Atlanta, but now George was a Met, and Henry took him over the fence in the fourth and then again in the sixth. On the thirteenth, Bill Stoneman, the Montreal pitcher, threw Henry a mistake with two on in the fifth in Atlanta for a three-run homer and home run number 697.

On the seventeenth, against Philly, Dusty Baker, as only he and Garr could, cornered Henry in the dugout to try to pull him out of the darkness with humor. He hadn’t homered in five days and had grown weary of the constant cosmic question of when he would hit number seven hundred. He was tense, annoyed, and exasperated, but he hadn’t snapped. Baker saw that Henry walked around the clubhouse as if he were wearing a beauty mask, trying hard not to move a single muscle in his face. Baker angled up to Henry, holding the knob of the bat as a microphone, imitating Howard Cosell. “Hank, what do you have to do to hit seven hundred home runs?” he asked.

On this day, even Baker couldn’t rescue Henry. He had not come this close to cracking since he blew up at Milo Hamilton years earlier, a confrontation so involved that Bartholomay and the front office had to broker a peace treaty. But now, Henry was having a Roger Maris moment, Ralph Garr thought. Once, in 1961, when asked one time too many if he believed he could break Ruth’s single-season home-run record, Maris finally cracked, responding in a group interview session, “How the fuck should I know?”

But even on the edge, Henry did not break. He composed and steeled himself. There had been weaker, despairing moments, like the time the writers had at last left his locker after a home game and he turned to Bob Hope and pleaded softly to be left alone. “I just want to play baseball. That’s it.” Hope realized that Henry began to tear up; he was talking more to himself than to Hope.

At this moment, Henry looked at Baker, one of his protégés, gave a wan smile, and said before walking away, “How? Hit three more home runs. That’s how.”

Hours later, up 6–1 on the Mets in the sixth, Henry belted a Tug McGraw meatball into the left-center bull pen. Three days later against the Phillies, facing Wayne Lee Twitchell, another man-mountain at six-six, 220 pounds, Henry stepped in, down 5–0, with one out in the seventh, and cranked another; this one glanced off the BankAmericard sign in left-center field. The next day, the steamy Saturday afternoon of July 21, Ken Brett, with one on in the third, threw a weak fastball that Henry crunched into the seats in left, over the bull pen, and seven hundred was complete. The Braves immediately painted the seat red to commemorate the moment.

Only 16,236 fans showed up for Henry’s seven hundredth, the Atlanta fan base thereby solidifying its reputation for being ambivalent to baseball. That wasn’t even the worst of it, which happened to be the official baseball response to Henry’s achievement. Nothing. Not a phone call or telegram congratulating him from Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball.

For two years, Henry had played it cool where baseball was concerned. He said nothing bothered him, not the pressure of the chase, not the hate mail, not the death threats that arrived by the bucketful so often on stained composition paper, the suffocating press coverage, or even the unwinnable comparisons to Ruth.

Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner, however, had insulted Henry. It would never be quite clear why Henry held Kuhn in such high esteem. The two had no previous history and it wasn’t as if this commissioner was particularly fond of the players. Marvin Miller had been installed as the head of the surging Major League Baseball Players Association and he had begun to establish a new, empowering orthodoxy: The commissioner was not your friend. The commissioner was not your ally. The commissioner was not impartial. The commissioner of baseball, despite the rhetoric of using his power in the “best interests of baseball” actually used his power in the best interests of the clubs. After all, the owners hired the commissioner. If the commissioner were a nonpartisan advocate for players and owners alike, the players would have input in who actually got the job and who kept it. There was, too, the biggest of disconnects that Miller passionately imparted to the black players: No commissioner ever used his “best interest of the game” power to integrate the sport. One—Landis—actively kept blacks from playing, for it was not a coincidence that integration moved quickly after Landis’s death in 1944. Nevertheless, Henry seemed to possess respect for the office of the commissioner. He was, if nothing else, a believer in the hierarchy.

If Henry had his reasons for his drive toward beating Ruth’s record, people like Bowie Kuhn represented an important motivation. Kuhn was a member of the baseball establishment, first a longtime lawyer for the league before being elected commissioner in 1969. He was arrogant and uninterested in the larger tapestry of black achievement or in much beyond maintaining the power of the elite. Kuhn was an unimpressive thinker, unable to recognize the speed of change taking place in his sport and society in general. He was unprogressive, and his inability to acknowledge the reserve clause as untenable (and recognize Marvin Miller’s superior intellect) cost the owners billions of dollars and years of control. His comportment was one of a man who believed himself above being held accountable to players. He was condescending and seemed totally unaware that Henry saw right through him.

The commissioner would say that he did not want to set the precedent of congratulating every player for their daily milestones—hitting for the cycle, their 100th double, 135th win, and 1,000 th hit—as if he or any baseball fan had been fans when both Ruth and Aaron had reached their individual milestones. He assured Henry that he hadn’t shown up for his seven hundredth because he was saving his appearance for the
big one
, when Henry broke Ruth’s record. As the news cycle mushroomed, Kuhn and Henry conversed days later and the commissioner made Henry a promise: “I’ll be there for seven hundred and fifteen.”

Two weeks later, before the Braves played the finale of three games the perennially lost Cubs, the Reverend Jesse Jackson invited Henry to be the breakfast speaker at a gathering sponsored by Jackson’s organization, Operation Push. During the late 1960s, as Jackson and Henry both gained national prominence, the two formed a budding friendship. At a south-side storefront, Henry was greeted by an overflow crowd of black Little League teams, black Boy Scout troops, and community organizers. Standing tall and athletically next to Henry, Jackson wore an olive T-shirt with green horizontal stripes and a dark collar, sporting a full Afro, a mustache, and muttonchop sideburns. Jackson was thirty-one at the time and had been a collegiate athlete. With his familiar oratory, Jackson introduced Henry:

He refused to defile his body
²²⁰
and refused to have his mind defiled, and because he’s overcome staggering odds we look to him as a success model, as one who represents the very best in our people. When we look at Hank, there’s something on the outside in his presence that tells us that we can achieve, and because he’s just like us, there’s something on the inside that tells us that we deserve to achieve, and if he can any man can.

Henry stepped to the podium and addressed the crowd. A poster stood on the wall behind him, red bordered in gold, in the center a black silhouette of the African continent. Henry was dressed fastidiously but stylishly—a brown suit and eggshell shirt—a brown striped tie with a double Windsor knot:

I would like to read to you
²²¹
this morning a letter I received from Chicago and I consider this a real good letter, considering some of the letters I’ve gotten in the past, and it reads as follows:

Why are they making such a big fuss about you hitting 700 home runs? Please remember you have been to bat 2700 more times than Babe Ruth. If Babe Ruth came to bat 27 [
sic
] more times he would have hit 814 home runs. So Hank, what are you bragging about? Let’s have the truth: you mentioned if you were white, they would give you more credit. That’s ignorant. Stupid. Hank, there’re three things you can’t give a nigger: a black eye, a puffed lip, or a job.”

In delivering the punch line, Henry gave a genuine laugh, because even gallows humor could be funny in the right crowd, and here with Jackson, surrounded by black faces, he was protected, in a positive environment, by his people. He beamed the thousand-watt smile that had been suppressed by fog for the previous two years, the one that even Dusty Baker could not lift. Then he continued:

And it went on to say the Cubs stink, stink, stink, and gave me a phony name and address at the end. But these are the kind of letters I receive, and when I was talking about hate mail, this is a good one compared to some of the others. So I consider this a good one. Things like this just make me push a little harder, because just as Reverend Jesse Jackson said, first of all, growing up in Mobile, Alabama being a black person, I already realized I had two strikes against me, and I certainly wasn’t going to let them get the third strike against me. I figured that being a baseball player, there was only one way to go, and that was up.

A few hours later, Henry hit home run 702 at Wrigley, and then 703 and 704 the next two nights at Jarry Park in Montreal. The next one came at home, against the Cardinals, off of a weak slider from the Canadian right-hander Reggie Cleveland. He hit seven during the month of September, to finish with forty for the season, but, sitting on 713 on the final day of the season in Atlanta, in his final at bat, with the Aaron shift on against Houston pitcher Dave Roberts, he popped up weakly to second. It was over until 1974.

I
T HAD ALWAYS
been true that Henry found his solitude in the winter, when the baseball season had finally ended. The regular season provided no respite. At home, Henry was smothered under the crush of interview requests and public appearances. On the road, Henry had set up an elaborate plan to create a sliver of privacy: two hotels on the road, one that remained empty under the name Henry Aaron, the other—where Henry actually slept—listed under the alias A. Diefendorfer. When he was young, Henry would find the most secluded spot on Three Mile Creek and sit on the banks of the river in Toulminville, fishing and skipping rocks, usually with his friend Cornelius Giles, hidden from view. At thirty-nine, he took to the water anew, on the seventeen-foot speedboat he’d bought as a refuge, first going out into Polecat Bay and then north up the Spanish River toward Grand Bay. Henry also owned a twenty-seven-foot cabin cruiser, which he would use when he ventured south into larger bodies of water, taking down into the mouth of Mobile Bay and beyond. “It’s the only place,”
²²²
he said of his boats in 1973, “where the phone doesn’t ring.”

That Henry escaped along the rivers toward the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico was somewhat incongruous, for his mother, Stella, had always discouraged him from going near the water. Even now, when he was almost forty, the owner of two boats, Henry could not swim well enough to save his own life. Yet, throughout his periods of turmoil, it was the inky waters of Mobile Bay to which he turned for catharsis. His routine was often the same: He would arrive in Mobile without warning, sneaking in a day or so early. Quite often, he would not even tell Herbert or Stella that he would be arriving, for with fame there was never any such thing as a secret. But the locals in Mobile, the ones who worked in the restaurants and the hotels, always knew when Henry was coming to town. The good ones, the ones who knew a day early, would understand, of course. But the ones who weren’t connected, who found out that the great Aaron had just blown through town, unseen
(again)
, began to wonder just what Henry held against Mobile, so concretely and for so long. The locals were proud of him; that was all. They couldn’t exactly be blamed, either, for it was no secret that Henry’s relationship with Mobile was complicated. Even when he was in his mid-seventies, there would be people in Mobile who believed Henry could never quite forgive the city for its past, for what it had done to Herbert and to so many other black men. But during the fall and winter months of 1973, Henry did not advertise his visits anywhere. One day of warning could ruin the entire purpose of the trip, which was to escape, to indulge in a moment of peace.