The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (56 page)

Safely in Toulminville, Henry would contact his brother Hebert junior, who would contact Joseph Coleman, one of Henry’s old classmates, who was known as an expert with a boat, rod, and reel. Calvin Wardlaw, always armed, always watching, would be with them, as well. Sometimes, there were others, but those invitees always came at a moment’s notice. On the water, Calvin enjoyed Henry best. Henry would reminisce about Mobile, point out the physical markers of his history, drift into the years that belonged to him, long before he was Hank. And it was in these moments, too precious to last, when Henry recharged, watching Joe Coleman, soft-bellied and shirtless, his torso mimicking the winding river: vertical for a moment before curving wide and growing expansive. Herbert junior looked casual in his plaid pants, the group sauntering down the river in search of croakers and bass. Croakers were the toughest ones to catch, Henry said, because once caught, their gills popped out, felt like needles.

Henry would sit in the boat,
²²³
his legs dangling over the bow, like a twelve-year-old surrounded by grown-ups, the only man of the group who always wore a life preserver. He would sit on the edge of the boat, rod in his right hand, soaking in the pieces of himself that seemed so difficult to keep, immersed less in the camaraderie than in the serenity surrounding him, the chopping waters, hunched trees, and faint lavender of the wisteria, the elements upon which he would rely for regeneration.

I
N
D
ECEMBER
1973, Henry announced he had signed a five-year, one-million-dollar personal-services contract with the television manufacturer Magnavox. Henry would do commercials, make public appearances on behalf of the company, and grace virtually every Sunday paper in the country, standing next to a shiny Magnavox color TV in a full-page ad.

To the outside world, Henry stood in an enviable position; the breaking of Ruth’s record would produce even greater financial opportunities. He was already the highest-paid star in the game. Things were moving quickly. Sammy Davis, Jr., flew Henry to Beverly Hills to discuss a movie project, tentatively titled
The Hank Aaron Story
.

What was not so well known at the time was that Henry was teetering on the verge of financial collapse, and he had signed the exclusivity deal with Magnavox (though he likely could have commanded more than a million) as a sure way to begin reversing his sinking finances. When he first arrived in Atlanta, he teamed with a consortium of white businessmen for a barbecue restaurant start-up in southwest Atlanta. The restaurant was called Hammerin’ Hank’s, and the initial goal of the business plan was for the first restaurant to be the centerpiece of a powerful local chain. The restaurant disappeared faster than one of Henry’s home-run balls into the night. Not long thereafter, Henry connected with another business partner, who enticed him to think big and invest in sugar futures, a risky enterprise, which sounded better than it actually was. When he looked at the balance sheet, Henry saw he had lost twenty thousand dollars.

Then, soon after Henry signed the richest contract in baseball history, came the big fall. In the spring of 1972, Henry finalized a three-year, $200,000 contract. He immediately teamed with two investment bankers (men he would refuse to name) and gave them power of attorney—which is to say, complete control over his finances. His paychecks were signed over directly to them. The firm invested his money for him, and it was so easy, he was told, he didn’t have to lift a finger. Over the ensuing months, Henry proceeded to hit home runs, make the all-star team, and lose his shirt. Finally, his secretary, Carla Koplin, suggested that he hire an auditor to check out where his money was going and investigate the firm’s legitimacy. Henry would tell the story that when the auditors arrived, they found that the firm did not exist. Their offices were vacated and the two men had blown town.

The swindle had damaging implications. Following the 1965 season, Henry had begun thinking about his future beyond baseball. He had just completed his twelfth season and started to take the long view that he naturally could not play forever. In 1966, for the first time, he began deferring portions of his salary for when he retired, so he would still receive income. That year, Henry’s salary was $70,000 and he deferred $20,000 for future payment. The following year, Henry received a raise to $92,500, with $42,500 to be deferred, disbursed in semimonthly cash payments following his retirement.

In 1973, Henry earned $165,000, with $50,000 to be disbursed over a ten-year period beginning at retirement. As he grew more involved with his real-estate and restaurant ventures, Henry needed cash flow. On June 12, 1973, he took out a bank loan of $300,000 secured by the Braves. As part of the agreement, Henry made a handshake deal, verbally agreeing to repay the loan—$10,000 per quarter, or all of the cash flow from the project, whichever was greater. When the project went bust, Henry was on the hook for the loan, $40,000 per year.

When he totaled the damage, Henry figured he’d lost his entire life savings, well in excess of one million dollars. His lawyers told him he had been taught an expensive, cautionary lesson and that perhaps he needed to file for bankruptcy. There was only one way to assess where Henry stood during 1973 and 1974.

“I was wiped out,” he said.

E
VEN THE OFF-SEASON
could not protect him, and during the final months of 1973, Henry’s problems at least rivaled the discomfort of his fame. On November 12, 1973, a month before the Magnavox deal was announced, on November 14, 1973, Henry married Billye Williams, a former Atlanta television host, in a private ceremony at the University of the West Indies chapel in Mona, Jamaica, after nearly three years of dating. But after hearing about the Magnavox deal and his $200,000 baseball contract, Barbara wanted more money. Not long after he became the home-run king, she took him to court to get it. He was the highest-paid player in baseball, and the two would trade accusations, his that she was obstructing him from spending more time with his children, hers that now that his income had increased, so should her alimony, from $1,600 a month to $16,000.

AARON SUED FOR TENFOLD ALIMONY
²²⁴

A
TLANTA
, J
UNE
3 (AP)—Hank Aaron’s former wife filed a petition in Superior Court here today seeking an increase in the alimony and child support payments she currently receives from the Braves’ baseball star.

Barbara Aaron said the Atlanta Braves’ slugger was earning about $100,000 a year when they divorced in February 1971, but now earns “in excess” of a million dollars per year.

Years later, he would discuss these years with a fair amount of regret, saying that in some instances he had become what he had always dreaded: the rich ballplayer with no money. “I was easy, just like so many athletes today,” he recalled. “It’s not easy when you don’t know anything about nothin’ and you have all this money.” He had been careful about frivolities, enjoyed being famous without the extravagances that would define the modern-day athlete. He drove a 1973 Chevrolet instead of a Porsche, wasn’t the kind of player who wore a shirt once and threw it out, and yet in the months before he would break the record, he was broke.

Once the Magnavox deal was finalized, Henry began to prepare for spring training with an eye on the future. On February 5, 1974, he turned forty, and Henry had resolved that he would endeavor to make massive changes with regard to business matters. Taking better care of his finances was a given. He would be more involved. He would learn the businesses that carried his name. Women, cars, and clothes were easy, high-profile ways to lose it all, but so, too, were bad investments.

“I was angry, but I wasn’t helpless. I still had my name and time to recoup,” he said. “I decided to be more careful with my money.”

H
E DID NOT
approach the challenge of breaking Ruth’s record, at least privately, with self-deprecation, that “Aw, shucks, fellas” immodesty. Now that it was in sight, surpassing Ruth, being the best there ever was at hitting home runs, if not an obsession, something he craved, and now he had to wait for the entire offseason. One day in Mobile, he told Stella that he wanted the record. “He said, ‘I want a record of my own,’” she recalled. To his mind, because he was so close, it was as if the record already belonged to him, and that was where his mind played such cruel tricks on him, where life teased and taunted him with its power over him and destiny, where he knew he was at his least potent. At the tail end of the 1973 season, a piece entitled “Henry Aaron’s Golden Autumn” appeared in
Time
magazine. It was clear in the article that he had begun to smell the record. “I’ve always read Mickey Mantle,
²²⁵
Willie Mays, Roger Maris—then Hank Aaron. I’ve worked awfully hard to get my name up front,” he told the interviewer. “I’ve waited for my time, and it’s just now coming.”

Still, the forces of life, Henry knew, were far more difficult to face than any hard thrower on the mound. The batter’s box was the easy part. That was where Henry was king, the most powerful man on earth, in control of every facet of his life—but only at that moment. Guaranteeing that he would have another opportunity to stand in the box, to dig in and take the record in his hands and claim it for his own was another story altogether.

When his mind wandered, it brought him back most vividly to the dynamic Clemente, who had reached his three thousandth hit on the final day of the 1972 season and never lived to see the new year, killed in a tragic, unnecessary plane crash over the Caribbean. He thought about Roy Campanella, the Dodgers catcher headed for the Hall of Fame when the 1957 season ended, but after a terrible car crash on January 28, 1958, would not walk or use his hands ever again. And there was always Jackie, who had seriously thought of playing for the Giants in 1957, but then he climbed out of bed one day and life made the decision for him: He crumpled to the floor, betrayed by an arthritic knee that would never again cooperate. And maybe those nut jobs out there with their pens and their pads and stamps weren’t as blustery as Bob Hope thought. Maybe he would walk down the street and one of them would see his chance, size Henry up, and take it all away with a single shot.

“I don’t want to wait,” Henry said when a reporter told him there was no need to worry, that he was so close to the record that it would be his within the first month of the 1974 season. “You can’t wait. Look at Clemente. What would have happened to Roberto Clemente if he had waited?”

T
HE INVENTORY LIST
for the Braves home opener looked as though it belonged to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade instead of to a baseball game. Bob Hope had the final figures and details for the evening: five thousand balloons, dancing girls, and two bands. For the eight previous home openers in Atlanta, an average of seventeen policemen had been assigned to work the game. But for the ninth, the April 8, 1974, home opener, the Atlanta Braves versus the Los Angeles Dodgers, that number would increase to sixty-three. Joe Shirley, the team director of security, discussed with Bartholomay the possibility of a riot when Henry hit his 715th home-run ball, so Shirley had mapped out a strategy to combat a potential free-for-all: The left-center-field bleachers had been designated ground zero, since that happened to be Henry’s power alley. Shirley would dispatch six policemen, four security men, and eight extra ushers to the left-center bleachers, with the intention of keeping order should the record breaker land in the same spot as so many of his balls in the past. The grounds crew was working to beat the forecast of intermittent rain, but they were professionals, so there was no reason to worry. Nearly a full day before game time, they had completed painting a red-white-and-blue replica of the map of the United States across shallow center field: 140 feet by 80.

Hope’s celebrity overtures had borne fruit. Pearl Bailey was no longer just a wish. She was on board, having agreed, per Henry’s request, to sing the national anthem. Sammy Davis, Jr., had not only confirmed that he would attend but had already offered the Braves $25,000 for the home-run ball. Herbert Aaron would throw out the first pitch and both he and Stella would be part of the pregame festivities. Hope had concocted a program that would resemble the old TV show
This Is Your Life
. Herbert and Stella would stand in Alabama on the painted map, representing Mobile. Hope had contacted John Mullen, the old Braves executive who had signed Henry from the Clowns. Mullen would represent Indianapolis. Donald Davidson would stand on Boston, where the Braves were located when Henry signed in 1952. And Henry’s first big-league manager, Charlie Grimm, would appear, standing in for Milwaukee. Around the chain-link outfield fence would be eight-foot-high letters that read
ATLANTA SALUTES HANK AARON
.

There would be no fraud, Bill Acree, the Braves clubhouse man was assured. Acree had been given the responsibility of guarding the specially marked baseballs that had been used for Braves games since Henry hit number seven hundred. It was one of the details that had been a colossal pain for the pitchers, since these were the years before memorabilia would become an industry, pitchers having gotten annoyed that a perfectly good ball was being tossed aside whenever Henry stepped to the plate. In a certain way, the pitchers felt Henry was being given an advantage, because a fresh ball was just a bit slicker, harder for a pitcher to grip. Any disadvantage to a pitcher, no matter how slight, tipped the scale in favor of a hitter of Henry’s skill.

These were also the years before milestones had become marketing opportunities, moments to be captured and manipulated, and, of course, profited from. That made Bill Bartholomay the villain in the pinstriped suit, again ahead of his time for all the wrong reasons. In his first at bat in the first inning of the first game of the 1974 season in Cincinnati, April 4, Jack Billingham—who had already surrendered home runs number 528, 636, 641, and 709 to Henry—threw a sinking fastball that Henry on his first swing of the season, redirected toward the left-center gap and over the fence to tie Ruth. The businessman in Bartholomay saw potential disaster, and Bob Hope’s ulcer-riddled stomach began churning anew. With eight more innings in the opener and two full games remaining in Cincinnati before the Braves went back to Atlanta to play their first home game of the season, Henry could conceivably break the record on the road, in the antiseptic bowl that was Riverfront Stadium, and rob the Braves of at least one sellout home date and possibly more. After the game, Bartholomay would tell his manager, Eddie Mathews, to sit Henry for the remaining two games, which inflamed Kuhn, who ordered Henry to play. The players had never respected Kuhn in the first place. Before the next game, Pete Rose walked to the batting cage and yelled out to Joe Morgan, “Hey, Joe, you playing today? Did you check with the commissioner?”