The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (58 page)

Downing’s nickname was “Ace.” He had been raised in Trenton, New Jersey, by his father and two aunts after his mother was killed in a car crash when he was seven years old. From the start, he was considered a special talent: left-handed and fast. Downing’s America consisted of integrated schools in New Jersey and integrated traveling baseball teams. When he was fourteen, he played on a traveling team that fielded two other blacks. When the team arrived in Frederick, Maryland, Al and his black teammates, William Crossland and Arnold Thomas, were told there were no rooms for them at the hotel and that the three boys would have to find a rooming house for blacks in a different part of town.

“One night, someone brought up the idea
²³²
that we should go to the movies, not even thinking that this policy existed socially in every aspect of the city. So we get to the movies and we pay for our tickets and the usher looked at me and the other two black players and said, ‘You three have to sit in the balcony and you guys can go downstairs,’” Downing recalled. “All the white guys on the team just looked at us and said, ‘They go to the balcony, we’ll go to the balcony.’ That was a moment when I knew how special those guys were, and then we all went up to the balcony and we watched the movie.”

Alston did not dwell on Henry in the pregame meeting. Steve Yeager, the brusque and unpredictable catcher, would recall years later that the scouting report on Henry contained just two words: his name. “Henry Aaron. What else did you need to say?
²³³
I mean, he was Henry Aaron.” Henry and Alston went back twenty years, since they were both rookies in the same season, 1954, Henry a twenty-year-old with the Braves, Alston taking over for a pennant-winning Dodgers club as a forty-two-year-old rookie manager. They were both monuments to an ancient species: baseball men who had served just one employer. As players, Alston and Aaron were polar opposites: Henry tapped for fame before he could legally drink alcohol, while Alston with career that consisted of exactly one inning and one at bat in the big leagues. The date was September 27, at Sportsman’s Park, the last game of the 1936 season.

“Well, I came up to bat for the Cards in 1936 and Lon Warneke struck me out,” he once said. “That’s it.”

Ironically, both entered the big leagues in 1954, both would retire in 1976, and both would one day be honored in Cooperstown. These days, Walt Alston resembled Charlie Grimm in Milwaukee, for somehow the Dodgers couldn’t break free from second place. For the last four years, the Dodgers had been just good enough to go home, losing to Cincinnati in 1970, 1972 and 1973, and to the Giants in 1971. Pervading the 1974 club was a combination of frustration, desperation, and old-fashioned stubbornness. Mike Marshall was the club’s newest acquisition, picked up from Montreal. Marshall was an iconoclast by nature and a progressive thinker, a combination that could put one on the fast track to becoming a baseball outcast. He had been raised in Michigan and attended Michigan State, earning a Ph.D. in kinesiology. If Ted Williams was fascinated by the science of hitting, Mike Marshall was passionate about the science of pitching mechanics. He was seeking to create a new pitching orthodoxy, to develop a new method of throwing a baseball that would no longer result in the ruin of a thousand pitching arms. He wanted, essentially, to reinvent the pitching wheel. Downing had been teammates with Marshall for only three months, but he loved listening to him talk about the pitching, about torque created through the shoulder and elbow, and its heavy price. Almost immediately, a semicircle of Dodger pitchers—Al Downing, Andy Messersmith, and Tommy John—began discussing their aches, pains, and tweaks with Marshall, quite often before approaching the team medical staff, a group whose best interests for the history of baseball had always been heavily weighed toward the team and not the player. Marshall’s combination of advocacy and intellect not only made him controversial when it came to Dodger management; it made him dangerous. The Dodgers would go to the World Series in 1974 and Marshall would pitch 208 innings in relief, a modern-day record. He would win the Cy Young Award, but it was apparent that as quickly as he’d arrived, his days in Los Angeles were numbered. “He was too smart for them,” Downing recalled. “If you had a knot in your shoulder, you’d run it by Mike, because he knew what he was talking about and he’d give it to you straight. They didn’t like that kind of competition and immediately began to create a wedge between Mike and the rest of the ball club.”

The season was a week old and Marshall had not yet assessed his new team.

“I had no idea who they were,
²³⁴
or how they competed. You can be highly talented and once the season gets going, when the pressure mounts, the talent can go the other way, and I think that was what was happening on the Dodgers,” Marshall recalled. “They had the best pitching, and an outstanding offense, maybe not in terms of home runs, but certainly in the number of ways they could score runs. It was a very strong team and I was hopeful.

“In Montreal, I had been with Gene Mauch, and when we had a chance to win, he’d give me the ball and say, ‘Let me know when it’s over.’ But there, I didn’t pitch an inning in the first three games and I’m thinking, Why am I here? What I loved about Montreal was that it kept battling. What I had heard about the Dodgers was that there was lot of cross-blaming going on. My attitude had been that everyone does what they can and don’t judge other people by what they can’t do. We ended up becoming a very close-knit pitching staff, all mature people, not prone to getting overexcited.”

Jimmy Wynn walked down the runway and into the visitors’ dugout. He looked around the stadium at the placards—715 and
WE WANT HANK—
as he stepped into the cage for batting practice. The atmosphere, he thought, was relatively quiet nevertheless. Bill Buckner, the Dodger left fielder, sprinted toward the fence and leaped once and then twice more. He was, he later admitted, practicing scaling the fence, just in case he’d need to rob Henry of his home run. The Dodger bull pen, located behind the right-field fence, was businesslike. Downing was already in the pen, warming up.

T
ONY
K
UBEK
, the Milwaukee native who had played so well for the Yankees against Henry and the Braves in the 1957 World Series, was now a broadcaster for NBC. Both he and his partner, the veteran Curt Gowdy, could feel the groundswell of the moment. “Everybody expects him to do it every time now.
²³⁵
It’s gotten that far out of proportion,” Kubek said. “People won’t take singles or even triples from Henry Aaron anymore. There’s a lot of pressure on Henry. He’s withstood it all.”

The 53,775 in attendance roared when Ron Reed, the Braves hulking six-foot-six-inch, 230-pound right-hander—who, like Gene Conley, was another Braves pitcher who had played in the NBA—erased the Dodgers in the first. And they groaned when Downing, pitching carefully, walked Henry in the bottom of the second without even inducing a swing, his last two pitches very nearly in the dirt. The legendary Dodgers announcer Vin Scully, was on the call. Scully, Bronx-born, started his Dodgers broadcasting career in 1950, the same year that Henry was expelled from Central High and that the Phillies and Yankees competed in the last World Series to be played only by whites.

Henry begins to walk up to home plate.
²³⁶
The crowd gives him a standing ovation and the familiar number 44 steps into the batters box. Joe Ferguson, mask on, but evidently said something, and Al Downing, who also wears 44, [
who
] sat on the bench when Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s one-year mark with 61 home runs … Downing doesn’t want to walk Aaron. He doesn’t want anyone to point the accusing fingers. He’s just trying to pitch his game. Downing checking, Aaron waiting … and the 3–1 pitch is outside, Downing ball four, so not right now, Henry.

The night existed for one moment, its tension enveloped in only one man, who would come to bat perhaps once every thirty-five minutes, maybe get a pitch to hit or maybe not, maybe do something with that pitch or maybe not. The rest of the game—the pitches, the swings, the people—the rest was just filler: Henry raced around third and scored on a double by Dusty Baker that Buckner bobbled. When Henry crossed the plate with his 2,063rd run of his career, he broke another record, passing Mays for the all-time National League mark. But tonight, nobody cared, nor did the crowd appear particularly pained that the home team was suddenly losing as the Dodgers rallied for three runs off of Reed in the top of the third. With the possible exception of the time Maris passed Ruth back in 1961, never had the events of the baseball game seemed more secondary.

It was also clear as the night progressed that there was only one other day in the history of baseball—April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson’s debut in Brooklyn—when baseball so sharply held a mirror up to America, to its blacks and its whites and its generations and its change, reflecting what the nation was at that moment and what it was about to become. Sitting in the press box, Bob Hope could feel it, as could Jimmy Carter; Stella Aaron knew it: that the record was secondary to what it represented.

In center field, Jimmy Wynn, playing for the opposing team, had decided that he wanted Henry to hit a home run—on this night, now. Like Mike Marshall, Wynn had been focused only on assimilating with his new team and on what the Dodgers needed to do to beat Cincinnati, to finally win the division and get back to the World Series, a place Los Angeles had not been since 1966 when they were destroyed by Baltimore. At that time, Wynn was in Houston, the first star player for the old expansion Colt .45’s, which by then would be known as the Astros. He had known Henry only slightly. The two had met briefly over the years, and Wynn respected Henry immensely. Wynn would recall that he did not think of Henry breaking the record until he’d reached 714, and then he began to assess Henry not in baseball terms but in historical context. He thought of his father, Joe Wynn, when Jimmy was a boy growing up in Cincinnati. Joe Wynn was a ballplayer first, playing in the industrial leagues in Ohio and Kentucky, but his generation could not dream of playing in the major leagues. Joe Wynn was the best player Jimmy had ever seen, and he had told his father he wanted to follow in his footsteps, to which the elder Wynn replied, “No, you have your own footsteps.”
²³⁷

In between pitches, Jimmy Wynn thought about his own road to the major leagues, and the humiliations he’d endured because he wanted to be a baseball player. On numerous occasions, when the environment grew too rough, he would turn to Big Joe Wynn for comfort and sometimes to plead with his father to return home. Joe Wynn was always unsympathetic, telling him, “You’re in the world now.”

Jimmy Wynn would remember a game in Palatka, Florida, which probably took place in 1962 or 1963 while he was playing for the Tampa Tarpons, a farm club of the Reds. Wynn was playing third base and a pair of whites in the stands catcalled out to him, “Hey, nigger, where’s your tail?”

Wynn stared straight ahead.

“Hey, nigger, I’m talking to you.”

The Tarpons manager, a white man named Herschel Freeman, called time to talk to his young third baseman.

“He asked me, ‘Jimmy, are you all right?’ I told him I was and I told him, ‘Let’s play baseball.’ But these two just wouldn’t stop,” Wynn recalled. “They’re throwing the
N
word around and asking me where was my tail. They kept doing it, and finally, Herschel Freeman called time and went up into the stands and grabbed one of them and said, ‘His name is Jimmy Wynn. If you don’t want to call him that, then call him
Mr
. Wynn. If you don’t want to call him that, then say nothing. And if you don’t, I
will
visit you once again.’

“And the next words I heard from them were, ‘Come on, Jimmy.’” In a flash, the dense, mythic fog of the evening—of who was the greater player or who, Ruth or Aaron, had the greater impact—began to clear and there was nothing left about the night of April 8, 1974, for Jimmy Wynn, the famed “Toy Cannon,” except one crystallizing thought: “It wasn’t about numbers. It wasn’t even really about Babe Ruth. It was about him breaking a white man’s record. Everything he went through was happening because he put himself in a position to break a white man’s record. You see, that record, it
belonged
to them, and in a lot of ways, to them, the ones who wrote those letters and said those things, Henry Aaron was taking it from
them
and giving it to
us
. He was giving us a little something more than what we had, something that we’d never had.”

I
N THE FOURTH
inning, Henry received a long standing ovation for his second at bat. Darrell Evans was already on first; a throwing error by the shortstop Russell put him on. It was the top of the fourth, nobody out, and the Dodgers had already committed three errors. They would commit three more before the evening was over. Downing threw another pitch into the dirt.

Downing’s next pitch would in some ways end his career as much as Henry’s swing would end his. Neither man would ever be three-dimensional again. Technology—that is, television—would rob Henry of his speed, his arm, his youth, reducing him forever to a sagging forty-year-old worthy of only one moment, leaving it to his contemporaries and admirers to remind future generations of what a complete, dynamic ballplayer he once was. And Downing would no longer be the proud descendant of the denied Negro Leaguers in general and Bill Yancey, the first black man to ever scout for the Yankees, in particular. The twenty-game season in 1971, being the first black pitcher to start a World Series game for the Yankees—all of it would be deleted in the public mind except for one fastball that hugged too much of the plate, a bad pitch. For the next six years of his life, Al Downing would spiral, referring to this period as “bitter” and his life as “rough” because the mirror would be held up once again to America and the divide between black and white could not be assuaged. One day during the bad years, Downing would be in the bull pen, a father and son ten feet above him in the stands. The father would point at Downing and say, “There’s Al Downing.
²³⁸
He gave up Hank Aaron’s seven hundred and fifteenth home run. He’s no good.” He would hear the father whisper to the son that two black men (“soul brothers” is the phrase Downing recalls hearing) conspired to take away a white man’s record. It would not be the first time nor the last that he would be accused of purposely throwing a home-run ball to Hank Aaron. Only after that period would Downing reclaim the full scope of his career and his equilibrium as a man. “Let me get this straight,” Downing would say years later. “I got vilified for years for giving up a home run to a man who hit more home runs than anyone who ever lived? Does that make sense to anyone?”