The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (59 page)

M
ILO
H
AMILTON
(“THERE’S A NEW HOME CHAMPION OF ALL TIME, AND IT’S HENRY AARON!”)
received more attention, but it was the legend, Vin Scully, who offered the more poignant, textured, and lasting call of the moment:

And swinging two bats is Henry Aaron
²³⁹
… and once again a standing ovation for Henry Aaron. He means the tying run at the plate now, so we’ll see what Downing does. Al at the belt and he delivers and he’s low, ball one…. And that just adds to the pressure … the crowd booing…. Downing has to ignore the sound effects and stay a professional and pitch his game. One ball and no strikes, Aaron waiting … the outfield deep and straight away … fastball, high drive into deep left center field … Buckner goes back … to the fence … it is GONE….

For twenty-five seconds, Vin Scully stayed quiet, allowing the fans to speak to America for him as Henry rounded the bases. And then he continued with the words that would make a career:

It is over. And for the first time in a long time that poker face of Aaron shows the tremendous relief…. What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron.

The racial divide in America was apparent even during his victorious trip around the bases. Henry rounded first and passed Steve Garvey, who attempted to give Henry a congratulatory slap of hands but missed. In the Dodger dugout, Steve Yeager, the backup catcher, watched the flight of the ball and for the next three and half decades would take little more from the evening than one number surpassing another. “It was a long time ago,”
²⁴⁰
he would say. “It was a historic moment, a big moment, but there are a lot of big moments in sports. But, you go on. For him to do that shows what an outstanding hitter he was, one of the best in baseball.” For the black players, the home run meant so much more. The second baseman, Davey Lopes, was the first person to shake Henry’s hand—the kind of shake third-base coaches give home-run hitters—then wound up with his glove hand and gave Henry a swipe on the rump. What Lopes was witnessing would resonate deeply. He is not African-American, but Cape Verdean. A small island off the westernmost point of Africa, near Senegal, Cape Verde had long been colonized by the Portuguese. In the early twentieth century, Cape Verdeans emigrated to the United States, settling largely in the old fishing and whaling towns of southern New England, places with historic names from another century, like Plymouth, New Bedford, Falmouth, Wareham, and Buzzards Bay. Lopes was raised by a single mother in Providence, Rhode Island, and his experience in America was one of being caught in between the black and the white culture, sometimes at the price of his own natural heritage. “If you told someone you were Cape Verdean,
²⁴¹
they wouldn’t even know where to begin to look,” he recalled. New England does not produce many baseball players, and historically the ones talented enough to compete with players from the baseball-rich regions of California and Texas are celebrated as local heroes, inspirations. But Davey Lopes did not receive such attention and knew his darker skin to be the catalyst for his relative anonymity. In a few months after Henry’s home run, Lopes and the Dodgers would play the Oakland A’s in the World Series and Lopes would tell an interviewer, “I don’t even think Providence knows I’m here.” Like Al Downing, Lopes was proud of his special heritage as a person of color, more specifically that he was a dark-skinned second baseman wearing the uniform of the Dodgers, standing in the same position as Robinson and, after him, Jim “Junior” Gilliam. “I remember when I first came up. We’d be in spring training and Junior would tell me to come with him. I’d say, ‘Where we going?’ and he would just tell me to come on. We’d be in St. Petersburg and he’d point out the majestic hotels. He’d say, ‘That’s where the Dodgers used to stay,’ and I was just in awe. Then we’d go farther into a neighborhood and he’d show me some average-looking house and say, ‘And that’s where
we
had to stay.’ And it blew my mind, because it wasn’t long ago. I thought about those things, about where we’d come as people of color, and that’s why I shook Henry Aaron’s hand. It felt like something I had to do.”

Henry rounded second and, seemingly out of nowhere, two fans appeared and escorted him between the bases. At third, Ron Cey saw the two kids racing toward Henry and thought for a second that this was it: They might attack him.

“Well, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do
²⁴²
when it happened. But it became clear what I was going to do when he came around, and two kids had run onto the field—I was going to stay clear of it,” Cey recalled. “If he’d been running solo, I probably would have shaken his hand, but the other part of it was that this was really his moment, and you know, he should kind of walk alone.”

Having grown up in socially segregated Tacoma, Washington, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in a sense Cey was vindicated. He had always believed that sport, at its best, could be the great antidote for the American divide.

“I grew up playing sports, so I always had a relationship of playing with black kids throughout all the amateur sports: football, basketball, baseball. You know, it wasn’t an issue. We grew up playing each other,” Cey recalled. “I think sports, in a way, has a way of breaking down those issues. We’re all trying to do something that involves a common bond. We’re just making the best of it and trying to win. It [his neighborhood] was pretty segregated back then. There was a part of the town where black kids went to school. But it was a normal, everyday, middle-class place to be. There was a certain boys club downtown that was predominately black that I frequented because of my relationships with some of these players, and we didn’t have any issues. This was where sports would bring you together. It’s not like we all signed up on the same team to play. Somebody drafted us and we made our way to the big-league club. These were the best players. These were the players who were going to be part of our future, and when you take the field, you’re all working for the same thing. If you’re on a different page than that, you really shouldn’t be there.”

In the crowd, the two kids were racing toward Henry, and Calvin Wardlaw stood, flinching, and considered reaching for his pistol, which rested in his binocular case. A few feet away, Davey Lopes didn’t even see them. “I always wondered,
²⁴³
Where the hell did they come from?” he recalled.

Within milliseconds, it was clear the two fans had come in peace. Henry gently nudged the two kids aside as he headed toward home plate, where the home run would be official and the chase finally over. Both Britt Gaston and Cliff Courtney were students at the University of Georgia. Both would be arrested, the charge on the report alleging the two “ran onto ballfield during ballgame and interrupted ballgame.” Henry would lend his name to the list of those who wanted the charges against the two kids dropped. Among those in Henry’s inner circle, the running gallows joke for years would be that the smartest decision of the evening was Calvin Wardlaw’s electing to leave his gun in his binocular case.

T
OM
H
OUSE
considers himself
²⁴⁴
a “real low-end guy,” “happy for every day” he gets to spend in the big leagues. He watched the flight of the ball and Bill Buckner climbing the fence in an attempt to put his pregame calisthenics to use. “My God, he’s gonna catch it,” House blurted out. The ball was beyond Buckner’s reach. House threw a triumphant fist in the air. Jimmy Wynn took his glove off and began to clap.

This was the first year House had made a big-league club out of spring training without the immediate fear of being sent down. He was aware of his place in the big-league hierarchy, an environment where batting averages, strikeout totals, and earned-run averages might as well have been printed on everyone’s forehead. He had noticed that during the day-to-day activities, Henry stood at a bit of a distance. In House’s words, that was “because he’s Hank Aaron.” He said that he was “thrilled” that Henry even knew he was alive. “He was unfailingly kind. I didn’t really understand the social IQ and the things he was going through, but you would never have known,” House recalled. “He called me ‘Tommy’ and he was the same all the time—same way, same demeanor. A whole lot people were pulling for him and pulling against him, but you would never have known. I remember thinking that this guy was probably the most underrated superstar in the world. He was unbelievably civil, from the clubhouse kids to my tier of athlete all the way to the top. He was a pleasure to be around.”

House had had visions not dissimilar to those of Joe Shirley, the Braves security man. “I had visions of a little old lady getting stomped by a Georgia Tech football player.” But the most important baseball in the world was speeding toward him. His friend and bull-pen mate, Buzz Capra, was boxing him out to negotiate a better angle and wound up pushing House closer to the ball. House recalled what he realized at that moment: “If I don’t catch it, the stitches will hit me right in the forehead.”

House caught the ball and sprinted toward the infield, where Henry was being mobbed at home plate. Stella had him in a mother’s embrace, a physical expression of exhalation. “He’s hugging his mom and he’s got a crocodile tear, and I’m thinking, Holy crap. Hank Aaron has a tear in his eye and he’s hugging his mom. It’s a Life Saver moment. The fact that Hank Aaron had tears in his eyes shook me more than anything,” House recalled. “Then I find out a few days later from Dusty that she held him so tight to prevent anyone from shooting him. Here were a mom and a son sharing the ultimate moment in baseball, a Little League family moment in a way that nobody else would understand. But what sticks in my mind was that the tear was that he might have been happy that it was over, and the rest of the world would have killed to be in his shoes.”

T
HE MIRROR WAS
held up to America and there were the white men who did not flinch at the discomforts of the divide. They were the ones whom, back in the 1920s and 1930s, Ed Scott used to call “the good ones”: whites who saw America’s racial odyssey in all of its complexities and hypocrisies, and who understood its true cost and how much all of the people who called themselves Americans, and not just the blacks, had been diminished. Mike Marshall was one of those men. “He showed that it could happen.
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He showed all the nonsense about black people not being smart enough to be quarterbacks or as good as Babe Ruth,” Marshall said. “Talent comes in all hues. That’s what he did.” Marshall was sitting in the dugout when Henry’s ball jetted over the infield to its final destination.

“I grew up in a small town in Michigan, a farm town. It was long before the big numbers of Latinos moved in. Our farm wasn’t big enough, so we didn’t have crops that needed to be picked. I played in Selma and Chattanooga and Montgomery. I remember the different bathrooms and drinking fountains and places where you could sit and where you couldn’t, and I remember thinking we’re all the same people. How can these people be so far behind?” When Marshall suffered through difficulties in baseball, his friendship with Ronnie Woods, an outfielder Marshall met when the two were with Detroit in the mid-1960s, sustained him. The two became teammates in the big leagues in Montreal in 1972.

“Back then, even in the early 1970s, there wasn’t a lot of interracial rooming. I think I was the first guy on the Expos with a black roommate, but I didn’t care. His friendship made playing baseball a lot easier.”

The game was stopped for eleven minutes, and Henry was too weary to be eloquent. Honesty without flourish was all he could offer. There was no joy contained in his drained face, no desire to bask in his own afterglow. His words were not reflective or introspective or prescient, nor, upon reflecting upon this evening, would they ever be. “I just thank God,” Henry said, “that it’s all over with.” For the next thirty-five years, Henry Aaron would not waver from this position. In San Diego, Cito Gaston heard Henry had broken the record and felt tears well up. “I was just proud.
²⁴⁶
That was all I felt—pride. And years later, when I had read about how much the record hurt and how a lot of that hurt never went away, I just thought to myself, What would life be like without so much discrimination?”

T
HE GAME RESUMED
, and Dusty Baker was amazed at how quickly the sellout crowd disappeared. “There were about fifty-five thousand people
²⁴⁷
there for the record, and about ten thousand people left after it was over,” Baker recalled.

In center field, Jimmy Wynn had an uncontrollable urge to speak to Henry. Players on opposing teams were discouraged from fraternizing back then, but this moment was bigger than silly rules.

“My thing was, It’s over with.
²⁴⁸
Now Hank can lead a comfortable life,” Wynn recalled. “I kind of paused, and then told myself, The hell with it. I’m going to shake his hand. I’m going to treat this man with respect. I shook his hand and I was glad I did. You could see what the whole thing did to him. He could have said, ‘I did it. I am the number-one home-run hitter of all time,’ and should have been happy about it and should have enjoyed it. But you know what? He never did.”

The Braves closed the clubhouse for an hour after the game and celebrated the moment as a team. There were plans for celebrations throughout the baseball world whenever Hank Aaron came to town, for the first time as the all-time leader in home runs. When the doors to the Braves clubhouse opened, Henry shook a few hands and offered a few words to the writers, the most telling to Wayne Minshew. “All he said was,
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‘I’m going home now,’” Minshew said. “That was it. ‘I’m going home.’”