The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (63 page)

And so much of those good old days had been nothing but a mirage anyway. Henry knew it, knew that he’d been insulated from the rough edges by his talent for hitting pennant winners for the home team. The mirage—or, more accurately, the belief in it—was a reason the current realities now seemed so harsh. Father Groppi, the activist conscience of the city, knew this better than anyone. Groppi, the heroic South Side priest who had assaulted the city’s housing inequities with embarrassing protests of the city leadership—including members of his own archdiocese who preached tolerance and conciliation by day yet were members of segregated social clubs by night—found himself isolated by the 1970s, in his words, “stripped” of his parish and disillusioned by the nobility of the priesthood.

By the time Henry returned, Groppi had gone back to his old job, driving a public bus for the city for the final decade of his life. The fire for justice burned less bright. He was a weary and beaten underdog, his belief that change was possible less fervent. Nevertheless, Groppi had been more than a symbolic figure. The public protests, like the 1967 march on Kosciuszko Park, contributed to the city’s first fair-housing ordinance the following year. He had joined the legendary generation of white Catholic priests who were as much a part of the civil rights movement as the better-known, historic figures they marched beside.

When Henry arrived, the nation’s eyes rested upon the racial cauldron in Boston, which for years had first resisted the charge that the city’s schools had been purposely segregated or denied that segregation produced an inferior education for black children—old arguments both, dating back before
Brown v. Board of Education
, yet the cornerstones of Northeast resistance. Boston had begun court-ordered busing
(forced
busing, the whites called it, lest anyone be unsure of where they stood on the issue of school integration), and in the school years of 1974 and 1975, the city erupted so violently and so completely that it would never lose its reputation as the symbol of American urban racial hostility.

Boston received the attention, and the infamy, but it was in Milwaukee where the nation’s first lawsuit was filed, in 1965, challenging de facto segregation—public schools were segregated because city neighborhoods were segregated and, as such, could not be remedied without busing. It was quiet, innocuous Milwaukee that the frustrated locals, white and black, would call “the most segregated city in America.” Since Milwaukee’s neighborhoods were so clannish, the question of whether to bus the city’s students to achieve integration was inevitable. As in Boston, Milwaukee school board officials tried every stalling tactic short of the four corners defense. When Henry and Billye moved into a condominium downtown, school desegregation was the central, roiling issue in the city, on the front page of both newspapers.

BUSING TO INTEGRATE? NOPE!
²⁶⁹

By Joel McNally of the
Journal Staff

The popular expression is, “I am not against integration. I just don’t like busing.”

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund analyzed white opposition to busing differently in a study called, “It’s not the distance. It’s the niggers.”

… A majority said they favored racial integration of schools, but by an even wider margin they disapproved of busing to achieve it.

… a closer look shows … busing … is opposed only when it would lead to racial integration.

For years, Henry had sought respect. Like Jackie Robinson, he wanted to be an important voice on significant issues. But in 1975, Bud Selig noticed a different Henry, less public, more distant, and certainly less willing to engage. Selig believed the difference, naturally, was the hangover effect of chasing Ruth. Henry veered away from the desegregation issue in Milwaukee, much to the disappointment of the local NAACP chapter, which felt Henry’s voice might have made a difference. He was not hostile to the causes of integration in Milwaukee, but his kids were no longer in the public school system. The issue was not as much of a personal one. He was reticent to lend his name to the civil rights battles that had predated him. Not only did this fight seem not to be his but he did not appear to have much fight left in him at all.

O
N THE FIELD
, Henry had no illusions. For two seasons, sustained by nostalgia and professionalism—not to mention a healthy dose of the athlete’s refusal to face his own mortality—Henry flailed at the plate. He was a tired baseball player mentally, and an increasingly limited one physically. Nevertheless, the nostalgia maintained the fantasy, and Henry played along. At each of the seemingly endless civic luncheons before spring training, Henry set his usual goals—thirty to thirty-five home runs, a .300 average—even though he’d finished 1974 with the fewest number of home runs since Eisenhower desegregated the public schools, and he hadn’t sniffed .300 all season. What he didn’t tell the fans was that a hitter’s greatest weapon—something even more valuable than his wrists—were his eyes, and Henry could no longer see as well as he once had.

He had taken to wearing glasses, first for reading and then to drive. That meant he could not see items that were close to him nor could he see things from a distance particularly well. Most importantly, he couldn’t see the ball well in batting practice. If he couldn’t see a batting-practice fastball, it was only a matter of time until he would be exposed.

T
HE
B
REWERS TRAINED
in Sun City, Arizona, a holdover from the days of the Seattle franchise. On the team, Henry would be surrounded mostly by kids, though they would be talented ones. The advantage in being awful all those years was drafting high. Slowly, sunshine began to peek out from behind the clouds. The second baseman, Jim Gantner, was a comer, they said. Gantner wasn’t spectacular and probably wouldn’t make the club in 1975, but he knew his way around the bag. And he was local, from Fond du Lac. The outfielder they drafted in the first round, back when the franchise was in Seattle, was an enigma named Gorman Thomas. Thomas looked like he should be playing third base with a can of beer by his side in the Milwaukee recreational softball leagues, but Thomas, despite his portly brawn, was oddly athletic. Even more oddly, the coaches were looking at him in center field. There was one thing in particular Thomas could do, and that was knock the hell out of the ball. The problem was, he made contact with the ball only about once a week. The catcher was the hotshot Darrell Porter, the fourth pick in the draft, who made the all-star team in his second year in the league. They were already talking about him playing for a long time.

And lastly, there was a nineteen-year-old kid shortstop from Illinois. Robin Yount was his name, and they said he had all the tools. He was a shortstop who could play anywhere and hit anything. He could even hit the ball out of the park if you weren’t careful. He was another one, a top-five pick (third overall in the 1973 draft), a can’t-miss. Yount was the kid whom, when he walked into the batting cage, everybody was taking notes about to see if the reports and the hype and the fanfare were true. Henry understood that.

Yount recalled being too nervous to approach Henry, calling him “Mr. Aaron,” even when Henry told him to cut it out. Yount immediately realized there was no pretentiousness with Henry. In the clubhouses, the phrase for acting better than the rest was to “big-league it”—with teammates, fans, friends, everybody. But that wasn’t Henry.

“He was significant.
²⁷⁰
Even though I was just nineteen, I could see how important he was, and not just in baseball, either,” Yount recalled. “He had already broken the record. I knew how big he was, but he didn’t come off that way in person. I mean, he didn’t let it get to him. We knew all he had accomplished in this game, but he acted just like anyone else.”

They were just kids, but they all loved Henry. He was spent as a player, but Crandall knew the master had a way and a warmth with people. He had also accomplished more in a season than most of them had in their whole careers. So, periodically during the spring, Crandall would gather his young team in the outfield and have Henry—the man who did not enjoy public speaking—give a talk. Sometimes the conversations would be about the game—the situations, the different pitchers, what made them big leaguers different from the cats who drifted around the minor leagues. Other times, Henry would talk to them about professionalism, what it took to
stay
in the big leagues once they’d finally arrived. These were the moments that deepened his conviction that he had made the right choice in leaving Atlanta. No one in the Braves front office, by his recollection, had ever sought his counsel, despite the fact that he had hit 733 home runs and collected three thousand hits.

N
OW, UNLIKE
1974, Henry could take solace in breaking the record. He could be comforted by the couple of streaks that reminded pitchers to fear him. But in Milwaukee, time also kept sending him the same overdue bill.

The first notice came in Boston, on opening day, when Henry was collared, first by the remarkable Luis Tiant (a complete-game eight-hitter) and that erratic slop-thrower, Bill Lee. Then in the home opener, against Cleveland, 48,160 saw Henry knock in his first hit and RBI as an American Leaguer, only to see his old enemy, Gaylord Perry, strike him out three times two nights later. He would avenge the insult days later in Cleveland by hitting his first home run of the season off Perry, but when the Brewers landed in Baltimore for a series with the powerhouse Orioles, Henry was hitting .095.

The second notice came April 23, after the Brewers left Baltimore and headed to New York for the first trip of the season. Henry had expected to play in Yankee Stadium, which he hadn’t visited since game five of the 1958 Series, but Yankee Stadium was under renovation and the Yankees played at Shea Stadium that year. It was there, in Queens, that Henry took Crandall aside and asked his old teammate to drop him in the order. Henry Aaron could no longer bat third. He was hitting .114 at the time. In the first game against the Yankees, Henry rapped two hits, including his second homer, a floater off Pat Dobson, the Brewers only run in a 10–1 Bronx mugging.

The final notice? That came a couple of months later, when Henry Aaron, hitting all of .226, with seven home runs, was selected to play in the All-Star Game for the twenty-fourth and final time. It was all charity, and that was flattering, but charity made everything feel even worse. Henry Aaron, the charity case? He’d said he would never let that happen to him, sagging to the finish, pitied by the same eyes and ears that used to look to him for the thunder. The game was played at County Stadium, and though he received the biggest ovation, even that didn’t feel as good as it should have, because Henry was voted to the team ahead of Yount, who was left off the team even though it was obvious in that half season that the teenager was the best player in uniform.

The next year, 1976, was no different, and in some ways, it was even worse. Crandall was gone, fired the season before after losing ninety-four games. Henry considered quitting, the evidence long irrefutable, but he couldn’t let go.

“I knew I was better than a .234 hitter,”
²⁷¹
he said. “My contract called for $240,000 and I thought I could earn it.” Unlike Crandall, the new skipper, Alex Grammas, had little connection or sympathy for his forty-two-year-old designated hitter, and the season was a slog. Collectively, the Brewers finished thirty-two games out of first, having lost ninety-five games. Henry played eighty-five games, hit .229. He hit ten home runs, five of which came during a ten-day period in July.

Still, the kids sustained him, made him feel wanted, as did one veteran in particular, George Scott. Scott, the world-famous “Boomer,” had been in the league for a decade, since debuting with the Red Sox in 1966. Scott was immediately popular. Scott was colorful. He often spoke in the third person and referred to home runs as “taters.” He received his nickname from the majesty of his monstrous home runs and told anyone who would listen that his jewelry, particularly his necklaces, was made from the teeth of the dozens of second basemen he’d ruined.

Scott was from Greenville, Mississippi, in the deepest part of the Delta, a place of intense poverty and debilitating racial codes. At Coleman High, Scott was an accomplished basketball player, averaging more than thirty-five points per game (“Without the three-point shot,”
²⁷²
he would say a half century later. “With it, I could have averaged sixty points a game.”)

The segregation was grinding. Its very existence often undermined Scott’s sense of self-worth, and during his worst moments as a high school athlete, he always wondered if his best was still inferior to that of whites, simply because the two powerhouse schools were not allowed by custom and law to compete. “I always wanted to play in integrated competition. There was a good white school, Greenville High, and every year, one of us would bring home a championship. One year it would be us; the next year it would be them. But I always wanted to play them, just once, just to see who was the best.”

The Red Sox had signed him as an amateur free agent in 1962, one of just a handful of black players the club had signed in its history. The Red Sox integration began in earnest with the signing of George Scott, who was signed by none other than Ed Scott, who had discovered Henry Aaron eleven years earlier. Ed Scott’s firm belief in “the good ones”—the whites who treated blacks fairly—was rewarded when Milt Bolling, another Mobile native, suggested to Red Sox management that Scott would be an asset in recruiting the black players who were changing the game. The Red Sox hired Scott, who would begin a three-decade career with Boston by signing George Scott. “Had we signed him earlier,” Bolling said of Ed Scott, “we might have had Hank Aaron and Ted Williams in the same outfield.” Scott, like most black players, was well aware of the team’s notorious reputation when it came to dealing with blacks, and his early years in the minor leagues were characterized both by his heightened sensitivity to slight and the surprising relationship he forged in Winston-Salem with Eddie Popowski, the longtime Red Sox minor-league manager. Scott did not believe he was a popular player, owing to his quick temper.