The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (31 page)

BORN TO PLAY BALL
¹¹²

Milwaukee’s prodigious Hank Aaron
doesn’t go in for “scientific” hitting.
He just grabs a bat and blasts away
.

In Jacksonville, Florida, where he carried off almost everything except the franchise during the South Atlantic League baseball season of 1953, there is still a considerable degree of puzzlement about Henry Louis (Hank) Aaron, now one of the mightiest warriors in the tribe of the Milwaukee Braves. There was, for instance, the time in Jacksonville that summer when Aaron was in the grip of a rare batting slump, and one of his teammates asked in conversation how he was going to cure it.

“Oh, I called Mr. Stan Musial about it,” was Aaron’s dead-pan reply, “and I coming out of it.”

“What did Musial tell you to do?” asked the teammate, an infielder named Joe Andrews.

“He say, ‘Keep swinging,’” Aaron said.

Shortly the slump passed and Henry thundered on to a .362 finish. Meanwhile, the Musial story was repeated often in dugouts around the league. On the day when Aaron got the league’s most valuable player award, manager Ben Geraghty decided it might be well to have Henry repeat his Musial tale to the sports writers who were inquiring into the reasons for his success.

“Man, I never called Stan Musial,” Aaron said, shaking his head vigorously.

“But you told Joe Andrews you did,” Geraghty said.

“I liable to tell Joe Andrews anything.”

Spec Richardson, general manager of the Jacksonville Braves, is representative of the perplexed local opinion that Aaron left behind. “Tell you the truth,” he says, “we couldn’t make up our minds if he was the most naïve player we ever had or dumb like a fox.”

For decades, journalists would speak of Henry with a mixture of respect for his baseball achievements and deep frustration bordering on anger for what they considered to be Aaron’s unnecessary suspicion of them. Henry would not dispute the writers’ descriptions of him. Often, he would confirm what the writers believed, for his wariness of the press was real. He did not believe that how he thought about himself as a person had ever been accurately conveyed in print, that the gap between his recollections of a given interview and the finished product was always far too wide. Furthermore, it was a gap that never seemed to tilt in his favor. Yet Henry also would not explain that the roots of his remove could be found in the pages of
The Saturday Evening Post:

Even in Aaron’s earlier days with the Braves, there were occasions when he surprised everybody with his mental nimbleness….

Off the field, the Aarons stay pretty well tied to the little apartment when the Braves are at home. For all his natural rhythm, Henry doesn’t dance a step….

One of the biggest moments in Henry’s career so far was the 1955 All-Star Game, which was played in Milwaukee. Henry scored a run, walked and singled twice. His second single, combined with Al Rosen’s error tied up the game and sent it into extra innings. Stan Musial finally won it with a twelfth-inning home run.

“I enjoy that,” Aaron said. “but my first year in the league I play in Jim Wilson’s no-hit game. That’s the most kick I get out of baseball.”

Over the three-page spread, Bisher exposed, though perhaps unintentionally, an important subtext of the baseball culture at the time. Integration by 1956 was clearly a success—only the Tigers, the Phillies, and the Red Sox had not yet integrated. But in the eight full seasons since Jackie Robinson had debuted, black players had dominated the sport, yet having star black players on major-league rosters did not amount to actual equality. He noted that Henry’s Braves teammates had nicknamed him “Snowshoes” for his stiff-legged running style. At no point did Bisher mention that Henry did not engage with his teammates easily because he, along with Joe Andrews and Felix Mantilla, were the first black players ever to play in the Sally League. Integrating a southern league was no insignificant task; in 1953, most southern states still carried laws on the books prohibiting competition between whites and blacks. Certainly entering such an environment could have explained much of Henry’s hesitation, but Bisher, a southerner comforted by his own sense of normalcy, saw Henry merely as an unsophisticated black character. Even Jackie Robinson, insulated in the minor leagues by playing in Montreal, had not had to endure the indignities that came with playing in the South on a daily basis.

The Sally League had long been considered perhaps the most notorious of the minor-league systems, and baseball people believed the league seemed the most unlikely to transition smoothly to integration. The Sally League’s reputation (combined with the cities and states that comprised it) was so formidable that big-league teams (the Red Sox and Cardinals primarily) used the fear of conflict in their minor-league affiliations in the South as reasons the big-league teams did not integrate. Bisher, and by extension Henry’s teammates and the men in the Jacksonville front office, captured Henry’s reticence, but they interpreted his hesitancy as an inability to navigate or a lack of intelligence, instead of recognizing the social forces at work. In the South, blacks were forced by habit, custom, and the law to be careful about how or if to approach whites. Henry had been taught from birth not to assume, and thus he would not have believed that he was entitled to the perk—which likely seemed extravagant at the time—of choosing a personal collection of bats.

In the fifteen hundred words he used, Bisher painted a disturbing portrait of Henry as nothing more than a country simpleton. Bisher wrote of him in the most condescending of terms, portraying a kind of hitting savant unaware of the larger, sophisticated world around him and without a passable IQ. The device Bisher used most effectively was language. Sharp and yet subtle, language could convey intelligence, stupidity, or
nothing
. It could be deftly used to feed into racial stereotyping.

“I guess the thing I’d most rather do of all,” he said, cocking his head and biting his lower lip, “I’d rather hit four hundred. A lot of guys are hitting forty homers nowadays, but nobody is hit four hundred since Ted Williams a long time ago.”

In 1955, Henry and two other Braves players arrived in Bradenton to begin early work before spring training. Today, players are allowed to work out at a club’s minor-league facilities during spring training but are prohibited from arriving at the major-league grounds until the league-scheduled reporting date.

But in 1955, players were not allowed to use the club facilities at all until the mandatory reporting date. Commissioner Ford Frick wired the Braves and fined the players fifty dollars. Charlie Grimm alerted Henry with a note, telling him he’d been fined by Frick, and Aaron’s reply was, “Who’s that?”

The Frick story had been told many times and would become an apocryphal anecdote that would follow Henry.
FRICK—“WHO’S THAT?” HENRY ASKED WHEN TOLD OF FINE
, read one headline in
The Sporting News
.

Aaron, so the story goes, crumbled a telegraphic notice of his fine without reading it. Manager Charlie Grimm asked if Aaron knew who sent him the wire. Aaron said he didn’t.

“Ford Frick,” Grimm told him.

“Who’s that?” asked Aaron without batting an eyelash, tossing the wire into the wastebasket.

Bisher retold the Frick story in his profile.

When Manager Charley
[sic]
Grimm handed Aaron his copy of the telegram, Henry shoved it into his pocket unopened.

“Better read that thing, Henry,” Charley said. “It’s from Ford Frick.”

The picture of innocence, Henry looked at Grimm and said, “Who’s dat?”

As even the best hitters must, Aaron has his batting slumps. He got into one at the end of spring training, going nine straight times without a hit. “I saving up for opening day,” he said.

If Bisher was taken by Barbara, he did not spare her in his writing.

In Milwaukee, the Aarons live in a little upstairs flat at the rear of a faded brown house on North 29th Street, just off busy West Center. Two pieces of furniture eat up most of the limited space in the living room—a big leather easy chair and a large screen television set. “He just sit there and watch those shooting westerns and smoke cigarettes,” his wife says, chuckling at the chance to poke fun at her mate.

Later, Bisher asked Henry if he had been motivated to play baseball because Satchel Paige, one of the great pitchers of the day, had grown up in Mobile. “I never heard of him till I was grown,” Bisher quoted Henry as saying. “I didn’t know he come from Mobile, and I never seen him till yet.”

With language, that was all it took—a little manipulation in pronunciation here, a phonetic license there—and the desired effect could be achieved. Though both were southerners at a time when social issues were reaching the confrontation point, Bisher did not ask for Henry’s opinion of the emerging fight for civil rights. Bisher did not believe Henry to be particularly bright, and the clear picture he painted of Henry is unmistakable for any reader.

The most devastating effect of the profile would be its influence on future profiles about Aaron. A profile on him would always be some form of referendum on his intelligence. It would, however, be misleading to suggest that Furman Bisher alone created the composite that would become Henry Aaron’s public personality. He did not. It would be more accurate to say that the Bisher story legitimized that point of view, for ever since Henry’s rookie season, a certain type of scrutiny had always been reserved especially for him.

Three weeks before the Bisher’s story was published,
The Sporting News
took note of Henry’s batting surge and ran a two-page feature. If Bisher focused on Henry’s diction,
The Sporting News
article, written by Lou Chapman of the
Milwaukee Sentinel
, portrayed Henry as graced with natural hitting talent but insufficiently intelligent to grasp such a complicated game.

BRAVES’ BLAZING AARON BIDS
FOR BATTING TITLE
¹¹³

Amazing Wrist-Action Gives Outfielder Whiplash Power

The accompanying cartoon—a montage of illustrated anecdotes that underscored the widely held perception of Aaron’s disdain for hard work or hard thinking—was more demeaning than the story itself, but one section remained with him.

Aaron was guilty of particularly atrocious base-running in one game….

… one of the veterans took Henry aside to give him some pointers….

“Henry,” he said, “you’ve got to watch the ball when you’re running the bases and you’ve got to decide whether and when you should tag up and go to another base.”

“I can’t do all that,” Aaron said, thus ending the discussion.

For years, Henry would speak about Herbert’s determined pride, and the admiration he held for his father, who had been able to carve out an existence despite his harsh circumstances. The early portrayals of Henry were painful. He had endured the taunts and assumptions of the Sally League (“Just wanted to let you niggers know you played a hell of a game”) and now was in the major leagues, beyond the reach of his expected place in Mobile, beyond the reach of the old limitations. Race was never America’s dirty little secret, for it was never a secret at all. The real secret was class, and all of its insidious tentacles. If Henry had thought he had finally escaped and was ready to be introduced to the American public as the new force on baseball’s emerging team, Bisher, with a pen stroke, brought Aaron, if not physically then at least mentally, back into the condescending caste system of the South.

A
FEW WEEKS
before the all-star break, Fred Haney was in the dugout, grousing about his bench. The reserves, usually the strength of a balanced team, were melting over the summer months. Pafko wasn’t hitting. Frank Torre was an excellent defensive first baseman, but he didn’t scare anyone at the plate, and Haney had already sent Covington out. The front liners—Aaron, Mathews, Bruton, Logan, and Adcock—were holding up their end and more. The starters who weren’t—Thomson and O’Connell—well, they’d been shipped out, responding to being traded from the Braves by going on hitting tears for the Giants. During one pregame bull session, a reporter asked Haney, “What would happen to your club if Adcock were to break his leg?”

It was one of those apocryphal baseball stories, surreal, ridiculous, and, of course, 100 percent true. On the afternoon of June 23, in the second game of a bitter doubleheader with the brash, contending Phillies at County Stadium, Joe Adcock broke his right leg. He would be gone until mid-September.

On July 11 in Pittsburgh, two days after the All-Star Game, Bill Virdon led off the bottom of the first with a dying quail to short center. Bruton raced in from center, Mantilla out from short, and neither slowed down. When the play was over, Virdon was on second with a double. Mantilla and Bruton were both knocked cold. When Bruton came to, he was on a stretcher, out for the year with a knee injury that would affect him for the rest of his career. Even Haney spent a week in the hospital, missing six games due to ulcers.

With Bruton gone, Haney chose Henry to fill the space in center field. To Fred Haney, acknowledging Aaron’s versatility was a compliment. Henry filled in at second base a few times. He had batted second, and now, in the middle of a five-team race, he would be the new center fielder.

But for Henry, the constant shifting hampered his development as a player. He wanted to learn how to be a great right fielder, and playing center would not help. Haney had placed him out of position in the batting order and now in the outfield.