The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (44 page)

The Milwaukee fans even knew how Henry held his cigarette, right arm tight to his body as he took a long drag, head always facing in the opposite direction from where he would eventually flick away the spent butt. Henry had smoked since he was a teenager shooting pool on Davis Avenue. During the 1950s, advertising campaigns often featured major-league players
(how to smoke like a big leaguer)
, the perfect recruiting tool for a new generation of tobacco consumers. Sometimes, the fans with the best angle could look into the dugout and catch Henry stealing a drag before walking to the on-deck circle, extinguishing a butt on the bottom of his spikes. Like his idol DiMaggio, Henry adopted Camels as his cigarette of choice. It would always be unclear whether Henry succumbed to advertising, but DiMaggio once appeared in a Camel ad: “Joe DiMaggio has something to say about how different cigarettes can be.” Henry never admitted it to be true, but some Aaron fans distinctly remember Henry taking a drag once or twice near the on-deck circle. Take your pick of the magazines—
Sport, Sports Illustrated, The Saturday Evening Post
, and you would likely find a ballplayer selling cigarettes.

THE CAMEL MILDNESS TEST
¹⁶⁹

How thorough can cigarette mildness be? Here’s your answer!

In a coast-to-coast test, hundreds of men and women smoked only Camels for 30 days, averaging 1–2 packs a day. Each well-noted throat specialist examined their throats. These doctors made 2,470 careful examinations and reported not one single case of throat irritation due to smoking Camels!

VIC RASCHI—“You can’t beat ’em for flavor—and they’re mild!”

BOB LEMON—“Camels are great tasting, and mild!”

MEL PARNELL—“I like the taste and they get on fine with my throat. It’s Camels for me!”

Seven years later, Henry got his turn, appearing in his own ad for Camels. Gracing the pages of a 1958
Life
magazine advertisement, Henry wore a tweed jacket, a cigarette resting carefully in his left hand.

H
ANK AARON HIT MORE HOMERS
than any other ballplayer in the majors last season. He also led both leagues in total runs batted in, won the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award, and paced the Milwaukee Braves to their world championship. This real pro smokes Camel, a real cigarette. “Can’t beat ’em for flavor. And Camels sure smoke mild.”

The fans were protective of their hero, and he made them feel safe and good about their unexpected, glorious moment in time. The only problem was that in the 1960s, for the first time, the graphlines of Henry Aaron and those of the Milwaukee Braves trended divergently. In the beautiful 1950s, with the Braves challenging for pennants, Milwaukeeans raced through the turnstiles as if it were ten-cent beer night, and Henry was just another one of the players, an undeniably outsized talent to be sure, but without the clubhouse influence (and responsibilities) of Mathews and Spahn, Burdette and Logan and Bruton.

Within a decade, though, Henry had run right past them all. Some of the distance from his early years certainly benefited him, for he was eager to escape so much of the old life, starting with the tiresome act of having to accept the daily humiliation of being depicted as a simpleton. He had actively begun to reinvent himself, augmenting his awesome statistics with political awareness and social clout, while all the while growing more resolute in his belief that his baseball talent meant nothing if it did not translate to improving the general condition of the world around him. He was a man rounding into substantive form. Some of the changes were dramatic. He had made the conscious decision to be more outspoken on racial issues, striking up a friendship with the football player Jim Brown, then considered the most politically minded black athlete in the country. He had chosen to be more active in politics. These characteristics were easily detectable to his teammates (if not exactly understood), while others were deemed only superficial. One such change was in his dress. In the 1950s, Henry dressed like an insurance salesman—short-sleeve oxford-cloth shirt, dark, thin tie with a half Windsor knot, dark pants. Into the 1960s, as he began to make more money and grew more into himself, compared to his first years in the league, Henry looked more like a kaleidoscope: plaid and checkered suits, sunglasses, Afro, and, that great staple of the 1960s, turtlenecks with a sport coat. Both poles, those of politics and fashion, however, represented a singular truth: Henry had left one stage of his career and entered another.

And as he grew, the Braves just could not keep up. For 130 games in 1960, Milwaukee fought emerging Pittsburgh for the pennant, only to finish second, seven games back. The key sequence between the two clubs occurred in late July, with the young Pirates—led by the hard-nosed shortstop Dick Groat (who would win the league MVP that year) and featuring the passionate, determined right fielder Clemente—holding a half-game lead. Two years earlier, when the Braves won their second pennant, the Pirates had challenged but wilted at roughly the same point in the season, late July, when pitching arms die and the bats feel more like lead than lightning. And here it was, poised to happen all over again, the Braves, veterans at breaking pretenders as the summer intensified, ready to catapult the Pirates back into the land of the almost ready. On the night of July 26 in San Francisco, Sam Jones blinded the Braves lineup for six innings. He would strike out eleven, including a furious Henry, to lead off the seventh. But Milwaukee pushed home a run in the seventh, and then Henry singled and scored off Jones for payback, as well as making an eighth-inning insurance run, in a 3–1 win. The lead was still wafer-thin. Spahn and Burdette were next in the rotation, while Pittsburgh was in St. Louis to face a Cardinals team that was just beginning to show threats of being dangerous. The pressure was on the Pirates.

Then, over the next fifteen games, the Braves lost eleven times, five to the Dodgers, dropping them down to fourth place, while Pittsburgh, green to the fight, embraced the pressure and won eleven games during the same stretch. The lead was seven, and the pennant was gone. The following year, it was an inspired Cincinnati team that clubbed its way to the pennant, while Milwaukee dropped to fourth, ten games back. Nineteen sixty-two belonged to the West Coast, the renewal of the old New York rivalry to a new time zone. The Dodgers and Giants won 205 games between them, and played an epic three-game play-off that ended with Mays once again in the World Series. The Braves didn’t overcome the .500 mark for good until July 25 and finished as poorly as they’d ever had since arriving in Milwaukee, fifteen and a half games out, in fifth place.

The only thing that gave 1962 special heft was that Henry’s little brother Tommie made the big-league club out of spring training. For the first time in organized ball, Henry and Tommie would be teammates. Five and a half years younger, Tommie Aaron was a big kid. He stood six-one, and weighed 190 pounds, fifteen pounds more than Henry had at eighteen. He had played baseball as religiously as Henry, but also football at Central High.

The Braves had signed Tommie back in 1958, but, unlike Henry, Tommie Aaron was not a can’t-miss prospect. Henry played a total of just 224 games in the minor leagues, and hit .353 in those games. Tommie followed immediately in Henry’s footsteps—two seasons in Eau Claire, Class C ball, then a full season at Class B Cedar Rapids of the Three-I league in 1960, with cups of coffee in Jacksonville and Louisville. In 1961, he played 138 games in Double-A Austin of the Texas League, but the game did not seem to come easily to him. Henry believed he indirectly affected Tommie’s progress, for the Aaron name produced expectations that the little brother would possess the same magic of his older, famous sibling.

For Tommie, just reaching the majors, to be on the roster, he would need to study and learn the game, find coaches interested in his success, and work at it. In the minor leagues, he was a respectable hitter—.274 his first year in Eau Claire, .299 both at Cedar Rapids and Austin—and had power. In the majors, hitting—which was the difference between staying with the club and being sent back down—would be the weakest part of Tommie’s game.

Yet having Tommie in the big leagues changed the dynamic of the Braves clubhouse, and the other Braves asked themselves that old saw: How could two people who grew up in the very same circumstances, in the same house, with the same parents, be so different?

While Henry kept his distance, Tommie was the gregarious one, navigating each clique that existed in the room, soaking up the clubhouse energy, recycling it back. Henry loved baseball, but Tommie seemed to love it
and
enjoy it simultaneously. Joe Torre used to marvel at just how fast after games Henry would dress and leave the clubhouse, but Tommie was the opposite. He talked the game, chatted up the coaches and the managers and the clubhouse kids. It was part of Tommie’s personality that had been evident even back in Mobile.

“He was such a good, open man,”
¹⁷⁰
Joe Torre said. “A really good man with a really good baseball mind. Tommie was always quick with a laugh, and he made it easier for Hank.”

For a time, Tommie lived with Barbara and Henry. He hadn’t been on the big-league club long before he met a girl, whom he would marry. Carolyn Davenport had been a friend of Nancy Maye, wife of Braves reserve outfielder Lee Maye. Carolyn had grown up in Little Rock, but the family moved to Milwaukee when she was fifteen. Her father, Willis Davenport, was a steelworker and relocated the family after finding work at Inland Steel.

She had little interest in baseball, but she and Tommie connected quickly. “It was almost from the time we met,”
¹⁷¹
she recalled. “I met Tommie at the ballpark and little did I know. I didn’t know the rules, but it became normal fast. I just got used to it.”

Having Tommie on the club brought Henry even closer to the city and the club, but one by one, the old cast who’d whooped it up at Ray Jackson’s faded. Pafko was finished after the 1959 collapse to the Dodgers, remaining with the team as a coach. Johnny Logan lost his starting job to Roy McMillan, and he was traded to the Pirates for Gino Cimoli in June 1961. He played two more uninspired years for Pittsburgh and retired to his house on the South Side. Joe Adcock’s last big year came in 1961; then the bottom fell out and he was done in Milwaukee the following year. Bruton was never again the same player defensively after the collision with Mantilla in 1957. He led the team in hits in 1960, then was sent off to Detroit that winter for Neil Chrisley and Frank Bolling, the Mobile boy against whom Henry played as a kid in the sandlots but never as a teammate, since whites and blacks were prohibited from competing in Alabama. Mantilla, who never could convince management he was good enough to be an everyday player, was gone in 1962, sent to the hapless expansion Mets, where he played for Casey Stengel. Frank Torre got hurt in 1960, played just twenty-one games, and was released, replaced in 1961 by his talented little brother Joe. There were two whippersnappers, Tony Cloninger and Joe Torre, who were destined for long, productive careers, and another, the talented Ricardo Adolfo Jacobo Carty, whom Henry would take under his wing, but many of the new faces wouldn’t last. Chuck Dressen, Jackie Robinson’s favorite manager, took over the club in 1960; he talked tough but lasted just two seasons. Dressen never blended with this club;
¹⁷²
he lost Spahn and Burdette almost immediately, reduced to calling the two “the Katzenjammer Kids.” Birdie Tebbetts, the general manager, came down from the front office and guided the team right into fifth place. Bobby Bragan, the southerner who once preferred to be traded than to have Jackie Robinson as a teammate, took over, and the results didn’t get any better.

Some of the names were still there, but they were just ghosts, closer to the Old-Timers Game than a September pennant race. Spahn stubbornly beat back time, winning twenty-three games as a forty-two-year-old in 1963, but he would be gone a year later to the Mets and Giants and Cooperstown. Burdette won eighteen games in 1961 but would never win more than ten in a season thereafter. By 1963, he was traded to St. Louis for Gene Oliver and Bob Sadowski. Even Mathews, once projected to give Ruth a run for his money, wheezed to the finish. He would remain with Henry in Milwaukee, but he could never drive in one hundred runs or hit better than .265 after 1961. Mathews, in his time the greatest power-hitting third baseman ever, would hit thirty home runs only once more. In Milwaukee, the names were just that, names that produced a seductive whiff of sentimentality, giving off a teasing and bittersweet aroma no different from that of the old bread factory, which had long ceased production.

A
ND THEN THERE
was Henry. As a player in his prime who could conjure up the old wistful magic and still put a hurting on Koufax, Drysdale, and the new kids who were starting to dominate the National League, there was, in Milwaukee, only Henry. And he was brilliant: .292 average, 40 homers, 126 RBI, 11 triples in 1960; 34 home runs, a .327 average, and 120 driven in the following year. Then came the two monster years that dwarfed Mays, Mantle, Maris, all of them, and put Henry on the Cooperstown track, an equal with the greats but second to nobody: .323, with 45 bombs, 128 driven in 1962, backed up by a torrid .319 average, with 44 homers, 130 RBI, and 201 hits in 1963.

Nineteen sixty-three was the
big one
. At the plate, nobody was better. He led the league in home runs, but only once, on September 10 against Cincinnati, did he hit two in a game. He led the league in runs batted in and runs scored, was second in the league in stolen bases and hits. He lost the batting title to Tommy Davis by seven points—finishing third behind Davis and Clemente—and those seven points would have given him the Triple Crown. The future Hall of Famers on the mound didn’t want any part of him. Henry hit .471 against Drysdale with four homers and .318 off Marichal (though one, Bob Gibson, handled him easily, holding Henry to just two hits in fifteen at bats).