The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (49 page)

“For any young teenage kid, being around this heroic ensemble, when they paid attention and spoke to you, it was a pretty awesome thing. Pat Jarvis, Clay Carroll, they laughed and joked and hung out with us,” Eisenberg recalled. “With Aaron, it was different. With Aaron, it was worse than picking on us. He ignored us…. I didn’t know the word at the time, but I thought it was arrogance, but later when you found out the life he was living, you sort of realized how he insulated himself from his teammates. You realize the defense mechanisms he had to set up, the walls he needed to protect himself.”

I
T WAS THE
kids who brought Henry to life—two of them, actually, who whenever he was around acted as though they were precocious and slobbering little pups, looking up to the big man with a reverence so complete that it couldn’t help but make Henry feel young and full, and, above all, appreciated. They saw him as a person of great wisdom, as somebody who wasn’t just the most feared bat in the lineup but actually a person who had something important to teach. Around them, Henry let his guard down, which he had not been able to do elsewhere. He could show the dormant, mentoring side of himself that had always been present in his first fourteen years in the big leagues. With them, he could show the smile that Buz Eisenberg said he never saw.

The fact was that whether it was when he was a kid or a big leaguer, Henry never did let a lot of people in. It just wasn’t his way. Though neither would ever quite understand why Henry had chosen them to be the ones to enter his private space, Johnnie B. Baker and Ralph Garr were the exceptions.

When Garr tore up the Texas League, playing for Shreveport, with his speed and they nicknamed him “Gator” and he was called up to the big club for that September 3, 1968, game with the Mets, it was Henry who was the first to greet the youngster at the door, to tell him to wait for him after the game and the two would have dinner. Garr, believing that Henry was aware of the number of black kids who were called up to the big leagues, having no guidance and only fragile confidence, always recalled the first significant words Henry ever said to him: “What got you here is what’s going to keep you here.
¹⁹¹
Don’t let anyone take that from you. Don’t you forget that.” Garr came from Monroe, Louisiana, and attended Grambling University. Six hours away from graduation, in 1967, he was drafted in the third round by the Braves and immediately reported to Double-A Austin. The minor leagues, even (or perhaps especially because of the civil rights movement) during the 1960s, could be a harsh place, and Garr thrived under difficult circumstances due to baseball men, many of them white, who took an interest in his success. There were Mel Didier, who signed him out of college, and Hub Kittle, his manager in Austin, who worked with him on footwork, first on the base paths and then in the outfield. There was Cliff Courtenay in Austin. And in the background was his father, Jesse, who told him there was no turning back, not during the times Ralph wanted to return home, as most black players did at one point or another. The white man was in control, his father told him, whether he came back home or whether he played baseball. So he might as well keep on playing.

It was Henry who taught him how to be a professional. Once, during an intrasquad game during spring training in 1969, Garr made a late read on a base hit to right but tried to score from second base anyway. Henry did not just make the throw that embarrassingly wiped Garr out at the plate by a mile but also galloped into the dugout to find Garr and explain
why
the kid had been embarrassed. Getting thrown out on the base paths was not always a big deal—that is, he told Garr, unless management believed you were thrown out for not understanding the situation. White players could get away with those types of mistakes, Henry said, but blacks could not. A black player who misunderstood an in-game situation could be branded for his whole career as unintelligent, Henry told him, and Ralph Garr was not an unintelligent baseball player. During this exchange, Henry was clearly recalling his own long years of enduring the humiliating caricatures from his coaches, teammates, and the press when he was a young player. He told Garr that no matter what else they did for the rest of their lives on a baseball diamond, black players who made mental mistakes early in their careers would never be allowed to live down those first impressions, even after their careers were long over.

“He was teaching me how to play the game. He said, ‘You’ve got the speed, but watch the game. There was no reason for you not to score.’ So he threw me out and made me a better player,” Garr recalled. “Because of him, what I was trying to do was make sure I didn’t make it hard for the next black guy who came up. Henry led by example, so
you
led by example. I wanted to show people that we weren’t monkeys.”

Away from the ballpark, Henry always picked up the tab, for dinners and taxis and the small sips of hard liquor he was known to take, but each check he picked up came with a lesson about being a big-league ballplayer, whether it was about leaving the proper tip or understanding which sections of town in a given city were best avoided. And the messages were always delivered the Henry way: He would not volunteer his wisdom easily. He would wait. If Garr made a mistake in judgment, he knew Henry would say nothing until Garr felt embarrassed, beaten down enough to ask for help.

One day, Garr asked Henry why he did not chew guys out when they were not meeting his exacting standards, just to get it over with. Eddie Mathews, for example, who would return to the Braves as manager in 1972, was extremely rough and unpredictable with players. “I’ll never forget it. That wasn’t who Henry was. Henry wasn’t going to give you the answers. He wanted you to understand the reasons why he was going to say something to you, and that could only come when you were ready to listen,” Garr said. “He used to say, ‘If you give a man a fish, he can eat tonight. But if you teach him to fish, he can eat for the rest of his life.’”

Henry was pleasant to the rest of his teammates, and they often sought to bathe in his aura. But Henry Aaron was no Mickey Mantle, gregarious and inclusive, the clubhouse leader of the pack when the team landed in a city, a list of friendly joints and bartenders at the ready. Few people were ever granted the golden pass to Henry’s inner circle. That was why Ralph Garr and Dusty Baker were vital, for Henry had not been as close to teammates socially since Mantilla and Bruton. As much as these young men fed off of Henry, the reverse was probably just as true.

Sometimes he would surprise the others, like the time in the early summer of 1967 when Tito Francona came over from Philadelphia. The Phillies had just played two games in Pittsburgh, then flown home for a series with the Braves. The next morning, June 12, Francona was informed he’d been traded to Atlanta, thus beginning one of those strange adventures in employment germane only to baseball. Francona woke up a member of the home team, intent on beating the tar out of the Braves, but by lunchtime, with a simple change of laundry, the enemy had become the good guys.

Francona had been a big leaguer
¹⁹²
for ten years, having joined Baltimore in 1956, just two years after Henry, and was thirty-three at the time of his trade to Atlanta. A couple of days later, the club was in Houston. Francona showered and headed downstairs for dinner, and there, sitting alone in the lobby of the old Rice Hotel, was Henry, who asked Tito where he was going.

“I’m going to get a steak, I guess.”

“Do you mind if I come with you?”

“We used to go out all the time. Hank liked steaks, especially in the big towns like Chicago and New York,” Francona recalled. “We used to go to have lunch before a ball game and we’d flip a coin to see who would pay.”

Born in 1933, a year before Henry, John Patsy Francona came from a tough-knuckles section of Pittsburgh that everyone in the neighborhood referred to as “Honky Alley.” It was a neighborhood of Hungarians and Italians, with some Jews and blacks, neither group large enough to threaten the order. The real threat during the years leading up to the war was having enough food on the table. When his son, Terry,
¹⁹³
would become a successful manager with the Boston Red Sox, Tito would always tell any of his friends at the ballpark to yell out “Honky Alley!” if they wanted a foolproof method for the boys from the old neighborhood to capture his son’s attention.

In New York, Tito and Henry
¹⁹⁴
would go to Eddie Condon’s to catch some jazz and a steak. On the plane, they would play hearts. Tito never stopped being in awe of Henry’s ability, but he was not one of the players (and over the years there were many) on the team who tiptoed around the superstars. “I remember when I first come up, with Baltimore, first game in the big leagues, and you know I’m nervous. I got butterflies and all, so I get to the ballpark around six a.m. We’re playing the Red Sox and I’m walking along the tunnel and I see this big number nine coming toward me—it’s Ted Williams. And he says, ‘Hey, you’re Tito Francona.’ And I’m thinking, How the hell do
you
know who I am? And he tells me he was once teammates with my roommate Harry Dorish, and Harry told him to look out for me. And Ted was great, gave me advice on hitting and everything, told me not to use such a heavy bat when the weather got warm.

“Henry had so much raw talent, it was unbelievable. I remember one game I batted after him. He hit a ball bad and he was so mad that he slammed the bat down onto the dirt and snapped the bat in half. Then he looks up and the ball went out of the ballpark. Imagine being able to do that.”

In terms of being cultivated by Henry, Tito Francona was one of the lucky few over the years who not only held warmth and respect for Henry but shared some intimate times with him. Yet Ralph and Dusty saw Henry
¹⁹⁵
in a way perhaps no one else in baseball ever did. Dusty was different from the start, for no one in Henry’s inner circle ever called him Hank. Hank was the name his talent created, something the sportswriters and the ball club and the fans used. To anyone on the inside not named Dusty, he was Henry. “I never noticed it, but I guess it’s true,” Baker said. “But he never corrected me, either.”

With those two kids, Henry was totally engaged, treating them as members of the family, and because of Henry’s connection to them, Dusty and Ralph became connected to each other. Both represented the third generation of black player, post-Depression, post–World War II men who had entered the big leagues with a different set of expectations both from baseball and from life. The Negro Leagues were gone and therefore no longer the expected destination, and ambition for blacks born after the war was a less dangerous commodity. Dusty Baker grew up in Sacramento, California. For a time, he had gone to college, but in 1968, he joined the marine reserves (volunteering for six years in the reserves wasn’t foolproof, but it was the best way to stay out of Vietnam). In the marines, L. Cpl. Johnnie B. Baker had shown leadership qualities and was given responsibilities, yet he entered the Braves system as a nineteen-year-old kid with something of a reputation for being free-spirited, a little disdainful of authority figures, maybe one to watch. And quietly, those in the Braves front office would nudge the big man to sort of keep an eye on Dusty. But Henry was already a step ahead of the suits.

And ahead of Henry was Dusty’s mother, who when Baker signed with the Braves asked Henry directly to “take care of my boy.” Henry, traditionally distant and cool to the younger generation, agreed to to do.

“There were times I got called in
¹⁹⁶
for going certain places or being with certain people. They asked Hank to talk to me about certain things. Other times he would take it upon himself, getting me up to eat breakfast, putting the room-service card, all filled out, outside my hotel door to make sure I ate, make me go to church, invite me to go to certain meetings, NAACP meetings and things, freedom rallies back then and stuff. He promised my mom that he would take care of me as if I was his son, which he did.”

And it was there, by Henry’s side, that Dusty Baker saw the world. It was also where he saw the deep contradictions of race. Dusty recalled that in general the white kids and black kids and Latino kids in California were all the same. They all played together and went to the same schools. Yet when Baker considered his idea of wealth in California, the memory was always the same: whites living in exclusive neighborhoods.

In Atlanta, Baker saw just the opposite: blacks living in wealthy and upper-middle-class districts but still racially separated on a day-to-day basis. Henry’s southwest Atlanta neighborhood had a white-collar sensibility, and there were civil rights meetings. It was with Henry that Dusty met Sammy Davis, Jr., and Maynard Jackson and Herman Russell, power players in local and national politics. In Chicago, Dusty dined at the home of Jesse Jackson, with Henry, of course. In Los Angeles, Henry introduced Dusty to Flip Wilson. Backstage in New York, it was Ramsey Lewis, and the start of Dusty Baker’s lifelong love affair with jazz. They used to joke that even when Henry and Barbara thought they were eating alone, Dusty and Ralph were probably under the dinner table.

“He was a fun-loving guy, but a serious guy at the same time. He was a complex guy, but an everyday guy,” Baker said. “He only let certain people really in. He extended himself to everybody, but he only let really certain people get in.”

In Atlanta, Ralph and Dusty were part of the family. Barbara would cook for them, and they treated her as a surrogate mother, because Dusty was still a kid.

“I was there so young, nineteen years old, I was closer in age to his kids and to the batboys, so I just hung out with them all the time,” Baker recalled. “I couldn’t go to bars and drink with those guys, so I hung with the batboys. Lary, Hanky, Gaile, and Dorinda, who was just a little ole girl. They’re all like my brothers and sisters now. We’d just hang out at Hank’s house. I’d go watch their football games in high school, stuff like that…. Kid stuff, you know?”