The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (54 page)

Nevertheless, the important kernel in Schonfeld’s recollections is how Mays apparently treated Henry that day, and Henry’s reaction for the next fifty years—to diffuse, while not forgetting, the original offense—would be consistent with the shrewd but stern way Henry Aaron dealt with uncomfortable issues. The world did not need to know Henry’s feelings toward Mays, but Henry was not fooled by his adversary. Mays committed one of the great offenses against a person as proud as Henry: He insulted him, embarrassed him in front of other people, and did not treat him with respect. Such an exchange was not the kind Henry would be likely to forget. As they say in the news business, Schonfeld stuck by his story.

“I was just a kid, and it was exciting to me
²¹³
to be there. It was pregame. There was nobody in the stands. I wanted to interview Warren Spahn, and I remember them playing a joke on me, because I was a rookie, too. They sent Burdette out. Luckily, I knew what Spahn looked like,” he said. “You could see Hank was getting really worked up through the interview, and I thought we did a really good piece. I don’t think he spit at me, but it was at my feet, like something left a bad taste in his mouth.

“Willie was calling him ‘farm boy’ and saying stuff like ‘You’re in the major leagues now.’ I specifically remember Willie using the word
nigger
, but I didn’t think a lot about it, because that was how a lot of blacks talked to each other. I always thought it was bench jockeying, or maybe Willie just didn’t like to see the next guy coming up being just as good as he was.”

B
Y THE EARLY
months of 1972, time was breaking Henry, too. He reported to West Palm Beach in February and headed straight to the trainer’s room. His ankles hurt, and so did his right knee, injured in a home-plate collision during spring training, and his back had hurt for nearly three years. And that was how in 1972 Henry would play 105 games at first base, both to ease his physical trouble and, mostly, to replace an injured Orlando Cepeda, as well as Rico Carty, who had shattered his leg.

On the good days, Henry would tell the writers during spring training that he felt like he was a kid again. “I feel like I’m eighteen again,” Henry said. On the bad days, when his right knee would buckle and bite, he explained he had not elected to have off-season surgery because of his age. And there was the matter of his arthritic neck, which seemed to flare up with regularity.

The season did not start on time—the first-ever players strike made sure of that—and when it did, Henry victimized the Reds (first Don Gullett, then Jack Billingham) and then the Cardinals (Bob Gibson, then Rick Wise) during a four-day stretch in April at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium.

Ten days later, on May 5, he returned the favor in St. Louis with a two-run shot off Gibson. The next day, May 6, 1972—also known as the forty-first birthday of Mr. Willie Howard Mays, Jr.—Henry caught Wise again, for career home run number 645. Willie, meanwhile, hadn’t yet hit his first of the season. Henry was one behind Mays. Nineteen games into the season, hitting .184, with no bombs and three RBI, on May 11, the spiral was complete: The Giants traded Mays to the New York Mets for pitcher Charlie Williams (who would produce an 8.68 ERA for his new team) and fifty thousand dollars in cash.

The showman was back on Broadway, in his town, and Mays provided a nostalgia burst. May 14, in his first game as a Met (against the Giants, of course), Mays walked and scored in the first, then broke a 4–4 tie in the bottom of the fifth with a home run that stood as the game winner, 5–4 Mets. At Veterans Stadium in Philly a week later, May 21, Mays shook that year-old concrete bowl. This was a Phillies team that would win just
fifty-nine games
all season, and yet on this night they weren’t pushovers, because of Steve Carlton, who would win twenty-seven games all by himself. The Phillies led 3–0 in the sixth with Carlton, on the hill when Willie led off with a double and scored on Tommy Agee’s home run. On his next at bat, with one on in the eighth and the Phils up 3–2, Mays broke Carlton’s heart with a two-run homer, for a 4–3 Mets win. The leader was
back
.

Willie would be respectable for the rest of the year, hitting .267, but alas, that was it for the heroics. On May 31, at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium, Henry Aaron caught Willie Mays with home run number 648, a first-inning drive off San Diego’s Fred Norman that snaked around the left-field foul pole.

WEDNESDAY NIGHT:
²¹⁴
AARON TIES MAYS FOR 2D PLACE

It took Hank Aaron 18-plus seasons to catch Willie Mays. His next target is Babe Ruth’s record.

Aaron hit his 648th home run Wednesday night….

Aaron also became the second player in history to attain 6,000 total bases, reaching 6,001. The record of 6,134 belongs to Stan Musial….

Ten days later, also at the Vet, Henry passed Mays with a little sizzle of his own: a grand slam against hulking six-foot-six-inch, 215-pound Wayne Twitchell.

Henry would never look back. He would never chase Willie Mays again as much as he would stalk the record book, passing whoever was next on the page. For the first time in his career, that next person was not Willie Mays.

Now, Henry made a marathoner’s final kick toward Ruth. Atlanta hosted the All-Star Game in 1972, the first held in the Deep South, the young blazer Jim Palmer against the old pro Bob Gibson. Palmer froze Henry with a called strike three in the first and Mickey Lolich induced a lazy fly to right. But in the sixth inning, down 1–0, Henry faced his favorite spitballer, Gaylord Perry, and launched a two-run home run to deep left-center field. It was the first home-run hit in an All-Star Game in Atlanta.

The rest of the year, he followed this star turn, backing up his forty-seven-homer year with thirty-four more in 1972. That put him at 673 for 1973. The hype machine, which had generally left him alone during the 1960s, had returned for a sober, often unflattering reappraisal: to assess whether Henry was worthy of surpassing the iconic Ruth. As early as the end of the 1971 season, as Henry assaulted the record book, the combination of journalists who pointed out that Henry’s consistency did not match Ruth’s dominance and a segment of the public that sent him death threats returned the favor.

And it was there that Henry Aaron retrenched. He had escaped Mobile. He had realized his talent, played the game hard, and yet for all of it he was being reminded that none of it mattered, that he was again reduced, in his words, to “being just another nigger.”

T
HERE WAS PERHAPS
no better barometer that Henry was now a central figure in the national conversation than that fact that he was included in the comic strip
Peanuts
, Charles Schulz’s daily masterpiece.

Schulz was the most famous cartoonist in America, and more:
Peanuts
uniquely represented the heart of the American mainstream as well as baseball’s place in it. According to Schulz’s biography, by 1967, the strip appeared in 745 daily newspapers across the country and in 393 Sunday papers. According to United Feature Syndicate, more than half of the nation’s population made the travails of Charlie Brown part of their daily reading.

Even in the funny pages, Willie held dominion. “It’s kind of fun now and then
²¹⁵
to use the names of real people in my comic strip,
Peanuts,”
Schulz once told Mays biographer Charles Einstein. “And after looking over about twenty-five years’ accumulation of strips, I discovered that I used the name Willie Mays more than any other individual. I suppose it’s because to me, Willie Mays has always symbolized perfection.”

Yet from August 8 to August 15, 1973, Schulz featured Henry, and it was a seminal moment for each. Henry was national now, and it was widely assumed that as he continued his ascension, he could pass Ruth in 1973. As such, he had taken over some of Willie’s real estate.

Simultaneously, Willie had fallen once and for all. Though his team, the New York Mets, would advance to the World Series, Mays would play out the rest of the 1973 season hitting .211.

Schulz created a prescient story line, where Snoopy needed one home run to break Babe Ruth’s home run record while facing a hostile public. If Henry had always been handicapped by playing in markets that were a shade below prime time, Schulz, in his ubiquitous way, had elevated Henry and the politics of the chase into the mainstream discussion, while at the same time providing a clever, biting social commentary:

Snoopy [wearing a baseball cap, reading a letter on his doghouse]: “Dear Stupid, who do you think you are? If you break the Babe’s home-run record, we’ll break you! We’ll run you out of the country. We hate your kind!”

Charlie Brown: Is your hate mail causing you to lose any sleep?

Snoopy [now lying flat on his doghouse, a rising tidal wave of letters hovering high over him]: “Only when it falls on me.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
RUTH

A
LL WEEK LONG
, Bob Hope dreamed of naked people. In the morning, he could see them, bare feet tramping blissfully across the cool, crunchy grass, bodies flapping, arms cutting feverishly in free release through the humid air. When Hope lay down to sleep, the naked people followed into his bedroom, giggling with delight as they ran him straight into ruin.

It was perfection that stood at the center of his anxieties, and so far, even as ulcers pierced his gut, he felt he was close to achieving it. He believed he had done everything right in managing the demands of Henry’s pursuit of Ruth, and now, following the first week of the 1974 season, Henry stood on 714 home runs, an eleven-game home stand all but guaranteeing that Bill Bartholomay’s engineering to have Henry break the record in Atlanta would pay off.

Hope had tried to provide Henry with some semblance of personal space, an oasis to ease the ordeal. Hope loved baseball so much that he was all too aware of Roger Maris—the last person to challenge Babe Ruth—and all that his team, the New York Yankees, had not done for him in 1961, when Maris would break Ruth’s single-season record of sixty home runs. With history in mind, he was determined to protect Henry. Once, during the chase, word got out that the Braves had arranged for a dying boy to meet with Henry briefly before a game. “He had leukemia.
²¹⁶
He was dying and he asked can he meet Hank Aaron. Well, suddenly our phone started ringing, and with every one of these calls, every kid had one disease or another,” Hope recalled. “As the pressure is growing and we’re getting faster and faster toward the record, I go to an NL meeting, and the league adopted a rule that no youngsters would be allowed in the dugout before games. I told Hank we had all these requests and now we could get out of it. I told him I could get him an extra twenty minutes. And besides, I told him that all these kids, well, most of them, aren’t sick. I can just tell them it’s against the rules. So we go back and forth and I keep telling him, ‘Hank, they aren’t sick.’ And Hank said, ‘Yes, but some of them are.’

“So after it’s all said and done, years later I’m walking through an airport or something and a man stops me and recognizes me as being part of the Braves. He tells me that his son got to meet Hank Aaron and not long after that he died on the operating table. So you can imagine how I felt.”

Hope was convinced that he had successfully executed the virtually impossible balancing act of providing Henry privacy without alienating the throng of journalists, well-wishers, and dignitaries who wanted to be close to him.

Over the winter, he and his staff had updated a growing pamphlet chronicling Henry’s career; the booklet had now swelled to dozens of pages, opening with the words “The Greatest Sports Story in America Is Taking Place in Atlanta.” The Braves had issued daily press credentials to an average of four hundred journalists per day, forcing Hope to open the football press box at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium for the spillover. “It was,” Hope said, “like doing public relations for two teams at once: the Braves and Henry Aaron.”

Bob Hope did not fear the alleged assassins who were now attracting so much attention. Since the early part of 1972, when the mathematics of Henry hitting 715 home runs grew closer to a certainty, and his was the only name to challenge Ruth’s record, the threat of death increased. Carla Koplin served as Henry’s personal secretary and Calvin Wardlaw, an off-duty Atlanta police officer, was assigned to Henry as a personal bodyguard. As ubiquitous as his home run total were the letters he would receive from his fellow Americans, guaranteeing his death should he continue the quest.

Hope believed that so much of the talk of murdering Henry Aaron was just that, the work of a lunatic fringe just unbalanced enough to threaten anonymously and ruin Henry’s peace of mind, but not sufficiently motivated to kill. The letters Henry had received were real enough, and existed in great enough volume that Hope was not cavalier about the possibility of violence. But Hope felt that the combination of the FBI, the Atlanta police, and the two-man personal security force of Wardlaw and Lamar Harris would be sufficient to deter any maniac who may have thought his bullet could change history.

Instead, a more likely and embarrassing image continued to dominate his thinking: the sight of Henry Aaron hitting the momentous record-breaking home run, rounding first under a deafening, triumphant roar, the nation and the world’s journalists chronicling every detail of the moment by typewriter, microphone, and television camera, Ivan Allen’s dream of the country focusing its collective eyes on Atlanta for something other than the collision between blacks and whites at last realized. And then Hope could see the rest of the scene unfolding in his mind’s eye, almost in slow motion: Henry rounding second and then, there they were, a couple of streakers running onto the field, as naked as the day they were born, zigzagging away from security, probably freaked out on LSD, upstaging Henry, embarrassing the Braves, baseball, and the city of Atlanta, his perfect night lampooned for all time.

“That’s all I could think of,” Hope recalled. “Can you imagine that? You have to remember that those were the days of Morganna the Kissing Bandit and kids taking off their clothes and jumping onto the field. At that moment! We would have never, ever, lived something like that down.”

B
OB
H
OPE WAS
convinced that by virtue of his connection to Henry, who was challenging the home run record, he was party to something truly historic, especially in the South. The arc of his own personal life told him so, for a black person attaining such a valued place in American history in of itself represented the promise of dignity for black people that had not existed during his upbringing. Hope had grown up in the twin gulfs of class privilege and racial segregation, a classically southern motif, in an affluent section of Atlanta. His parents and grandparents routinely used the word
nigger
in their common speech, as did all of their friends. The Hope family owned a vacation home at Lake Lanier, in Forsythe County, and for years a black maid, a woman named Johnnie Lue, worked for the family. When he was a teenager, Bob Hope was constantly frustrated by one of his responsibilities, for it cut into his free time: When the family stayed at the vacation house, he was to keep track of the time, for Forsythe County was a sundown town: No blacks were allowed within county limits after dark, and the Hope family had to shuttle Johnnie Lue out of town or risk both violation of local ordinances and their standing in the eyes of their white neighbors. “When I was sixteen, I had to watch the sun because she had to be out of the county before the sun went down,” Hope recalled. “I knew it was a law, but it was a pain in the neck. It’s hard to fathom that there was a time when these things were considered normal.”

When he was a teenager on the football team at Northside High School in Atlanta, his coach explained to the team why Northside never played the local black high school, even though the schools were but a few miles apart.

“Clearly, growing up in the South, if you were white, you didn’t have an opportunity to be around blacks. I went to high school and graduated before they had integrated sports. We had only two blacks at our school,” he recalled.

“It wasn’t like you had anything against them, but you hadn’t affiliated with them, either. My parents and grandparents still used the N word. The white South didn’t understand the black South. The black South was still a novelty. You didn’t go to the same places. You heard about the colored water fountains. When I was a kid, I thought ‘colored water’ meant that the water was a different color, and as a kid, you wanted to drink the colored water. Then you learned the Negroes were segregated. You read the newspapers and you realized that Martin Luther King, Jr., was there. You understood what they were marching for was fair, but you didn’t understand the full magnitude of what was going on.”

When Hope attended Georgia State College, just ten years earlier, the law prohibited blacks and whites from competing together in the major college conference in the region, the Southeastern Conference, in either basketball or football, and now Henry was about to break a record considered unassailable, set during the tail end of the most aggressive period of segregation since Reconstruction. That the home-run record had been established at a time when blacks were not allowed to play in the major leagues carried its own degree of meaning. It was as if breaking the record would signify the hard-won fall of another barrier in the struggle for acceptance, proof of the illegitimacy of keeping blacks out of the game in the first place, proof of all that could have been possible years earlier. Henry identified with the words of Buck O’Neil, the Negro league player and manager who had never been granted the opportunity to test his skills against the great white players in the major leagues but would become the first black scout in the major leagues, discovering Ernie Banks and Lou Brock for the Chicago Cubs. “Just give us the chance,”
²¹⁷
O’Neil often said, “and we’ll do the rest.”

P
UBLICLY
, H
ENRY ADOPTED
a typically American position. He was just another in a line of kids who in this country could grow up to be anything, do anything, if they put their mind to it, he said. It was a convenient path to follow, because it made America feel good about itself and its possibilities. Henry appeared grateful and not resentful that the opportunity for blacks had been so long in coming. On March 20, 1974, an article under Henry’s byline appeared in the
Montgomery Advertiser
, with Henry writing, “The Babe is a legend now. He created more excitement than any player who ever lived.

“What I find so hard to believe is that Hank Aaron, a nobody from Mobile, Alabama is the first player in 40 years to challenge that home-run record. How did it come about?”

What was clearer than the myth America liked to tell itself was how breaking the record would represent the fall of another domino in the acceptance of black athletes in professional sports, and the speed at which the old rules were being rewritten by force of time and personality. Robinson destroyed the belief that blacks weren’t talented or disciplined enough to compete alongside and against whites. Ali changed the way the black athlete could express himself to the public. By challenging the all-time home-run record, Henry represented a third front: the black athlete at the top of a team sport who would break a record held by a transcendent white athlete.

By 1974, Bill Russell had been retired five years. He had won eleven NBA championships and become the first black head coach in mainstream American professional team sports, winning two championships as a player-coach. Wilt Chamberlain had statistically dominated his sport as no athlete since Ruth. Jim Brown retired as the all-time leading rusher, but in becoming the most prolific runner in his sport, Brown accumulated only numbers. He did not surpass a player who held the public imagination in a way that rivaled Ruth. In basketball, Chamberlain was every bit as dominant as Ruth in baseball, but basketball, if not exactly a fringe sport, did not define any substantial portion of America, nor did the sport’s records. Who was the all-time leading scorer in NBA history before Chamberlain was a trivia question hardly even basketball fans knew the answer to.

Apart from Ruth, the sports icon with whom white America most closely identified may have been Jack Dempsey, the richest, most popular heavyweight champion of his day, and Dempsey would not fight black challengers. Joe Louis beat Jim Braddock, thereby winning the heavyweight title, but he and Jesse Owens made their initial mark nationalistically, as Americans, defeating Germans, not other Americans, for even though Louis beat the American Braddock to win the title, it would be his knockout of Max Schmeling that catapulted him into the American conscience, the symbol of American values at a time when the world faced its own larger questions of morality. Preparing to attend the first game of the Braves home stand against the Dodgers in hopes that Henry would break the record was the Georgia governor and future president, Jimmy Carter. Carter had already contributed to the anticipated celebration of Henry’s victory by announcing an executive order: The state’s prisoners would get right to work on a new commemorative state license plate that would read HENRY—715. Carter remembered that night in 1938 when Louis beat Schmeling and won the title, and he at once understood the deep roots of white superiority toward blacks, and by extension, this illustrated to him how Henry’s surpassing Ruth would seem even more offensive to the white sense of superiority than Schmeling’s losing to Louis.

Carter recalled how the whites along the dirt roads of Plains, Georgia, had rooted for Schmeling, and he could remember the roars of the black citizens down the street when Louis destroyed Schmeling in the first round. “For our community,
²¹⁸
this fight had heavy racial overtones, with almost unanimous support at our all-white school for the European over the American,” Carter wrote in his book
An Hour Before Daylight
. “A delegation of our black neighbors came to ask Daddy if they could listen to the broadcast, and we put the radio in the window so the assembled crowd in the yard could hear it. The fight ended abruptly, in the first round, with Louis almost killing Schmeling. There was no sound from outside—or inside—the house. We heard a quiet ‘Thank you, Mr. Earl,’ and then our visitors walked silently out of the yard, crossed the road and the railroad tracks, entered the tenant houses, and closed the door. Then all hell broke loose, and their celebration lasted all night long. Daddy was tight-lipped, but all the mores of our segregated society had been honored.”

Babe Ruth had held the all-time home record not for forty years, as Henry and most of America had once believed, but considerably longer. While it was true that Ruth retired in 1935 with 714 home runs, he had actually taken over the major-league lead in his eighth year in the big leagues, in 1921, when he hit his 139th homer. His record actually stood for fifty-three years. When Ruth hit his final home run in 1935, he had merely piled on his own record, as he had for fourteen years. Like Jimmy Carter, Bob Hope also felt a certain swell
²¹⁹
of civic pride that baseball history was going to be made, in Atlanta of all places, and, like Carter, he believed that even something as ephemeral as a sports team had contributed to the rehabilitation of their city. And that meant that despite the discomfort, the problems, the history, and the countless number of instances when it appeared that
change
was a dreamer’s word, life in the South had actually changed dramatically. A year earlier, in 1973, Maynard Jackson, a proud descendant of one of Atlanta’s most venerable black political families, the Dobbs family, was elected mayor. Carter recalled that in the years before he became president, a generation of white liberal politicians had quietly played a historic role in toppling the old order.