The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (64 page)

“They used to call blacks lazy all the time, and I never understood that,” Scott recalled. “How can any black player be called lazy when it was so hard for us to even get to the big leagues? You couldn’t
be
lazy if you wanted to make it. I was waiting for someone to use that word on me, but they never did. If anyone ever called me lazy, I’d be right there to pop him in the mouth.”

Scott recalled the resistance he encountered as he moved through the Red Sox system. He was chided about his weight and his swing and his attitude, for he was part of the new breed of black player—more independent, less deferential. And each time he despaired, it was Popowski, all five feet, four inches of him, who reminded Scott of his talent and defended him to the front office, often at his own peril.

“Eddie Popowski was always there for me, and I felt the same way about him. Back in the day, when I was in the minor leagues, he told the Red Sox they’d be making a mistake by not bringing me into the organization,” Scott recalled. “The Red Sox told him not to mention it again or he’d be fired. Eddie stood up for George Scott. I’ll always be one of Eddie’s guys.”

Scott was a big player in the Red Sox magical year of 1967, hitting .303, but then struggled the next year, hitting .171 in 350 at bats. He chafed under the unsparing manager Dick Williams, who constantly attacked Scott for his weight, yet Scott believed Williams was the best manager he’d ever played for.

He had a jocular relationship with the press. He was loud and boisterous and funny. He made them laugh, and he certainly was a character, a showman by nature. But Scott also later believed his personality and physical charisma undermined him as a serious ballplayer, and in retrospect he would be wounded that his colorfulness fed into the stereotypes of the uneducated black athlete. Some of the stories of Scott’s glibness bordered on the apocryphal, the by-product, he often felt, of cruel baiting by the white press to make him appear ignorant. Once, during the bloody Nigerian-Biafran war, a reporter asked Scott what he thought of Biafra, the portion of Nigeria that seceded from the country. “I don’t know him,” Peter Gammons once quoted Scott as saying. “But if I ever face him, I’ll hit a tater off him.”

He swung hard enough to generate Santa Ana winds, and during the years when it was still an embarrassment, the mark of a less accomplished hitter, Scott struck out at least one hundred times in a fourteen-year career. But he was also a perennial Gold Glove fielder as well as a devastating power hitter.

When Henry arrived, Scott was already legendary. Henry was ten years older than Scott, so the two did not travel in the same circles, but Scott and Tommie Aaron knew each other from the off-seasons Scott would spend in Mobile.

Immediately, Scott gravitated toward Henry, watching how the big man conducted his affairs. George Scott noticed how much time Henry took preparing himself to play, both offensively and defensively. Henry’s work in the outfield especially impressed Scott because Henry was the designated hitter; he didn’t have to work on his defense because he would not be playing the field. And yet it was Henry who set the example.

“You didn’t see him dive for a lot of balls, because he didn’t have to. He played the outfield the way I played first base. Watch where the hitters put the ball ninety-nine percent of the time and be at that spot,” Scott said. “He knew that you weren’t supposed to run after the ball; you were supposed to be where the ball was going to land. My first year with him, I had the best year of my career. Too bad I didn’t play five or six more years with him, because I did everything I could to learn from his example.”

S
UNDAY
, J
ULY
11, second game of a doubleheader against Texas, one of those hellish games in a baseball season: Henry twice flied out weakly to left and grounded out twice. Nobody wanted to be there, slogging through the muggy Milwaukee air, neither team going anywhere, but the Brewers had won the first four games of the five-game series and the Rangers, already salty, didn’t want to get sent home like chumps, either, wearing the collar.

Texas held a 2–0 lead in the seventh before both teams decided to alternate two-spot positions: The Brewers tied it 2–2 in the bottom of the seventh; Texas went up 4–2 in the ninth, only to give up two more in the bottom of the inning. Scott fouled out to first in the bottom of the tenth. Henry, zero for four, took one pitch from Steve Foucault before belting the next one into the left-field seats for a 5–4 win. The home run was number 754, and in the clubhouse afterward, Henry took another glimpse into the way-back machine. “Only the home run I hit to win the 1957 pennant
²⁷³
felt better than this one,” he said. Only later did he admit why, because hitting home runs had become so hard that each day the great man went to the ballpark in 1976, he was never quite sure if he would ever hit another one.

Nine days later, on July 20, against Dick Drago of the Angels, Henry wafted a home run into the seats, but for the next two and a half months he would not hit another. That was it. By that time, Henry had begun collecting souvenirs. But this home run, number 755, snared by Dick Arndt, a member of the Brewers grounds crew, would never find its way to Henry. Selig would threaten his job (and later fire the kid) for not giving up the ball. Henry would plead, appealing to Arndt’s sense of goodwill (then offer ten thousand dollars), but Arndt wasn’t selling. Henry would never hold his final home-run ball.

F
OR THE NEXT
two and a half months, Henry played and sat as the drudgery and losses piled up. It all ended on a Sunday afternoon in Milwaukee, October 3, against the Tigers. Virtually nobody was there. Two years earlier, in the final game of the season, he had called his own shot. Now, in the sixth inning, down 5–1, with two out, Henry bounced a single up the middle that the Detroit shortstop, Jerry Manuel, grazed with his glove. Henry chugged to first for a run-scoring single, hit no. 3,771. Grammas sent out Gantner to replace him. Charlie Moore clapped and shook Henry’s hand as he continued to the dugout.

A SINGULAR EXIT
²⁷⁴
FOR KING HENRY I

By Mike Gonring of the
Journal Staff

…
kings deserve better…. Hank Aaron, the king of home runs, ended his sparkling career … with a .229 batting average, .232 for the two seasons…. Kings are supposed to go out on top….

… After he had dressed, he smoked a cigarette and chatted with friends…. And then Aaron was gone, out the same door he had entered 23 seasons before. The king has ended it.

“There’s something magical about going back
²⁷⁵
to the place where it all began, as if it will make things begin all over again. I think the fans feel it, too. Everybody wants to turn back the clock,” Henry wrote in
I Had a Hammer
. “But I discovered the same thing that Ruth, Hornsby and Mays did: you can’t do it.”

When he retired, nearly a century of organized baseball had been played. Only Cobb had recorded more hits. Only Cobb had scored more runs. Nobody had come to the plate more, driven in more runs, amassed more total bases, produced more extra base hits, or hit more home runs than Henry.

When the inning ended, Scott grabbed his first baseman’s mitt, gave Henry a soft rap on the hip, and then jogged out to first base. It was over.

“I didn’t think it bothered Hank
²⁷⁶
that much and I don’t think it bothered the fans that much, because everyone was so happy to have him around. I didn’t see anything in his personality that said outwardly how hard it was to play when he couldn’t do all the things that made him Hank Aaron,” Scott recalled. “He wasn’t pouting or anything, because he helped me. I knew I was playing with one of baseball’s all-time greats. The way he carried himself made me a better individual, a better player. He carried himself so professionally that I never thought about him being diminished as a player. Not once. He wasn’t sad. I was sad for myself that I wasn’t going to get to play with this man anymore.”

PART FOUR
FREE

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DRIFT

H
ENRY
A
ARON’S FIRST
two decades of retirement were good years for the memories business. Many of the prewar, preintegration legends—Williams, DiMaggio, Greenberg, Feller, Spahn, Musial—were still alive and lucid, telling the stories of what would be called “the Greatest Generation.” Alive, too, were their less-known, uncelebrated shadow counterparts: the ignored Negro Leaguers, whose institutional memory was now suddenly a valuable asset, both to be mined by historians and a book industry that fell in love with baseball. Baseball sought the survivors of the old Negro Leagues, too, as a sort of social penance. They would now, far too late, be called heroes by an industry once convinced their participation would undermine the standing of the sport.

The confluence of history continued with the first generation of the integrated era—Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, Joe Black, Larry Doby, and, of course, Henry—entering its golden years. The living memory of the sport went back to before World War II. Henry was still in the public eye, simultaneously present and curiously distant, a visible member of the Atlanta Braves front office—having finally been brought back by Bartholomay months after retiring—yet still uneasily removed from his contemporaries. When the public or the writers would seek out Williams or DiMaggio, it was often with wistfulness, the words on the pages of the magazines and the newspapers willfully compliant to create that special frothy brand of nostalgia: Williams’s cantankerousness was no longer uncomfortable and unrefined, proof of the Splinter’s classlessness. Now, a Williams broadside was reshaped into an endearing virtue—a throwback forgotten in favor of an emptier, valueless time. The longtime baseball man Joe Klein would reminisce about the time Williams managed the Texas Rangers. It was 1972, and Ted sat in his sweltering office, watching a fuzzy black-and-white television. Klein was just a pup, a kid working in the Rangers front office, bubbling at the privilege of sitting next to the great one. On the television screen was Henry Aaron, thirty-eight years old, trotting around the bases after yet another home run, and right then, as the television replayed in slow motion Henry’s home run, Williams shot out of his chair, fizzing like a bottle rocket. Just the sight of Aaron at the plate had set off in confounded admiration his cranky perfectionism.

“He was just raging,”
²⁷⁷
Klein recalled. “I mean, just yelling at the television: ‘HOW THE HELL DOES HE DO IT? THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A FRONT-FOOTED POWER HITTER! YOU CAN’T HIT FOR POWER OFF YOUR GODDAMNED FRONT FOOT.’ That was Ted. He loved him because Hank Aaron did everything right as a hitter to Ted, except that. Ted used to say it was impossible to do what Henry did, to drive the ball out of the ballpark off the front foot. You just weren’t supposed to hit that way. But Hank did it, what, seven hundred and fifty-five times?”

In retirement, Williams grew larger still in all of his fiery impatience. So, too, did DiMaggio, tailored, silvery, and elegant, a distinguished gentleman at seventy-eight years old. A PBS documentary in 1994 by the filmmaker Ken Burns unearthed another invaluable baseball artifact: the Negro Leaguer Buck O’Neil, whose love of the sport and unfailing optimism during segregation blunted the game’s institutional guilt and, in turn, made O’Neil into the unlikeliest star for the rest of his life. They were celebrated as the living treasures of the game. That was the deal.

Then there was Henry. With Henry Aaron, it was all just a bit different, just a bit off, the sepia longing missing from his aura—and everybody knew why. The writers knew it, and it was the big reason someone always made the trek to Atlanta. Henry knew it, and that was what made him different from all the rest, for what he held close to his breast was a big piece of Americana, cold and irrefutable and terrible, and, unlike Williams’s misanthropy, impossible to massage into wistfulness. When the writers came looking for him, they came looking for one thing—the letters, the physical pieces of paper Henry’s fellow Americans had sat down and written, one by one, threat by death threat, during the record years.

The stories would grow in psychological complexity. Stan Kasten, who worked with Henry as a kid with the Braves under Ted Turner, had heard the stories for years: that when Henry left the Braves in 1974, he took the letters with him as dutifully as he took his spikes, bats, and a few jerseys. Some people said Henry still kept the letters in the attic of his house. Other times the story went a step beyond: that in numerous instances during a calendar year, Henry would go upstairs, walled off from the world, and revisit his America, the America that robbed him of his joy, reading and rereading the threads of his country that were now fused into him like a skin graft. Some people heard the letters were in shoe boxes; others were told he kept them in an old burlap mail sack or a plastic mail tub.

The writers would come to find out if the rumors were actually true, and when he grew tired of it all, of being both reduced and defined in equal measure by the same moment, he would say, “Hate mail and home runs.
²⁷⁸
You know, there’s more to me than that. But nobody cares. It’s the only thing people care about.”

The newspapermen perked up, usually months before one of the standard milestones of his record-breaking accomplishment. April 8, 1994, for example, was a particularly big one—the twentieth anniversary of his immortality. By then, Henry was sixty years old. An unstoppable battalion of gray hairs had overtaken his dark hair, and the long parenthetical creases that bordered his mouth deepened further into his cheeks. Billye Aaron always said Henry was his mother’s child, and as he aged, Henry looked even more like Stella: powerful cheekbones suppressing an arresting, wide smile, small eyes alert, surveying, flashing spontaneously at a pleasing sound. Henry wore glasses full-time now, and though he had continued to exercise, the weight he had gained began to settle at his waistline.

W
AITING FIVE YEARS
to be immortalized is, usually, easy-chair living. The endorsements begin to line up, almost as quickly as the various and lucrative offers to serve on this board or that charity, but from retirement in 1976 to his Hall of Fame induction in 1982, tranquillity and Henry did not spend much time together. Henry would find himself in a drift. He would always draw a paycheck from baseball, and during this period he began to make business connections that would serve him for the next three and a half decades. Yet he spoke of himself as intellectually and emotionally unsatisfied, searching for that greater purpose, in constant conflict about finding that proper balance of activism, expressing his opinion when and where it was most needed. He would often reiterate that he wanted to belong in the world of baseball, but despite his accomplishments as a player, finding his place after retirement was a challenge that proved difficult.

He would say with great frequency that he wanted baseball to be “one chapter of his life, not the entire story,” and yet even as this vision crystallized, Henry was unsure exactly of what that meant in actual practice.

As the 1976 season ended, Henry had resolved to return to Atlanta. In a sense, he had it right: There’s no going back. Milwaukee would never lose its emotional and personal appeal, its place in his story, but he was no longer a kid. Atlanta, for all of its seeming ambivalence toward him and baseball in general—the city would always be a notoriously poor draw, even during the years the Braves fielded a championship-caliber team—was now his home.

The real reason the promise of Milwaukee did not materialize as he had expected had less to do with nostalgia and longing and more to do with business. When he retired, promises were made, gifts exchanged, but the reality never quite matched the handshake. Bud Selig was somewhat vague about Henry’s place in the organization, though without the bitter edge that poisoned Henry’s final days in Atlanta.

There was talk about managing the Brewers, talk that intensified after Del Crandall was fired. In later years, both Henry and Bud Selig would say they had “discussed” the idea of Henry’s becoming a manager, but the truth was that Henry was as noncommittal about managing as Selig was about making him a hard offer to take over the club. The beer-distributorship offer fell through, too, not that Miller failed to keep its word in taking care of Henry. Instead, Henry did not particularly care for the fine print attached to the deal: He could have the distributorship, but he would have to put up some of his own money: a million dollars’ worth.

And the matter of what territories Henry would oversee—possibly Baltimore or Cincinnati, possibly elsewhere—was equally ambiguous. He was a big name, national news, but one was an American League city and the other had no great relationship with him. He had been burned in business during his first decade in Atlanta, and it took years for him to recover financially. He thanked Selig for his time, and the lifetime deal never took place.

At the same time, the Braves had made subtle overtures to Henry during the waning months of 1976, raising the possibility that he might return to the Braves following his retirement, overtures that took on a certain intensity following Bartholomay’s sale of the club to Ted Turner.

Turner was many things—bombastic, erratic, eccentric, brilliant, visionary—but he wasn’t part of the staid baseball establishment. He was not a member of the old-school club, whose members used the veneer of tradition to maintain their curmudgeonly positions of authority and, by extension, to keep the players in their place. That alone made Turner an immediate threat to the old guard. He was a businessman who could see further and wider than most anyone else in the media or baseball and he understood immediately the value of Henry Aaron. Already a millionaire at thirty-four, Turner had purchased WTCG-17 in 1974. A year later, after gaining permission from the Federal Communications Commission to broadcast nationally via satellite to a nascent cable-television viewership, Turner recognized the power and utility of sports as a programming tool. He purchased the Braves the following year and Turner had immediately thwarted baseball’s rigid structure—especially its tight rules on broadcasting rights—as his cable station, renamed TBS, broadcast the Atlanta Braves in every television market in the country. And there was nothing baseball could do about it.

If one thing was clear about baseball, it was how tightly controlled the job market was. Henry himself had complained about baseball’s culture of retreads, of how difficult it was to get new blood into the pipeline for managing and front-office jobs. Turner was a starting fresh, and as such, the old prejudices and baseball customs did not always exist around him. He had already hired Bill Lucas, Barbara Aaron’s brother and Henry’s ex–brother-in-law, to be the team’s general manager.

“Bill was farm director when I promoted him
²⁷⁹
to GM,” Turner recalled. “And then I find out later that he was the first black person in baseball to be a general manager. Then I find out that he was the first black person in
any sport
to be a GM. When I see a person, I don’t see color. I wasn’t looking for points with the civil rights movement. It just didn’t seem to be out of the ordinary.”

Turner was bigger than life. He had no time for baseball’s silly little conventions, and for Henry, that meant an opportunity. What Henry was not completely aware of was the opposition to his returning to the Braves, especially in a front-office capacity. It explained why the club had been so willing to let him go following the 1974 season. There were some men, like Dan Donahue, the Braves chief operating officer, who viewed Henry only as a hitter, not as a person who could contribute to the front office. He was a former player, and former players belonged on the field, or on their fishing boats. Superstar ex-players were even less complicated: They were given no-show jobs or jobs as spring-training instructors, an easy way to titillate the fans and keep a famous name around while the person was drawing a paycheck. In other words, Henry should have been content with the job of being Henry Aaron—leave the heavy lifting to the professionals.

But when Henry and Turner discussed Henry’s return to Atlanta, it was with a real job, with an actual title and responsibilities. As Turner recalled, he asked Henry what jobs he was interested in, and Henry told him farm director because it was a position that required talent evaluation.

“When I bought the team, naturally I wanted Henry. It was the right thing to do because he was so important to the Braves,” Turner recalled. “I asked him what he wanted to do and he told me he wanted to be farm director because that was a job with some teeth. I didn’t worry about whether he could do the job. I didn’t know very much about baseball when I came in. If I could go from nonbaseball person to owner, he could go from baseball player to the front office. After all, it’s not rocket science we’re talking about here.”