The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (70 page)

“Hank could never say ‘Country Time.’ He would always say ‘Country Times,’” Henneberry recalled. “It was the southern way of saying it. I told him a hundred times to say it right, and he said it wrong ninety-nine times. It drove them nuts.”

Henry turned sixty-five that February and was feted with a gala event that he would never forget. The Hyatt Regency Atlanta was packed, lined with limousines, luxury cars … and the Secret Service. President Clinton made a surprise appearance.

That night, the Hank Aaron Award was unveiled (Manny Ramirez and Sammy Sosa would be the inaugural recipients), announced to a rousing ovation. Bill Henneberry wasn’t pleased, though, for his original concept never got off the ground. Baseball stepped in and took a scalpel to the idea. Rich Levin, baseball’s top public-relations man, thought Henneberry’s vision encroached upon sacred turf, which was the Most Valuable Player awards, given out to each league by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, the most prestigious awards, which went back to the 1930s. The MVP was the award of Williams and Mays and Mantle. Nothing could be introduced to reduce its impact. During that time, the players union tried to compete with the BBWAA by creating the Players Choice Awards, but it didn’t work. Players wanted to be associated with the hardware Hall of Famers held.

Levin was also concerned
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that a quantitative award based on the top offensive categories was too close to the Triple Crown, which marked the leader in batting average, home runs, and RBI.

“What we ended up with was different than what I had envisioned,” Henneberry said. “I have nothing but respect for Rich Levin, but I thought it got totally screwed up. I thought we could have done more. The Triple Crown? The Triple Crown is a total anachronism. I mean, who was the last guy to win it? Yastrzemski forty years ago? The award never became as important as it should have been.”

Throughout the years, Henry had met presidents. It never failed to tickle Billye that she could say without exaggeration that she and Henry had slept at the White House more than once. They had traveled the world and dined with kings and queens and prime ministers. Usually, however, he went to them, the Home Run King as invited guest. But seeing Bill Clinton, a sitting president at the Hyatt, in town
just for him
, well, it touched a nerve in Henry Aaron that softened and humbled him.

Bill Clinton traced the roots
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of his relationship with Henry to March 1, 1992, when the Democratic party was slugging it out in a primary with no clear front-runner. One day it was Tom Harkin, the next day Paul Tsongas. For a time, even Jerry Brown was leading in the polls. Not that who won would matter anyway, because the winner, the pundits said, would only get demolished by the invincible sitting president, George H. W. Bush, fresh and muscular after winning the Gulf War, his approval ratings making him, if numbers were to be believed, the most popular president in history.

Still, in desperation, the phone call was made the way all important calls are made, through a maze of high-rent channels: a campaign operative called Sam Nunn, the powerful Georgia senator, who located the civil rights giant and former U.N. ambassador Andy Young, who found Henry. When he picked up the telephone, Bill Clinton, the Arkansas governor, still trying to gain a foothold in the presidential race, was on the other end, asking for Henry’s help.

Clinton was holding a rally at Georgia Tech,
²⁹⁸
he told Henry, and he was desperate to pump some life into his campaign. He had not yet won a single primary. Would the Home Run King allow the Clintons to use his name to raise the turnout, especially among the black voters, who, when properly motivated, could swing an election in Georgia? And one other thing, Clinton asked: Would he be willing to appear himself?

Henry told the governor he would be honored to do whatever he could to help the Clinton campaign.

On October 29, 1999, after he had won a second term, President Clinton regaled the audience at a Democratic National Committee function in Atlanta with his reminiscence of his 1993 comeback. According to the official White House transcript of the president’s remarks, Clinton was consistent in his praise for Henry:

“Georgia was good to me.
²⁹⁹
I remember when I ran in the Georgia primary, all the Washington experts said that Governor Clinton heads south to Georgia in deep trouble. If he doesn’t get at least 40 percent in the Georgia primary, he’s toast. By then, I’d already been clear dead three times. Now it’s happened so often, I’m going to open a tombstone business when I leave office. (Laughter.)

“But anyway, and the people of Georgia in the primary gave me 57 percent of the vote in 1992, and sent me on my way. And I’m very grateful for that. (Applause.) And then I remember, we had a rally in a football stadium outside Atlanta, in the weekend before the election of ’92. You remember that, Max [Cleland]? And we filled it. And I think Buddy Darden was there. We filled the rally. And I remember Hank Aaron was there, and there were over 25,000 people there. And we won the state by 13,000 votes. So everyone who spoke at that rally can fairly claim to have made me President of the United States, since there were twice as many people there as we won the state by. But we made it, and the rest is history.”

Over the years, President Clinton would use his oratorical masterstrokes to massage his message to fit the contours of his audience, but Henry always found his way into every anecdote, and in return, Henry and Billye would give the Clintons their loyalty.

“We were in a tough, tough campaign,”
³⁰⁰
Bill Clinton recalled. “Hank Aaron had always been a hero of mine, and at the last minute he and Sam Nunn organized a rally. It turns out that we get twenty-five thousand people to fill a football stadium, mostly, I believe, because Hank Aaron was there. We held a tremendous rally and went on to win fifty-seven percent of the vote, and later I became the first Democrat to win the state of Georgia since 1976. And no Democrat has won it since. So, when I tell everyone that Hank Aaron is a big reason I became president of the United States, it’s not just hyperbole because I love the man. I say it because it’s true.”

At his birthday party, Henry was tearful when the president spoke, and so many emotions over the past year seemed to rush for space behind his eyes at exactly the same time. There was, always, the simple triumph of his life, but this time combined with the losses, losses he dealt with quietly and stoically. There was the photo of Henry in black suit, wearing dark sunglasses at the funeral of his father, Herbert, who had died quietly May 21, 1998. Herbert was eighty-nine years old and through his son had lived the triumph of the American story. As times changed, Herbert had been a legend in Mobile, the father of Mobile’s most famous man. He had been visible around town, always known as “Mr. Herbert” or “Mr. Aaron.” He had been fastidious and proud of his son. At the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Henry eulogized Herbert. “He was poor and unlearned,”
³⁰¹
Henry said. “Yet he was rich and wise. You might say he had a Ph.D in common sense … we should all be so blessed to live a long and successful life. He did his share of bragging about me. Now, I’m bragging about him. Farewell, Dad.”

A little more than two months later, on August 1, Henry held a family reunion in Atlanta. Three hundred relatives attended. Two days later, Henry’s youngest brother, James, and eldest sister, Sarah, drove back to Mobile, while Henry and Billye flew to Tokyo to attend the World Children’s Baseball Fair.

The next day, Sarah complained that she had trouble lifting her leg. She was admitted to the hospital, where she suffered two heart attacks. Following the second attack, Sarah slipped into a diabetic coma and never regained consciousness. She was seventy-one when she died.

Henry’s brother Alfred never survived past birth. Tommie had died fourteen years earlier. Over a sixty-day span in 1998, his father and eldest sister were also gone.

The president of the United States however, had held the microphone at his birthday party, and the big man began to crack, puffy with tears. Periodically, he would talk about how fortunate he had been to be born with ability and the desire to hone his talent, but at the birthday party the words were distilled into something tangible, something real. The party would be the highlight of his life, providing him a certain energy, from which he would often draw. The emotions of the evening reinforced his desire to build a foundation that would have impact. And that wasn’t all. Before President Clinton left, his presence had generated more than a million dollars for Henry’s foundation.

“You never know what it means to me
³⁰²
to have the president say those things about me,” Henry recalled. “I think he was exaggerating, because he didn’t need me, but it gives you a warm feeling that the president of the United States would take the time. It told me that what we were trying to do for young people was the right thing to do.”

Henry sought to capitalize on his momentum by strengthening his philanthropic mission. All professional athletes touted their charitable foundations, but few of them did more than host an annual golf tournament and fly their friends around the country, tax-free. Henry felt an opportunity existed to create a model that would be truly lasting. It was, thought Frank Belatti, an opportunity for him to fuse together his two passions: separating himself from being just another ballplayer and taking an interest in the future of children, particularly children of color, who often lacked the parental guidance and educational opportunities to have a real chance in the world.

“Henry would always say, ‘If you’re going to influence a child, you have to do it early. Even high school is too late,’” said Allan Tanenbaum. Four years earlier, Ted Turner had provided the seed money, $100,000, for Henry’s original foundation idea, but having raised another million dollars when Bill Clinton crashed his birthday party, Henry and Billye wanted to sharpen their vision. They met with Allan Tanenbaum and Frank Belatti and began to form a plan to help children. At the All-Star game in Boston—Ted Williams’s last triumphant public appearance—Tanenbaum, Henry, and Billye met on behalf of the newly named Chasing the Dream Foundation. Bud Selig and his deputies, Bob Dupuy, Tim Brosnan, and John Brody, were presented with a one-page proposal that contained six bullet points. The foundation was created to help 755 children—symbolically, one for each of Henry’s home runs—with educational and financial support from grade school through graduation.

It was an ambitious project, and an expensive one that required corporate partnership. The Boys and Girls Clubs of America were in. Henry turned back to baseball, to his relationship with Bud Selig. Times had changed: the corporate and sports worlds relied heavily upon each other. The foundation needed to raise $2.5 million.

Selig was in, and not for a portion of the $2.5 million, but the whole thing. The Boys and Girls Clubs would be the administrator. Eventually, the project would be expanded to be named 44 Forever, which meant the foundation would be funded by baseball and its corporate partners in perpetuity. This would not be a fly-by-night endeavor but a project that would outlive Henry.

“Bud had a year left on his contract. The Hank Aaron Award was special to him,” Tanenbaum recalled. “This wasn’t a project you could execute on your own. It was more challenging. The baseball partnership recognized it’s potential.”

Billye had always described the motivation behind the foundation work as an opportunity to balance the scales.

“Both Henry and I had come up
³⁰³
always being on the receiving end,” she recalled. “When I look back on my life, I had someone helping me at every turn. I remember being called the teacher’s pet, always into things. I remember wanting to be part of a production at school and not having the clothes. A woman named Mrs. Phillips bought me clothes. And I remember saying, ‘One day, I’m going to have so many clothes.’ We believed that in this position, we had a responsibility.”

Henry said he knew it years before, but after the birthday party, when the president and the Secret Service and all the guests had left, his vision had crystallized: He would immerse himself in his foundation work.

P
ERHAPS JUST SLIGHTLY
, Henry felt a certain satisfied restitution. The night did not change the hell he had endured while seeking to break the home-run record, or cure the wounds that had been so deep, but 1999 represented a breakthrough for Henry.

“I wouldn’t say that the twenty-fifth was a major success
³⁰⁴
for baseball, but it was a major success for Hank,” Bill Henneberry said. “People said, ‘We can use him,’ because he can speak. He can’t speak for five minutes, but he can do Q and A for an hour. He’s funny, had a great sense of humor. It rebranded him. People began to find out: ‘Hey, he’s a wonderful guy.’ He’s sweet more than anything else. People didn’t know that.”

MasterCard hadn’t backed Henry’s anniversary rollout, but now it had a problem and needed help: what to do about the end of the century. The millennium was coming and baseball’s biggest sponsor didn’t have a plan. The year 2000 was a tailor-made marketing opportunity, and MasterCard, with $29 million invested in baseball, needed to hit a tape-measure home run. Kathy Francis went back to Bill Henneberry and asked for a concept. The result was the All-Century Team, where fans would choose the greatest lineup of the century. But there were two problems. The first was that baseball, parochially clannish to the end, could not reach a consensus on this promotional idea. The Red Sox wanted to do their own all-century team, with Red Sox players only, and Ted Williams as the centerpiece. The second problem, from a national standpoint, was finding the right person to be the face for this promotional campaign.