The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (71 page)

“The question was, Who was the most marketable? Who was still alive? Ted was sick. Musial was one hundred and five years old. So we came up with Hank, and Willie Mays and George Brett and Barry Bonds,” Henneberry said. “But Brett wasn’t on the All-Century Team, and nobody wanted to work with Bonds.”

Henry would spend part of the year doing public appearances with Bonds and Brett and Mays. The All-Century Team was a great thing for fans, debating players of different eras. It was all fun, the preferences for one player over another as harmless as choosing Kobe beef over caviar, or a Bordeaux rather than a Burgundy. But the old wounds were always close to the surface, especially when it came to competition with the two professional baseball players who always seemed to define Henry’s time: Ruth and Mays.

Bill Henneberry had come a long way with Henry since their first conversation in Philadelphia. Now, when MasterCard wanted Henry to appear during the All-Century campaign, Henry would specifically request that Henneberry be the representative who traveled with him. The two crisscrossed the country.

And then, days before the public announcement of the All-Century Team, Henneberry received a phone call.

“We’re driving back from the airport. MasterCard did this silly online promotion, not well publicized. Only ten thousand people or so voted for the thing, and Hank had gotten the second-highest number of votes, behind Ruth. MasterCard hadn’t yet announced the starting lineup, but they had told me that it was going to be Ruth, Willie, and Ted Williams. I’m sitting with him when I get the call. So when I told Hank the news, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t make a sound. But you could see it in his face, that I’d hurt him, that it hurt. And I immediately wanted to take it back. I ruined his afternoon.”

I
T WAS THE
corporate world that had resurrected Henry. During a period of less than three years, he had undone twenty years’ worth of public perception about him. He had shown that he could be funny and engaging. His was a modest balance. In the right environment, he could take the floor. He had to open up, relax, for his true charisma to show through. During the mid- to late 1990s, he had assuaged whatever doubts existed among the sales and marketing people. He could be, in his own way, a leading man. In sporting parlance, he had made the adjustment. It was either that or the scouting report on him had been dead wrong all along.

And in so many ways, it was fitting that his revival occurred only within a particular corporate setting: He thrived behind the scenes. He still did not do many commercials, did not hawk products, did not offer his personality to every living room in America. Unlike Joe DiMaggio with Mr. Coffee or George Foreman with an electric grill, Henry would never become synonymous with a single product. He cultivated the corporate types in small gatherings, often private or semipublic. It worked better that way. Henry had always remained not only close to power but on the right side of it, and now his pragmatism was being rewarded. It was pragmatism that made him different from his idol Jackie Robinson. In Robinson’s time, the issues were clear and Robinson was uncompromising: equal citizenship, nothing less. Henry took the responsibility of carrying the Robinson mantle seriously, as his politics and public statements often reflected, but his manner had always been different. Henry had always been methodical in dealing with the men in suits who controlled the money. It was not only political passion but also money that allowed projects to progress beyond the idea stage, and if Henry did not inspire in the Robinson mode, he nevertheless possessed a deft touch, to which executives tended to respond. He made the money men comfortable, and such a disposition had two consequences: The first was that he would often be exposed to the charge that he did not use his influence. The second was that making powerful men comfortable often led to financial opportunity. Now that he had been resurrected, the offers started coming in: fifty thousand for this, twenty-five grand for that. He was now part of the inner circle.

He had always loathed public speaking, but now when some corporate giant wanted him to come speak to the sales force about how to be home-run hitters in business (and in life), Henry was commanding upward of $35,000 per appearance. His foundation was growing, the backbone of his philanthropy, and lucrative invitations to serve on corporate boards followed. Ted Turner had contributed to making Henry a very rich man. Henry had served on the board of directors of TBS Broadcast Systems for a decade and a half, and he was also on the board of directors of the Braves, the Atlanta Falcons, the Atlanta Technical Institute, and Medallion Financial Corporation (“In niches there are riches,” so went the company motto).

So much of it all was happening the way Bud Selig had believed it would, if baseball could just stop fighting with itself over money. Big corporate sponsorships would lift the game out of the haze of the strike. Baseball would do its part by putting a dynamic face on the game—less Bud Selig and Don Fehr, more Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. The game was fun now, built on an anabolic cocktail of muscles and home runs and scripted Hallmark moments, mandated directly from the commissioner’s office, moments that took the rough edge off of the game and replaced sharp elbows with a “field of dreams.”

The highest (players would later call it the lowest) point came during the 2003 World Series, when Roger Clemens, who said he was leaning toward retirement, left game four after the seventh inning. Clemens, pitching on the road against the Florida Marlins in a World Series game, walked off the mound to a standing ovation from
both teams…
. And that was the first time baseball may have overdone it with the orchestrated moments, because after the tearful, hackneyed good-bye, Clemens changed his mind. He wound up pitching for four more years.

There was the money, and the feel-good mandate, but during the great home-run chase of 1998, the summer of Sosa and McGwire, both men with different but equally powerful appeal,
USA Today
released a poll that revealed 75 percent of the country preferred that McGwire break the record, rather than Sosa. Henry appeared on an ESPN interview program soon after the poll numbers were released, and he said publicly what blacks and Latinos were saying to one another.

“It’s just absolutely ridiculous that you could have that lopsided an opinion about who should break the record,” he said on the air. “And I’ve seen other little things that happened that make me believe that McGwire was the favorite rather than Sosa. And I think the reason for that is because he’s from the Dominican [Republic] and also happens to have black skin. I just don’t think it’s fair to him or his family or his country.”

What followed was the requisite beat-down: that Henry Aaron
was
bitter after all.
And how dare he inject race into the home-run race?

“I received hundreds of calls to do interviews,”
³⁰⁵
he told the
Mobile Register
. “I turned them down because I was afraid if I did it, I would be misquoted. Finally, I said yes to one, and, lo and behold, I was misunderstood.”

The point was it wasn’t a question of the public, or the press, misunderstanding Henry. There could be no misinterpretation of what Henry had said or what he had conveyed during the interview. Even though McGwire hit home run number sixty-two during the first week of September, the general reaction was that the record belonged to him, simply because he had surpassed the sixty-one milestone first. Three weeks still remained in the season, and for one afternoon, Sosa had tied McGwire at sixty-six, but the story line had been set: The record belonged to McGwire. Sosa would have to be content to play the stereotypical sidekick, the happy Latin.

The problem was that Henry had the temerity to talk about a real issue in this land of make-believe. He had sparked a fire with a Robinson-like resolve, and gotten smacked down for it. He had found out what was being discovered across the country: Dissent, whether it was right or wrong, was unacceptable. It got in the way of the money machine.

Henry responded to the backlash by saying nothing else on the subject. Despite the criticism, Henry held firm privately: McGwire was the chosen one because he was white, and that’s the way it was in America. Publicly, however, he rushed back to the reservation, reprogrammed. “It couldn’t have happened at a better time for baseball,” he later said of the home runs of 1998. “Baseball had some problems because of the strike and this has helped. It’s been great.”

Though it had been Henry who defended Sosa, it was Sammy who eventually ran afoul of Henry. This happened a couple of years after the 1998 frenzy, when John Hancock, another big baseball sponsor, announced plans to sell its stock to the public. To commemorate the occasion, it wanted a big name to ring the bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, one of the fun perks that came with being the person of the hour. It was an honor designated for visiting dignitaries, Super Bowl winners, and famous sluggers, to name a few.

Hancock, naturally, wanted McGwire, but he said no. But Sammy Sosa said yes, as did Henry. The deal was going to be simple: Two legends from their respective eras would celebrate Hancock’s IPO. They would shake hands, sign autographs, and have lunch with the big shots, who then could brag to their friends. Bill Henneberry brokered the deal. Henry negotiated his usual fee, and agreed to a couple of additional events to push the numbers above a hundred grand.

But to the surprise of the Aaron people, Sosa cut his own deal: $135,000 for just the one afternoon. The day before the event, Sosa canceled, telling the firm he wouldn’t be attending. Stiffing Hancock meant stiffing Henry, who was left alone to carry the event.

“So, we’re going to meet and sign
³⁰⁶
a hundred bats, then go to breakfast with the market makers,” Henneberry recalled. “Then we get a call from Sosa’s agent, who says, ‘Can we do this another time?’ ‘What do you mean? We’re going public tomorrow!’ The John Hancock guy is freaked. There’s all kind of shit flying around. They come back and say Sosa isn’t showing. He had a signed contract. He doesn’t show. I know I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but people think he’s this great guy. He’s not.”

And for the entire next day, a solo act instead of a duo, Henry was the star. He rang the bell on the exchange floor. He had them eating out of his hand. He told stories about the old days and gave that big laugh and made the executives enjoy being around him, their silvery hair turned dark and youthful for one afternoon. Everyone was taken by Henry’s gentleness and humor.

“Hank had to do the whole thing, and he was delightful,” Henneberry recalled. “He shook hands. He was great.”

I
T WAS A
piece of popular fiction that Bud Selig was responsible for initiating Henry’s second act. Selig’s family roots were in the car business and thus it made sense to think that when Henry created the Hank Aaron Automotive Group, the umbrella for a string of car dealerships he would begin in 1999, Selig had been the inspiration.

Not only was that not the case but Selig recalled warning Henry to think twice, and then think some more, before entering the car game. “Everybody was going to blame me
³⁰⁷
if it didn’t work,” Selig said. “So I wanted him to know exactly what he was getting into.”

It was Henry’s old friend Jesse Jackson who indirectly got Henry involved in cars. It turned out that, even as the millennium neared, not a single American distributorship of Bavarian Motor Works, the great BMW, was owned by an African-American. When this situation came to light, the corporate types at BMW grew skittish, at first denying the charge, while refusing to name the black-owned distributorships. This was embarrassing, even more so when Jackson began to advertise the fact. Like other status symbols, owning a BMW meant you had made it. It meant class, speed, and enough disposable income to accept no substitute. An African-American who owned a BMW represented a significant financial achievement; thus Jackson did not relent in his criticism of the company. The criticism of BMW resonated especially in Atlanta, the city that came, not always accurately, to symbolize the success of black capitalism. That meant in Atlanta, a lot of successful black people were driving BMWs, and they could afford to change allegiances, switching to, say, Mercedes-Benz. Offending such an influential constituency was not good business.

And thus it came to pass that Henry Aaron became the first black majority owner of the first BMW franchise in the country, Hank Aaron BMW, located in Union City, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. Vic Doolan, an important man in the Atlanta auto business, understood the necessity of being on the right side of a potentially explosive issue. He reached out to Henry and his people, and from protest came progress.

As a condition of ending the pressure, which had first been exerted on luxury import car makers for years by the National Association of Minority Automobile Dealers, BMW agreed to attract black ownership of BMW franchises, starting with Henry.

That was sweet, but not as sweet as the deal Henry received. Allan Tanenbaum brokered the deal. He wanted two things, the first being choice of location. The second was that Henry would not have to put up any of his own money. BMW had come to him. The name Hank Aaron was currency enough.

Initially, not everyone was happy with the deal. The fact that Henry was receiving such a golden deal ruffled the minority professionals who had struggled and sweated in the low margins and glass ceilings of the car business. To them, it was just another example of a celebrity handout.

HANK AARON GOES TO BAT FOR BMW
³⁰⁸

But while industry insiders don’t necessarily begrudge Aaron’s accomplishment, some question the wisdom of appointing a high-profile franchiser with little to no automotive experience.