The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (73 page)

A week into the 2006 season, Henry attended a dinner in Milwaukee, where he gave an impromptu press conference, and it was here that he would begin to define his public position about Bonds.

AARON PREFERS TO FOCUS
ON THE POSITIVES
³¹⁴

“I think what the commissioner is trying to do is trying to put an end to all of this,” Aaron said after a news conference at the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee. “I know people have said, ‘Where is this investigation going, and what purpose?’ But I think he’s trying to put an end to it.”

Aaron said Selig was trying to do what is right. Asked if the allegations about drug use hurt the game, Aaron sidestepped the question.

“This game has got so much to offer,” he said…. “Yet we are focusing on one thing, and that’s steroids. We need to get rid of it once and for all and, hey, let’s get on with the job of playing baseball.”

He frustrated certain elements of the press, which believed that Aaron was being passive-aggressive: He complained about not being taken seriously and yet shrank when the world looked to him on a serious issue. Even his supporters were often perplexed by his lack of a position, for it was incongruous with the man they knew.

“The one thing Henry
³¹⁵
hated
was cheating. The whole thing bothered him,” Ralph Garr said. “Why do you think he and Gaylord Perry never got on well? He might not have said anything, but anyone who knew Henry Aaron knew that the whole thing about drugs, that really bothered him.

“You’d have been ashamed to do stuff like that around him. He’d form his opinion from the inside. It wasn’t Henry Aaron’s way to tell you about your business. That’s why he’s not going to mention Barry. He’s gonna let that train pass.”

That Henry was quiet about steroids was to some degree generational. For a man of Henry’s time, drugs were designed to alter the mental state of the user. Drugs made you dopey—hence the slang term
dope
. But the sophistication and purpose of designer steroids and human growth hormone—
There were drugs that could improve your eyesight?—
were outside of his sphere. Dusty Baker thought that while Henry appreciated his status as baseball royalty, he did not want this issue, so tawdry and difficult, to be the one that forced him back into the public eye. Drugs were, as they say, a dirty business. On the one hand, he was still a ballplayer, and he bought into the rhetoric that there was nothing in a bottle that could help a player once he stepped into the batter’s box. The batter still had to see the ball and make contact. Yet he knew simply by looking at the numbers and the immense size of some of the players that something was amiss. “I played the game,” Henry would say. “It’s just not possible to hit seventy home runs.” In interviews, however, such as before game four of the 2007 World Series between Boston and Colorado, he referred to performance enhancers as he would a dime bag of marijuana.

“I just don’t want to get involved with conversations
³¹⁶
about dope,” he said.

Yet another reason was political. His friend of a half century, Bud Selig, was under assault—from the union, from the players, from the fans and writers, and from Congress—for not being swift and decisive on the issue, and Henry was careful with his opinions. A blistering indictment of steroid use would indirectly be a criticism of his ally Selig and Selig’s handling of the situation.

T
HE REAL POINT
was, Henry thought he could not win on the Bonds issue. He would tell intimates that Bonds was a “lose-lose.” If he spoke out against Bonds, then he risked the criticism that he was just a bitter old man who could not deal with his record being broken. There were people close to Henry who believed that he enjoyed being the all-time home-run leader. He had held the record for so long that it had become a part of him. It had given him the sort of legitimacy that being a transcendent player did not. And what was not to like about holding the record?

Yet, this was not a reason for Henry not to want his record broken. What Billye Aaron admired most about Henry was the comfort he seemed to have within himself. “He knows what he did,”
³¹⁷
she said, “and he knows that the time would come when the record would belong to someone else. That part of it didn’t bother him, as far as I’m concerned.” Henry himself would repeat the same refrain: Records were made to be broken. It was a shopworn cliché, and it certainly masked whatever complex feelings he held toward Bonds, but it was true.

Henry also believed that if he said nothing, or supported Bonds in his quest to break the record, if for no other reason than to be a good ambassador to baseball, he would be tacitly condoning steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. Throughout his life, he had been proud of how he approached his profession. He didn’t want to be associated with the drug culture, which had changed the game and the way the sport was viewed.

For all of his fears, there was still another section of the press that knew Henry was being placed in an impossible position. Even saying nothing about Bonds was, by definition, a statement in and of itself.

During each public appearance, he invariably would be faced with a question about Bonds. His responses were often odd, and for a press that felt Henry was in a position of leadership, this was maddening. There was, for example, the day in Milwaukee when the Brewers were dedicating a plaque for Henry’s 755th home run, his last big-league home run, the record.

“Barry Bonds?” Henry said. “I don’t even know how to spell his name.”

To Henry’s inner circle, it was a great quote, one that made everybody laugh. Henry was showing his dry sense of humor to break up a tense moment. However, the press had the opposite reaction. Flippant and evasive comments did not endear Henry to the press. And then there was the bizarre interview he gave to the Associated Press:

Q: In fact, I was just going to ask you,
³¹⁸
how closely do you follow the games?

A: Oh, I watch the Braves play every day.

Q: How many games do you go to a year?

A: I don’t go to too many. I don’t attend too many, but I watch on television every day.

Q: Do you have any advice for Barry Bonds?

A: For who?

Q: Barry Bonds, because he went through so much, as you did.

A: I don’t have any…. As I said before, I don’t have any advice whatsoever, no advice to anybody.

Q: Have you spoken with him?

A: No. I have not talked to anybody, really.

Q: What will you be doing when he’s on the brink of tying or breaking your record?

A: I have no idea, probably playing golf somewhere.

Q: Would you reconsider your decision to stay away?

A: I will never reconsider my decision.

Q: That’s pretty strong. Why is that?

A: Nothing. Just that it’s the way I am…. I traveled for 23 years and I just get tired of traveling. I’m not going to fly to go see somebody hit a home run, no matter whether it is Barry or Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig or whoever it may be. I’m not going anyplace. I wish him all the luck in the world.

Q: Well, if it happened in Atlanta would you go?

A: No, I won’t be there.

Q: Really?

A: No.

Q: If he breaks your mark do you think it’s an accomplishment on par with what you did?

A: I don’t know, and as I said before, I don’t want to discuss him, really. Really, I don’t mean to discuss anything about it…. I’ve stayed out of this.

Behind the scenes, Henry and Bud Selig spoke numerous times each week. Henry would ask Selig for advice on how to handle the mounting questions about Bonds. Selig told Henry to speak his piece if he chose, and said the two would always be friends. It was Henry, in fact, around whom seemingly everyone in the game tiptoed. Dusty Baker found himself in the most awkward position: a commentator for ESPN during the year Bonds neared the record. Baker was trapped: For forty years, Henry had treated him like a son. But Baker had managed Bonds for ten seasons in San Francisco.

“I was caught in the middle,” Baker recalled. “I’m on the air and they’re asking me about steroids and Barry, but in the back of my mind I’m also thinking about Hank. So what did I do? I called Hank every week, just to make sure he was cool. He told me, ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m fine with it.’ But I
did
worry about it, because it was Hank.”

As usual, it was Selig who remained the ultimate power broker. While he remained loyal to Henry, Selig was also fielding calls from Bonds during the summer. Bonds wanted to know why Henry had not contacted him.

As Bonds approached the home-run record, members of Henry’s inner circle believed he needed to take on the Bonds issue directly and candidly. There was no point, one adviser told him, to believe “this thing” could be avoided. At a meeting, Henry was inundated with ideas for how he should handle confronting the public as Bonds neared his record. One suggestion was to cultivate a friendly journalist and offer the exclusive story—Henry Aaron on Bonds and the record—to
Sports Illustrated
. It would be a cover story, of course. The people closest to him, who had known him for decades, including Bud Selig, all thought it a splendid idea: a controlled environment, with Henry on record, the kind of preemptive move public-relations experts loved. Another suggestion was to find a friendly television journalist (Tim Russert and Bob Costas were the top candidates) and have Henry do an hour-long sit-down. The freight train approached. And Henry would lie between the tracks. He said no to each strategic suggestion. And then he cut off all discussion of the matter.

The truth was, Henry was personally and permanently offended by Barry Bonds. The reasons were always sketchy, for Henry did not talk about Bonds specifically. To understand Henry, you had to know how to read body language, facial expressions, and sounds. You had to understand that Henry Aaron did not always speak with words. It was often what Henry
didn’t
say that carried all the meaning. And during those two summers of 2006 and 2007, you had to be truly illiterate not to understand what he was trying to convey about both Bonds and the record.

Members of the inner circle may have sounded conflicted about the Bonds conundrum, unsure of what to say publicly (mostly out of loyalty to Henry’s friend Bud Selig), but Henry shared no such uncertainty.

Bonds and Henry had done business before, back in 2002 for a Charles Schwab Super Bowl commercial, which showed Bonds taking batting practice as a mystical voice whispered in the background that Bonds needed to retire, to begin thinking about his future, in the mode of
Field of Dreams
. Finally, Bonds stopped hitting and yelled up to the press box, “Hank, will you cut it out?” The camera fixed on Aaron’s surprised face and Henry delivered the commercial’s punch line. “Hank? Hank who?”

It was a hilarious spot, but there was talk of a falling-out between the two men after. But what really frosted Henry was when in 2005 the Bonds people invited him to be part of what could only be termed a Barry Bonds victory tour. Bonds already had his godfather, Willie Mays, on board. Celebrations would be planned, the first when Barry hit home run number 661, passing Mays on the all-time list. The second would be after home run number 715, when Ruth was passed again, by another black man. Finally, the big fireworks would go off when Bonds hit number 756 for the all-time record.

The underlying incentive, the Bonds people told Henry, was race. Just imagine: the three greatest black players in history combining forces, finally taking history and reshaping it, turning the Bonds moment into something black America could be proud of. And there was big money to be made: exclusive appearances, limited-edition signed balls, bats, and merchandise (how many people owned memorabilia that contained the signatures of Bonds, Mays, and Aaron anyway?). The pitch ended with Henry being told his share alone might net three million dollars.

Henry spurned each overture by Bonds and his handlers to cultivate him, to make him a partner in the creation (or at least the marketing) of the beginning of a new history, the beginning of the Bonds era as home-run king, anointed by his legendary godfather, blessed by Henry. Henry made it clear to his closest advisers he would have nothing to do with Bonds. No Sunday conversation on ESPN, no traveling with Bonds to market or even aid in rehabilitating a game wounded by drugs. In a culture where everything, especially ethics, seemed to be for sale, Henry thought marketing the home-run record perhaps the crassest thing he’d ever heard. Bonds needed Henry for legitimacy, perhaps even for his own baseball salvation. But Henry Aaron needed Barry Bonds like he needed a root canal. No one would know what was exactly said during that phone conversation between the two, but there was no ambiguity about Henry’s position. Confidants recalled Henry’s words afterward as being “He’s trying to buy me. And I resent that.”

A
T HIS
L
OS
A
NGELES
office, Mike Tollin received a call from Rachael Vizcarra. Vizcarra was one of two women who did personal public-relations for Bonds, outside of the Giants official team sphere. She went back to Bonds’s days with the Pirates and was Bonds’s special envoy to Tollin, who now sat on the board of Henry’s Chasing the Dream Foundation.

Tollin and Bonds had crossed paths before: A dozen years earlier, Tollin had interviewed Bonds for his documentary on Henry,
Chasing the Dream
. Given how events would ultimately unfold, it was more than a little ironic to watch the end of the film, with its interviews of stars from the mid-1990s—Frank Thomas, Ken Griffey, Jr., Cal Ripken—and see Barry Bonds offer the last word of the documentary on Henry.