The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (75 page)

In the press box, the writers lived for these moments. Sitting in on history was one of the biggest reasons to be in the news business. You get only one shot to write it big, and write it well. And Bonds, with all of his bitterness and contradictions, his talent and hubris, made for great theater, if nothing else.

Dave Sheinin of the
Washington Post
was in the press box, enjoying a unique vantage point. Two years earlier, when baseball’s equivalent of the Blue Wall finally crumbled in Room 2154 of the Rayburn Building during the devastating hearings on March 17, 2005, Sheinin covered Mark McGwire’s disintegration and the nadir of the Steroid Era for the front page of the
Post
, and now just one Bonds home run would provide the coup de grâce.

Now the game was tied at 4–4. Bacsik threw Bonds a fastball, which he did not miss.

“I remember the moment he hit it.
³²⁴
I was like, ‘Here we go.’ And at that moment, it felt historic,” Sheinin recalled. “For about as long as it took for him to circle the bases, and of course you see Hank’s face on the Jumbotron, all of that felt really huge to me. There was a ten-minute window when it really felt immense. But that was it.”

Bonds’s ball cleared the field of play, soaring into discredited space. He was facing an imminent federal indictment, which would come less than four months later. He had determined that the moment would belong to him, that because he cherished owning the record, the record would be cherished. Weeks earlier, Bonds had sparred with the writers again about the legitimacy of his holding the record. Finally, he attempted to curb debate by declaring, “Once I break the record, it’s mine.”

“It’s weird. It cheapened the moment
³²⁵
but elevated the moment at the same time. It didn’t feel legit. It didn’t feel real. It felt fraudulent. But from a pure story standpoint, it made it richer,” Sheinin said. “If it was regular old Barry Bonds with no steroids who broke Hank Aaron’s record, it wouldn’t have been strong. But the way it occurred made it important for society because of what it meant. It was paradoxical.”

In 1998, when McGwire hit number sixty-two, every member of the Cubs infield—Mark Grace at first, Mickey Morandini at second, the shortstop José Hernandez—embraced him as he rounded the bases. Bud Selig and Stan Musial sat next to each other. The Chicago third baseman, Gary Gaetti, pounded his glove with excitement as McGwire passed. The Cubs catcher, Scott Servais, hugged McGwire and didn’t seem to want to let go, even as McGwire’s own team, the Cardinals, rushed to mob the hero.

Nine years later, orange-and-black streamers rained from the upper deck, and San Francisco, isolated in its joy, whooped and hollered. Bonds gave a two fisted-pump to the heavens and began his historic trot, but not a single Nationals player shook his hand as he rounded the bases. No one slapped him on the back, or even smiled. As he reached home plate, the Nationals catcher, Brian Schneider, stood away from the dish, as impassively as if play had been stopped to clear a stray beach ball from center field.

As Bonds and Willie Mays stood with their backs to the field, waving to the crowd, there came a roar within the roar. On the Jumbotron, wearing a charcoal suit and a striped tie was Henry. Those in the Nationals dugout along the first-base line, showing emotion for the first time, clapped politely.

Henry squinted and spoke his words. Bonds and Mays turned around to watch the video display.

“I would like to offer my congratulations to Barry Bonds on becoming baseball’s career home-run leader. It is a great accomplishment which required skill, longevity and determination,” Henry said. “Throughout the past century, the home run has held a special place in baseball, and I have been privileged to hold this record for 33 of those years. I move over now and offer my best wishes to Barry and his family on this historical achievement. My hope today, as it was on that April evening in 1974, is that the achievement of this record will inspire others to chase their own dreams.” Upon completing the final sentence, Henry offered a soft little smile. Janie McCauley, a reporter
³²⁶
for the Associated Press, put in a call to the Aaron residence in Atlanta. A woman answered the phone. “Mr. Aaron is asleep,” she said, and hung up the phone.

I
T TOOK SEVEN
takes to complete the forty-five-second video. On the first six, Henry seemed fine, but he looked weary and tired, like he’d rather have been in West Palm or … Pluto … or
… anywhere
else. The words were his, but they were a scripted, clandestine, collaborative effort. E-mails circulated from Allan Tanenbaum to Henry to Mike Tollin to some staffers in the commissioner’s office to Bud Selig. The message had to be subtle, yet energetic and graceful, lest Henry open himself up to the charge that, yes, he congratulated Bonds, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Of course, that part was true: His heart was miles away from this compromise. But Henry had given his word to Larry Baer and the Giants, and thus he would tape a congratulatory message.

In Atlanta, Billye Aaron read each new incoming message—a word tweak here, a change of emphasis there—a working draft for the digital age. Henry and Allan Tanenbaum proceeded to a studio in downtown Atlanta for the taping. The dark backdrop was accompanied by a montage—an Aaron home Braves jersey, a replica of the Hank Aaron Boulevard street sign.

Henry read the words carefully and dutifully, but after the sixth take, a young technician stopped him, summoning the courage to offer an artistic appraisal of the filming. Henry’s delivery was fine, he said. His pacing was good. But, the young man said, this tape was being made for a celebration, for history. Was it possible, the technician asked Mr. Aaron, for him to show a little more joy? Perhaps a smile would be good.

Henry looked at the man and delivered a line that, in the face of Bonds, would forever make him the people’s champion.

“Young man,” Henry Aaron said. “Do you really think I have anything to smile about?”

A
ND SO
, after thirty-three years it was over. Henry was no longer the home-run king. Bonds would hit six more that season, finish at 762, and, for his effort, never again be allowed to wear a big-league uniform.

“What was happening is that,
³²⁷
for the first time, unlike when Babe Ruth held the all-time home-run mark, the standard-bearer and the record holder have been separated,” Harry Edwards, the famed sociologist, said of the tainted Bonds surpassing Henry. “Henry Aaron, Roger Maris, these are the standard-bearers. Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, these are record holders. For the first time ever, the standard of excellence and the record holder are totally different people.

“If you’re going to maintain the integrity of the sport, the standard-bearers and the standard of excellence have to again become the same person. Right now, they’re not. Henry Aaron is the standard of excellence. Because of this drug thing, baseball doesn’t care about the record holder. He’s just standing out there. Baseball cares about the standard of excellence, and that means people will always look to Henry Aaron.”

EPILOGUE

O
N
O
CTOBER
30, 2008, roughly thirty schoolchildren gathered at a chain-link fence in front of the Toulminville Grammar School as a rugged eighty-foot-long flatbed truck negotiated the tight, narrow maze of streets in their neighborhood of Toulminville, Alabama. The buzzing among the kids was rooted in the sheer technological undertaking of the procession, for the children did not believe what they were about to see: an entire house, sixty feet in length, twenty feet high, would be lifted off of the ground, taken in its entirety from the small tract of land where it had sat, undisturbed, for sixty-seven years, laid on the bed of the truck, and driven away. Trucks carry dirt; trucks carry cars, they confirmed to one another. But a whole house?

The moving team worked methodically, thwarted momentarily by annoying obstacles: The height of the house made it difficult for the flatbed to pass under dangerous high-tension wires. Overgrown trees hampered the crew’s exit route, and no chain saw could slice through the bureaucracy: City ordinances prevented the removal of even a single tree branch without government authorization.

Police escorts awaited the convoy. An elderly woman, Mrs. Ruth, had lived next door to the house since FDR was in his third term, since the Great Depression began to slowly loosen its grip on America. Her hand covering her mouth, cheeks dampening, she stood at a slight distance from the commotion, steps removed from the construction crew and the police, from the officials from the city of Mobile and a few from the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, in Cooperstown, New York.

This was Henry Aaron’s childhood house, 2010 Edwards Street, Mobile, the house where he had come to live when he was eight years old. That was why everyone was making such a big fuss. It was the house Herbert had built with his bare hands and lived in for the next fifty-six years, never falling to the temptation of trading up to something bigger and better, to somewhere more luxurious and exclusive, as his famous son had suggested. It was the house where Henry’s mother, Estella, had lived for ten more years after her husband’s death, the place where Estella Aaron and Mrs. Ruth shared a friendship that lasted a lifetime. And now they were taking the house away to the city’s baseball park in central Mobile, where it would become a museum.

How the deal got done was quintessentially Henry, not the Henry Aaron who sought respect and found disappointment, but the polished and regal seventy-four-year-old who could now call presidents and CEOs directly for social visits. Bill Shanahan, the president of the Mobile BayBears, the Double-A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks that played its home games at the stadium named after Hank Aaron, had an idea of how to celebrate the seventy-fifth year of Henry’s life: a museum would be named after Aaron, serving as a veritable time line for the American twentieth century. Hank Aaron’s childhood home more than deserved to become a civic landmark in Mobile, Shanahan reasoned. Toulminville might be a challenging locale to draw tourist traffic, so what better place for the Hank Aaron Museum than the actual house he grew up in, located at the ballpark that bore his name? The house had been boarded up for a couple of years. Its contents—photographs, furniture, clothing, and even the Presidential Medal of Freedom Henry had received from President Clinton—remained inside.

Shanahan called the Baseball Hall of Fame for help, and Cooperstown officials, finally enjoying an overdue thaw with Henry, agreed.

The consortium of builders were all southern white men, some old enough to remember the old Mobile, when people like Henry were forced by custom to defer to people like them, when Herbert Aaron was forced to give up his place in line to them. And now, in another century, a different time, these same men jumped at the chance to be close to Henry Aaron, and to honor his father’s house. The bill to relocate and renovate the house would hit fifty thousand dollars. Much of the house still contained the original wood from 1942, when Herbert Aaron completed its construction. The moving expenses would be considerable, and would Henry be amenable to moving the family house in the first place? Many an honorable project wilted in the boardroom over lack of funds, but here a creative enthusiasm built up. Local architect Larry Hinkle said he’d do the entire job for free. The Hall of Fame would use its muscle. The BayBears said they would maintain the museum. All Henry Aaron had to do was agree.

No one was sure how to approach Henry. The word had been out about Henry for years: He was bitter. He was angry. He was unapproachable, the guy the real fans feared most: that legend you always wanted to meet, only to have the little boy in you leveled by the jerk in him.

Mike Callahan, the general manager of the BayBears, made the call. He pitched Henry the idea. The silence was awkward.

“I really thought I’d pissed him off,” Callahan recalled. “There was so much silence on the other end, I’m thinking to myself that I had this one opportunity and I blew it.”

Mike Callahan realized only later that the silence on the other end was Henry holding back to keep from crying on the telephone.

T
HE TRUCK LURCHED
before ambling slowly forward. The movers saw heaven in the form of I-65, a freeway wide enough to accommodate the flatbed. The house would travel eight miles in nine hours. The convoy passed Hank Aaron Park in Toulminville and curved around the Hank Aaron Business Loop in Mobile to reach its final destination, Hank Aaron Stadium.

Even when Henry was a boy, the house talked to him, told him in some strange way that he and his family were something special. Now the house was talking to Henry again. It had transformed honor, pride, ownership, and responsibility from airy concepts into something real, something he could hold in his hands. Henry Aaron would always be called a mama’s boy, but the house was a piece of his father, an example of the unpretentious hard work he had exemplified during his adult life.

Henry was the patriarch now. Ninety-six years old, Stella Aaron died in April 2008, ten years after Herbert. She remained in Mobile until diabetes made it too difficult to keep up her house, then moved to Atlanta to live with Henry. When she was home, in Mobile, her routines were none too dissimilar from Henry’s escapist tendencies when he was a boy. Henry would disappear to hook catfish on the banks of Three Mile Creek. Stella found her own spot along Mobile Bay, off of Halls Mills Road, digging up bait with a friend, trolling for redfish and white trout.

“People say over time it gets easier,” Henry said one day in New York, months after Stella’s death. “But it doesn’t. When you lose your mother, it is always going to be hard.”

Of Herbert and Stella’s eight children, only three remained: Alfredia, James, and Henry. The rest were all gone, but the house still stood. In a sense, the house now mirrored what Henry had become—once intensely private, now a public institution.

T
HE NEXT GENERATION
of Aarons remains, conflicted. The children dealt with their father’s fame and its effects on them in their own ways, with varying degrees of success. Gaile Aaron speaks of her father with an intense pride, saying that he “was always a better father than a baseball player,” and yet navigating her own life under his immense shadow could be complicated.

“Being introduced to someone, I was always ‘Gaile, Hank Aaron’s daughter,’” she said. “It was like it wasn’t good enough to be just Gaile.”

Lary Aaron played football in high school and then at Florida A&M. He never played big-league baseball, but he became a minor-league scout for the Milwaukee Brewers.

“There are advantages and disadvantages. When we grew up, my father told us he was really no different than anyone else,” Lary Aaron said. “He just had a job that was in the limelight and people liked to see. We never thought we were better than anyone else, and he always said that he’s no better than the guy who’s digging a ditch.”

Dorinda Aaron, Henry’s youngest child from his marriage to Barbara, works for her father at the 755 Restaurant Corporation, the parent company for Henry’s fast-food restaurants.

The 755 Restaurant Corporation is a reflection of Henry’s closest circle. His son-in-law, Victor Haydel, oversees the operation—Popeye’s, Church’s Chicken, and Krispy Kreme—while Louis Tanenbaum, son of Henry’s attorney Allan Tanenbaum, is also part of the management team.

Tommie Aaron, Jr., Henry Aaron’s nephew, would drive to Toulminville one afternoon to visit his grandfather’s house, only to see what neighbors saw in 1941: an empty square, bordered by wilted tufts of grass. Tommie junior did not know the movers had taken the house. “That,” his mother Carolyn Aaron says, “was my fault. I forgot to tell him the movers had taken his grandfather’s house.”

The decision to dedicate the house—indeed, to give it to the world—was not a democratic one, nor was it universally popular. It was largely Henry who had maintained it, Henry who feared it being neglected and falling into disrepair if left alone in Toulminville, Henry who paid the taxes, and Henry who made the executive call to turn it over to the city of Mobile.

Herbert Aaron’s granddaughter, Veleeta Aaron, passes Hank Aaron Stadium each time she drives along Interstate 65 and is vexed when she sees the house Herbert Aaron built now sitting on the grounds of a baseball stadium.

“It’s sad. When you think about that house, through all the years, it was ours. It’s sad just because I grew up in that house,” she says. “It was something that we had to ourselves, something that was ours for our family. It was our safety place.

“I guess now, when you think about all kinds of people walking through the living room, it belongs to everybody. And that is kind of sad and kind of good. It’s a part of history now.”

F
EBRUARY 19, 2008:
Henry was in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, the spring-training home of the Braves. A group of reporters asked him about Roger Clemens, Clemens’s recent testimony to the House Government Reform Committee, and the growing likelihood that Congress would seek an indictment for perjury against him. Henry responded in the same opaque manner in which he’d discussed Barry Bonds a year earlier. It was the typical, evasive boilerplate. He knew nothing about it, he said. Baseball was heading in the right direction. He didn’t care about whether Clemens was inducted into the Hall of Fame. That was a decision for the baseball writers, and, he added, “I don’t have a vote.”

F
OR THE PAST
two years, when it became clear that his record would fall, a nation of baseball fans would call on him and he would confuse them. Perhaps his voice would provide cover for them, the ones who watched the bodies expand and the offensive numbers rise and yet would not make the only kind of stand—refusing to spend their disposable income on baseball—that the game’s leadership would respect. Certainly, a decline in profits would have attracted the attention of Bud Selig and the baseball owners. But the fans did not do this. They spent and watched and cheered and waited for Henry to tell them that something had gone horribly wrong with the sport.

Their respect, in a sense, was the part of the hero game that Henry had long craved. For the majority of his baseball life, he had been judged based on what he wasn’t. He wasn’t flashy enough. He wasn’t talkative enough or sufficiently articulate. He did not go on the offensive for these injustices and that made him dignified. Perhaps it was a matter of finally having what he’d always wanted and not knowing what to do with it. Or perhaps Henry’s reticence was prompted by this particular issue, the drugs tied up in the runaway, unattractive commodities he did not respect, that kept him away from the calls of the nation. But that was just the problem: The leader doesn’t get to choose which issue will send him into action. His only choice is whether to accept the mission.

In 2009, in Cooperstown, the day before Rickey Henderson and Jim Rice were to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, Henry Aaron erased the ambiguity. In little ways, if you paid close enough attention, he had let his feeling be known not by what he said about Barry Bonds, but by the enthusiasm he exhibited a year after Bonds broke his record, when he congratulated Ken Griffey, Jr., who in June 2008 hit his six hundredth home run. Griffey had always been considered something of a tragic figure, robbed by injuries—as well as by the widespread steroid culture around him and the prevailing belief in the baseball world that he had never used performance-enhancing drugs—of the opportunity to continue to be what he had once been: the most exciting player in the game since Mays.

If Henry was tepid in his response to Bonds when he broke the record, his message to Griffey contained no ambiguities.

“Ken Griffey Jr., congratulations on hitting your 600th home run. I got a chance to see you at the Boys and Girls Club function just recently, you and your lovely wife, and you know you’ve always been a favorite of mine.

“I played with your dad, I know him very well, but you know I’ve always said that if anybody was going to reach 700, with no pun intended to anybody, I thought you had an excellent chance. Of course we can’t, we don’t know how injuries played a very big part, but congratulations to reaching 600. Only a few, and you are the sixth person to do that.

“Congratulations Ken Griffey Jr., and many, many more. I’m just hoping that you’ll have the greatest year you’ve ever had in your life. Thank you.”

Now, in Cooperstown, Henry was as direct as he once had been evasive. He told a small group from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, the body that votes for Hall of Fame enshrinement, that the Steroid Era must be acknowledged in perpetuity with a scarlet letter. “If a player is elected who’s known to have used steroids, then I think there ought to be an asterisk or something mentioned on the plaque that he used steroids.

“To be safe, that’s the only way I see you can do it. I played the game long enough to know it is impossible for players, I don’t care who it is, to hit 70-plus home runs. It just does not happen.”

And with that statement, the people loved him even more. The record did not belong to him, and he did not need it. He had become the people’s champion.