The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron

518 Pages·2010·5.19 MB·English

by  Howard Bryant

ALSO BY HOWARD BRYANT
Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston
Juicing the Game:
Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball

In memory of Nona Bryant,
and for Donald Bryant,
my parents
CONTENTS
Introduction
ESCAPE
PART ONE:
Herbert
ONE:
Henry
TWO:
Stepin Fetchit
THREE:
Milwaukee
FOUR:
MAGIC
PART TWO:
Wehmeier
FIVE:
Photo Insert 1
Jackie
SIX:
Scripture
SEVEN:
Bushville
EIGHT:
Almost
NINE:
LEGEND
PART THREE:
Respect
TEN:
Atlanta
ELEVEN:
Willie
TWELVE:
Ruth
THIRTEEN:
Mortal
FOURTEEN:
Acknowledgment
FIFTEEN:
FREE
PART FOUR:
Drift
SIXTEEN:
Photo Insert 2
Cars
SEVENTEEN:
756
EIGHTEEN:
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendixes
A Note on Sources
Notes
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
Nearing the crest of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, all Henry Aaron wanted was a
milk shake. It was June, and the weather was humid—an uncomfortable day
gathering momentum toward oppressive.
Initially, the line out front wasn’t much, just a couple of kids in baseball caps
and shorts, holding baseballs and cellophane-protected glossies. Then it grew
longer, sloping eagerly down Ninety-third street toward Second Avenue. New
York had never been one of Henry’s favorite cities, yet he had awakened on this
particular Saturday at 4:00 a.m. so he could catch a 6:15 a.m. flight from Atlanta
to La Guardia.
This autograph signing was the latest example of concept marketing: an event
held in an upscale ice-cream parlor that doubled as a high-end memorabilia
store. The idea that the upper-middle-class gentry from Westchester and North
Jersey would spend their disposable income on mint chocolate chip cones and
autographed three-hundred-dollar baseball jerseys was the brainchild of Brandon
Steiner, the head of New York collectibles juggernaut Steiner Sports.
Inside the brightly colored, baseball-themed storefront sat Henry Aaron,
seventy-four years old, in an air-conditioned back room across from clear plastic
containers of Gummi Bears, Swedish Fish, and bobblehead dolls. Behind a
folding table, Henry was flanked by candy and enough photographic evidence of
his life to suggest a forensic exhibit.
There were black-and-whites from his high-flying days in Milwaukee, when
he was all muscle and torque and potential; there were plastic blue-and-white
batting helmets with the cursive letter A, for the Atlanta Braves, and pictures of
when Hank hit a home run in the 1972 All-Star Game, played in Atlanta, the first
major-league All-Star Game played in the Deep South. And there were
snapshots of his jaunty, jowly American League finale, the career National
Leaguer sporting the powder blue double knits of the Milwaukee Brewers.
Overwhelming it all were images from the night of April 8, 1974, at Atlanta–
Fulton County Stadium. The images recorded that evening showed the follow-
through from the batter’s box, when his eyes lit up, and the moment he’d made
impact. They showed the two kids catching up with him as he crossed the plate.
They showed Joe Ferguson, the dumpy Los Angeles catcher, looking as though
he were standing on the wrong subway platform. And they showed Hank Aaron
holding up the historic ball returned to him by the teammate who had caught it,
relief pitcher Tom House.
The line gathered outside and Henry girded. He knew it was time to reach into
himself and get into character and become, once again, Hank Aaron. Each of the
hundreds of photographs of the moment that had made him an international hero
filled Henry with a special sense of dread.
This had been true for the last fifty-five years, this uneasy relationship. Inside,
Aaron would do an in-store interview with ESPN Radio, trying to sound as
though he actually cared about baseball in 2008, about which of today’s players
reminded him of himself (none!), and whether Yankee third baseman Alex
Rodriguez could hit eight hundred home runs. (“I don’t get to see him much,”
Hank said, “except in the play-offs and World Series.”)
During a commercial break, a perky staffer filling a waffle cone promised
Henry she would make him a milk shake. (“Coming right up!”) Henry stood up
and stretched a bit while the eyes on him—from the few dozen fans inside the
store to the throng still waiting on the sidewalk, tapping on the glass—bulged at
the sight of him. They didn’t yell, just stared at him, soaking in the deep creases
of his face, the protruding belly, the white tennis shoes, and the limp, a souvenir
from knee surgery that had left him on crutches for virtually the entire winter.
The ones who didn’t speak tried to attract his attention with hand gestures and
provocative clothing (a middle-aged woman sporting a Mets cap and cottage-
cheese thighs, backpack slung over both shoulders, wore a T-shirt that read
755: THE
). He smiled politely, wading easily through the crowd,
REAL HOME RUN RECORD
unpretentiously close physically yet at a complicated emotional remove.
The words from the crowd solidified for him the idea that Hank was a
necessary creation, a public conduit for his considerable fame, his tremendous
ability, which had been sculpted into legend, and it was this distance, impossible
to navigate, between what he represented to them and who he was, that Henry
Aaron truly detested the most. The most obvious clue could be found in the
name itself, for nobody who really knew him ever called him Hank. Well, almost
nobody. Only one member of the inner circle, a kid Henry had met back in 1966,
ever got away with calling him Hank. Henry had promised Johnnie and Christine
Baker that he would take care of their son Dusty when he arrived in his first
spring camp, and maybe that was why the rules were a little different for Dusty
Baker.
To everybody else who mattered, he was Henry. Neither his first wife,
Barbara, nor his second, Billye, ever called him Hank. As a boy, his name was
Henry. That was what his mother and father and all seven siblings knew him by.
His best friend from grade school, Cornelius Giles? To him, he was Henry.
When he’d first entered the big leagues a lifetime earlier, the name was how he
differentiated the familiar, the friendly, from the rest. “When he first came up, if
you called him ‘Hank,’ he wouldn’t even hear you,” recalled Billy Williams,
who grew up close to Henry in Whistler, Alabama, a fingertip’s reach from
Mobile. “I remember we were in Chicago one day and everybody was yelling for
him. They were screaming, ‘Hank! Hank!’ and he just kept walking. Then, when
everything died down, I said, ‘Henry!’ and he immediately turned around. That
meant you were a familiar face. That meant you knew him, and that was the only
way he’d ever turn around.”
The adorning of him as the people’s champion (“You’re still the home run
king, Hank!”) did not evoke a response. He did not respond to the dozen
offhanded variations of the same theme—the Barry Bonds question. It was the
public’s way to broach the unspeakable, and by his total lack of reaction, you
would have thought the numbers that used to define him—714, 715, and 755—
as well as the names of Mays, Ruth, and Bonds, were by now just street noise to
him.
The names and iconic statistics are, of course, much more than that and the
oceanic space between the public Hank, who avoids confrontation, and the
private Henry, who is clear and passionate and committed, explain why he can
never do enough or say enough to satisfy supporters thirsty not only for his
statesmanship but his fire. Bonds was where the collision between Hank and
Henry was often the fiercest, where the facade came closest to dissolution. It was
Hank, the public man, the legend, who wished Barry well in his quest to break
the all-time home run record, who avoided controversy. It was Hank Aaron who
publicly drove down the avenue of gracious cliché. Records were made to be
broken, he would say. He had enjoyed his time as the record holder, and now it
was time for someone else to take over.
Aaron would be called bitter, an assessment that hurt him deeply. Henry
would often say he wanted the people to know him, yet he was convinced that all
the public wanted to know about was Hank. “People don’t care about me. They
don’t care about the things that made me into the person I am,” he said one
wintry day in January 2008. “They don’t care that I raised five children and try
to help people do whatever they can to get the most out of their lives, to allow
them to chase their dreams. All they care to talk about is that I hit seven hundred
and fifty-five home runs or what I hit on a three–two pitch. There is so much
more to me than that.” The space between Hank and Henry wasn’t supposed to
be such difficult terrain. He was supposed to be like Reggie or Ruth, Ted
Williams and John Wayne, where the person and the legend meshed so
seamlessly that the individual became the myth. And whatever gulfs did exist,
Henry believed most people felt it just wasn’t their problem. The fans didn’t care
that what drove him was not the unremarkable desire simply to be left alone
(many superstars before and after him were uncomfortable with the demands of
fame), but the wish to use the enormous advantage of his talent, first to avenge
the devastating limitations racism placed on previous generations of Aaron men,
and, second, like Robinson, to be complete, to develop an important voice on
important subjects beyond the dugout.
Henry believed the fans had no interest in these concepts, in his moral
indignation; they just wanted Hank. He was on their baseball card. He was
supposed to make them happy, and for all his gifts on the baseball field, Henry
Aaron lacked the oratory skills and unrestrained charisma (he loathed public
speaking) to bridge the gap between Henry’s smoldering drive and Hank’s
reticent celebrity. Roxanne Spillett, a friend and philanthropic partner of Henry,
said, “When I think of Henry Aaron, I see an introvert in an extrovert’s role.
Anyone who has ever been put in that position knows just how difficult it truly
is.”
To memorabilia collectors, Henry was nothing but a commodity. They were
the ones who pushed the bats in the man’s large hands, their eyes cold marbles,
devoid of nostalgia or awe. They were the ones who demanded specifics. (“This
one has to say seven hundred and fifteenth home run, not seven hundred and
fifteen home runs.”)
The ones in line who weren’t, however, who waited in the heat to trudge an
inch closer to him, they were the ones who told him stories (or at least tried; the
line had to keep moving) about what Hank Aaron meant to them, then and now.
He was their happiness before and, in a baseball universe ethically complicated
and corrupted by drugs and money, the person they looked to for their
conscience today. (“I just want you to know you’re the real home run
champion.”) It was Hank whom the public came to see, and each and every one
of them, in their shorts and tank tops and Yankees and Mets caps, stared into the
lines of the old man’s face, hoping—in fact, begging—to make eye contact, so
that when their turn to have their picture signed of Hank breaking the record or a
souvenir baseball or their tattered copy of his face on the cover of the New York
Daily News, April 9, 1974 (“Mr. Aaron, I just wanted you to know that I’ve been