The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  “I don’t care if the guy is yellow68 or black or has stripes like a fuckin’ zebra,” Durocher said in early 1947 when white Dodgers resisted the idea of being Robinson’s teammate. “I’m the manager and I say he plays.”

  Durocher, Perini also knew, provided instant credibility, the big New York name that would trumpet to the baseball universe that Milwaukee wasn’t the bushes. By drawing two million fans twice, Perini was already the financial envy of the baron class, especially the owners who chafed at being second in those two-team cities—the Philadelphia A’s and St. Louis Browns had skipped town to Kansas City and Baltimore, respectively, within a year after Perini left Boston—and he knew he was close to fielding a dominant team, as well.

  All of which added up to one nagging, significant thing: expectations, the kind that defined hungry baseball cities like New York and Boston, the kind that were just descending on Milwaukee and threatening to upset the idyllic equilibrium, free eggs and free cheese and free gas for a smile and an honest effort. Big-league baseball may have existed in Milwaukee for less than five years, but the attitude shift from just “happy to have a team” to “We deserve a pennant” was happening faster than Henry’s wrists whipped through the strike zone.

  And there was the pressure of time. Financially, Perini recognized a window of opportunity when he saw one. There was already talk of more franchise moves. Philadelphia had left for Kansas City and St. Louis left for Baltimore in 1954, and it was only a matter of time before baseball expanded to the West Coast and the South. The night at the Wisconsin Club was good hot stove fun, but the truth of the matter was that in little unassuming Milwaukee, Perini was outdrawing the big boys of New York. On the field, with Spahn and Burdette on the hill, plus Mathews, Adcock, and Aaron, the Braves owned a front line that was better than that of the Giants, and rivaled that of the Yankees and the Dodgers. Yet all three had titles, while Milwaukee had a manager who proved he could play the banjo and come in in second place. In the weeks leading up to spring training, before the Braves reported to Bradenton, Perini hit the Milwaukee dinner circuit, where he often said publicly, “We should win the pennant.” The simmering message in Milwaukee for 1956 was an obvious one, and it was being sent to Charlie Grimm, by his own bosses, special delivery: Win it now. Win the pennant … now … or else.

  HENRY DID NOT live in Milwaukee during the winter. He, Barbara, and their daughter, Gaile, now almost two years old, went back to Toulminville, living in the house on Edwards Street. Unlike the year before, when he’d hopped around on crutches and wondered how his ankle would respond, Henry had been healthy when preparing for 1956. At the end of the 1955 season, he had accepted an invitation to join an all-black barnstorming team assembled by Willie Mays and Don Newcombe. The touring team, originally formed by Jackie Robinson following the 1947 season, was inherited by Mays from Roy Campanella, and it might have been the best barnstorming team ever assembled, even rivaling the Satchel Paige teams in the 1930s. For Henry, the invitation served as another indication that if he was not yet being discussed as one of the game’s elite players, his potential was obvious. He belonged.

  The most telling element of the team wasn’t who played—in addition to Mays, the club featured Henry and the whiz shortstop Ernie Banks, who banged forty-four homers in 1955—but who didn’t play. Most specifically, it was how little of the American League was represented. Aside from the Cleveland Indians, American League team owners would fight being on the wrong side of history for decades, but the proof lay in their rosters: Integration was virtually nonexistent in the American League. Of the powerful men who ran the league—Boston’s Yawkey and Cronin, George Weiss of the Yankees, Calvin Griffith of the Washington Senators, Campbell and Briggs of the Tigers—none could boast an even discussable record in regard to racial progressiveness. The great migration of black players to the major leagues was almost entirely a National League phenomenon.

  Crowe and Charlie White joined Aaron from the Braves. Newcombe, fresh from beating out the Braves in the regular season, joined the team after the Dodgers finished the Yankees in the World Series. Banks and Gene Baker of the Cubs made up the double-play combination, while the great Negro League and White Sox pitcher Connie Johnson teamed with Joe Black and Brooks Lawrence of the Cardinals on the mound.

  The first downside of the tour for Henry was that Sam Jones was also on the squad. Jones, he of the big curveball and famous temper and love of the bottle, was the rare black player who publicly fought with other blacks. Aaron would recall that Jones would even fight with Mays, who had invited him to join the squad in the first place. There really were two Sams: the one who was drunk and the one who had been drinking. Neither was pleasant to Aaron, who saw no advantage in an extended quarrel with Sam Jones. Since Robinson, the unwritten rule among black players was ironclad: Whatever grievances that existed, blacks did not fight other blacks on the field or throw at them. The reasoning was simple: When it came to integration, the real game being played was not taking place on the field. Everyone knew the stereotypes about blacks—how they were short-tempered, quick to fight. Each black knew what he had left before being promoted to the majors, and no one wanted to go back. The first wave of integration was too important to have progress halted by petty gripes between players.

  Sam Jones would be his greatest antagonist. Each of Henry’s first few seasons would contain at least one new chapter of his twelve-round battle with Jones. For one month in 1955, they were teammates.

  The team played thirty-two games. It played against white teams and against Negro League all-star teams. And it was on that barnstorming trip that Henry witnessed the sheer incandescence of Mays. The dates were full, sellouts all. The big stars all had their homecomings: Banks in Dallas, Aaron in Mobile, Mays in Birmingham. The players earned, for the month, between three thousand and four thousand dollars, a big number, considering that in his rookie year of 1954, Henry earned just six thousand dollars for the whole season. Willie played at a thousand watts. In Longview, Texas, the game was delayed twenty-five minutes because even at game time, the line of fans still waiting to enter the ballpark snaked around the block. Mays treated the crowd to a single, a triple, and a home run, and, of course, a signature defensive play that would leave the crowd buzzing. The Defender was there, and the main subhead of the story put Mays in lights: “Willie Puts on Power Show.”

  “The Giants’ outfielder also made a tremendous throw from the four-hundred-foot wall in deep center to third base to nail a runner attempting to stretch a double,” the paper reported.

  They would win every game, laughers mostly—13–3 in Longview, led by Willie; 9–2 in Austin; 12–2 in Waco, with Willie homering and doubling; 10–1 in Corpus Christi, when Willie homered twice; and a 20–1 rout in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, when Willie cleared the fences against an overmatched ragtag band of Negro American League All-Stars.

  When the tour concluded with three games at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, Willie was a supernova; all eyes were trained on him that noted day Americans tuned in to baseball, November 6. The barnstormers had won all thirty-one games, but in the finale against the Southern California All-Stars, the music was all but stopped when Willie stepped up to the plate to offer a proper demonstration of how to do the hero thing. Down 4–3, with two on and two out, Mays sliced a three-run job that curved the left-field foul pole, winning it, 6–4.

  WILLIE’S WALLOP WINS WINDUP69

  ON BARNSTORMING TRIP

  LOS ANGELES, CALIF.—The Willie Mays–Don Newcombe All Stars concluded their 32-game tour in practically the same way they started the junket….

  The team won every game…. In the finale at Wrigley Field, 12,012 turned out to see Mays apply a spine-tingling finish to the contest.

  HENRY WASN’T EXACTLY invisible, and in another time, under a different sun, maybe he would have been the headliner. As it was, he was difficult to miss. The Defender ran his photo with the story of the Longview game, and when it had finally finished tripping o
ver itself in praise of Mays, the story did eventually note that, yes, Henry had gone four for four with two home runs. Henry homered in the 20–1 destruction at Hazelhurst, again in El Paso, and in the opener in Los Angeles. If Henry had already been convinced of his abilities, the barnstorming trip proved that he could hit with anyone, Willie Mays included. But in building a legend that would live in the mind as well as on the stat sheet, Mays emitted his own unique pheromones—the sweet aroma of stardom—which could not be duplicated.

  In small ways, Mays could even transcend Jim Crow. Henry recalled that once, in Birmingham, he and Mays walked into a department store. Mays, eyeing a few suits, pulled out a healthy roll of hundred-dollar bills, more money than a black man was supposed to carry in the Deep South. The store clerk began dialing the telephone, when Mays told him he wasn’t just any Negro, but the Willie Mays. That changed everything.

  “It was okay to be black in the South,”70 Henry would say years later, “but only if you happened to be Willie Mays.”

  After the trip, Henry returned to Mobile. He worked at Carver Park, the old playground a few blocks from his house, as a recreation supervisor for the city, busy working, with a goal in mind: the batting title. During the early years of his time, before the home run became the definitive measure of a hitter, batting for average was a far more important barometer of a hitter’s true ability than hitting for power. It was a combination of hits and power in the tradition of Musial and DiMaggio that was the mark of a true hitter. Anybody could run into one and yank it over the fence, but it took an accomplished batsman to back it all up with a consistently high level of hitting. That’s why Musial was so great. Musial would win the batting title seven times, and six times would lead the National League in hits. And he was no Punch-and-Judy hitter. Musial led the league in doubles eight times, triples five times, and though he would never hit 40 home runs in a single season, he would wind up with 475 home runs.

  For the bulk of his career, more than Mays, more than Williams, Clemente, or even Ruth, Musial would be Henry’s standard of success. When he dreamed about records during the first half of his career, it was not with Ruth in mind, but Musial’s National League record for hits.

  In early January, Quinn sent Henry his contract for 1956, which called for a salary of twelve thousand dollars. Aaron sent the contract back in the mail, he said, with a note to Quinn that read, “You must have sent me O’Connell’s contract by mistake.” He would sign for seventeen thousand dollars that season. At home, he enjoyed something of the celebrity life, but the humiliating reminders of Mobile were always close. Six days after sporting the tux at the Wisconsin Club, he was named “Negro mayor” of Mobile for Mardi Gras, the signature event of New Orleans, but whose American roots dated back to 1702, when Mobile was the first capital of the Louisiana Territory. Henry was the guest of honor for dinner at the Elks Club. But Mobile’s withering segregation rules immediately reduced Henry, and an incident ensued that he would carry with him for the next half century.

  The Elks Club invitation came with a condition: He would be a welcome guest of the club for one night only and could bring no guests. When he arrived with Herbert, his father was not allowed entry to see his son’s big night. When the evening was complete, Henry would not be allowed to leave the building through the front door with the white guests. Herbert was not just turned away at the door; he was instructed to meet Henry at the back entrance. Henry never forgot this slight. It was America at its most contradictory—saluting excellence while demeaning the individual.

  The hype for 1956 started in January at the Wisconsin Club and continued when the trucks rolled out of County Stadium for Bradenton. Lou Perini may have been unsure about Charlie Grimm, and the rest of the league had its doubts that the Braves were capable of staring down the Dodgers, but apart from complaints about his charisma level, no one in baseball took a dissenting view of Henry.

  Barbara did not join Henry in Bradenton. She was aware of the local customs, and the routine of having to walk around the outside of the park to the colored entrance (which was hardly an entrance as much as it was a wooden fence slat that had been removed to allow blacks to enter—at full price, of course) would have been too humiliating. She did not want to listen to the jeers and the jibes from the adjacent white sections of Ninth Street Park. She remained in Mobile until the regular season started and the team headed up north.

  FOR MOST OF his postcareer life, Henry—and even more passionately his supporters and teammates—would bristle at the lack of star power that accompanied his accomplishments. They would call him the most underrated superstar of all time, a man who never received proper respect for everything he had done in the game. Johnny Logan would tell anyone who would listen that Aaron, day in and out, was a better player than Mays.

  “All Mays had over Henry71 was flash,” Logan would say, as if star power was valueless.

  Yet, in later years, Henry would reflect on those years and conclude that he was something of a hotshot, after all, the rising star in the same class as Mantle and Mays. He really was the can’t-miss. The personal awards were piling up—MVP in Jacksonville in 1953, team Rookie of the Year in 1954 (Henry’s first invitation to the Wisconsin Club), all-star and team MVP in 1955, before he was twenty-two—and he may not have known the details, but he knew he had value. Had he been unaware that he was being projected as an all-time great, he likely would never have sent Quinn’s contracts back with sarcastic notes attached.

  Branch Rickey, the bushy-eyed Mahatma who was running the Pirates, had tried during the 1955 season to buy Henry from the Braves, offering Perini $150,000. Had he accepted, the Pirate outfield would have featured Aaron and the newest Rickey prospect, a gifted Puerto Rican outfielder who went by the name of Clemente. The careers of Clemente and Aaron would always circle each other. When Clemente was a teenager and Aaron was tearing up the Sally League, it was the Braves that offered Clemente three times what the Dodgers put forth. But Clemente desired to play in New York more than he wanted money.

  The problem of perception had nothing to do with Henry’s skills, which were universally admired. The problem was that there was always a new boy on the street—someone with a prettier swing or a better press agent, somebody with more panache, a stronger arm, or that special intangible you built magic around.

  This time, in the spring of 1956, when Henry came to Bradenton, lashing line drives and fully healthy, it was another Robinson from California he encountered, this one in the Cincinnati system. His name was Frank and he was from Oakland, where, like Mobile, ballplayers seemed to grow out of the ground. Robinson had been a two-sport star at McClymonds High, on Oakland’s west side, the alma mater of Bill Russell, the star basketball player. Oakland would always be fertile baseball territory, and Cincinnati had hit the trifecta. In addition to Robinson, the Reds had just signed a young black center fielder from Oakland Technical High named Curtis Flood, and they had the inside track on another McClymonds kid everyone was talking about: Vada Pinson.

  Frank Robinson was listed as being six one and weighing 190 pounds, just an inch and ten pounds bigger than Aaron, but he was built like a football player and possessed an intimidating presence. Where Henry was slender in the arms and calves and thicker in the waist, Frank Robinson carried his muscle in his chest and shoulders. Virtually overnight, Henry’s stage grew crowded even before the curtain went up. Mays was omnipresent, Banks hit for more power than any National League shortstop, and now the word was this kid Robinson might be so good that the down-and-out Reds could even make a little noise. The hype machine was always looking for fresh material, especially during spring training, when for every legend born, thirty never produced a thing.

  ERNIE WHITE, the old pitcher who won seventeen games for the Cardinals in 1941 and was a teammate of Warren Spahn in Boston, was the first to feed the machine enthusiastically, this time in an INS news wire item on March 17, 1956. After watching big Frank tattoo a couple of balls, White gushed, and in the proces
s, he started a trend that would hound Henry Aaron for his entire career.

  ROBBY HAS REDS BUZZING72

  Ernie White, former hurler for the St. Louis Cardinals and the Boston Bees who managed Robinson last year at Columbia, added:

  “I was managing Columbia when Hank Aaron tore the Sally League apart for Jacksonville. Robinson can outdo Aaron in everything. He’ll outrun him and he’ll outhit him. He has great power to all fields.”

  During spring training, Henry seemed especially focused on the Dodgers, perhaps just to show that at least one member of the Braves wasn’t intimidated by Newcombe or Drysdale, Robinson or the moment. Henry dominated the champs all spring, hitting .552 against them, including four home runs. Walt Alston, the Dodger manager and Aaron admirer, said, “What’s more, he’s likely to hit .552 all season.”

  Even Robinson, ferocious competitor that he was, understood Henry possessed the ability to be feared, and he was forced to give a tip of the cap. Roger Kahn recalled a story about Henry stealing second base during spring training that year. When he swiped second a second time, Robinson landed on Henry, pinned him hard to the dirt, and began filling Henry’s spikes with handfuls of dirt.

  “Jackie, what are you doing?”73 Henry cried.

  “I’m making sure you don’t steal on me again.”

  CERTAINLY, there were chances for populism, magical opportunities for the words and deeds to meld, chances to be beautiful. Look magazine loved Aaron, naming him “a lock” to win the batting title. “Hank is a ‘3-L hitter’: lean, loose and lethal,” the magazine said. “His batting secret is his supple, powerful wrists.” The Chicago Defender, the influential black newspaper, ran an AP story, following Look’s lead, predicting Henry would win the batting crown.

  AARON PICKED TO WIN74

  NATIONAL BATTING TITLE

  Some of the keenest baseball observers are convinced that the leading hitter … will be a 22-year-old … outfielder for the Milwaukee Braves. This unobtrusive athlete is Hank Aaron.