Gene Conley saw Henry socially on similar terms as Johnny Logan. “He really was all business.106 He had a job to do and he did it. Then he was out of there.” Conley had competed with and against blacks for years. The racial codes, both real and clumsily ignored by the Braves players, made him uncomfortable even decades later. Conley would be especially aware not because he was a social activist but because he was a basketball player.
“I just didn’t go for that stuff. I didn’t make a big deal of it then or now,” Conley recalled. Logan, too, who came from upstate New York, was not uncomfortable or distant with his black teammates, but he wasn’t unaware of the difficulties.
There were days when Conley seemed intrigued by Henry, but he also knew the strict codes about mingling socially with his black teammates. Conley recalled knowing specifically that during spring training, when teams developed their collective personality, hanging out with blacks in town after games was prohibited. More than his other white teammates, Gene Conley found he was uncomfortable to the point of anger when discussing the racial questions of the day. Conley recalled that later, when he joined the Boston Celtics, he often spent more social time with Russell than with Henry. It all seemed so stupid, he thought. “The 1950s,” Conley said ruefully one day a half century later, “were hard.”
The other power brokers on the team were less predictable, which made the concept of drinking with them less palatable. Spahn wasn’t from the South, but nevertheless he held racial attitudes not always considered progressive. Spahn and Aaron had something of an odd relationship. Throughout the league, Spahn had developed a reputation for being, if not a strident racist, a man who was less sympathetic toward the black situation and, despite his education and combat service in World War II, less willing to change. Both Spahn and Aaron would profess respect for each other’s Hall of Fame talent, but Spahn was glib and aloof, while Henry was known for his deliberate and shrewd assessment of people. Henry, like Bob Gibson, was constantly, if not openly, measuring what kind of men the white people around him were. Spahn could make a joke and if you didn’t get it, well, that was your problem. If it offended you, then maybe you were just being too sensitive, like the time he offered and answered a riddle in the clubhouse. This was during the season the Braves were receiving national attention for being the first big-league club to field an all-black outfield. There was Bruton in center, Wes Covington in left, and Henry in right.
“What’s black and catches flies?” Spahn asked one day in the clubhouse.
“The Braves outfield.”
In the baseball culture, that was Spahn’s right. He had been a star pitcher for so long that he did not have to adjust to his teammates as much as they needed to learn about him, a dynamic especially true in the case of Spahn’s black teammates.
Burdette was from West Virginia, and his hostile attitude toward blacks had been well established, while Adcock and Henry already knew where they stood. Some players engaged in a spirited talk about “niggers” without realizing Henry was within earshot. The Braves may have been teammates, determined to win the World Series together, but Henry did not assume he was necessarily welcome in every situation.
“You had to remember that integration107 was a new thing,” Henry said. “We had players coming from places where that wasn’t accepted. Everybody had to learn to live differently.”
With the Braves grinding through another tight National League race with four other teams, the national press descended on Henry for a closer look at the man who was, even in July, the leading candidate for Most Valuable Player and the Triple Crown, goals he had set for himself back in spring training. And that wasn’t all. Two days after he joined the All-Star Game, the Associated Press announced that Henry had invaded the thinnest airspace possible for a baseball player.
HANK AARON TIES RUTH HOMER
MARK108 AFTER 77 GAMES
With the 1957 major league season at the halfway mark, young Hank Aaron is even with Babe Ruth’s record home run pace. Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees is four behind.
Aaron, who also leads the National League in batting (.347) and runs batted in (73) has hit 27 home runs in 78 games, the same number Ruth totaled in the same number of games en route to his record 60 in 1927 with the Yankees.
On Monday, July 29, the Braves enjoyed one of their most rousing wins of the season, a 9–8, tenth-inning affair over the Giants at County Stadium. Spahn, taking a terrible pounding, couldn’t get out of the fifth, while Willie and Henry played tit for tat. Mays was thrown out while trying to steal home in the third; then Aaron beat him deep with a triple over his head, and scored when Covington drove him in, to tie the game at 4–4. Willie broke the tie with a long homer off Pizarro in the seventh, and the Giants broke it open in the eighth with three more.
Down 8–4, with one out, in the bottom of the ninth, Crandall homered and started a four-run rally that tied it at 8–8. With two out and the bases loaded in the bottom of the tenth, Al Worthington walked Mantilla home for the victory.
That morning, the latest issue of Time magazine hit the newsstands, a sultry illustration of the actress Kim Novak on the cover. Inside were 589 words under the headline THE WRIST HITTER.109
In the wildly unpredictable street fight for the National League lead, the Milwaukee Braves were last week’s team to beat…. But the man mainly responsible for the Braves’ surge into first place was a lithe Negro outfielder named Hank Aaron, who is hitting the baseball better and more often than any man in the National League.
The story recounted the old Aaron chestnuts—his days with the Clowns, Dewey Griggs scouting him in Buffalo, the Mobile beginnings—but in the final section of the piece, the subheadline referred to Aaron as “The Talented Shuffler.”
Aaron claims to enjoy playing right field … because “… I don’t have as much to do, especially not as much thinking.” Thinking, Aaron likes to imply, is dangerous. But by now everyone knows that Aaron is not as dumb as he looks when he shuffles around the field (“I’m pacing myself”), and some … think he will … rank among the game’s great hitters.
In later years, when the country’s attitudes shifted and talk that had been common for centuries became socially unacceptable, Henry would gain an annoying reputation among writers for being bland, the same writers who would later attempt to deify him. More likely, Henry had erected a wall around himself, a protective barrier designed to prevent, or at least minimize, the lasting damage of the words written about him.
“I wouldn’t have taken that shit,”110 Bill White recalled. “I would have had to have a talk with a lot of people had they said those kinds of things about me. But you also have to remember that a lot of those first black players were from the South, and this is what they knew. It had been reinforced in them and their families for so long and they had been taught not to fight back. That’s why it used to anger me when people accused Willie of not saying enough. The reason why Henry is a man of respect is because of things like this. He did not respond with words, but with his bat. But Henry Aaron took a lot of crap.”
The press had traveled to Milwaukee to see Henry before. It was in 1956, when Charlie Grimm was still managing the club and the Braves were the fashionable choice to end the Dodger reign. A month before Haney took over, The Saturday Evening Post ventured to Milwaukee to profile Henry. Like every top prospect or signature player on a club, he had been featured in the local papers, but The Saturday Evening Post, with its Norman Rockwell covers and decades-long residence on American coffee tables, was another matter altogether.
Even in the mid 1950s, as The Saturday Evening Post’s influence had begun to wane and television accelerated its final demise, few magazines reached the heart of America like it did. Its interest in Henry represented his arrival in just his third season, but it also seemed to validate the Perini claim that Milwaukee would one day become the country’s baseball capital. Sports Illustrated and Sport, the two national sports magazines that would carry the industry for nearly
a half century, were still in their infancy. The Sporting News had not been surprised by Aaron, but the Baseball bible in those days was more a trade magazine for the industry. A feature in The Saturday Evening Post meant Henry would be introduced to the mainstream. This form of recognition was reserved for only the most gifted players, the ones who either had transcended their own sport or achieved a degree of cultural significance beyond the limits of the batter’s box.
Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio had been on the cover of Time and Life, as had Jackie Robinson. Willie Mays made the cover of Time in 1954 and would win the cover of Life for the first, but not the last, time in 1958, as the Giants arrived in San Francisco. With the interest in him expressed by The Saturday Evening Post, Henry would have two important breakthroughs: He would begin his ascent into the ruling class of baseball players, and for the first time in his career, he would be introduced to a larger American audience interested in reading about important people.
The writer of this profile was Furman Bisher, a thirty-seven-year-old reporter, whose full-time job was covering sports for the Atlanta Journal. Bisher had been raised in Denton, North Carolina. A speck of a town in the central portion of the state, it claimed just six hundred people. As a boy, when he was not milking cows and completing his farming chores, Bisher had longed to be a third baseman, a dream only enhanced when one of his high school friends, Max Lanier, went on to pitch in the major leagues, primarily for the St. Louis Cardinals. Through good luck and good connections, Bisher landed a freelance writing contract with The Saturday Evening Post to write periodic sports pieces. He had gained the trust of a top editor at the magazine after a pair of profiles of college football coaches were well received by the New York office.
Bisher knew Henry from years before, having covered the Sally League in Atlanta when Aaron played for Jacksonville. Bisher liked to tell the story that he supplied the great New York columnist Red Smith with a variation on one of the more memorable lines regarding Henry Aaron. Smith wrote that in Jacksonville, Henry “led the league in everything except hotel accommodations.”
For the better part of a week, Bisher absorbed the life of Henry Aaron. He dined at the apartment on Twenty-ninth Street and watched television with Barbara and little Gaile. Bisher would recall particularly enjoying the company of Barbara, whom he would refer to as “shy,” “trim and pretty,” with a “great personality.” “We got along quite well,”111 he recalled. Early during the visit, he decided that Henry wasn’t equipped for the fame that his talent would ultimately create, but Barbara seemed more readily inviting and eagerly curious about the life of a sports star, a life that was beginning to define their environment.
Bisher talked to Grimm, who told him that Henry was “one in a thousand. You can’t make a Willie Mays out of him. He’s not that spectacular. He does things in his own way. But he’ll probably be around a long time after Willie’s gone.” He retold the few chestnuts about Henry’s early life that became boilerplate for every writer attempting to shape Henry Aaron for the next half century: his brief time with the Indianapolis Clowns, Dewey Griggs’s signing him with the Braves, his brief and wondrous play at each level in the minor leagues. Bisher recalled being taken by the Aaron family and considering Henry a friend.
When the Bisher profile appeared in the August 25, 1956, issue, Henry’s introduction to America in The Saturday Evening Post would not be the triumphant moment that trumpeted his arrival onto the national scene. Instead, it was the most influential and devastating piece of journalism ever written about Henry Aaron.
BORN TO PLAY BALL112
Milwaukee’s prodigious Hank Aaron
doesn’t go in for “scientific” hitting.
He just grabs a bat and blasts away.
In Jacksonville, Florida, where he carried off almost everything except the franchise during the South Atlantic League baseball season of 1953, there is still a considerable degree of puzzlement about Henry Louis (Hank) Aaron, now one of the mightiest warriors in the tribe of the Milwaukee Braves. There was, for instance, the time in Jacksonville that summer when Aaron was in the grip of a rare batting slump, and one of his teammates asked in conversation how he was going to cure it.
“Oh, I called Mr. Stan Musial about it,” was Aaron’s dead-pan reply, “and I coming out of it.”
“What did Musial tell you to do?” asked the teammate, an infielder named Joe Andrews.
“He say, ‘Keep swinging,’” Aaron said.
Shortly the slump passed and Henry thundered on to a .362 finish. Meanwhile, the Musial story was repeated often in dugouts around the league. On the day when Aaron got the league’s most valuable player award, manager Ben Geraghty decided it might be well to have Henry repeat his Musial tale to the sports writers who were inquiring into the reasons for his success.
“Man, I never called Stan Musial,” Aaron said, shaking his head vigorously.
“But you told Joe Andrews you did,” Geraghty said.
“I liable to tell Joe Andrews anything.”
Spec Richardson, general manager of the Jacksonville Braves, is representative of the perplexed local opinion that Aaron left behind. “Tell you the truth,” he says, “we couldn’t make up our minds if he was the most naïve player we ever had or dumb like a fox.”
For decades, journalists would speak of Henry with a mixture of respect for his baseball achievements and deep frustration bordering on anger for what they considered to be Aaron’s unnecessary suspicion of them. Henry would not dispute the writers’ descriptions of him. Often, he would confirm what the writers believed, for his wariness of the press was real. He did not believe that how he thought about himself as a person had ever been accurately conveyed in print, that the gap between his recollections of a given interview and the finished product was always far too wide. Furthermore, it was a gap that never seemed to tilt in his favor. Yet Henry also would not explain that the roots of his remove could be found in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post:
Even in Aaron’s earlier days with the Braves, there were occasions when he surprised everybody with his mental nimbleness….
Off the field, the Aarons stay pretty well tied to the little apartment when the Braves are at home. For all his natural rhythm, Henry doesn’t dance a step….
One of the biggest moments in Henry’s career so far was the 1955 All-Star Game, which was played in Milwaukee. Henry scored a run, walked and singled twice. His second single, combined with Al Rosen’s error tied up the game and sent it into extra innings. Stan Musial finally won it with a twelfth-inning home run.
“I enjoy that,” Aaron said. “but my first year in the league I play in Jim Wilson’s no-hit game. That’s the most kick I get out of baseball.”
Over the three-page spread, Bisher exposed, though perhaps unintentionally, an important subtext of the baseball culture at the time. Integration by 1956 was clearly a success—only the Tigers, the Phillies, and the Red Sox had not yet integrated. But in the eight full seasons since Jackie Robinson had debuted, black players had dominated the sport, yet having star black players on major-league rosters did not amount to actual equality. He noted that Henry’s Braves teammates had nicknamed him “Snowshoes” for his stiff-legged running style. At no point did Bisher mention that Henry did not engage with his teammates easily because he, along with Joe Andrews and Felix Mantilla, were the first black players ever to play in the Sally League. Integrating a southern league was no insignificant task; in 1953, most southern states still carried laws on the books prohibiting competition between whites and blacks. Certainly entering such an environment could have explained much of Henry’s hesitation, but Bisher, a southerner comforted by his own sense of normalcy, saw Henry merely as an unsophisticated black character. Even Jackie Robinson, insulated in the minor leagues by playing in Montreal, had not had to endure the indignities that came with playing in the South on a daily basis.
The Sally League had long been considered perhaps the most notorious of the minor-league sy
stems, and baseball people believed the league seemed the most unlikely to transition smoothly to integration. The Sally League’s reputation (combined with the cities and states that comprised it) was so formidable that big-league teams (the Red Sox and Cardinals primarily) used the fear of conflict in their minor-league affiliations in the South as reasons the big-league teams did not integrate. Bisher, and by extension Henry’s teammates and the men in the Jacksonville front office, captured Henry’s reticence, but they interpreted his hesitancy as an inability to navigate or a lack of intelligence, instead of recognizing the social forces at work. In the South, blacks were forced by habit, custom, and the law to be careful about how or if to approach whites. Henry had been taught from birth not to assume, and thus he would not have believed that he was entitled to the perk—which likely seemed extravagant at the time—of choosing a personal collection of bats.
In the fifteen hundred words he used, Bisher painted a disturbing portrait of Henry as nothing more than a country simpleton. Bisher wrote of him in the most condescending of terms, portraying a kind of hitting savant unaware of the larger, sophisticated world around him and without a passable IQ. The device Bisher used most effectively was language. Sharp and yet subtle, language could convey intelligence, stupidity, or nothing. It could be deftly used to feed into racial stereotyping.
The Last Hero Page 23