The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  […]

  I would greatly appreciate it, Larry, if you would honor this request.

  Sincerely yours,

  Joe

  A month later, on April 3, Timilty received the signed glossies (did they really think Burdette, of all people, was a “Colored ball player”?) of President Kennedy and passed them on to Duffy Lewis, but Henry would never know the backstory—that his usefulness to the campaign was not simply to help Kennedy win but to parry Robinson. Had Henry known that Robinson had chosen Humphrey, he might well have joined Robinson in supporting Humphrey against Kennedy. But he had no way of knowing he was being cultivated to neutralize the most iconic black athlete in the country’s history. Henry would call his association in the 1960 campaign an “honor,” and for the next half century, he would support Democratic candidates at every political level.

  Although Henry had always considered Jackie Robinson his standard of courage and commitment, the perfect blend of athletic achievement and social conscience, he would not approach his activism in the often isolated, crusading Robinson manner. Following Humphrey’s withdrawal from the presidential race, Robinson campaigned vigorously for Nixon against Kennedy.

  Robinson seemed particularly wounded by the Nixon defeat, and even as Nixon reached his first political nadir, Robinson continued to believe in him. On Chock Full o’ Nuts stationery, Robinson wrote to Nixon on November 12, 1962:

  Mr. Richard Nixon

  c/o Republican Headquarters

  Los Angeles, California

  Dear Dick:166

  It is difficult to write a letter such as this, but I shall do the best I can.

  The only regret I have in supporting you twice is that I was unfortunate not to have been able to help more than I did. I am sorry also that most Negroes were unwilling to believe the promises you made. I personally was, and still am, convinced that you were the best candidate for the presidency in 1960 and a man we need very much in Government Service.

  I am concerned because you have said that you have had your last press conference. I hope that you will reconsider, Dick, because it is the great men people attack. You are good for politics; good for America. As one who has great confidence in you and who sincerely appreciates the opportunity of having known and worked for you, I urge you to remain active. There is so much to be done and there are too few qualified people to do the job now. Your loss would be an added blow to our efforts. Do not let your critics cause you to give up your career. Each of us came into this world for a purpose. I believe that yours is service to our country.

  Cordially,

  Jackie Robinson

  Robinson would always pay the heavy price of loneliness for his activism and his headfirst approach. Passion is often uncomplicated, and in complex political waters, Robinson flailed admirably and desperately, seeking a similar commitment for civil rights.

  Yet in the end, before history would completely recognize Robinson’s passion triumphing over his strategy, he lived as the single-minded outsider, loyal to the cause, at the cost of his allies ignoring him. Once it became clear that whatever Robinson saw in him as a man, Nixon’s loyalties were with a Republican party that regarded civil rights with hostility, Robinson would eventually even break with Nixon on a political level, while maintaining a personal fondness for him.

  On July 25, two days after being elected to the Hall of Fame, Robinson seemed melancholy, his fire submitting to his heart. In a sentimental moment, he wrote a letter to Walter O’Malley, an attempt at reconciliation, or at least closure.

  Dear Mr. O’Malley,167

  Sunday night, as I had dinner with my family at the Otesago Hotel in Cooperstown, I had the opportunity of chatting with Mrs. O’Malley briefly. We talked about things I am sure she does not remember, but I really wanted to talk with her about you and I.

  I couldn’t help but feel sad by the fact that the next day I was entering the hall of Fame and I did not have any real ties with the game. I thought back to my days at Ebbetts Field, and kept wondering how our relationship had deteriorated. Being stubborn, and believing that it all stemmed from my relationship with Mr. Rickey, I made no attempt to find the cause. I assure you, Rae has on many occasions discussed this, and she too feels we should at least talk over our problems. Of course, there is the possibility that we are at an impasse, and nothing can be done. I feel, however, I must make this attempt to let you know how I sincerely regret we have not tried to find the cause for this breach.

  I will be in Los Angeles on Friday. If you feel you have about fifteen minutes, I’ll drop by. I shall call your office when I arrive.

  Sincerely yours,

  Jackie Robinson

  After writing the letter, Robinson lived ten more years, O’Malley for another seventeen. Robinson grew as an unquestionable American icon, while O’Malley would live as one of the venerable family names in baseball. For the sake of scrubbing history, Peter O’Malley, who succeeded his father in running the Dodgers for nearly another two decades, would say that Walter never held Robinson in anything less than admiration. Of course, as Robinson grew beyond baseball to the top shelf of American legend, O’Malley criticizing him was about as smart as trading Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas. Regardless of the reason, one fact remained throughout the lives of the particulars involved: The reconciliation Robinson sought between himself and Walter O’Malley in the summer of 1962 never took place.

  Henry learned a valuable lesson. Beginning in the early years of the 1960s it would be Henry who often articulated the cost of Robinson’s passion, noting in interviews that Robinson was never offered a coaching, managerial, or front-office position at any level of the major-league baseball system. Nor was he asked to manage in the minor leagues or to scout. Even Branch Rickey, who had been part of two organizations, the Pirates and Cardinals, following Jackie’s retirement, did not offer him a job. Where baseball was concerned, he was the loneliest immortal in history, his isolation comparable only to Babe Ruth’s, who was discarded by the game as casually as a hot-dog wrapper.

  INSIDE THE GAME, Henry was famous and respected and comfortable, and time and success had distanced him from the way things once were, from his old place in line. Segregation had ensured that he would never feel complete in Mobile, even though it was home, and when he’d arrived in Milwaukee a decade earlier, the heart and soul and imagination of the team had begun with Mathews and Spahn. Now, he was ten years older, and so, too, were the fans who had come to the ballpark for all those years. The kids who used to line Wisconsin Avenue for the parades of the 1950s had now gone to college and built families and careers, the younger ones—now that Spahn had aged and Mathews was less dominant—having grown up with Henry as their unquestioned star. Even fans like Bud Selig, who were the same age as Henry (Henry was six months older than Selig), knew the Henry Aaron routines by heart and would be as tickled by him as when they were teenyboppers looking for a prom date: the two bats he swung in the on-deck-circle dress rehearsal, no batting gloves; the front-foot stomp and drive as the pitch approached, leading easily into that signature flash of violence; the lightning spark of his bat slashing through the strike zone. They emulated him in their slow-pitch softball games, copied his moves in the backyard with their kids while playing Wiffle ball, and recalled from their lush reservoir of memories Henry’s limp during his home-run trot. There was the way he stood impassively on deck, on one knee, watching the pitcher solemnly, awaiting his chance. These traits, the kids rattled off by heart. Even when he struck out, especially on a slider, Henry would pirouette, a futile corkscrew following a swing and miss, before walking, head down, toward the dugout, rarely giving the pitcher the satisfaction of that over-the-shoulder peek back at the mound. Fifty years later, Bud Selig still delighted in all of these unique stylistic traits, how Henry’s bat would lash so viciously across the plate, lacing home runs into the Perini pines that didn’t seem to lift more than ten feet off the ground, simple doubles in the alleys for other players. “Nobody,” Selig woul
d say, “hit more home runs168 that everyone else thought might hit the wall. With Henry, you looked up, and the ball was gone.” Henry would lope stoically around the bases, stern as a lumberjack, only to break into smile once safely in the dugout.

  The Milwaukee fans even knew how Henry held his cigarette, right arm tight to his body as he took a long drag, head always facing in the opposite direction from where he would eventually flick away the spent butt. Henry had smoked since he was a teenager shooting pool on Davis Avenue. During the 1950s, advertising campaigns often featured major-league players (how to smoke like a big leaguer), the perfect recruiting tool for a new generation of tobacco consumers. Sometimes, the fans with the best angle could look into the dugout and catch Henry stealing a drag before walking to the on-deck circle, extinguishing a butt on the bottom of his spikes. Like his idol DiMaggio, Henry adopted Camels as his cigarette of choice. It would always be unclear whether Henry succumbed to advertising, but DiMaggio once appeared in a Camel ad: “Joe DiMaggio has something to say about how different cigarettes can be.” Henry never admitted it to be true, but some Aaron fans distinctly remember Henry taking a drag once or twice near the on-deck circle. Take your pick of the magazines—Sport, Sports Illustrated, The Saturday Evening Post, and you would likely find a ballplayer selling cigarettes.

  THE CAMEL MILDNESS TEST169

  How thorough can cigarette mildness be? Here’s your answer!

  In a coast-to-coast test, hundreds of men and women smoked only Camels for 30 days, averaging 1–2 packs a day. Each well-noted throat specialist examined their throats. These doctors made 2,470 careful examinations and reported not one single case of throat irritation due to smoking Camels!

  VIC RASCHI—“You can’t beat ’em for flavor—and they’re mild!”

  BOB LEMON—“Camels are great tasting, and mild!”

  MEL PARNELL—“I like the taste and they get on fine with my throat. It’s Camels for me!”

  Seven years later, Henry got his turn, appearing in his own ad for Camels. Gracing the pages of a 1958 Life magazine advertisement, Henry wore a tweed jacket, a cigarette resting carefully in his left hand.

  HANK AARON HIT MORE HOMERS than any other ballplayer in the majors last season. He also led both leagues in total runs batted in, won the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award, and paced the Milwaukee Braves to their world championship. This real pro smokes Camel, a real cigarette. “Can’t beat ’em for flavor. And Camels sure smoke mild.”

  The fans were protective of their hero, and he made them feel safe and good about their unexpected, glorious moment in time. The only problem was that in the 1960s, for the first time, the graphlines of Henry Aaron and those of the Milwaukee Braves trended divergently. In the beautiful 1950s, with the Braves challenging for pennants, Milwaukeeans raced through the turnstiles as if it were ten-cent beer night, and Henry was just another one of the players, an undeniably outsized talent to be sure, but without the clubhouse influence (and responsibilities) of Mathews and Spahn, Burdette and Logan and Bruton.

  Within a decade, though, Henry had run right past them all. Some of the distance from his early years certainly benefited him, for he was eager to escape so much of the old life, starting with the tiresome act of having to accept the daily humiliation of being depicted as a simpleton. He had actively begun to reinvent himself, augmenting his awesome statistics with political awareness and social clout, while all the while growing more resolute in his belief that his baseball talent meant nothing if it did not translate to improving the general condition of the world around him. He was a man rounding into substantive form. Some of the changes were dramatic. He had made the conscious decision to be more outspoken on racial issues, striking up a friendship with the football player Jim Brown, then considered the most politically minded black athlete in the country. He had chosen to be more active in politics. These characteristics were easily detectable to his teammates (if not exactly understood), while others were deemed only superficial. One such change was in his dress. In the 1950s, Henry dressed like an insurance salesman—short-sleeve oxford-cloth shirt, dark, thin tie with a half Windsor knot, dark pants. Into the 1960s, as he began to make more money and grew more into himself, compared to his first years in the league, Henry looked more like a kaleidoscope: plaid and checkered suits, sunglasses, Afro, and, that great staple of the 1960s, turtlenecks with a sport coat. Both poles, those of politics and fashion, however, represented a singular truth: Henry had left one stage of his career and entered another.

  And as he grew, the Braves just could not keep up. For 130 games in 1960, Milwaukee fought emerging Pittsburgh for the pennant, only to finish second, seven games back. The key sequence between the two clubs occurred in late July, with the young Pirates—led by the hard-nosed shortstop Dick Groat (who would win the league MVP that year) and featuring the passionate, determined right fielder Clemente—holding a half-game lead. Two years earlier, when the Braves won their second pennant, the Pirates had challenged but wilted at roughly the same point in the season, late July, when pitching arms die and the bats feel more like lead than lightning. And here it was, poised to happen all over again, the Braves, veterans at breaking pretenders as the summer intensified, ready to catapult the Pirates back into the land of the almost ready. On the night of July 26 in San Francisco, Sam Jones blinded the Braves lineup for six innings. He would strike out eleven, including a furious Henry, to lead off the seventh. But Milwaukee pushed home a run in the seventh, and then Henry singled and scored off Jones for payback, as well as making an eighth-inning insurance run, in a 3–1 win. The lead was still wafer-thin. Spahn and Burdette were next in the rotation, while Pittsburgh was in St. Louis to face a Cardinals team that was just beginning to show threats of being dangerous. The pressure was on the Pirates.

  Then, over the next fifteen games, the Braves lost eleven times, five to the Dodgers, dropping them down to fourth place, while Pittsburgh, green to the fight, embraced the pressure and won eleven games during the same stretch. The lead was seven, and the pennant was gone. The following year, it was an inspired Cincinnati team that clubbed its way to the pennant, while Milwaukee dropped to fourth, ten games back. Nineteen sixty-two belonged to the West Coast, the renewal of the old New York rivalry to a new time zone. The Dodgers and Giants won 205 games between them, and played an epic three-game play-off that ended with Mays once again in the World Series. The Braves didn’t overcome the .500 mark for good until July 25 and finished as poorly as they’d ever had since arriving in Milwaukee, fifteen and a half games out, in fifth place.

  The only thing that gave 1962 special heft was that Henry’s little brother Tommie made the big-league club out of spring training. For the first time in organized ball, Henry and Tommie would be teammates. Five and a half years younger, Tommie Aaron was a big kid. He stood six-one, and weighed 190 pounds, fifteen pounds more than Henry had at eighteen. He had played baseball as religiously as Henry, but also football at Central High.

  The Braves had signed Tommie back in 1958, but, unlike Henry, Tommie Aaron was not a can’t-miss prospect. Henry played a total of just 224 games in the minor leagues, and hit .353 in those games. Tommie followed immediately in Henry’s footsteps—two seasons in Eau Claire, Class C ball, then a full season at Class B Cedar Rapids of the Three-I league in 1960, with cups of coffee in Jacksonville and Louisville. In 1961, he played 138 games in Double-A Austin of the Texas League, but the game did not seem to come easily to him. Henry believed he indirectly affected Tommie’s progress, for the Aaron name produced expectations that the little brother would possess the same magic of his older, famous sibling.

  For Tommie, just reaching the majors, to be on the roster, he would need to study and learn the game, find coaches interested in his success, and work at it. In the minor leagues, he was a respectable hitter—.274 his first year in Eau Claire, .299 both at Cedar Rapids and Austin—and had power. In the majors, hitting—which was the difference between staying with the club and bei
ng sent back down—would be the weakest part of Tommie’s game.

  Yet having Tommie in the big leagues changed the dynamic of the Braves clubhouse, and the other Braves asked themselves that old saw: How could two people who grew up in the very same circumstances, in the same house, with the same parents, be so different?

  While Henry kept his distance, Tommie was the gregarious one, navigating each clique that existed in the room, soaking up the clubhouse energy, recycling it back. Henry loved baseball, but Tommie seemed to love it and enjoy it simultaneously. Joe Torre used to marvel at just how fast after games Henry would dress and leave the clubhouse, but Tommie was the opposite. He talked the game, chatted up the coaches and the managers and the clubhouse kids. It was part of Tommie’s personality that had been evident even back in Mobile.

  “He was such a good, open man,”170 Joe Torre said. “A really good man with a really good baseball mind. Tommie was always quick with a laugh, and he made it easier for Hank.”

  For a time, Tommie lived with Barbara and Henry. He hadn’t been on the big-league club long before he met a girl, whom he would marry. Carolyn Davenport had been a friend of Nancy Maye, wife of Braves reserve outfielder Lee Maye. Carolyn had grown up in Little Rock, but the family moved to Milwaukee when she was fifteen. Her father, Willis Davenport, was a steelworker and relocated the family after finding work at Inland Steel.

  She had little interest in baseball, but she and Tommie connected quickly. “It was almost from the time we met,”171 she recalled. “I met Tommie at the ballpark and little did I know. I didn’t know the rules, but it became normal fast. I just got used to it.”

  Having Tommie on the club brought Henry even closer to the city and the club, but one by one, the old cast who’d whooped it up at Ray Jackson’s faded. Pafko was finished after the 1959 collapse to the Dodgers, remaining with the team as a coach. Johnny Logan lost his starting job to Roy McMillan, and he was traded to the Pirates for Gino Cimoli in June 1961. He played two more uninspired years for Pittsburgh and retired to his house on the South Side. Joe Adcock’s last big year came in 1961; then the bottom fell out and he was done in Milwaukee the following year. Bruton was never again the same player defensively after the collision with Mantilla in 1957. He led the team in hits in 1960, then was sent off to Detroit that winter for Neil Chrisley and Frank Bolling, the Mobile boy against whom Henry played as a kid in the sandlots but never as a teammate, since whites and blacks were prohibited from competing in Alabama. Mantilla, who never could convince management he was good enough to be an everyday player, was gone in 1962, sent to the hapless expansion Mets, where he played for Casey Stengel. Frank Torre got hurt in 1960, played just twenty-one games, and was released, replaced in 1961 by his talented little brother Joe. There were two whippersnappers, Tony Cloninger and Joe Torre, who were destined for long, productive careers, and another, the talented Ricardo Adolfo Jacobo Carty, whom Henry would take under his wing, but many of the new faces wouldn’t last. Chuck Dressen, Jackie Robinson’s favorite manager, took over the club in 1960; he talked tough but lasted just two seasons. Dressen never blended with this club;172 he lost Spahn and Burdette almost immediately, reduced to calling the two “the Katzenjammer Kids.” Birdie Tebbetts, the general manager, came down from the front office and guided the team right into fifth place. Bobby Bragan, the southerner who once preferred to be traded than to have Jackie Robinson as a teammate, took over, and the results didn’t get any better.