The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  It was a good story, and maybe even parts of it were true, but little did anyone know the fix Atlanta was already in. No one admitted it, of course, but piece by piece, little by little, the forgotten scraps of details formed the entire, cynical canvas. Bartholomay may have thought about Sherman and Reconstruction and second chances a century later, but before he had even purchased the club, Perini already had his eye on moving the club to Atlanta. During the 1962 All-Star Game in Washington, McHale met with Furman Bisher, the sports editor and influential columnist (and noted Henry Aaron nemesis) of the Atlanta Journal, requesting a private meeting with Atlanta’s mayor, Ivan Allen, Jr.

  “Mr. Perini is planning to move the Braves,”177 McHale told Bisher. “I’m certain you’ll keep this in confidence at this time, but he’s very interested in Atlanta and wants me to look into it. I want you to take me to see the mayor, but I want to keep my visit between us.” Bisher maintained his silence for two years, and though Perini sold the team to Bartholomay and never met with Allen, events took precisely the course Perini had envisioned. Perini most likely disclosed his Atlanta plan to Bartholomay during the negotiations, and the Atlanta back channel explained why Perini did not entertain local offers to purchase the club. The secret deal with Atlanta also explained why Perini sold the club without announcing it was for sale, for perhaps a different ownership group would actually have been committed to keeping the team in Milwaukee. Moreover, the combination of forces answered the question originally posed by Doyne: The commissioner did not step in on behalf of Milwaukee because the wheels toward Atlanta were already in motion, four years before the team ever played its first game there.

  The desire to move the Braves to Atlanta all along finally explained the sad case of Harry Sampson, the Milwaukee businessman who had offered to buy the Braves three months before Perini sold to Bartholomay. Instead, with an offer in hand he did not intend to entertain, Perini met with Bartholomay and another member of the ownership group, thirty-four-year-old Tom Reynolds, secretly in Toronto, and they closed the deal in just over a week.

  MILWAUKEE SYNDICATE OFFER178

  REJECTED TWO DAYS EARLIER

  MILWAUKEE, WIS.—Harold Sampson, a Milwaukee businessman, revealed after the sale of the Braves was announced November 16, that a group he had headed had tried unsuccessfully to buy the club.

  “We had a firm offer on file with Lou Perini since September,” Sampson said. “Our offer was kept confidential at his request. He said he did not want it generally known that the Braves were for sale. He formally declined our offer two days before he announced the sale.”

  Sampson said that his group was made up entirely of Milwaukeeans.

  In 1964—perhaps as a last attempt to prove to the baseball cartel that economics did not make baseball untenable in Milwaukee—attendance rose by 200,000, even as the team sank to fifth place. Eugene Grobschmidt, the chairman of the governing board of County Stadium, not only accused the team of sandbagging the city but also claimed the Braves had tried to lose their remaining games to make their departure appear less egregious. In his final year with the club, even Spahn, the greatest pitcher in the history of the franchise, said that Bragan wasn’t trying to win.

  In Atlanta, Mayor Allen oversaw construction of an eighteen-million-dollar stadium that awaited a baseball team, soon to be named Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium. Bartholomay and the Braves foresaw arrival in Atlanta in 1965—that is, until Grobschmidt led a court battle that kept the Braves from leaving town until 1966.

  The bitterness broke the link with the past. In a bygone era, young sportsmen had bought baseball teams to fulfill their own egos, to compensate for their own limited athletic abilities. Now, they were speculators, real estate prospectors whose job it was not only to build a pennant winner but to sense when a market had reached the point of diminishing returns, had outlived its usefulness. Milwaukee would be the city of firsts, the first in the modern era to provide a rebirth for a team that had languished near extinction in two-team Boston. And now it was the first in the modern era to suffer no obvious economic trauma and still somehow outlive its usefulness. As one embittered Milwaukee fan wrote of Milwaukee in The Sporting News when the Atlanta deal became final, “The cow had been milked.”179

  The players did not suffer the wrath of the city. Milwaukee was loyal to Spahn, Mathews, Adcock, Logan, and, naturally, to Henry. The players would live forever as a symbol of youth and vitality, of a nostalgic time when everything seemed good, when a person’s word actually meant something. In Henry’s case, the ignoble actions of the front office only seemed to burnish his standing, and the last of the Milwaukee years created something of a pact between Henry and Milwaukee. He would promise the people of the city that he would never forget them, never refuse their hospitality, and, in turn, they would always consider him one of their own.

  Four days before Thanksgiving, 1965, the Mary Church Terrell Club held Henry Aaron night, his first testimonial dinner. Four hundred guests crowded the Sheraton-Schroeder Hotel. Henry, wearing a dark suit, along with a skinny tie and white pocket square, was presented by Billy Bruton, who had since retired and was working in public relations for Chrysler. Henry received a silver bowl, Barbara an orchid. The crowd gave him a standing ovation, and he would later admit to being embarrassed by their warmth. It was not lost on him or the crowd that no one from Braves management was in attendance. No one from the Braves showed up, largely, because they had all since moved to Atlanta. Assistant general manager Jim Fanning sent a telegram.

  For the better part of three years, while Perini had been playing cloak-and-dagger with Furman Bisher and as Bartholomay jousted with Milwaukee politicians, Henry had something else in the back of his mind: the prospect of returning to the South. For the team’s black players, especially the ones who had been raised in the Deep South, the prospect of returning—the prospect of reliving indignities and humiliations—was not met with enthusiasm. Lee Maye, a young black outfielder who grew up in Tuscaloosa, began voicing his trepidation about Atlanta to Henry, who went a step further. While Bartholomay and Grobschmidt traded epithets and legal briefs, Henry initially said he would not go.

  MOVE TO GEORGIA PEACHY? NOT TO AARON180

  The Milwaukee Braves ask the National League this afternoon for permission to move to Atlanta. There are at least two Braves players, Lee Maye and Hank Aaron, who have their fingers crossed that the league says “no,” although they know that is wishful thinking.

  Maye and Aaron, Negro outfielders, yesterday expressed fear of racial discrimination if the club moves to Atlanta, although both added they would go because it’s their “job.”

  AARON AND MAYE DISTURBED181 BY

  DECISION TO GO TO ATLANTA

  MILWAUKEE, WIS.—The Braves’ decision to move to Atlanta was accepted with regret by two of their Negro players, outfielders Henry Aaron and Lee Maye. Both said they disliked the idea and would not move their families to the Georgia city. Both have children in integrated schools in the Milwaukee area.

  Aaron even planned to take a trip to Atlanta to investigate conditions for Negroes there.

  State Sen. Leroy R. Johnson, the only Negro legislator in the South, said he was writing Aaron to assure the Braves’ slugger that he need have no fears about racial problems in Atlanta.

  HENRY HAD NEVER considered himself as important a historical figure as Jackie Robinson, and yet by twice integrating the South—first in the Sally League and later as the first black star on the first major-league team in the South (during the apex of the civil rights movement, no less)—his road in many ways was no less lonely, and in other ways far more difficult.

  He would receive credit for handling the inequities of his life with dignity, and yet he was rarely afforded the dignity of being recognized as having played a significant role in eradicating important barriers to the movement. Robinson had confronted the first, impenetrable obstacle of being allowed to compete at the major-league level; his was the first success, which made all
other successes—including Henry’s—possible, and Henry was never so presumptuous as to believe anything to the contrary. But after Robinson, the integration of other levels of the sport, in regions where breaking the social customs proved far more difficult (with considerably less interest), was not a story that received much coverage.

  Rather, the conventional thinking concerning minor-league integration held that sooner or later, black prospects would have to play with their white teammates. Either that or the clubs would be forced to relocate their minor-league teams, moving away from the South, at considerable expense and difficulty. Thus, the breakthrough of playing baseball in the segregated South would largely be seen as an inevitablility, no real breakthrough at all.

  Henry had not been recognized for his groundbreaking achievement, and now he was being told to return to the South once more. Playing in Atlanta meant confronting the South all over again, with its contradictions and its conditions. It meant being reduced once more to a person with no rights and no dignity. That had been hard enough when he was a kid, when he knew no better. But in 1966, Henry was thirty-two years old, was earning $70,000 per season, and was on a clear Hall of Fame path. He was famous and accomplished and angered that in the South all he had produced could be taken away by a teenage store clerk or an average housewife, just because they were white and he was not.

  “I have lived in the South182 and I don’t want to live there again,” Henry told a reporter in 1964. “This is my home. I’ve lived here since I was a kid 19 years old. We can go anywhere in Milwaukee. I don’t know what would happen in Atlanta.”

  In Milwaukee, Henry fought hard for his comfort. During one offseason, he took a job as a spokesman for the Miller Brewing Company. In another, he and Bruton formed a small real estate company, the Aaron-Bruton Investment Co. When the team struggled as Perini and Bartholomay began to distance the Braves from the city, Henry volunteered to sell season-ticket packages to fans (but even the great Henry Aaron had little success once it became clear that Bartholomay had other plans for the franchise).

  He had become a part of Milwaukee. By the early 1960s, just as Perini sold out to Bartholomay, Henry’s friendship with Bud Selig had grown stronger. Selig was already something of a name in Milwaukee, thanks to the family car dealerships and the powerful connections he had made at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His college roommate was Herbert Kohl, who would go on to a long career in Wisconsin and national politics. Both Kohl and Selig maintained a strong interest in sports and both would one day own professional sports clubs. One of Selig’s fraternity brothers, Lewis Wolff, built a fortune as a real estate developer. Selig, with his folksy demeanor, would often be easily underestimated. He was not the loudest or the most opinionated person, and yet he possessed a deceptively keen ability to gain the ear and confidence of a majority of people in any given situation. For years, Selig would cultivate a persona as someone who just happened to fall into leadership positions, and it was that persona that provided a certain cover for his own desires and vision. Bud Selig was driven and ambitious, with an understated, but no less fierce, desire to lead.

  Selig also knew how to navigate in various arenas. One that held his attention above the rest was baseball, and he had made his first inroads modestly, befriending players by doling out favors. When he was younger, his father sent him to the annual business school in Dearborn, Michigan, sponsored by Ford, where Selig learned the car business. While there, he met a fellow student who happened to be friends with Frank Torre. Soon, Torre and Selig became friendly, and after that first introduction, Bud Selig became the man players went to when they needed cars during the season. When Torre’s younger brother Joe was called up to the big club, it was Bud Selig who sold Joe Torre his first car, a 1961 Thunderbird.

  Selig’s relationship with Henry flourished at City Stadium, home of the Green Bay Packers. Selig was a die-hard season-ticket holder, a devoted worshiper of all things Lombardi. Henry, meanwhile, was committed to the Cleveland Browns, and the two men built a friendship around football, around Ray Nitschke and Jim Brown. Selig did not remember who initiated the first contact between the two, but he recalled Henry, predictably in those times, as quiet, somewhat unsure of himself, but with a dark, sarcastic sense of humor.

  He would never call Henry Hank, and it was a subtlety that accelerated Bud Selig into Henry’s inner circle.

  “I don’t think it was on purpose. It definitely wasn’t calculated, but it just seemed natural to me,” Selig said. “Henry Aaron. That was his name. I don’t think I ever called him ‘Hank.’”

  Bud Selig was eating his breakfast when he read Bob Broeg’s piece in The Sporting News in 1964, which confirmed what he and other Milwaukeeans had refused to believe: The Braves were leaving. The Milwaukee press was quick to cover the story, albeit slower to analyze the implications. Ollie Kuechle, the sports editor and columnist of the Journal, had maintained that the Braves were not leaving. The mayor of Milwaukee may have been a Braves shareholder, but the king of Wisconsin, Lombardi, was one, as well, and both were in the dark. “Yes, Vince was a shareholder. He was on the Braves board,” Selig recalled. “And even he couldn’t save them.”

  Selig remembered finishing the story and thinking it was the “worst day of my life.” He then began to canvass Milwaukee businessmen to mount a counterattack. If the Braves were going to be stolen, he would form a committee that would attract another team to Milwaukee, taking the first steps toward becoming the man who was synonymous with baseball in Milwaukee. From watching his team be yanked away, Selig would learn the rules of power and would vow to return big-league baseball to the city. While Doyne had once denounced “piracy,” Selig was naked in his coveting of vulnerable teams. Once the Braves departed, Selig staged exhibitions for the Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians, with the hope of attracting them to Milwaukee.

  Over thirteen years in Milwaukee, only the Dodgers outdrew the Braves on average, and that franchise played in the megalopolises of New York City and Los Angeles. As far as Bud Selig was concerned, his city had done everything right and had still ended up with a handful of sawdust. Selig was thirty-one when the Braves played their final season in Milwaukee, and he decided he would not stand on the fringes of power again. For the better part of the next half century, Bud Selig would, in his own seemingly unassuming way, become one of the game’s most astute and formidable power brokers. In later years, when baseball made both men extremely wealthy, Selig recalled that Bartholomay would often joke with him, telling him that the wrenching years of the mid-1960s were the best thing that could have happened to Selig. Without his having moved the Braves to Atlanta, Selig remembered Bartholomay telling him, Bud Selig never would have become what he would ultimately be: the most powerful man in baseball.

  BARBARA AARON DID not want to believe the Braves were considering Atlanta. When the rumors first surfaced that relocation was a real possibility and that she, Henry, and the children would be moving back to the South, she felt her heart sink with profound disappointment. The house in Mequon was a handsome ranch, with a proud brick facade and a long, rambling roof that featured two cathedral peaks. The sprawling, manicured front lawn sloped sharply downward toward the street. The front of the house looked majestic in winter, a dense sheet of snow enveloping the lawn, leaving an unbroken swath of white, in contrast to the black pavement of the long driveway.

  Living in Wisconsin had provided Barbara with a certain level of comfort and dignity, and she did not believe this would be true in Georgia. She was the wife of the famous Henry Aaron, and such ballplayers were always afforded special dispensation, but she also knew the codes of the South were considerably less respectful of Henry’s fame. The more notorious places, the rural areas and cities such as Birmingham, which collectively seemed to revel in their reputations, even sought out prominent blacks with the intention of humiliating them, to remind them that, despite their education or accomplishment, they were still at the core niggers, permanently beneath the
lowest white man of any social class.

  Atlanta’s historical personality was one of moderation and compromise, but the end result in the early 1960s was generally the same: Whites on top, blacks on the bottom. The family now risked having everything they’d earned in Milwaukee taken away by the denigrating ways of life in the South. Education was a primary concern for Barbara. Hankie, Gaile, Lary, and Dorinda were all enrolled in public school, and the thought of them having to leave an integrated school in Wisconsin to attend a segregated school in Atlanta particularly galled her. As a family, the Aarons had come too far to go back. Despite the fact that the Aarons were the only black family in Mequon (and the reality that, in ostensibly tolerant Milwaukee, only Henry’s outsized fame allowed them to live there), Barbara nevertheless had made friends and believed that she was part of a growing community.

  She had been raised in Jacksonville, nearly as close to Atlanta as Henry had been in Mobile. She had heard the predictions about what Atlanta was going to be like, despite the apparent protections that had been promised the players and the team. During Bartholomay’s and McHale’s secret meetings with the Atlanta people, particularly Mayor Allen and the ubiquitous Bob Woodruff, the head of Coca-Cola and the most powerful businessman in the region, the Braves had been promised that seating in the Atlanta stadium would not be segregated. All tickets would be available to all fans. Black fans could sit in whatever seats they could afford, and Allen had promised there would be no nefarious pricing schemes that would promote de facto segregation. Allen told Bartholomay that the rest rooms, concessions, and all public facilities would be integrated.

  But what if those were just words, bargaining chips necessary to get an important deal done, to keep the best player on the club from making a fuss? The Braves weren’t going to refuse a multimillion-dollar move to Atlanta just because of the racial concerns the black people or players had. Had Henry’s objections been a consideration, the team wouldn’t have considered the South in the first place. Even if the Braves kept their promises, Barbara thought, she would have to live in the world beyond the ballpark. She’d have to take the kids to school and shop and deal with an environment she regarded with dread. What most whites did not understand, and indeed it was virtually impossible to do so, was the level of humiliation blacks in the South were forced to endure. In later years, when the confrontations of the civil rights movement would be documented in film and other media, the standard humiliations of separate drinking facilities and rest rooms would become so clichéd (and completely uncomprehensible to a new generation of black and white Americans), their mention would lose virtually all power to shock. It was not just the big humiliations that had to be borne, but the constant, daily, nagging small ones, as well. The depth of the racial prejudice, of just what whites truly believed about blacks, however, could not be underestimated. About a year before Bartholomay and Allen first began secretly negotiating the move, the relationship between Atlanta’s black community and Rich’s, the largest department store in the Southeast, had begun to deteriorate. For years, blacks were angered by the treatment they encountered at Rich’s while spending their hard-earned money. “Not only were blacks forbidden to sit183 at the Rich’s lunch counter,” wrote Gary Pomerantz in Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, his groundbreaking book about the white Allens and black Dobbses, the political families who transformed modern Atlanta, “they also could not try on clothes before buying them. The Atlanta department store’s rule of thumb was that white customers would not buy clothes if they knew blacks once had sampled them.” When the Braves move was finalized, it was Rich’s (“Atlanta born … Atlanta owned … Atlanta managed”) which became one of the Braves first advertisers.