The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  Bob Hope, an Atlanta teenager and rabid baseball fan who called the Braves for an internship a year before the team had finalized the move, knew how ingrained the white attitudes regarding black hygiene truly were. “When I was in high school,184 our football coach told us that the sweat of a black kid would burn you,” Hope recalled. “They told us black kids wouldn’t just tackle you but in the piles they would bite you and you’d get diseases. That was one of the reasons why we never played against black teams.”

  Whether or not whites truly believed that blacks carried diseases was secondary to the true purpose these myths served, which was to maintain the system of legal segregation.

  Barbara had always been dubious about the Milwaukee club’s commitment to racial equality. For the past thirteen years, when she and Henry had traveled to Bradenton for spring training, the team had offered no protections against discrimination, nor even made much effort for their basic comforts, despite the annual protestations of Henry, Billy Bruton, and Wes Covington. The lives of the wives of black players was one of the greatly underreported and underappreciated experiences, and moving back to the South meant relearning the rules, enduring the slights, large and small (the small were oftentimes the worst because they occurred so frequently). Women from Rachel Robinson to Barbara Aaron endured harsh treatment when sitting in the stands during games or when taking public transportation in the South. Some of the fan letters that protested the move echoed Barbara’s personal concerns, ones that she felt had not been adequately addressed by the club.

  Editor of The Sporting News:

  … Milwaukee … supported their Braves at an average of about 1,600,000 per season. The fans have lavished gifts upon the players and been good to those … previously … subject to racial discrimination.

  The fans … went without televised games….

  In return, the new owners … have decided to pull up stakes and head elsewhere….

  John Wagner

  Glendale, Calif.

  Bill Bartholomay would say in later years that he understood Henry’s hesitancy about the region’s racial climate but that he was convinced of the city leadership’s commitment to break with its smothering history. Once, on a scouting trip of the area, he was immediately struck by the vast difference in racial attitudes once he arrived in Atlanta. The farther away he drove from Atlanta’s center, Bartholomay found, the harsher and more unwelcoming he found the response to any level of integration. It was like entering another world, Bartholomay thought, with sharp racial divisions being only part of the difference. Even in early 1960s Georgia, remnants of the sharecropper system existed in pockets of the state’s outlying areas. The complete lack of infrastructure—indoor plumbing, electricity, telephone service—underscored the level of poverty that still remained, unaffected by the postwar economic boom or advances in technology.

  The contrast left him with a potentially devastating problem: The Braves were being positioned as a regional team, but outside of Atlanta, interracial competition was not a concept being met with great enthusiasm in the surrounding areas. Should the Braves be unable to penetrate the full reach of their territory, the potential advantages of the South would be immediately thwarted, and Bartholomay was quite possibly staring disaster in the face. “There was a real hostile feel185 when you went to some of the outlying areas,” Bartholomay recalled. “But I had to believe that while those areas might not be too accepting of an interracial team where the biggest star, alongside with Mathews, was African-American, the city itself was going to accept the team.”

  If Bartholomay viewed Atlanta as a prime opportunity to make his mark in baseball, many of the region’s leaders saw the arrival of the Braves as key to their strategy to transform the image of the city, and by extension, the South. Geographically, Atlanta was close to perfect, and all of the reasons why it had been leveled during the Civil War were precisely the reasons why it carried such potential. Central to its value was Hartsfield Airport, named for Bill Hartsfield, the pragmatic political legend who held office for twenty-three years. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was massive airport construction that separated Atlanta from other southern cities such as Montgomery or Memphis. The massive expansion of the airport guaranteed Atlanta would be the central hub for southern commerce. Hartsfield was so ubiquitous, a running local joke was that when a person died, before going to heaven or hell, they had to first change planes at Hartsfield.

  Atlanta boasted the infrastructure, the fortuitous geography, and the population to be an economic powerhouse, but its racial undercurrent prevented it from becoming a world-class city. It had been only ten years since the state flag had been redesigned to contain a confederate flag (1956), a chilling reminder for blacks of the social order and their collective status within that structure. Atlanta had prided itself on its accommodation and moderation. But between 1960 and 1962, the Atlanta student movement staged demonstrations to integrate downtown lunch counters, not dissimilar to those protests held in Greensboro and Nashville and other southern cities, disappointing proof that the old guard—both the entrenched white political leadership and the longtime black clergymen—had moved too slowly and ineffectually for what was becoming a new, powerful movement.

  During years of secret negotiation, Ivan Allen, Jr.—himself a firm segregationist less than a decade earlier—held a private optimism that by 1965 the worst was over for Atlanta. He would say often that he staked his reputation and that of the city on his commitment to undoing the rigid racial customs of Atlanta, a claim that was not exactly hyperbolic. In just the previous four years, the city had undergone tremendous turmoil. The public schools had been ordered integrated. Led by Martin Luther King, Jr., a new generation of black students impatient with the speed of progress demonstrated for the integration of downtown lunch counters, as well as other public facilities: movie theaters, auditoriums, swimming pools, and restaurants. In 1961, Allen was elected to his first term as mayor by defeating the segregationist Lester Maddox. It was an election that shifted the balance, but only uneasily. Allen defeated Maddox in a runoff by winning 98 percent of the black vote, but less than half of whites voted for him.

  Allen represented the progressive political voice Atlanta required, but the power behind the change was Bob Woodruff. “The leaders of the city didn’t want186 to go the way of Birmingham, Little Rock, and other southern cities, and all of this was a prelude to major sports,” recalled Andrew Young, a former congressman and Atlanta’s mayor from 1982 to 1990. “They decided that Atlanta was going to integrate from the top down. Whereas most southern cities were trying to integrate schools and come up, Atlanta made the decision—which was different from any other city—that the business community was going to lead desegregation. And so they put two black businessmen on the chamber of commerce, Herman Russell and Jesse Hill. Herman was a major contractor and Jesse Hill was VP of Atlanta Life Insurance Company. And so you had a cohesiveness with the black business community. You also had the Atlanta University Center, with Benjamin Mays and Vivian Henderson; those two were the main ones, but from that point on the business community did very little without consulting the black community.”

  Having professional sports in Atlanta, Allen believed, would bring the world to the city, would legitimize it. The city could not afford to be an embarrassment in front of the nation. Allen did not merely accept the Braves; he cultivated them. The fact that the Braves had chosen Atlanta was as important to the city as it was to the team. Allen wanted football next, and he began to negotiate with the NFL for an expansion team, which would become the Falcons.

  “There was general agreement that one of the ways to make Atlanta a big-league city was to bring baseball and football; it was a concurrent proposal,” Young recalled. “When it looked like they could get the Braves, the mayor, Ivan Allen, and Mills B. Lane, who was the president of C&S Bank, which became Nations Bank, which is now Bank of America, they almost bragged that they built a stadium with money they didn’t have, o
n land they didn’t own, for a team they didn’t have yet. And if they tried to do that today, they’d all be in jail.”

  HENRY HAD JUST missed out on the batting title in 1965, and in the spring of 1966 he said he wanted it back. He hadn’t won it since 1959, and he was suddenly being surpassed in defensive reputation by a new star, the blossoming Clemente from Pittsburgh. For years, Henry would be compared to the electric Mays, a comparison under which his playing style suffered. The same would be true of Clemente, the first Latin American superstar, but he was something more, furiously prideful, politically aware. Both Henry and Clemente possessed the political passion of Robinson, but the difference was physical. Unlike Henry, Clemente seemed to translate his fire into his physical movements. Clemente played not simply for himself but also for his people, and, like Robinson, he conveyed a message with his body. The connection of racial and ethnic pride surged through each step, each swing. Each outfield throw seemed a political statement, reminding the baseball world that he and his people had been mistreated and underestimated and he was here to address that injustice.

  Clemente was a rising superstar. In addition to his consecutive batting titles, he excelled defensively. But right field was Henry’s turf. In 1957, 1958, and 1959, Henry was the king of his position, both offensively and defensively. He had been awarded the Gold Glove each year, had already won an MVP, and was an all-star.

  Then, like a supernova, Clemente appeared. He won his first Gold Glove in 1960, and then another, and another. By 1966, Clemente had won six straight. Henry was aware of Willie, but Willie played center. Clemente was different. He and Clemente both played right field, and the emergence of Clemente underscored both the immense level of talent in the National League and how quickly Henry could get lost as his team grew less important in the standings. Henry found himself at another disadvantage: In the television age, it was much easier to be taken by players like Clemente, a man who played with such yearning and, like Henry, smoldered at the thought of having his talent slighted.

  AARON SAYS HE COULD HAVE

  WON187 NL BATTING TITLE

  LAKELAND, FLA. (UPI)—“I had a number of opportunities to win batting titles and I purposely let them pass,” says Aaron. “… we were living and dying on home runs. So, I more or less forgot about my average and concentrated on hitting the ball hard. I believe I could have hit more than Clemente had I concentrated on it.”

  That Henry purposely began to eschew batting average for home runs was a telling admission. There was the moment back in 1954 when Henry sat in the hospital in Cincinnati, having snapped his ankle and ended his season. Sitting under crisp hospital sheets, surrounded by flowers and fan mail, Henry ignored the throb in his leg and the antiseptic hospital smell for a moment and allowed himself an inner smile.

  “I had read so much about Musial,188 Williams, and Robinson,” he said. “I put those guys on a pedestal. They were something special, Jackie above the rest because he was the only Negro player at the time. I really thought that they put their pants on different, rather than one leg at a time.”

  Then Henry let free a little secret. “Yeah, that’s when I thought about eventually getting 3,000 hits. That’s always been my goal.”

  It always had been. That is, until teammates began to notice a few changes in the way Henry went to bat. Joe Torre saw the subtleties, the way Henry would take certain pitches on the outer half of the plate, the ones he used to tattoo into the right-center gap. These were the pitches Mays used to complain about so often, the ones that Henry would wait on just that fraction of a second longer so he could find the gap and watch Mays run to the fence. Now Henry would let these pass, hoping for a pitch just a little more inside that he could jump on early, with the intention of pulling it down the line and out.

  The swing Torre once marveled at was the swing that just might produce four thousand hits, and what he now witnessed was something different, something deadly but far less efficient. Henry had developed a home-run stroke, not the old swing of a prodigy, who was just so talented that the ball was going to leave the park about thirty times a year regardless, but a swing designed with one purpose in mind: to power the ball over the fence.

  Musial had always been the target. More accurately, it was his National League hit record of 3,630 that Henry wanted. That was the only record he had ever craved; that was the true mark of an offensive baseball player—the number of times you came to bat and got a hit. But especially after Mantle and Maris put on a home-run show in 1961, Maris finally overtaking Ruth, the times were changing. Power was slowly growing more important to the people who ran and watched and reported on baseball—and Henry would change with them.

  THE FIRST MAJOR-LEAGUE game in the 121-year history of the city—the Atlanta Braves versus the Pittsburgh Pirates—took place on April 12, 1966. The contest lasted thirteen innings, decided by a two-run homer by Willie Stargell. The Braves went on to lose four of their first five games. And then there was Henry, who hit home run number four hundred off Bo Belinsky in Philadelphia, only to follow this with a tie-breaking hit the night of April 29, when the Braves and Astros wrestled into the night, Houston tying the game at 3–3 in the top of the ninth.

  Caroll Sembera, the new Houston pitcher, entered and retired Felipe Alou and Gary Geiger easily. That brought up Henry, who took two strikes and lashed a low line drive over the fence to end it. The Braves were just a couple of games out of first place.

  And on June 3, at Atlanta Stadium, Henry hit another dramatic home run, this one off Bob Gibson in the bottom of the ninth. But it didn’t do any good, because the Braves still lost the game, 3–2. Their record was 20–30 and the club wouldn’t reach the .500 mark until September 6. Atlanta finished 85–77, and the pattern that began in Milwaukee continued. Henry was brilliant—44 homers, 127 runs batted in to lead the league—on a team that finished thirteen and a half games behind the Dodgers.

  Henry bought a handsome brick rambler that somewhat resembled the house in Mequon. It was set on two sprawling, shady acres and the address was 519 Lynhurst Drive. Almost immediately, Henry was invited to a series of informal meetings at the Braves offices, welcoming him to Atlanta. He had integrated the Sally League and now he would be the first black baseball player to be the signature attraction on a team in the Deep South. Bartholomay and members of the Atlanta business community were at one meeting. At another, he met a young progressive politician named Jimmy Carter, who was running for governor against the eccentric segregationist Lester Maddox. Carter told him then and would tell him in later years, when the two men became friends, that it was not merely the arrival of the Braves that legitimized the South but the Braves specifically being led by Henry Aaron. At another meeting was a group that would not forget Henry: Martin Luther King, Sr., Martin Luther King, Jr., and Andrew Young.

  “Martin was a big baseball fan,”189 Young recalled, adding that he remembered Henry being somewhat embarrassed that he wasn’t more publicly visible in the front lines of the civil rights movement. “We told him not to worry. When you talked to Henry Aaron, you knew how he felt about civil rights. We told him just to keep hitting that ball. That was his job.”

  In early 1966, the city held a parade to welcome the Braves. Against the backdrop of triumph, the story seems apocryphal, but Andy Young recalled the moment clearly.

  “I can remember standing out at the parade. The parade came down what is now Spring Street and I was standing in front of the American hotel, which is now a Marriott Suites. It was an old hotel and I was standing behind a bunch of rednecks and I kind of moved in amongst them to see what was happening,” Andy Young recalled. “Each of the major players was sitting on the back of a convertible, and when Hank came down, one guy said, ‘Now, if we’re gonna be a big-league city, that fella’s gonna have to be able to live anywhere he wants to live in this town.’ And I said, ‘Oh, shit … They said that? This must mean something.’”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WILLIE

  AS YOU EN
TERED the Braves clubhouse, an oversized refrigerator loomed to the right, a frosty glass door revealing shelves of Fanta grape and orange soda distributed by the Coca-Cola Bottling Company. Next to the fridge sat the cigarette machine and a tub filled with ice and Piels beer. A side table housed assorted sundries—sunflower seeds, tobacco, bubble gum—and a jar, about ten inches high, brimming with amphetamines.