Away from the ballpark, Henry always picked up the tab, for dinners and taxis and the small sips of hard liquor he was known to take, but each check he picked up came with a lesson about being a big-league ballplayer, whether it was about leaving the proper tip or understanding which sections of town in a given city were best avoided. And the messages were always delivered the Henry way: He would not volunteer his wisdom easily. He would wait. If Garr made a mistake in judgment, he knew Henry would say nothing until Garr felt embarrassed, beaten down enough to ask for help.
One day, Garr asked Henry why he did not chew guys out when they were not meeting his exacting standards, just to get it over with. Eddie Mathews, for example, who would return to the Braves as manager in 1972, was extremely rough and unpredictable with players. “I’ll never forget it. That wasn’t who Henry was. Henry wasn’t going to give you the answers. He wanted you to understand the reasons why he was going to say something to you, and that could only come when you were ready to listen,” Garr said. “He used to say, ‘If you give a man a fish, he can eat tonight. But if you teach him to fish, he can eat for the rest of his life.’”
Henry was pleasant to the rest of his teammates, and they often sought to bathe in his aura. But Henry Aaron was no Mickey Mantle, gregarious and inclusive, the clubhouse leader of the pack when the team landed in a city, a list of friendly joints and bartenders at the ready. Few people were ever granted the golden pass to Henry’s inner circle. That was why Ralph Garr and Dusty Baker were vital, for Henry had not been as close to teammates socially since Mantilla and Bruton. As much as these young men fed off of Henry, the reverse was probably just as true.
Sometimes he would surprise the others, like the time in the early summer of 1967 when Tito Francona came over from Philadelphia. The Phillies had just played two games in Pittsburgh, then flown home for a series with the Braves. The next morning, June 12, Francona was informed he’d been traded to Atlanta, thus beginning one of those strange adventures in employment germane only to baseball. Francona woke up a member of the home team, intent on beating the tar out of the Braves, but by lunchtime, with a simple change of laundry, the enemy had become the good guys.
Francona had been a big leaguer192 for ten years, having joined Baltimore in 1956, just two years after Henry, and was thirty-three at the time of his trade to Atlanta. A couple of days later, the club was in Houston. Francona showered and headed downstairs for dinner, and there, sitting alone in the lobby of the old Rice Hotel, was Henry, who asked Tito where he was going.
“I’m going to get a steak, I guess.”
“Do you mind if I come with you?”
“We used to go out all the time. Hank liked steaks, especially in the big towns like Chicago and New York,” Francona recalled. “We used to go to have lunch before a ball game and we’d flip a coin to see who would pay.”
Born in 1933, a year before Henry, John Patsy Francona came from a tough-knuckles section of Pittsburgh that everyone in the neighborhood referred to as “Honky Alley.” It was a neighborhood of Hungarians and Italians, with some Jews and blacks, neither group large enough to threaten the order. The real threat during the years leading up to the war was having enough food on the table. When his son, Terry,193 would become a successful manager with the Boston Red Sox, Tito would always tell any of his friends at the ballpark to yell out “Honky Alley!” if they wanted a foolproof method for the boys from the old neighborhood to capture his son’s attention.
In New York, Tito and Henry194 would go to Eddie Condon’s to catch some jazz and a steak. On the plane, they would play hearts. Tito never stopped being in awe of Henry’s ability, but he was not one of the players (and over the years there were many) on the team who tiptoed around the superstars. “I remember when I first come up, with Baltimore, first game in the big leagues, and you know I’m nervous. I got butterflies and all, so I get to the ballpark around six a.m. We’re playing the Red Sox and I’m walking along the tunnel and I see this big number nine coming toward me—it’s Ted Williams. And he says, ‘Hey, you’re Tito Francona.’ And I’m thinking, How the hell do you know who I am? And he tells me he was once teammates with my roommate Harry Dorish, and Harry told him to look out for me. And Ted was great, gave me advice on hitting and everything, told me not to use such a heavy bat when the weather got warm.
“Henry had so much raw talent, it was unbelievable. I remember one game I batted after him. He hit a ball bad and he was so mad that he slammed the bat down onto the dirt and snapped the bat in half. Then he looks up and the ball went out of the ballpark. Imagine being able to do that.”
In terms of being cultivated by Henry, Tito Francona was one of the lucky few over the years who not only held warmth and respect for Henry but shared some intimate times with him. Yet Ralph and Dusty saw Henry195 in a way perhaps no one else in baseball ever did. Dusty was different from the start, for no one in Henry’s inner circle ever called him Hank. Hank was the name his talent created, something the sportswriters and the ball club and the fans used. To anyone on the inside not named Dusty, he was Henry. “I never noticed it, but I guess it’s true,” Baker said. “But he never corrected me, either.”
With those two kids, Henry was totally engaged, treating them as members of the family, and because of Henry’s connection to them, Dusty and Ralph became connected to each other. Both represented the third generation of black player, post-Depression, post–World War II men who had entered the big leagues with a different set of expectations both from baseball and from life. The Negro Leagues were gone and therefore no longer the expected destination, and ambition for blacks born after the war was a less dangerous commodity. Dusty Baker grew up in Sacramento, California. For a time, he had gone to college, but in 1968, he joined the marine reserves (volunteering for six years in the reserves wasn’t foolproof, but it was the best way to stay out of Vietnam). In the marines, L. Cpl. Johnnie B. Baker had shown leadership qualities and was given responsibilities, yet he entered the Braves system as a nineteen-year-old kid with something of a reputation for being free-spirited, a little disdainful of authority figures, maybe one to watch. And quietly, those in the Braves front office would nudge the big man to sort of keep an eye on Dusty. But Henry was already a step ahead of the suits.
And ahead of Henry was Dusty’s mother, who when Baker signed with the Braves asked Henry directly to “take care of my boy.” Henry, traditionally distant and cool to the younger generation, agreed to to do.
“There were times I got called in196 for going certain places or being with certain people. They asked Hank to talk to me about certain things. Other times he would take it upon himself, getting me up to eat breakfast, putting the room-service card, all filled out, outside my hotel door to make sure I ate, make me go to church, invite me to go to certain meetings, NAACP meetings and things, freedom rallies back then and stuff. He promised my mom that he would take care of me as if I was his son, which he did.”
And it was there, by Henry’s side, that Dusty Baker saw the world. It was also where he saw the deep contradictions of race. Dusty recalled that in general the white kids and black kids and Latino kids in California were all the same. They all played together and went to the same schools. Yet when Baker considered his idea of wealth in California, the memory was always the same: whites living in exclusive neighborhoods.
In Atlanta, Baker saw just the opposite: blacks living in wealthy and upper-middle-class districts but still racially separated on a day-to-day basis. Henry’s southwest Atlanta neighborhood had a white-collar sensibility, and there were civil rights meetings. It was with Henry that Dusty met Sammy Davis, Jr., and Maynard Jackson and Herman Russell, power players in local and national politics. In Chicago, Dusty dined at the home of Jesse Jackson, with Henry, of course. In Los Angeles, Henry introduced Dusty to Flip Wilson. Backstage in New York, it was Ramsey Lewis, and the start of Dusty Baker’s lifelong love affair with jazz. They used to joke that even when Henry and Barbara thought they were eati
ng alone, Dusty and Ralph were probably under the dinner table.
“He was a fun-loving guy, but a serious guy at the same time. He was a complex guy, but an everyday guy,” Baker said. “He only let certain people really in. He extended himself to everybody, but he only let really certain people get in.”
In Atlanta, Ralph and Dusty were part of the family. Barbara would cook for them, and they treated her as a surrogate mother, because Dusty was still a kid.
“I was there so young, nineteen years old, I was closer in age to his kids and to the batboys, so I just hung out with them all the time,” Baker recalled. “I couldn’t go to bars and drink with those guys, so I hung with the batboys. Lary, Hanky, Gaile, and Dorinda, who was just a little ole girl. They’re all like my brothers and sisters now. We’d just hang out at Hank’s house. I’d go watch their football games in high school, stuff like that…. Kid stuff, you know?”
Being that close, closer than all the rest, it was Dusty and Ralph who could best see the growing tension between Henry and Barbara, and it was Dusty upon whom Henry would rely. “Barbara treated me like a member of the family. She treated me like one of her own. There were people around the ballpark who said this or said that, but I’m not one of them. I was around Hank when things began to go sour between them, and it was a hard time. I have nothing bad to say about Barbara Aaron. I watched Hank deal the way Hank deals with everything—he tried to keep focused. He didn’t want to put his problems off on everybody else. Those times were definitely rough on Hank.”
Henry and Barbara had been together for fifteen years, since they were teenagers, were together as dreams came true and were in the public eye as America confronted itself and came steadily apart. The players’ wives were often a tight sorority, enjoying the fortunes of the baseball life, but it was different for black women. They were accepted as begrudgingly at the bake sales and charity events as their husbands often were on the ball field, but sometimes it could all be too much. In a 1995 documentary, Barbara would talk about the vitriol in the stands directed at the black players, her husband among them.
Too often, she had to sit and take it. The wives always did. The baseball world, first a boys club, then an integrated boys club, was never sympathetic toward her. Barbara was not popular among those in the Braves front office; they insulted her and Henry by accusing her of being behind his evolving politics.
And then there was the infamous evening197 of July 30, 1966, when Barbara entered the player’s parking lot at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium before a Braves-Giants game and the attendant at the entrance gate refused to allow her in. Words were exchanged, an Atlanta policeman intervened, and Barbara drove past. The officer, L. W. Begwood, ordered her to stop. What occurred next would become a matter of debate. Barbara would say that Begwood removed his service revolver from his holster. Begwood would say that he placed his hand on his weapon but did not remove it from its holster. What was not in dispute was Barbara’s arrest and the subsequent three-week suspension of three Atlanta police officers involved in the incident. The publicity was bad all around—for the Braves, who in their first season were trying to cultivate a fan base in a racially tenuous city; for Henry, who called the officers “incompetent”; and especially for Barbara, who Braves officials thought overreacted. “That woman,” a Braves official said, “drove everyone crazy.”
Henry would not talk much about the details of his home life, but now it was coming apart, for too many reasons to count. Henry put on a good face—the best, in fact—and Ralph loved him for it. It went back to chopping the wood. “You could never tell at the plate198 what was going on with Henry. We knew he had his problems, but when he came to work—professional. He might have had the worst day at home, but when he got to the ballpark—nothing. Nothing got between Henry Aaron and his business.”
And in return, he was their unquestioned hero. They called him “Supe,” short for “Superman.” And they called him “Hammer.” And they called him “44.” Maybe they didn’t invent the nicknames, but they used them with such affection and reverence and frequency that Henry was transformed into a different person, always the silent backbone of a club, but certainly now something more. He was the wise elder for this new group of kids, and they did not do anything without checking with Henry first. “You could feel it. He was that guy that you did not want thinking any less of you,” Ralph Garr recalled. “In the back of your mind, he was the standard. You didn’t want to do anything that Henry wouldn’t do. If Henry could be on time for the team bus, you could be on time for the team bus. If Henry could play hurt, you could play hurt. We saw him do things that just made everybody want to be that much more professional. You have to understand just how much we looked up to this man, what he meant to us. Nobody wanted to be the one to disappoint Henry Aaron.”
During that time, there was another youngster, too, who looked up to Henry: Clarence Edwin Gaston, who went by the nickname “Cito,” a Texan from Corpus Christi who had played in the Braves minor-league system in Waycross, Georgia, and Greenville, South Carolina. During the season in spring 1967, Henry requested that Cito Gaston room with him, and, quite likely channeling his own home life with Barbara, an education ensued.
“I had the fortune to room with a guy199 who was my idol growing up as a kid. He taught me how to tie a tie. He taught me how to be an independent thinker coming into the big leagues,” Gaston recalled. “He taught me that no matter what happened in the game to forget it. If you had a good game, leave it at the ballpark. And if you had a bad day at home, don’t bring that to the ballpark. He taught me about concentration.” And he told Gaston that the inverse was also true, a rule he had been practicing firsthand as his relationship with Barbara declined: If you had a bad day at the park, don’t bring it home and take it out on the family.
It was the ethic that Henry wanted to impart to the kids, and sometimes he could do it with a look. If Dusty was spending too much time in the trainer’s room, it was Henry who could give him that look and Baker would have to reassess very quickly just how hurt he truly was. Maybe he could play after all. And then, suddenly, Dusty would be in the lineup. If Garr looked gassed in between games of a doubleheader but saw Henry, nearly twelve years his senior, taped and ready and dressed, suddenly Garr knew he had better find that extra fuel reserve, lest he drop in Henry’s esteem. Being a professional meant playing through pain, and so what if Henry’s pain threshold just happened to be abnormal. Somewhere, he would always remind Dusty and Ralph and Cito (who would be with him only in 1967, although Henry would have a lifelong impact on Cito Gaston) not to forget the special burden that came with being a black player. It meant playing with pain, leading by stellar example, and being accountable, for black players were quite often the easiest ones to be gotten rid of. Make it hard on them, Henry would tell the kids. Make it hard for them to get rid of you. And it was in that context that Henry would drop his famous credo on Garr. “He used to tell me all the time,200 whenever something hurt and I maybe needed a break. He would always point to guys that were hurt, or maybe hurt, and maybe they could play but they didn’t, and he’d say, ‘Ralph, you can’t help your club from the tub.’”
And then there was the question that Ralph Garr swished around in his mouth, grading its texture before offering a verdict: how to anger the cool and even Henry Aaron. The answer would have far-reaching consequences.
“Cheating,” Garr said.
“You want to make the man angry? Just cheat. That’ll do it. Henry wants a fair match, what you got against what he’s got. I remember one time in San Francisco and Gaylord Perry was on the mound throwing them spitballs. Henry fouled one off, and instead of letting the umpire or the catcher pick it up, he picked it up. Then he took it, rubbed the wetness off the ball, and rolled it back to the pitcher’s mound, looking right at him the whole time. That was Henry’s way of telling Gaylord Perry, ‘I’m onto you, son.’”
THE KIDS LISTENED, but there was one who got away. When he first arrived in
Bradenton from the dusty nothingness of San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic in the spring of 1964, armed with expectations of greatness but no road map on how to attain it, it was Henry who told Joe Taylor to put Rico Carty’s spring-training locker close to his. Henry wanted to teach the kid, who spoke little English—and the bit he knew was accompanied by an accent that provided an easy target for enemies—about the big leagues, wanted to make sure he succeeded. Carty was a strapping presence—six three, two hundred pounds—who swung a bat nearly as viciously as Henry. He wasn’t exactly in the millionth percentile, as Henry had been, but anyone who looked at Rico Carty, from his teammates to the manager Bobby Bragan, knew that if nothing else, Carty was a major-league hitter.
There was something in the way the kid wandered around camp that spring that reminded Henry of himself ten years earlier; a black player with ability whom no one seemed to be helping. Carty was unsure of himself. Learning language was not easy and, as Henry had learned from Felix Mantilla years earlier, the southern racial customs could be jarring to Latino players unused to the Deep South.
So it came to pass that Henry requested that Ricardo Adolfo Jacobo Carty room with him that spring. Henry watched as the press had its way with Carty, quoting him phonetically, as it did virtually all Latin American stars, the great Clemente included. “Already he ees showing me201 how to talk better, how to act, what to wear,” Sport magazine quoted Carty as saying of Henry. “He make me feel big, too. He ees even showing me about HEETING!”
Henry worked with Carty, taught him how to position himself in the outfield and how to set up pitchers at the plate. To the writers, Carty referred to Henry as “compadre.” Carty told the writers that it was Henry who was making him into a good player. He had taken a promising player under his wing.
The Last Hero Page 39