The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  The Giants were in first place on September 1, half a game ahead of the Dodgers, a game ahead of a surging Cincinnati club, and three up on the Braves, but while the teams staged a raucous pennant chase, the anticipated showdown of old lions never quite came to pass. Henry had held up his end, near the leaders in the usual offensive categories. Meanwhile, for the first time in his career, it was easier to look away from than at Willie Mays. In the final heat of the pennant race, Mays was barely an everyday player. At one stretch between August and September, he had gone 63 at bats without a home run, and for the first time in his career done something he’d never envisioned: He went an entire calendar month—July—without hitting one out of the yard.

  Still, the two found a way to create electricity. The Giants and Braves met Wednesday night, September 10, Pat Jarvis against Ron Bryant. The San Francisco team arrived in Atlanta holding a game-and-a-half lead over the Braves but just half a game ahead of the Reds. It was a night of raw nerves, exposed, on both sides of the field. There was the City Too Busy to Hate being exposed as the City Too Busy for a Pennant Race, as only 10,705 showed up to the yard with their first October on the line, exposing Atlanta’s indifference to baseball. Willie Mays, a dingy shell of his Broadway star, grounded into a double play in the first, perked up by nailing a runner at the plate from center, and then allowed a cheap run to score on an error during the decisive seventh inning.

  Henry continued to watch Willie grow faint in his rearview mirror: a long homer off Bryant in the fourth, plus two additional runs scored in an 8–4 win. The Braves took first place the next night, when Henry hit his forty-first homer of the year while Mays wore the collar.

  Five days later, when the two teams met again on September 15 in San Francisco, Atlanta this time holding a game-and-a-half lead, with fourteen to play, Willie took a few whacks at the rocking chair, driving in half of the Giant runs (including a backbreaking homer) in a 4–1 win in the opener. Marichal was the story the next night, shutting out the Braves with a four-hitter, but Mays, not quite ready to go away, went two for four and drove in the only run that mattered, and the Braves were back in second place, behind the Giants by half a game.

  For the fans who remembered (or cared to remember) the old Milwaukee Braves, the scenario was too familiar: inches from the play-offs, with a dozen games left, about to blow it. Understanding the history, wondering how many different ways the trapdoor could open was not an unkind question, especially because after getting swept by the Giants, the Braves went down the coast to Chavez Ravine, to the Dodgers, Jim Bunning, and Steve Stone. Bunning, fading, couldn’t get past the fifth, but the two teams jousted. And then there was Henry, who rapped a couple of hits and a run scored as the rivals slapped each other around into extra innings. Henry led off the top of the twelfth against Ray Lamb and smoked a fastball into the seats for a home run, one made even sweeter in the bottom of the inning when Henry caught the final out, and still sweeter when the team arrived in the visitors’ clubhouse, took a look at the fuzzy television in the room, and saw that Larry Dierker had outdueled Henry’s favorite, that cheater Gaylord Perry, up in San Francisco. Henry had put the Braves back in first.

  The Dodgers would win the next night, and then the Braves wound up and delivered the knockout punch: a ten-game winning streak to ice the division title on penultimate day of the season. The scheduling gods were kind: The Dodgers and Giants beat up on each other while the Braves sliced through San Diego (110 losses) and Houston. Henry, who had finished at .300, with one hundred runs scored, forty-four homers, and ninety-seven RBI, was back in the play-offs for the first time in a decade. A year earlier, the Braves would have been packing for the off-season, having won ninety-three games but seven short of the Mets for the pennant. Now, they were in the play-offs, a young, coalescing Mets club awaiting them in the inaugural National League Championship Series.

  THE PLAY-OFFS were over in an eyeblink. The Mets, racing toward destiny, finished off the Braves in three straight, but each game showed Henry in his true incandescent light.

  He had never liked New York, and yet he could not escape the big town. The New York Giants beat him in 1954. Brooklyn had kept him from the World Series in 1955 and 1956. He had played in the 1957 and 1958 World Series—both times against the Yankees—and here he was once more, in the postseason in New York, playing against a team that had not existed the last time he’d played October baseball. The first game, played under the pageantry of bunting, the first big-league play-off game ever in the state of Georgia, with 50,522 aroused for baseball, was tense and muscular: Seaver against Niekro, both bound for Cooperstown, Niekro giving up two early runs in the second, the Braves nicking Seaver for three by the end of the third, both teams trading runs, getting the nerves out.

  Seventh inning, one out, 4–4 game: Seaver recalled the sequence. In an earlier at bat, he threw Henry a fastball, outside corner, on which Henry was a couple of days late. In a tie ball game, nobody on, Seaver, all of twenty-four years old but winner of a league-best twenty-five games, figured he’d get ahead with the same pitch, which Henry sent sizzling into the left-field seats for a home run, 5–4 Braves.

  Even Henry was no match for destiny. The Mets knocked out Niekro the very next inning with a five spot, and the Braves went quietly the rest of the way. As if discovering the painting on the living room wall was an original Rembrandt, the New York press swarmed Henry.

  In the second game, the Mets beat Ron Reed, piñata-style. It was 8–0 before the Braves batted around the order for the second time. Before the series took on a decidedly lopsided shape, there was Henry. Down 9–1 in the fifth, Henry banged a three-run homer off Jerry Koosman to offer the crowd of 50,270 a faint breath, but the final score was 11–6.

  The Braves went to Shea Stadium a loss away from death. Gary Gentry took the mound for the Mets, surrounded by pennant-thirsty crazies, pumping him up, readying for the coronation.

  And there, once again, was Henry, who took a Gentry fastball four hundred feet for a first-inning two-run homer. Gentry would last but two innings. Up 2–0, Pat Jarvis couldn’t stop the stampede. The Braves lost leads of 2–0 and 4–3, succumbing for the final time of the year, 7–4. The hero was a twenty-two-year-old right-handed relief pitcher named Nolan Ryan, who mopped up for Gentry by giving up just three hits and striking out seven in seven innings, and it was over.

  The kids on the Braves already loved Henry—there was no question about that—but what he did against the Mets elevated him to an even higher plane. Afterward, the press mobbed Henry, as if it were his team going to the World Series instead of home for the winter.

  In the three games, he hit .357, homered in each one. He had five hits in fourteen at bats; none were singles. Three home runs and two doubles, and none of his hits were cheapies, either, pile-on jobs that didn’t affect the final outcome. Henry had given his team the lead or given them life. And though nobody knew it at the time, he did it, essentially, with one hand.

  “We were off that night208 after we won the division, and I was with Henry Aaron and Clete Boyer and some of the guys, and it rained,” Ralph Garr recalled. “We were in a car and it slipped into a ditch. Henry was pushing the car and cut his hand on the headlight. It wasn’t two or three scratches. If you looked at his hand, you would have thought he wouldn’t have played in the play-offs.

  “He didn’t practice, didn’t say too much, and now I’m scared to death. I’m thinking, What is Henry going to tell these people, and his team has got to play the New York Mets? Me and Dusty are talking in the clubhouse when the play-offs started and Henry walks in with Dave Pursley and the team doctor. They go into in the trainer’s room, and they shoot Henry in the hand with Novocain, right in between his fingers. He puts on a black glove and hit .360…. After that was over, it brought chills to me. You had to see that, son. You had to see it to see what Henry Aaron did to exemplify what it meant to be a baseball player.”

  Henry packed his bags for the year and headed to the ho
spital, having played through gritted teeth all season with a sore back. There would be no World Series, and he would never again play in the postseason. But in the eyes of the country, he had been reanimated, reintroduced as a superstar. He had played brilliantly during the season and was even better in the postseason. In the meantime, a process had begun—not always undertaken with great enthusiasm—the walk toward a new chapter in his life, one that would define him as one thing only. If before the 1969 season he was, in Mickey Mantle’s phrase, the “greatest, most underrated player in baseball,” he would leave as someone who would never go unnoticed. He had not changed, and yet he had crossed an unofficial threshold: From that day forward, he was no longer Henry Aaron. He was the man chasing Babe Ruth.

  THE TABLES TURNED for good right around Thanksgiving 1971, in Mexico City. Near the beach, Willie Mays was enjoying his honeymoon with his second wife, Mae, when he was accosted by an Associated Press reporter. It was there that Mays conceded what was once the unthinkable: Henry Aaron, and not Willie Mays, would likely pass Babe Ruth and break the all-time home-run record, sometime in either 1973 or 1974. Over the previous two seasons, the hard truth has permeated the soil that Mays had become a legend in cultivating, and others would recognize it faster than Willie. He was the one who was bigger than life, the product of his transcendent ability and the New York superhero machine. And yet during the winter after the 1971 season, for the first time in a career consistently overshadowed by star players with more charisma, playing with better media, Henry was more famous than even Willie Mays. He had 639 home runs, still seven behind Mays’s total of 646, but at this juncture Henry had never been closer to Mays’s career total. For the previous three seasons, with Mays in steep, heartbreaking decline, Henry had soared—44 four home runs in 1969, 38 home runs and 118 RBI in 1970, and 47 home runs, more than he’d ever hit in a year in 1971. In the opposing dugout, Mays had grown old and ordinary—as the 1972 season approached, Mays hadn’t hit thirty home runs or driven in one hundred runs since 1966, hadn’t scored one hundred or hit .300 since 1965. In 1971, he struck out 123 times in only 417 at bats, proof that his eyes and reflexes had weakened to the point where he could no longer make consistent contact. When Willie was Willie, say in 1962, he’d come to bat 621 times and struck out just 85 times. Numbers were meant to be massaged to political and partisan ends, but here the numbers were forcing Willie to face the larger truth that his run as the elite player of his time had come to a close.

  There was another number Hank achieved that Willie would not, the number of which everyone in baseball was most aware: In February 1972, Henry Aaron became the highest-paid player in the history of the sport, when Bartholomay signed him to a three-year, $600,000 deal.

  This, too, was Willie’s territory. Willie Mays had set the standard of salaries (at least for black players) for twenty years. Now Hank was making $200,000, the first $200,000 player ever. Actually, the real number was $165,000, as $45,000 per year was deferred over a ten-year period, semimonthly, beginning immediately after his retirement or on July 1, 1973—whichever came first—but it was still more than Mays, who was earning $150,000.

  AARON—600G FOR 3 YEARS209—

  CALLED “HIGHEST CONTRACT EVER”

  ATLANTA, FEB. 29 (UPI)—Braves’ superstar Hank Aaron, the man with the best chance of breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record, became the highest paid player in baseball history today when he signed a contract which will reportedly pay him $600,000 over the next three years.

  He was never supposed to be the guy. He didn’t hit home runs in the big, bombastic way home-run hitters do. He’d led the league in home runs four times but had never hit fifty in a year, the way Ruth or Foxx or Mantle or Mays had. Even when he hit his career-best forty-seven in 1971, there was always something else a little better going on: Mays and the Giants went to the play-offs, Clemente was great again—.341 batting average, a legendary, victorious performance in the World Series—and Joe Torre hit .363 and won the MVP.

  The record was never anything Henry verbalized for print, but at increasing points after 1968, he began to hone in on Ruth, doing so in his patented way: by staring at the number 714 as if through a spyglass, assessing his usual performance, subtracting for possible injuries and performance decline, but, most of all, determining that the record belonged to him. Periodically, he would sidle up to Wayne Minshew of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and say, “Hey, Wayne, do you think I have a chance at it?”

  “It was Milo Hamilton, the broadcaster,210 who really started doing the math and vocalizing that the record was there for him,” Minshew recalled. “And sometimes that created hard feelings. I remember one time Hank and Milo were in a feud and Hank said to me, ‘I can break this record if this guy would just leave me alone.’”

  Along the way, on May 17, 1970, at weathered Crosley Field in Cincinnati, came hit number three thousand, a first-inning single off Wayne Simpson, the first time Henry had beaten Mays to a major milestone—Mays would reach three thousand two months later. Henry had become the first black player to record three thousand hits, the first player in baseball history to reach three thousand hits and hit five hundred home runs. He had always said he would retire following his three thousandth hit, but by this point his priorities had changed.

  Willie would never surrender the stage easily to the man who had always played in his shadow. In Mexico City that day, Mays told the reporter that, yes, Henry would likely break Ruth’s record, but he didn’t stop there. Before walking away, he added halfheartedly, “Maybe I will, too.”

  And for years, that’s how it would be. They were not friends, and if Henry’d had his way, they wouldn’t have been rivals, either, because Henry truly seemed to admire Willie. The two men lived the American story with more similarities than differences. Both were black children of the Depression-era South, the defining characteristic for each. Both were unparalleled on the baseball diamond. As they aged, the similarities increased. By 1972, both men had been divorced—Barbara filed in 1970, after seventeen years of marriage, citing mental cruelty. Henry did not contest the filing, saying only that they had “grown apart.” In the smoldering shadow of Robinson, neither man felt appreciated for his position on civil rights. Neither—because of his financial position and inherent conservatism with regard to power—lent enough personal clout to the elimination of the reserve clause, the rule that kept players bound to their teams for life, kept them from the money that would change the game. When Curt Flood took baseball to court, Aaron and Mays were both curiously silent. Allowing players to become free agents, Henry told the Associated Press, would be disastrous for baseball. Mays went a step further, criticizing Flood for being ungrateful to the game.

  It was true that Henry Aaron was not uninterested in yapping back and forth in the papers and closed up about Mays to avoid the headaches of he-said/she-said journalism, but there was also something about Willie that wouldn’t allow a real friendship with Henry. Willie wouldn’t, or couldn’t, ever give Henry his due as a great player, and that inability on Mays’s part to acknowledge Henry as an equal was what really burned Henry.

  Periodically, Mays would soften, both men apparently recognizing there was little margin for either in fostering a narrative of the two greatest black players, from the same state, no less, at each other’s throats.

  “I’ll see how it goes,”211 Mays said about pursuing the record along with Henry in February 1972. “But a long time ago I said Hank would pass me, and if I happened to quit within the next year or so or when he does, I’d be happy to present him with the ball that he hits out of the park.”

  For years, they had fought for position, but in 1954 and part of 1958 and for the whole pivotal seasons of 1959 and 1969, they fought for pennants, too, their numbers virtually identical, their legacies cemented; they were the difference between New York and London—a can’t-miss either way, just depended on one’s preference. Over those years, Henry had gone out of his way to praise Mays. During the Fred H
aney years, when he grudgingly accepted Haney’s decision to play him in center field, Henry would joke about how he would never make an all-star team because he now played the same position as Willie, a self-deprecating comment that underscored Henry’s admiration for Mays and his confidence in himself. In interviews, Henry did not miss an opportunity to say Willie was the best player going, and in later years he would acknowledge Mays’s contribution in easing the way for black players, first through his barnstorming team in the 1950s and later by becoming the first black team captain in baseball history. Mays was the first black player in the history of major-league baseball to be called the greatest player of all time by the mainstream, and Henry often concurred with the opinion. Around 1971, there was the story circulating around baseball about Tal Smith, then a young executive with the Houston Astros. The tale went that Smith kept two autographed baseballs at his home, side by side, one signed by Henry Aaron, the other by Willie Mays. One day, Smith’s house was burglarized and the thief swiped the Aaron ball, while leaving the Mays ball in its place. Henry handled the story deftly. “All that proves,” he said, “is that there’s a crook in Houston who can’t read.”

  Willie returned the favor by giving Henry back nothing. When Henry began to soar up the home-run chart, Willie was loath to give even a partial nod to Henry’s ability, choosing instead to blame his own performance on his home turf, Candlestick Park, saying it was a lousy park in which to hit homers and that this was the reason for Henry’s onrush. The disadvantages of Candlestick were especially obvious in comparison to that bandbox Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium, famously dubbed “the Launching Pad.”

  The problem wasn’t that Willie was a proud and fiery competitor, but that he didn’t give Henry anything, not even an acknowledgment that for the first twelve years of Henry’s career, he played in a symmetrical park, County Stadium, whose dimensions did not favor him, while Mays played the early part of his career at the Polo Grounds, where the foul lines did not even measure three hundred feet. Mays’s comment on the evening of April 27, 1971, in Atlanta, when Henry hit career blast number six hundred, ironically against San Francisco, was a prime example of this attitude. “Hank might just catch Ruth,” Mays said backhandedly after the game. “He’s playing in the right parks.”