Willie never hit well in Milwaukee, for power or for average. From 1953 until 1965, Mays hit in County Stadium as a visiting player in his prime years and tallied a .289 average with thirty home runs in 199 games. Yet in his 2010 authorized biography of Mays, the author James S. Hirsch wrote, “Mays believes he would have hit eight hundred homers if he had not gone into the military and played in parks like Aaron’s.” That was what burned Henry: Willie couldn’t stop slapping him in the face.
Mays did lose two years to the army, and certainly at twenty-one and twenty-two, he would have had a better-than-average opportunity to record the fifty-five home runs he would fall short of to surpass Ruth. So much of why the relationship between Mays and Aaron was perceived, often rightly, as tense, if not acrimonious, stemmed from their personalities—the self-centered Mays and the diplomatic Aaron.
After years of being asked about his own feats, Mays almost certainly must have resented at some level being asked now more about Henry. Take the end of spring training, when, during an interview session, Henry was asked about his chances to catch Ruth. “I think I can make it if I stay healthy and if I have a strong man batting behind me, so they won’t pitch around me.”
When the scribes asked Mays the same question, Willie’s response said it all: “Well, he has to catch me first.”
MAYBE MAYS DIDN’T mean to sound like a jealous rival. Maybe it was simply Willie’s professional nod to the cruelty and unpredictability of the fates, for it was true that to reach the top shelf, everything had to go right: You had to play in the right park at the right time, you had to avoid missing time, and you couldn’t get hurt. Ted Williams might have been the one to beat Ruth, had the Splinter not missed nearly five years to war, and played in a park, Fenway Park, where the right-field power alley was a cavernous 380 feet. Williams was generally considered the best hitter who ever lived, but he hadn’t reached three thousand hits. Neither, for that matter, had Ruth or Gehrig. Maybe it wasn’t jealousy, but it sounded that way. It sounded as though Willie couldn’t accept the truth: Mays had the memories and the prose, but statistically, Henry had the numbers.
And that wasn’t all there was. For his generation, Mays exemplified the rare combination of physical, athletic genius and a showman’s gift for timing. What went less reported and, as the years passed, became an uncomfortable, common lament was just how cruel and self-absorbed Mays could be.
The veracity of one story would never be completely ascertained because Henry would refuse to discuss the details, but Reese Schonfeld never forgot it, and he believes every word of it to be true. Schonfeld would make his career in the television business, becoming a business associate of Ted Turner during the early years of the rise of cable television.
But in the summer of 1957, Schonfeld was just a kid, twenty-five years old, in Boston, excited to be sent to the Polo Grounds to interview the hottest player on the hottest team in baseball, Henry Aaron, and getting paid fifty dollars for the assignment.
“It’s July 1957,212 I’m working for United Press/Movietone news, and I’m up at the Polo Grounds, on assignment from WBZ Boston to interview Milwaukee Braves manager, Fred Haney, left-hander Warren Spahn, and the new phenom, Hank Aaron. WBZ wanted the interviews to promote the upcoming Jimmy Fund baseball game between the Braves and the Red Sox. The Jimmy Fund had been created by the Braves when they were still the Boston Braves, and they returned to Boston every year to help raise money for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the name of ‘Jimmy,’ a pseudonym for a twelve-year old boy who was a patient there. It was Aaron’s first appearance in the game, and his potential for greatness was apparent to all. The Boston fans wanted to see him in action.
“The Braves were playing the Giants in a twi-night double-header. We arrived about five p.m., set up our camera in foul territory, just off third base. Haney emerged from the dugout, did the interview, plugged the Jimmy Fund, and then sent out Warren Spahn. Spahn told us how much he missed the fans in Boston and looked forward to seeing them shortly. All good PR. Then out came Aaron. Aaron was different. The Boston fans had never seen Aaron. WBZ had asked me to talk to him about baseball, particularly about his wrists, supposed to be ‘the quickest wrists in all of baseball.’
“As we changed film for the new interview, Willie Mays came trotting in from center field, where he had been shagging flies, and knelt just on the fair side of the foul line. Dusk was falling, we had no electrician, and I had to finish the interview before the light faded entirely.
As we focused on Aaron, the cameraman measuring the distance between the lens and his subject, Mays started ragging on Aaron: ‘How much they paying you, Hank? They ain’t payin’ you at all, Hank? Don’t you know we all get paid for this? You ruin it for the rest of us, Hank! You just fall off the turnip truck?’
“Aaron is getting more and more agitated. Fred Haney trots out and explains to Aaron: ‘It’s the Jimmy Fund—it’s charity. It’s okay.’ We begin the interview then to get a better shot of his wrists; we move the tripod. Now Mays lays it on thick: ‘You showin’ ’em how you swing? We get paid three to four hundred dollars for this. You one dumb nigger!’ And he laughs. Finally we were done. Aaron shakes his head, I thank him, but half angry, half bewildered, he spits at my feet.
“When he gets back in the dugout, Haney tries to calm him down. It doesn’t work. Mays has gotten into Aaron’s head. Haney recognizes it and takes Hank out of the lineup. He plays not at all in the first game; in the second game he pinch-hits and walks. Willie had harassed Hank right out of the batting order. The New York Times cites the Mays-Aaron ‘years of friendship.’ I wouldn’t bet on it.”
If the idea that Henry Aaron, leading candidate for National League Most Valuable Player and one of the toughest, most focused clutch players in the history of the game, could be psyched out of the lineup by pregame chatter, even from Willie Mays, sounded apocryphal, it was. On July 21, 1957, just as Schonfeld recalled, the Giants and Braves did play a twi-night doubleheader at the Polo Grounds. In the first game, the Braves behind Spahn held a 4–3 lead into the bottom of the ninth, but the Giants rallied for two runs off Don McMahon and won, 5–4. Mays went one for three with a double and a run scored. Schonfeld’s memory fails him in that Henry did play in the first game, walking as a pinch hitter in the eighth. Dick Cole pinchran for Henry.
Henry did not play in the nightcap, a 7–4 Braves win, but it seems apparent that his absence had nothing to do with Mays. Four days earlier, in a 6–2 win in Philadelphia, Henry went on a rampage, a perfect day: three for three with a mammoth home run off Harvey Haddix, two batted in and two walks, one intentional. In that game, he injured his ankle. He missed the next three games and wouldn’t start again until July 23 in Milwaukee against the Phillies. The ankle injury, and not Mays’s banter, is the more likely explanation for why Haney would scratch Henry before a doubleheader in the middle of a pennant race. It also explained why Henry, second only to Bruton as the fastest man on the Braves, would be removed for a pinch runner in a tight ball game. Clearly, he had attempted to return to the lineup too early and couldn’t run.
Nevertheless, the important kernel in Schonfeld’s recollections is how Mays apparently treated Henry that day, and Henry’s reaction for the next fifty years—to diffuse, while not forgetting, the original offense—would be consistent with the shrewd but stern way Henry Aaron dealt with uncomfortable issues. The world did not need to know Henry’s feelings toward Mays, but Henry was not fooled by his adversary. Mays committed one of the great offenses against a person as proud as Henry: He insulted him, embarrassed him in front of other people, and did not treat him with respect. Such an exchange was not the kind Henry would be likely to forget. As they say in the news business, Schonfeld stuck by his story.
“I was just a kid, and it was exciting to me213 to be there. It was pregame. There was nobody in the stands. I wanted to interview Warren Spahn, and I remember them playing a joke on me, because I was a rookie, too. They sent Burdette out. Luckily
, I knew what Spahn looked like,” he said. “You could see Hank was getting really worked up through the interview, and I thought we did a really good piece. I don’t think he spit at me, but it was at my feet, like something left a bad taste in his mouth.
“Willie was calling him ‘farm boy’ and saying stuff like ‘You’re in the major leagues now.’ I specifically remember Willie using the word nigger, but I didn’t think a lot about it, because that was how a lot of blacks talked to each other. I always thought it was bench jockeying, or maybe Willie just didn’t like to see the next guy coming up being just as good as he was.”
BY THE EARLY months of 1972, time was breaking Henry, too. He reported to West Palm Beach in February and headed straight to the trainer’s room. His ankles hurt, and so did his right knee, injured in a home-plate collision during spring training, and his back had hurt for nearly three years. And that was how in 1972 Henry would play 105 games at first base, both to ease his physical trouble and, mostly, to replace an injured Orlando Cepeda, as well as Rico Carty, who had shattered his leg.
On the good days, Henry would tell the writers during spring training that he felt like he was a kid again. “I feel like I’m eighteen again,” Henry said. On the bad days, when his right knee would buckle and bite, he explained he had not elected to have off-season surgery because of his age. And there was the matter of his arthritic neck, which seemed to flare up with regularity.
The season did not start on time—the first-ever players strike made sure of that—and when it did, Henry victimized the Reds (first Don Gullett, then Jack Billingham) and then the Cardinals (Bob Gibson, then Rick Wise) during a four-day stretch in April at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium.
Ten days later, on May 5, he returned the favor in St. Louis with a two-run shot off Gibson. The next day, May 6, 1972—also known as the forty-first birthday of Mr. Willie Howard Mays, Jr.—Henry caught Wise again, for career home run number 645. Willie, meanwhile, hadn’t yet hit his first of the season. Henry was one behind Mays. Nineteen games into the season, hitting .184, with no bombs and three RBI, on May 11, the spiral was complete: The Giants traded Mays to the New York Mets for pitcher Charlie Williams (who would produce an 8.68 ERA for his new team) and fifty thousand dollars in cash.
The showman was back on Broadway, in his town, and Mays provided a nostalgia burst. May 14, in his first game as a Met (against the Giants, of course), Mays walked and scored in the first, then broke a 4–4 tie in the bottom of the fifth with a home run that stood as the game winner, 5–4 Mets. At Veterans Stadium in Philly a week later, May 21, Mays shook that year-old concrete bowl. This was a Phillies team that would win just fifty-nine games all season, and yet on this night they weren’t pushovers, because of Steve Carlton, who would win twenty-seven games all by himself. The Phillies led 3–0 in the sixth with Carlton, on the hill when Willie led off with a double and scored on Tommy Agee’s home run. On his next at bat, with one on in the eighth and the Phils up 3–2, Mays broke Carlton’s heart with a two-run homer, for a 4–3 Mets win. The leader was back.
Willie would be respectable for the rest of the year, hitting .267, but alas, that was it for the heroics. On May 31, at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium, Henry Aaron caught Willie Mays with home run number 648, a first-inning drive off San Diego’s Fred Norman that snaked around the left-field foul pole.
WEDNESDAY NIGHT:214
AARON TIES MAYS FOR 2D PLACE
It took Hank Aaron 18-plus seasons to catch Willie Mays. His next target is Babe Ruth’s record.
Aaron hit his 648th home run Wednesday night….
Aaron also became the second player in history to attain 6,000 total bases, reaching 6,001. The record of 6,134 belongs to Stan Musial….
Ten days later, also at the Vet, Henry passed Mays with a little sizzle of his own: a grand slam against hulking six-foot-six-inch, 215-pound Wayne Twitchell.
Henry would never look back. He would never chase Willie Mays again as much as he would stalk the record book, passing whoever was next on the page. For the first time in his career, that next person was not Willie Mays.
Now, Henry made a marathoner’s final kick toward Ruth. Atlanta hosted the All-Star Game in 1972, the first held in the Deep South, the young blazer Jim Palmer against the old pro Bob Gibson. Palmer froze Henry with a called strike three in the first and Mickey Lolich induced a lazy fly to right. But in the sixth inning, down 1–0, Henry faced his favorite spitballer, Gaylord Perry, and launched a two-run home run to deep left-center field. It was the first home-run hit in an All-Star Game in Atlanta.
The rest of the year, he followed this star turn, backing up his forty-seven-homer year with thirty-four more in 1972. That put him at 673 for 1973. The hype machine, which had generally left him alone during the 1960s, had returned for a sober, often unflattering reappraisal: to assess whether Henry was worthy of surpassing the iconic Ruth. As early as the end of the 1971 season, as Henry assaulted the record book, the combination of journalists who pointed out that Henry’s consistency did not match Ruth’s dominance and a segment of the public that sent him death threats returned the favor.
And it was there that Henry Aaron retrenched. He had escaped Mobile. He had realized his talent, played the game hard, and yet for all of it he was being reminded that none of it mattered, that he was again reduced, in his words, to “being just another nigger.”
THERE WAS PERHAPS no better barometer that Henry was now a central figure in the national conversation than that fact that he was included in the comic strip Peanuts, Charles Schulz’s daily masterpiece.
Schulz was the most famous cartoonist in America, and more: Peanuts uniquely represented the heart of the American mainstream as well as baseball’s place in it. According to Schulz’s biography, by 1967, the strip appeared in 745 daily newspapers across the country and in 393 Sunday papers. According to United Feature Syndicate, more than half of the nation’s population made the travails of Charlie Brown part of their daily reading.
Even in the funny pages, Willie held dominion. “It’s kind of fun now and then215 to use the names of real people in my comic strip, Peanuts,” Schulz once told Mays biographer Charles Einstein. “And after looking over about twenty-five years’ accumulation of strips, I discovered that I used the name Willie Mays more than any other individual. I suppose it’s because to me, Willie Mays has always symbolized perfection.”
Yet from August 8 to August 15, 1973, Schulz featured Henry, and it was a seminal moment for each. Henry was national now, and it was widely assumed that as he continued his ascension, he could pass Ruth in 1973. As such, he had taken over some of Willie’s real estate.
Simultaneously, Willie had fallen once and for all. Though his team, the New York Mets, would advance to the World Series, Mays would play out the rest of the 1973 season hitting .211.
Schulz created a prescient story line, where Snoopy needed one home run to break Babe Ruth’s home run record while facing a hostile public. If Henry had always been handicapped by playing in markets that were a shade below prime time, Schulz, in his ubiquitous way, had elevated Henry and the politics of the chase into the mainstream discussion, while at the same time providing a clever, biting social commentary:
Snoopy [wearing a baseball cap, reading a letter on his doghouse]: “Dear Stupid, who do you think you are? If you break the Babe’s home-run record, we’ll break you! We’ll run you out of the country. We hate your kind!”
Charlie Brown: Is your hate mail causing you to lose any sleep?
Snoopy [now lying flat on his doghouse, a rising tidal wave of letters hovering high over him]: “Only when it falls on me.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
RUTH
ALL WEEK LONG, Bob Hope dreamed of naked people. In the morning, he could see them, bare feet tramping blissfully across the cool, crunchy grass, bodies flapping, arms cutting feverishly in free release through the humid air. When Hope lay down to sleep, the naked people followed into his bedroom, giggling with delight as
they ran him straight into ruin.
It was perfection that stood at the center of his anxieties, and so far, even as ulcers pierced his gut, he felt he was close to achieving it. He believed he had done everything right in managing the demands of Henry’s pursuit of Ruth, and now, following the first week of the 1974 season, Henry stood on 714 home runs, an eleven-game home stand all but guaranteeing that Bill Bartholomay’s engineering to have Henry break the record in Atlanta would pay off.
Hope had tried to provide Henry with some semblance of personal space, an oasis to ease the ordeal. Hope loved baseball so much that he was all too aware of Roger Maris—the last person to challenge Babe Ruth—and all that his team, the New York Yankees, had not done for him in 1961, when Maris would break Ruth’s single-season record of sixty home runs. With history in mind, he was determined to protect Henry. Once, during the chase, word got out that the Braves had arranged for a dying boy to meet with Henry briefly before a game. “He had leukemia.216 He was dying and he asked can he meet Hank Aaron. Well, suddenly our phone started ringing, and with every one of these calls, every kid had one disease or another,” Hope recalled. “As the pressure is growing and we’re getting faster and faster toward the record, I go to an NL meeting, and the league adopted a rule that no youngsters would be allowed in the dugout before games. I told Hank we had all these requests and now we could get out of it. I told him I could get him an extra twenty minutes. And besides, I told him that all these kids, well, most of them, aren’t sick. I can just tell them it’s against the rules. So we go back and forth and I keep telling him, ‘Hank, they aren’t sick.’ And Hank said, ‘Yes, but some of them are.’
The Last Hero Page 42