“So after it’s all said and done, years later I’m walking through an airport or something and a man stops me and recognizes me as being part of the Braves. He tells me that his son got to meet Hank Aaron and not long after that he died on the operating table. So you can imagine how I felt.”
Hope was convinced that he had successfully executed the virtually impossible balancing act of providing Henry privacy without alienating the throng of journalists, well-wishers, and dignitaries who wanted to be close to him.
Over the winter, he and his staff had updated a growing pamphlet chronicling Henry’s career; the booklet had now swelled to dozens of pages, opening with the words “The Greatest Sports Story in America Is Taking Place in Atlanta.” The Braves had issued daily press credentials to an average of four hundred journalists per day, forcing Hope to open the football press box at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium for the spillover. “It was,” Hope said, “like doing public relations for two teams at once: the Braves and Henry Aaron.”
Bob Hope did not fear the alleged assassins who were now attracting so much attention. Since the early part of 1972, when the mathematics of Henry hitting 715 home runs grew closer to a certainty, and his was the only name to challenge Ruth’s record, the threat of death increased. Carla Koplin served as Henry’s personal secretary and Calvin Wardlaw, an off-duty Atlanta police officer, was assigned to Henry as a personal bodyguard. As ubiquitous as his home run total were the letters he would receive from his fellow Americans, guaranteeing his death should he continue the quest.
Hope believed that so much of the talk of murdering Henry Aaron was just that, the work of a lunatic fringe just unbalanced enough to threaten anonymously and ruin Henry’s peace of mind, but not sufficiently motivated to kill. The letters Henry had received were real enough, and existed in great enough volume that Hope was not cavalier about the possibility of violence. But Hope felt that the combination of the FBI, the Atlanta police, and the two-man personal security force of Wardlaw and Lamar Harris would be sufficient to deter any maniac who may have thought his bullet could change history.
Instead, a more likely and embarrassing image continued to dominate his thinking: the sight of Henry Aaron hitting the momentous record-breaking home run, rounding first under a deafening, triumphant roar, the nation and the world’s journalists chronicling every detail of the moment by typewriter, microphone, and television camera, Ivan Allen’s dream of the country focusing its collective eyes on Atlanta for something other than the collision between blacks and whites at last realized. And then Hope could see the rest of the scene unfolding in his mind’s eye, almost in slow motion: Henry rounding second and then, there they were, a couple of streakers running onto the field, as naked as the day they were born, zigzagging away from security, probably freaked out on LSD, upstaging Henry, embarrassing the Braves, baseball, and the city of Atlanta, his perfect night lampooned for all time.
“That’s all I could think of,” Hope recalled. “Can you imagine that? You have to remember that those were the days of Morganna the Kissing Bandit and kids taking off their clothes and jumping onto the field. At that moment! We would have never, ever, lived something like that down.”
BOB HOPE WAS convinced that by virtue of his connection to Henry, who was challenging the home run record, he was party to something truly historic, especially in the South. The arc of his own personal life told him so, for a black person attaining such a valued place in American history in of itself represented the promise of dignity for black people that had not existed during his upbringing. Hope had grown up in the twin gulfs of class privilege and racial segregation, a classically southern motif, in an affluent section of Atlanta. His parents and grandparents routinely used the word nigger in their common speech, as did all of their friends. The Hope family owned a vacation home at Lake Lanier, in Forsythe County, and for years a black maid, a woman named Johnnie Lue, worked for the family. When he was a teenager, Bob Hope was constantly frustrated by one of his responsibilities, for it cut into his free time: When the family stayed at the vacation house, he was to keep track of the time, for Forsythe County was a sundown town: No blacks were allowed within county limits after dark, and the Hope family had to shuttle Johnnie Lue out of town or risk both violation of local ordinances and their standing in the eyes of their white neighbors. “When I was sixteen, I had to watch the sun because she had to be out of the county before the sun went down,” Hope recalled. “I knew it was a law, but it was a pain in the neck. It’s hard to fathom that there was a time when these things were considered normal.”
When he was a teenager on the football team at Northside High School in Atlanta, his coach explained to the team why Northside never played the local black high school, even though the schools were but a few miles apart.
“Clearly, growing up in the South, if you were white, you didn’t have an opportunity to be around blacks. I went to high school and graduated before they had integrated sports. We had only two blacks at our school,” he recalled.
“It wasn’t like you had anything against them, but you hadn’t affiliated with them, either. My parents and grandparents still used the N word. The white South didn’t understand the black South. The black South was still a novelty. You didn’t go to the same places. You heard about the colored water fountains. When I was a kid, I thought ‘colored water’ meant that the water was a different color, and as a kid, you wanted to drink the colored water. Then you learned the Negroes were segregated. You read the newspapers and you realized that Martin Luther King, Jr., was there. You understood what they were marching for was fair, but you didn’t understand the full magnitude of what was going on.”
When Hope attended Georgia State College, just ten years earlier, the law prohibited blacks and whites from competing together in the major college conference in the region, the Southeastern Conference, in either basketball or football, and now Henry was about to break a record considered unassailable, set during the tail end of the most aggressive period of segregation since Reconstruction. That the home-run record had been established at a time when blacks were not allowed to play in the major leagues carried its own degree of meaning. It was as if breaking the record would signify the hard-won fall of another barrier in the struggle for acceptance, proof of the illegitimacy of keeping blacks out of the game in the first place, proof of all that could have been possible years earlier. Henry identified with the words of Buck O’Neil, the Negro league player and manager who had never been granted the opportunity to test his skills against the great white players in the major leagues but would become the first black scout in the major leagues, discovering Ernie Banks and Lou Brock for the Chicago Cubs. “Just give us the chance,”217 O’Neil often said, “and we’ll do the rest.”
PUBLICLY, HENRY ADOPTED a typically American position. He was just another in a line of kids who in this country could grow up to be anything, do anything, if they put their mind to it, he said. It was a convenient path to follow, because it made America feel good about itself and its possibilities. Henry appeared grateful and not resentful that the opportunity for blacks had been so long in coming. On March 20, 1974, an article under Henry’s byline appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser, with Henry writing, “The Babe is a legend now. He created more excitement than any player who ever lived.
“What I find so hard to believe is that Hank Aaron, a nobody from Mobile, Alabama is the first player in 40 years to challenge that home-run record. How did it come about?”
What was clearer than the myth America liked to tell itself was how breaking the record would represent the fall of another domino in the acceptance of black athletes in professional sports, and the speed at which the old rules were being rewritten by force of time and personality. Robinson destroyed the belief that blacks weren’t talented or disciplined enough to compete alongside and against whites. Ali changed the way the black athlete could express himself to the public. By challenging the all-time home-run record, Henry represented a third fro
nt: the black athlete at the top of a team sport who would break a record held by a transcendent white athlete.
By 1974, Bill Russell had been retired five years. He had won eleven NBA championships and become the first black head coach in mainstream American professional team sports, winning two championships as a player-coach. Wilt Chamberlain had statistically dominated his sport as no athlete since Ruth. Jim Brown retired as the all-time leading rusher, but in becoming the most prolific runner in his sport, Brown accumulated only numbers. He did not surpass a player who held the public imagination in a way that rivaled Ruth. In basketball, Chamberlain was every bit as dominant as Ruth in baseball, but basketball, if not exactly a fringe sport, did not define any substantial portion of America, nor did the sport’s records. Who was the all-time leading scorer in NBA history before Chamberlain was a trivia question hardly even basketball fans knew the answer to.
Apart from Ruth, the sports icon with whom white America most closely identified may have been Jack Dempsey, the richest, most popular heavyweight champion of his day, and Dempsey would not fight black challengers. Joe Louis beat Jim Braddock, thereby winning the heavyweight title, but he and Jesse Owens made their initial mark nationalistically, as Americans, defeating Germans, not other Americans, for even though Louis beat the American Braddock to win the title, it would be his knockout of Max Schmeling that catapulted him into the American conscience, the symbol of American values at a time when the world faced its own larger questions of morality. Preparing to attend the first game of the Braves home stand against the Dodgers in hopes that Henry would break the record was the Georgia governor and future president, Jimmy Carter. Carter had already contributed to the anticipated celebration of Henry’s victory by announcing an executive order: The state’s prisoners would get right to work on a new commemorative state license plate that would read HENRY—715. Carter remembered that night in 1938 when Louis beat Schmeling and won the title, and he at once understood the deep roots of white superiority toward blacks, and by extension, this illustrated to him how Henry’s surpassing Ruth would seem even more offensive to the white sense of superiority than Schmeling’s losing to Louis.
Carter recalled how the whites along the dirt roads of Plains, Georgia, had rooted for Schmeling, and he could remember the roars of the black citizens down the street when Louis destroyed Schmeling in the first round. “For our community,218 this fight had heavy racial overtones, with almost unanimous support at our all-white school for the European over the American,” Carter wrote in his book An Hour Before Daylight. “A delegation of our black neighbors came to ask Daddy if they could listen to the broadcast, and we put the radio in the window so the assembled crowd in the yard could hear it. The fight ended abruptly, in the first round, with Louis almost killing Schmeling. There was no sound from outside—or inside—the house. We heard a quiet ‘Thank you, Mr. Earl,’ and then our visitors walked silently out of the yard, crossed the road and the railroad tracks, entered the tenant houses, and closed the door. Then all hell broke loose, and their celebration lasted all night long. Daddy was tight-lipped, but all the mores of our segregated society had been honored.”
Babe Ruth had held the all-time home record not for forty years, as Henry and most of America had once believed, but considerably longer. While it was true that Ruth retired in 1935 with 714 home runs, he had actually taken over the major-league lead in his eighth year in the big leagues, in 1921, when he hit his 139th homer. His record actually stood for fifty-three years. When Ruth hit his final home run in 1935, he had merely piled on his own record, as he had for fourteen years. Like Jimmy Carter, Bob Hope also felt a certain swell219 of civic pride that baseball history was going to be made, in Atlanta of all places, and, like Carter, he believed that even something as ephemeral as a sports team had contributed to the rehabilitation of their city. And that meant that despite the discomfort, the problems, the history, and the countless number of instances when it appeared that change was a dreamer’s word, life in the South had actually changed dramatically. A year earlier, in 1973, Maynard Jackson, a proud descendant of one of Atlanta’s most venerable black political families, the Dobbs family, was elected mayor. Carter recalled that in the years before he became president, a generation of white liberal politicians had quietly played a historic role in toppling the old order.
THE RECORD WAS going to be broken on his watch, Bob Hope thought, and on whatever night it occurred, it had to be a moment that would be remembered for all the right reasons. The first game of the home stand, Monday night, April 8, against the Los Angeles Dodgers, would be the first test of Bob Hope’s expectations and preparations. Henry’s father, Herbert, would throw out the first ball. Maynard Jackson and Jimmy Carter would be there. The team had arranged for Pearl Bailey, one of Henry’s favorite vocalists, to sing the national anthem. The actor Sammy Davis, Jr., who had been periodically involved in trying to put together a movie deal for a biopic of Henry’s life, would try to attend. Everything would be perfect. Hope believed that the night the record fell was not going to be just something that baseball fans remembered but that it would be a demarcating line in American history, another seminal moment signaling that whatever America was, it would no longer be from that day forward. That was why the naked people frightened him so much. They were the unpredictable variable. They were the one thing that could turn a seminal moment in America into a sideshow.
THE ENTIRE WINTER reminded Henry of what he wasn’t able to do in 1973. On September 1, Henry stood at 706 home runs. There was nothing else to that season for the Braves, who epitomized the word mediocre. They had reached the .500 mark just once during those 162 games, when Henry broke a 1–1 tie in the sixth on April 12 in San Diego with career home run number 675, this one off willowy left-hander Fred Norman. The Braves won the game 3–2 and their record was 3–3, after which they would lose seven straight, and by that time, the competitive portion of the season was effectively over. The rest of the year was focused more on Henry and Calvin Wardlaw and Carla Koplin and hate mail than on winning the National League West flag.
At certain points, his stoicism would lapse, and Henry would then reveal just how sick of it all he had gotten. In the great pantheon of the game, only Ruth had hit seven hundred home runs, and during the challenge march came another drumbeat: There was only one Ruth. Baseball people, the crusty old-timers like Bob Broeg in St. Louis, made a point that Henry may have produced numbers but that Ruth was bigger than the game, the universe, life itself. Henry had played more games than Ruth, had come to bat a gazillion more times, and would have had to hit 250 homers in a season to outhomer every team in the league, as Ruth had done in 1921, and therefore Henry was not the man Ruth was. The comparisons were endless, and to Henry, they were insidious in their obvious insinuations that he was not worthy of the record.
The exact date Henry’s imperturbability seemed closest to cracking was July 17, 1973. Nine days earlier, at Shea, he had single-handedly trashed the Mets—two for three, two homers—crushing the big left-hander George Stone. Stone was built like a house, six-three and 210 pounds. He and Henry had been teammates for six years in Atlanta, but now George was a Met, and Henry took him over the fence in the fourth and then again in the sixth. On the thirteenth, Bill Stoneman, the Montreal pitcher, threw Henry a mistake with two on in the fifth in Atlanta for a three-run homer and home run number 697.
On the seventeenth, against Philly, Dusty Baker, as only he and Garr could, cornered Henry in the dugout to try to pull him out of the darkness with humor. He hadn’t homered in five days and had grown weary of the constant cosmic question of when he would hit number seven hundred. He was tense, annoyed, and exasperated, but he hadn’t snapped. Baker saw that Henry walked around the clubhouse as if he were wearing a beauty mask, trying hard not to move a single muscle in his face. Baker angled up to Henry, holding the knob of the bat as a microphone, imitating Howard Cosell. “Hank, what do you have to do to hit seven hundred home runs?” he asked.
On this day, even Baker couldn’t rescue Henry. He had not come this close to cracking since he blew up at Milo Hamilton years earlier, a confrontation so involved that Bartholomay and the front office had to broker a peace treaty. But now, Henry was having a Roger Maris moment, Ralph Garr thought. Once, in 1961, when asked one time too many if he believed he could break Ruth’s single-season home-run record, Maris finally cracked, responding in a group interview session, “How the fuck should I know?”
But even on the edge, Henry did not break. He composed and steeled himself. There had been weaker, despairing moments, like the time the writers had at last left his locker after a home game and he turned to Bob Hope and pleaded softly to be left alone. “I just want to play baseball. That’s it.” Hope realized that Henry began to tear up; he was talking more to himself than to Hope.
At this moment, Henry looked at Baker, one of his protégés, gave a wan smile, and said before walking away, “How? Hit three more home runs. That’s how.”
Hours later, up 6–1 on the Mets in the sixth, Henry belted a Tug McGraw meatball into the left-center bull pen. Three days later against the Phillies, facing Wayne Lee Twitchell, another man-mountain at six-six, 220 pounds, Henry stepped in, down 5–0, with one out in the seventh, and cranked another; this one glanced off the BankAmericard sign in left-center field. The next day, the steamy Saturday afternoon of July 21, Ken Brett, with one on in the third, threw a weak fastball that Henry crunched into the seats in left, over the bull pen, and seven hundred was complete. The Braves immediately painted the seat red to commemorate the moment.
The Last Hero Page 43