The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  Henry rounded second and, seemingly out of nowhere, two fans appeared and escorted him between the bases. At third, Ron Cey saw the two kids racing toward Henry and thought for a second that this was it: They might attack him.

  “Well, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do242 when it happened. But it became clear what I was going to do when he came around, and two kids had run onto the field—I was going to stay clear of it,” Cey recalled. “If he’d been running solo, I probably would have shaken his hand, but the other part of it was that this was really his moment, and you know, he should kind of walk alone.”

  Having grown up in socially segregated Tacoma, Washington, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in a sense Cey was vindicated. He had always believed that sport, at its best, could be the great antidote for the American divide.

  “I grew up playing sports, so I always had a relationship of playing with black kids throughout all the amateur sports: football, basketball, baseball. You know, it wasn’t an issue. We grew up playing each other,” Cey recalled. “I think sports, in a way, has a way of breaking down those issues. We’re all trying to do something that involves a common bond. We’re just making the best of it and trying to win. It [his neighborhood] was pretty segregated back then. There was a part of the town where black kids went to school. But it was a normal, everyday, middle-class place to be. There was a certain boys club downtown that was predominately black that I frequented because of my relationships with some of these players, and we didn’t have any issues. This was where sports would bring you together. It’s not like we all signed up on the same team to play. Somebody drafted us and we made our way to the big-league club. These were the best players. These were the players who were going to be part of our future, and when you take the field, you’re all working for the same thing. If you’re on a different page than that, you really shouldn’t be there.”

  In the crowd, the two kids were racing toward Henry, and Calvin Wardlaw stood, flinching, and considered reaching for his pistol, which rested in his binocular case. A few feet away, Davey Lopes didn’t even see them. “I always wondered,243 Where the hell did they come from?” he recalled.

  Within milliseconds, it was clear the two fans had come in peace. Henry gently nudged the two kids aside as he headed toward home plate, where the home run would be official and the chase finally over. Both Britt Gaston and Cliff Courtney were students at the University of Georgia. Both would be arrested, the charge on the report alleging the two “ran onto ballfield during ballgame and interrupted ballgame.” Henry would lend his name to the list of those who wanted the charges against the two kids dropped. Among those in Henry’s inner circle, the running gallows joke for years would be that the smartest decision of the evening was Calvin Wardlaw’s electing to leave his gun in his binocular case.

  TOM HOUSE considers himself244 a “real low-end guy,” “happy for every day” he gets to spend in the big leagues. He watched the flight of the ball and Bill Buckner climbing the fence in an attempt to put his pregame calisthenics to use. “My God, he’s gonna catch it,” House blurted out. The ball was beyond Buckner’s reach. House threw a triumphant fist in the air. Jimmy Wynn took his glove off and began to clap.

  This was the first year House had made a big-league club out of spring training without the immediate fear of being sent down. He was aware of his place in the big-league hierarchy, an environment where batting averages, strikeout totals, and earned-run averages might as well have been printed on everyone’s forehead. He had noticed that during the day-to-day activities, Henry stood at a bit of a distance. In House’s words, that was “because he’s Hank Aaron.” He said that he was “thrilled” that Henry even knew he was alive. “He was unfailingly kind. I didn’t really understand the social IQ and the things he was going through, but you would never have known,” House recalled. “He called me ‘Tommy’ and he was the same all the time—same way, same demeanor. A whole lot people were pulling for him and pulling against him, but you would never have known. I remember thinking that this guy was probably the most underrated superstar in the world. He was unbelievably civil, from the clubhouse kids to my tier of athlete all the way to the top. He was a pleasure to be around.”

  House had had visions not dissimilar to those of Joe Shirley, the Braves security man. “I had visions of a little old lady getting stomped by a Georgia Tech football player.” But the most important baseball in the world was speeding toward him. His friend and bull-pen mate, Buzz Capra, was boxing him out to negotiate a better angle and wound up pushing House closer to the ball. House recalled what he realized at that moment: “If I don’t catch it, the stitches will hit me right in the forehead.”

  House caught the ball and sprinted toward the infield, where Henry was being mobbed at home plate. Stella had him in a mother’s embrace, a physical expression of exhalation. “He’s hugging his mom and he’s got a crocodile tear, and I’m thinking, Holy crap. Hank Aaron has a tear in his eye and he’s hugging his mom. It’s a Life Saver moment. The fact that Hank Aaron had tears in his eyes shook me more than anything,” House recalled. “Then I find out a few days later from Dusty that she held him so tight to prevent anyone from shooting him. Here were a mom and a son sharing the ultimate moment in baseball, a Little League family moment in a way that nobody else would understand. But what sticks in my mind was that the tear was that he might have been happy that it was over, and the rest of the world would have killed to be in his shoes.”

  THE MIRROR WAS held up to America and there were the white men who did not flinch at the discomforts of the divide. They were the ones whom, back in the 1920s and 1930s, Ed Scott used to call “the good ones”: whites who saw America’s racial odyssey in all of its complexities and hypocrisies, and who understood its true cost and how much all of the people who called themselves Americans, and not just the blacks, had been diminished. Mike Marshall was one of those men. “He showed that it could happen.245 He showed all the nonsense about black people not being smart enough to be quarterbacks or as good as Babe Ruth,” Marshall said. “Talent comes in all hues. That’s what he did.” Marshall was sitting in the dugout when Henry’s ball jetted over the infield to its final destination.

  “I grew up in a small town in Michigan, a farm town. It was long before the big numbers of Latinos moved in. Our farm wasn’t big enough, so we didn’t have crops that needed to be picked. I played in Selma and Chattanooga and Montgomery. I remember the different bathrooms and drinking fountains and places where you could sit and where you couldn’t, and I remember thinking we’re all the same people. How can these people be so far behind?” When Marshall suffered through difficulties in baseball, his friendship with Ronnie Woods, an outfielder Marshall met when the two were with Detroit in the mid-1960s, sustained him. The two became teammates in the big leagues in Montreal in 1972.

  “Back then, even in the early 1970s, there wasn’t a lot of interracial rooming. I think I was the first guy on the Expos with a black roommate, but I didn’t care. His friendship made playing baseball a lot easier.”

  The game was stopped for eleven minutes, and Henry was too weary to be eloquent. Honesty without flourish was all he could offer. There was no joy contained in his drained face, no desire to bask in his own afterglow. His words were not reflective or introspective or prescient, nor, upon reflecting upon this evening, would they ever be. “I just thank God,” Henry said, “that it’s all over with.” For the next thirty-five years, Henry Aaron would not waver from this position. In San Diego, Cito Gaston heard Henry had broken the record and felt tears well up. “I was just proud.246 That was all I felt—pride. And years later, when I had read about how much the record hurt and how a lot of that hurt never went away, I just thought to myself, What would life be like without so much discrimination?”

  THE GAME RESUMED, and Dusty Baker was amazed at how quickly the sellout crowd disappeared. “There were about fifty-five thousand people247 there for the record, and about ten thousand people left
after it was over,” Baker recalled.

  In center field, Jimmy Wynn had an uncontrollable urge to speak to Henry. Players on opposing teams were discouraged from fraternizing back then, but this moment was bigger than silly rules.

  “My thing was, It’s over with.248 Now Hank can lead a comfortable life,” Wynn recalled. “I kind of paused, and then told myself, The hell with it. I’m going to shake his hand. I’m going to treat this man with respect. I shook his hand and I was glad I did. You could see what the whole thing did to him. He could have said, ‘I did it. I am the number-one home-run hitter of all time,’ and should have been happy about it and should have enjoyed it. But you know what? He never did.”

  The Braves closed the clubhouse for an hour after the game and celebrated the moment as a team. There were plans for celebrations throughout the baseball world whenever Hank Aaron came to town, for the first time as the all-time leader in home runs. When the doors to the Braves clubhouse opened, Henry shook a few hands and offered a few words to the writers, the most telling to Wayne Minshew. “All he said was,249 ‘I’m going home now,’” Minshew said. “That was it. ‘I’m going home.’”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MORTAL

  ON APRIL 8, the record-breaking home run had been Henry’s only hit in three at bats. In his first three games of the season, he’d hit two home runs, and then came the swings and the misses, and, following them, the embarrassed looks, the pity, and the doubts. The night after Henry broke the record, a kid named Tommy John collared him zero for four. So did Andy Messersmith, Clay Kirby, and Randy Jones, the future winner of the Cy Young Award, who at that time couldn’t get anyone out. Jones would lose twenty-two games for San Diego in 1974. Over the first sixteen at bats after hitting 715, Henry produced exactly one hit, home run number 716, off the Dodger knuckleballer Charlie Hough. His batting average was .179.

  With each weak swing against a weaker opponent, Garr and Baker looked at Henry, and you could see the hurt in their eyes. Nobody wanted to suggest that Supe, of all people, could no longer get around on a fastball. It was one thing to accept on an intellectual level that eventually baseball would get all of them, that even the immortals would inevitably sag and succumb as the calendar flipped forward. But it was quite another to see the Hammer getting beaten inside by a ham-and-egg fastball, needing a two-hit game, as he did April 21 in Houston, to get his average over .200. As the sun set, Henry fell deeper into himself. He was in the lineup less, playing left field now (Garr was the everyday right fielder), producing a running commentary of rejuvenation and avoidance, of willpower and resignation. “The problem is,250 when you’ve pounded baseballs for twenty years, it takes a lot of convincing to make you believe you can’t do it anymore,” Henry would reflect years later in his autobiography, I Had a Hammer. “I didn’t believe it yet.”

  Henry did his best not to let on that he was spending more of his time in the company of doubt. “You have to understand that we looked up to him251 so much,” Garr said. “Sure, there were pitches that he wasn’t getting anymore. He was definitely missing a few, but that was what made him great to me. If you came around looking for someone to cry, you came looking for the wrong man.”

  THE RECORD NOW broken, the easier it became for the Atlanta front office to reach the inevitable, hard assessment that Henry Aaron could no longer play. The record belonged to him and his name could never again be mentioned without the accompanying appositive, Hank Aaron, Home Run King, but Henry was also something far less regal: a forty-year-old outfielder making $200,000 a year, a player who was a full nine years older than Davey Johnson, the next-oldest position regular on the club. He was a player for whom—at least while wearing a baseball uniform—the past held far more glory than the future. The physical traits, certainly, were still apparent and they still gave Aaron watchers a nostalgic tingle: Henry resting on one knee in the on-deck circle, sometimes holding two bats to limber up, walking slowly to the plate, batting helmet in his right hand, Del Crandall–model bat dragging along behind him, leaving a caterpillar’s trail. He still stepped into the batter’s box as he always had, adjusting his helmet and scooping up a cupful of dirt (even in 1974, when the modern kids wore wristbands and sometimes two gloves, Henry did not wear even a single batting glove), as always his hitting prefaced by that deep, majestic clearing of the throat, an operatic harbinger. The routines were familiar and, in many ways, even more poignant as they yellowed.

  It was his consistency that had always left his contemporaries in so much awe, how he could always hit, regardless of the circumstances, and his ability to dial it up against the best fastballs, adjust to the sharpest curves. That was what was missing right now. “With Henry Aaron, it didn’t matter,”252 Ralph Garr reflected. “He could have just come back from a funeral and you wouldn’t know. You never knew what was weighing on his mind, what his mood was. You wouldn’t know, because his approach was always the same to hitting. Nobody ever had that kind of concentration. If he had problems at home, you’d never know. You couldn’t do anything to break him of his plan.” Garr used to watch Henry’s computerized mind dissect a pitcher’s patterns while he sat in the dugout waiting his turn. He could be in the tunnel smoking a butt and yet he knew that he could apply the snippet of information he’d gleaned when it came his time to hit. The macho guys trying to establish themselves, guys like Kirby and Billingham, might start him out with a fastball away, a curveball in, then try to finish him with the one pitch Henry would never completely master, the slider away. Starting Henry off the plate meant that a pitcher believed he had his good stuff and could come in hard with a fastball, but only when absolutely necessary. When a pitcher started him off with a fastball in, well, that was just a show-me pitch, because unless your last named happened to be Gibson or Koufax, you didn’t dare try to come inside twice on Henry in the same at bat. Gibson never gave you a chance to guess whether or not he had it on a given day, so Henry knew never to look for anything but hard and inside, and then adjust. Approaching Gibson any other way was just asking for it, for the last thing Bob Gibson would do was show weakness to a hitter, even if it meant throwing a substandard (by Gibson’s measure) fastball in a dangerous location to a dangerous hitter. Against the rest of the league, Henry had the pitching sequences against him so perfectly memorized that Garr would sit back with delight and watch the guy on the mound take his inevitable pounding at the hands of the master.

  The difference now was that Henry possessed the knowledge but was not producing the results, and day after day, the great man lunged where he once strode. The swagger remained intact, but now it was accompanied by fewer hits. The vaunted wrists were still plenty quick enough—until the day he walked off the field for good, nobody would easily strike out Henry Aaron—but instead of providing the gunpowder, the wrists now provided only protection, keeping him from striking out. There were times when the kids, with their hormones and muscles, would fire a fastball past Henry early in the game, thinking time had gotten the better of him. And then there he’d be, watching the fastball, sensing its movement, just as always, as some young catcher sat back, self-satisfied, waiting to watch the ball zip past the old man once more in a rush of hot air … only then, the wrists would spark to life, and the old baseball men, the scouts, with their Cadillacs and suspenders and their round bellies, their pens and pads and charts (in a few years, they’d be carrying radar guns, too), sitting behind the backstop would give one another that wry, wrinkly nod. That’s Henry for you. He’s still got it. And they would dig deep into their endless bags of folklore and chuckle. You got to get up early in the morning to sneak a fastball by ole Henry Aaron…. And it was right there, at that hundredth of a second in time—that unit of measure for the millionth percentiles that differentiated Mount Olympus from Cooperstown—when the universe, once so predictable, flew completely off of its axis. Once, there had been that automatic thunderclap. Now, when Henry swung, the baseball would just slide weakly off of the barrel of his bat and ricochet
backward into the netting, and Henry would turn and watch the ball sail foul, poker-faced, trying to ignore the doubt. The next night, he might be beautiful again, slashing through the zone, doubles one-hopping deadly off the base of the outfield wall. And on the very next night, an average fastball might catch the bottom of his bat and trickle harmlessly toward the third-base dugout, coughing up chalk as it spun along, giving life to more whispers. And his guts would churn, because he knew better than anybody that those were the pitches that through two wars and five presidents had routinely gotten tattooed. The wrists were no longer sparking fires, no longer doing the executioner’s work. Once they’d been torpedoes, but now the legendary wrists of the great Henry Aaron were just life preservers, prolonging hopeless at bats for one more pitch.

  HE WAS STILL Henry Aaron. That was why Eddie Mathews batted him fourth the whole season, the same spot he had hit since the Korean War. Whatever changes Mathews might have made to the lineup, he didn’t mess with one spot: When Henry played, he batted cleanup, which, whatever evidence to the contrary, made life feel normal. He fought time, even as he increasingly lost the battle. Every now and again, the old Henry would rise.