The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  SPLAT!259 IRATE AARON SMACKS

  WRITER WITH STRAWBERRIES

  “Henry was pretty hot … he told me he had never double-talked anyone…. I reminded him that he had told writers one thing before the game about wanting the Braves’ managing job and had said something else on television the same night.

  “All of a sudden he shot out with those strawberries he was holding in his hand…. I don’t know whether he hit me right or left-handed—but it was flush in the face.”

  THE TWO WORDS the writers used almost interchangeably when describing the opposite poles of Henry’s personality were dignity and bitter, the former during times when he seemed to exude uncommon patience with the world’s nuisances and injustices (which was another way of saying that Henry often let go unpunished transgressions that a more temperamental person would not have tolerated), the latter when his moods and reactions to seemingly benign situations (or worse, incidents largely of his own making) appeared to the writers incomprehensible. In later years, Henry would admit that he was not an easy man to understand, and throughout his public life he would often find himself reluctant to enter public discourse, expecting little clarity or understanding from the press, believing that any extended attempt to explain his positions would only make matters worse. The result would be a deepening gulf between the writers and Henry, each growing more suspicious of the other. In Henry’s view, the writers never understood him, did not take the time to understand him, and thus he did not trust them. To the reporters who covered him, Henry was oversensitive to slights and unaware of the power of his own words until they produced headlines. As far as they were concerned, Henry wanted to have it both ways, to be provocative but not to be criticized when his comments provoked.

  If a modern term could be used to describe Henry during this period of his life, passive-aggressive would seem the most appropriate. He enjoyed his fame, if not the constant attention, then the recognition of his position as one of the all-time great players. He accepted the spoils of his achievements as well earned, never falling into the category of athletes who called attention to themselves either by audaciousness on the field or obnoxiousness in front of the press, and he followed in the Robinson tradition of taking a public stance when he believed progress for blacks was being stalled.

  But that did not mean that Henry was always comfortable with how the baseball hierarchy viewed his worth, which, off of the field, was not as a valuable asset. He demanded that he be taken seriously for his accomplishments, and over the years he would often be caught between conflicting positions. Breaking Ruth’s record only emboldened him more. He fought with reporters during the month of July. “I’ve been saying the same things since 1963!” he would say. He took on Jesse Outlar in a wide-ranging interview, chastising him and anyone else who called Billye “militant.”

  And there was one real, unforgettable piece of evidence that Henry wasn’t the Henry of yore. Ralph Garr’s Henry could hit in a fog of controversies. But during July 1974, feeling assaulted by the papers, the front office, and isolated by a new generation, Henry hit just .212 for the month.

  In future years, the scenario would repeat itself: Henry avoiding directness, only to bristle at what he would consider a lack of respect for his stature. What he wanted, and admitted later, was inclusion—in the case of the Mathews situation, to be afforded the courtesy of being asked if he was interested in the job, based on his credentials as a player. That was how it was supposed to work. He was baseball royalty, after all. When Mathews was hired, he didn’t have to call Bartholomay and ask for the job. Bartholomay had reached out to Matthews, yet in Henry’s case, no one seemed to be reaching out.

  And he burned because he felt that was what happened when you were black, and if the ultimate goal of the Robinson mission was equal partnership, it was only natural that he be given consideration without having to apply, based on what he had done in the game. The number of players who had become managers was too great to count. Yogi Berra had been a Hall of Fame player and slid immediately into management, managing the Yankees when he was still playing in 1964. That same year, Stan Musial, without a day of experience in the front office, became general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. Henry had been playing twenty years and three of his white teammates—Mathews, Red Schoendienst, and Del Crandall—were already managing in the big leagues.

  What Henry discovered in a hard and embarrassing way was the curious dichotomy in baseball: It was easier for management to compensate black players for their talent than to promote them to the front office for their intellect. Compensating a player for what he could do on the field was the easy part. Understanding Henry Aaron’s value to a lineup took no more acumen than picking up the sports page and perusing the daily averages. A team with Henry batting fourth every day for 162 games was a better team. But adding a black player to the front office, giving him the authority to evaluate talent, to promote and demote white players, to hire and fire white personnel, well, that was a different concept altogether. Taking such a step would not provide enough of an obvious benefit to risk upsetting the order.

  And to the black players, watching Henry be treated like a beggar by upper management, despite his 725 home runs, only reinforced another long-held belief in the black baseball community: Once a black player’s career was over, opportunities beyond playing did not exist.

  HENRY KEPT HIS desire to continue playing largely a secret as the Braves fell behind the surging Dodgers and Reds. In the meantime, the Braves planned to send their legend off into the sunset. Even as late as September 25, a week before the season ended, the position of management was to “keep Henry around” in some undefined front-office capacity. The club had already determined to retain Clyde King as manager. The transition, at least from the management perspective, was supposed to be seamless. Henry would play his final game with the Braves, retire, and let the company take care of him. There had even been rumors that the organization had set him up with a $75,000-a-year job as a special assistant to Bartholomay.

  But as the final weekend approached, Henry voiced different plans. The summer had clearly hurt him, and the desire to continue playing, he finally began to admit in his own, deliberate, cryptic way, had not yet extinguished itself. For starters, he publicly stated two embarrassing pieces of information about his organization: The first was that there was no $75,000 offer on the table; in fact, there was nothing but vagaries about what Henry’s responsibilities would be when he retired; the second was that the organization had never offered him the opportunity to return to the team as a player in 1975. Henry repeated often that he did not want to “stand in the way” of the club, a passive way of reiterating that the club had not asked him back.

  So when the final game of the season approached, Henry did not say good-bye to baseball. There was no pageantry. He simply said, “I’ve played my last game in Atlanta,” which was the equivalent of taking the Braves gold watch and chucking it into the Dumpster. Henry was establishing his independence. He would play baseball in 1975, most likely in the American League as a designated hitter, maybe for the Boston Red Sox, a title contender not quite able to overcome Baltimore, or maybe he would return to Milwaukee, playing for his old pal Bud Selig and the Brewers. But he would not say good-bye to baseball, only to Atlanta.

  The ripples reverberated all the way to the front office, from a chagrined Eddie Robinson, who called the announcement “a surprise,” to an unaware and unenthused Bartholomay, who had been with Henry for years, since Milwaukee. Bartholomay shrugged his shoulders, offered a purple stare, and said acidly, “There’s no reaction from me,” then walked away. The Braves had signaled a youth movement, as Henry said often during the final two months of the season when he felt marginalized and unappreciated, and he was, it seemed, returning the favor by carving out a new path for himself, as eager to leave the Braves as the club was to look to 1975 without him. “The bottom line was that they were businessmen,” Ralph Garr said. “All of Henry’s people,260 th
e ones he grew up with in the game, his peers, they were all gone. The people who ran the club at that point didn’t have a lot of sentimentality about him.”

  October 2, Atlanta, with a sparse but enthusiastic crowd of 11,081 fans on hand to say good-bye, Henry popped out, walked, and grounded out the first three at bats of the rest of his playing life with the Braves. On the fourth, in the seventh inning against a rookie named Rawlins Jackson Eastwick III, Henry launched a vicious liner over the left field fence, the ball sizzling into the bull pen. Henry trotted around the bases, head down, and ran into the dugout, the crowd begging for a curtain call, for one last look. But Henry kept going, down the stairs of the dugout, down the tunnel, and into the clubhouse, moving, he would later say, to keep from crying. He took off the uniform and would never come back.

  AARON’S LAST HURRAH261 …

  The Hammer Slams a Homer,

  And Looks to the American League

  In the final swing of his 21st and final season with the Braves, Henry Aaron said farewell to Atlanta fans with a home run in the seventh inning….

  The Hammer said before his record 3,075 game in a Brave uniform that he would like to bow just like Ted Williams did by hitting a homer in his last time at-bat.

  Henry could have been Williams, walking away with one shining last moment. He would have been even better than Ted, and people would have deified 1974 in a way that gave Henry his own special wing in the hero worship Hall of Fame as the guy who hit a home run not only in the first at bat of his final season but also in his last. In between, he broke Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record and, just for kicks, called his home-run shot in his final at bat before the game. That was the kind of stuff people talked about for decades, the kind of legend that inspired the poets, the kind of outsized feats that synthesized the man and his numbers.

  But after the game, Henry was not full of poetry or melancholy or reflection, content on freezing his moment. He was evasive and, in the minds of some, the Atlantans who sometimes felt as underappreciated by Henry as he did by them, sarcastic. And in his own way, he was unburdened, his mind focused on the next chapter of his life, one that did not include Atlanta. “I’m hoping that was not my last one,” he said, laughing and talking with members of the Atlanta press for the final time at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium. “I might hit my last one against Cleveland, Chicago, somebody….”

  Even Wayne Minshew, who felt an uncommonly close connection to Henry, was unclear about the reason for Henry’s buoyancy and the lack of statesmanship on both sides. After all, he had played three thousand games with one organization.

  “His mood was flippant following the homer,262 however, his voice teasing,” Minshew wrote. “Nobody was sure how serious Aaron was. But it appears he is ready to part company with the Braves.”

  As had been true with the writers in Milwaukee, Henry did not have that great or lasting a relationship with any member of the Atlanta press, Minshew perhaps being the closest. But Jesse Outlar, who was not an Aaron adversary but could not be called an ally, knew he was writing for the history books. After the game, he wrote of Henry with an understanding of his weight and significance, both as a player and as a legitimizing force for baseball during his nine years in Atlanta.

  AARON’S BRILLIANCE LEAVES A MEMORY263

  The greatest Brave obviously isn’t departing on the best of terms from the only team he has ever played for.

  Ironically, Ruth ended his career with the Braves, disenchanted with the Yankees….

  Seeing Aaron take off no. 44 for the last time was a sad scene…. The long summer and the longest career had ended. You see a Henry Aaron once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky.

  For the next month, as football season raged through the South, and Henry and Billye flew to Japan for a home-run exhibition against the Japanese home-run champion Sadaharu Oh, Bud Selig and Bill Bartholomay began private negotiations in earnest. The Red Sox were in contention to trade for Henry, but no team could compete with Milwaukee.

  While Henry was in Tokyo,264 Davey May, still wrestling the cobwebs free from a season during which he had hit all of .226, called his home in Milwaukee from Chicago to check in on his wife, who immediately after picking up the phone informed her husband that he had been traded.

  “What? Where are we going?”

  “Atlanta.”

  “Atlanta?”

  “Yes. Hank Aaron is coming here.”

  “Me for Hank Aaron?” he said, then hung up the phone and repeated the exchange to Wayne Minshew. “I had to call her back to make sure I heard it right.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  AT VIRTUALLY EVERY major stage in Henry Aaron’s professional life, a familiar pattern would develop, predictable as a 3–0 fastball: He would excel on the field and somehow become wounded off of it, slowly burning at yet another personal slight. It was only after he’d walked out the door, embarking on the next chapter in his life, that he would be rediscovered, the people he’d left behind realizing, too late, that the world without him seemed just a bit emptier. The reassessment of him, in fact, would always be the same: Henry Aaron was a treasure after all. He carried himself with such dignity! And the people who wanted to celebrate him anew and be close to him and tell him how much he had touched them would always wonder why he appeared to live at a certain remove, and why he did not seem particularly overjoyed by their sudden and heartfelt acknowledgment.

  The answer, repeated by his handlers and friends, who were channeling the big man himself, was also almost always the same, resulting in maddening standoff: He wasn’t the one who’d changed…. No, he’s not bitter. He is living his life. He’s moved on. It’s not his fault you did not realize what you had. It happened in Mobile, when Henry grew to be one of the most famous, most accomplished people his home city had ever produced. It happened as a player (and later in retirement, during each anniversary of the record), when baseball would realize the depths of Henry’s substance, that he was the difference between a gorgeous fireplace and a hearty woodstove: Other guys may have shone more elegantly, but it was Henry who was the reliable one, who burned longer and brighter, the one who always produced the most reliable heat.

  So it only stood to reason that in the end, after the hugs and the kisses and the history making, leaving Atlanta would be no different from the other leave-takings. During the twenty-one-hour flight back from Japan, after the trade was announced and it was clear he was now a member of the Milwaukee Brewers American League Baseball Club—a team that did not exist until his seventeenth year in the big leagues—Henry had thought both about the significance of his return to Milwaukee and the details of his departure from the Braves franchise and, more pointedly, Atlanta. In a first interview, he gave the public a snippet of his conversation with Bud Selig.

  “I’m going home,” he’d told Selig, completely aware of the cutting double entendre. Yes, he was returning to the origins of his major-league career, and, no, Atlanta in the nine seasons he’d spent there had never quite felt like home. Privately, he was embittered, first that the Braves had seemed so dismissive of his potential as an organizational asset apart from his batting average, and, second, that they hadn’t seemed to hesitate about siccing the newspapers on him, giving the public the impression that the club had done everything it could to keep him in Atlanta, but Henry, alas, was leaving on his own accord. In retrospect, Bill Bartholomay would view Henry’s leaving265 Atlanta for Milwaukee as one of his great mistakes—perhaps his greatest in running the franchise, he would later say—but only after Henry was gone. At the time, in September 1974, trading Henry Aaron may very well have been a difficult choice for him, but there was another truth that Henry knew better than anyone else, Bill Bartholomay included: At no point did the Braves ever make an offer for him to stay.

  If there was an exception to the rule that Henry would only be appreciated over time, at the appropriate remove, it was Milwaukee. He told the reporters that he had never wanted to
leave in the first place, and though the bitterness between the Braves and the city would never be reconciled, the players only grew in stature, and Henry was now the biggest of them all. And now he was headed back.

  HE HAD REJECTED the poetic imagery, the walking away unforgettably and for good with a home run, the type of Ted Williams–style departure that would have given him a swashbuckler’s flourish. But Henry did not possess the artistic instinct to walk away, not now when he could receive something just a little more concrete, more consistent with his pragmatic nature: money. His three-year, $600,000 Braves contract completed, he signed a two-year deal with the Brewers that would pay him another $240,000 per season, and that did not include his million-dollar deal with Magnavox and other rising endorsement opportunities. His finances, once crumbling and in disrepair, were rebounding.

  In addition, he had gained something equally important to the cash, something that his home franchise, the Braves, had not even considered offering: a future. The Braves told Henry a job awaited him upon retirement, but when pressed, neither Bartholomay nor Eddie Robinson could specify exactly what Henry would be doing. He had wanted an opportunity that contained substance—a front-office job where he would be involved in the evaluation of players and the running of the franchise, yet the Braves would commit only to an ambiguous promise of “something in the organization.” Henry did not want to be trotted out only at the appropriate time—probably for some event that required the support of the black community—to shake a few hands and smile.