WAITING FIVE YEARS to be immortalized is, usually, easy-chair living. The endorsements begin to line up, almost as quickly as the various and lucrative offers to serve on this board or that charity, but from retirement in 1976 to his Hall of Fame induction in 1982, tranquillity and Henry did not spend much time together. Henry would find himself in a drift. He would always draw a paycheck from baseball, and during this period he began to make business connections that would serve him for the next three and a half decades. Yet he spoke of himself as intellectually and emotionally unsatisfied, searching for that greater purpose, in constant conflict about finding that proper balance of activism, expressing his opinion when and where it was most needed. He would often reiterate that he wanted to belong in the world of baseball, but despite his accomplishments as a player, finding his place after retirement was a challenge that proved difficult.
He would say with great frequency that he wanted baseball to be “one chapter of his life, not the entire story,” and yet even as this vision crystallized, Henry was unsure exactly of what that meant in actual practice.
As the 1976 season ended, Henry had resolved to return to Atlanta. In a sense, he had it right: There’s no going back. Milwaukee would never lose its emotional and personal appeal, its place in his story, but he was no longer a kid. Atlanta, for all of its seeming ambivalence toward him and baseball in general—the city would always be a notoriously poor draw, even during the years the Braves fielded a championship-caliber team—was now his home.
The real reason the promise of Milwaukee did not materialize as he had expected had less to do with nostalgia and longing and more to do with business. When he retired, promises were made, gifts exchanged, but the reality never quite matched the handshake. Bud Selig was somewhat vague about Henry’s place in the organization, though without the bitter edge that poisoned Henry’s final days in Atlanta.
There was talk about managing the Brewers, talk that intensified after Del Crandall was fired. In later years, both Henry and Bud Selig would say they had “discussed” the idea of Henry’s becoming a manager, but the truth was that Henry was as noncommittal about managing as Selig was about making him a hard offer to take over the club. The beer-distributorship offer fell through, too, not that Miller failed to keep its word in taking care of Henry. Instead, Henry did not particularly care for the fine print attached to the deal: He could have the distributorship, but he would have to put up some of his own money: a million dollars’ worth.
And the matter of what territories Henry would oversee—possibly Baltimore or Cincinnati, possibly elsewhere—was equally ambiguous. He was a big name, national news, but one was an American League city and the other had no great relationship with him. He had been burned in business during his first decade in Atlanta, and it took years for him to recover financially. He thanked Selig for his time, and the lifetime deal never took place.
At the same time, the Braves had made subtle overtures to Henry during the waning months of 1976, raising the possibility that he might return to the Braves following his retirement, overtures that took on a certain intensity following Bartholomay’s sale of the club to Ted Turner.
Turner was many things—bombastic, erratic, eccentric, brilliant, visionary—but he wasn’t part of the staid baseball establishment. He was not a member of the old-school club, whose members used the veneer of tradition to maintain their curmudgeonly positions of authority and, by extension, to keep the players in their place. That alone made Turner an immediate threat to the old guard. He was a businessman who could see further and wider than most anyone else in the media or baseball and he understood immediately the value of Henry Aaron. Already a millionaire at thirty-four, Turner had purchased WTCG-17 in 1974. A year later, after gaining permission from the Federal Communications Commission to broadcast nationally via satellite to a nascent cable-television viewership, Turner recognized the power and utility of sports as a programming tool. He purchased the Braves the following year and Turner had immediately thwarted baseball’s rigid structure—especially its tight rules on broadcasting rights—as his cable station, renamed TBS, broadcast the Atlanta Braves in every television market in the country. And there was nothing baseball could do about it.
If one thing was clear about baseball, it was how tightly controlled the job market was. Henry himself had complained about baseball’s culture of retreads, of how difficult it was to get new blood into the pipeline for managing and front-office jobs. Turner was a starting fresh, and as such, the old prejudices and baseball customs did not always exist around him. He had already hired Bill Lucas, Barbara Aaron’s brother and Henry’s ex–brother-in-law, to be the team’s general manager.
“Bill was farm director when I promoted him279 to GM,” Turner recalled. “And then I find out later that he was the first black person in baseball to be a general manager. Then I find out that he was the first black person in any sport to be a GM. When I see a person, I don’t see color. I wasn’t looking for points with the civil rights movement. It just didn’t seem to be out of the ordinary.”
Turner was bigger than life. He had no time for baseball’s silly little conventions, and for Henry, that meant an opportunity. What Henry was not completely aware of was the opposition to his returning to the Braves, especially in a front-office capacity. It explained why the club had been so willing to let him go following the 1974 season. There were some men, like Dan Donahue, the Braves chief operating officer, who viewed Henry only as a hitter, not as a person who could contribute to the front office. He was a former player, and former players belonged on the field, or on their fishing boats. Superstar ex-players were even less complicated: They were given no-show jobs or jobs as spring-training instructors, an easy way to titillate the fans and keep a famous name around while the person was drawing a paycheck. In other words, Henry should have been content with the job of being Henry Aaron—leave the heavy lifting to the professionals.
But when Henry and Turner discussed Henry’s return to Atlanta, it was with a real job, with an actual title and responsibilities. As Turner recalled, he asked Henry what jobs he was interested in, and Henry told him farm director because it was a position that required talent evaluation.
“When I bought the team, naturally I wanted Henry. It was the right thing to do because he was so important to the Braves,” Turner recalled. “I asked him what he wanted to do and he told me he wanted to be farm director because that was a job with some teeth. I didn’t worry about whether he could do the job. I didn’t know very much about baseball when I came in. If I could go from nonbaseball person to owner, he could go from baseball player to the front office. After all, it’s not rocket science we’re talking about here.”
Home run no. 703. By nature, Henry did not offer entry into his inner circle. The exception was Dusty Baker (number 12), whom Henry adopted as a mentee, just as Bill Bruton had done with him years before. Davey Johnson is standing behind Baker.
With Rev. Jesse Jackson during the height of the home-run chase
By 1973, Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts was appearing in nearly a thousand newspapers nationwide. Perhaps no other individual was as adept at capturing the country’s attitude. As Henry approached Ruth, Schulz inserted him into the strip during the week of Aug. 10–17, 1973, solidifying his place at the center of the national conversation.
With his second wife, Billye, and Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, on April 8, 1974, hours before he broke Babe Ruth’s thirty-nine-year-old home-run record. Carter would say that Henry Aaron “did as much to legitimize the South as any of us.”
Henry at the summit. Widely considered the greatest moment in the history of the game, April 8, 1974, the night Henry broke Babe Ruth’s record, would hold only bittersweet moments for him. He would not talk often about that night or reflect easily. “What should have been the best time of my life was the worst, all because I was a black man. Something was taken from me I’ve never gotten back.”
Outgoing and gregarious
, Tommie Aaron (right) joined the Braves in 1962. No other teammate could bring out the lighter side in Henry like his younger brother. Tommie had been forecast as one of baseball’s first African American managers in the major leagues, until leukemia ended his life in 1984.
Henry Aaron said he would never be one of those players who hung on past his prime, yet in two years with Milwaukee he hit .232, with 22 home runs and 95 RBIs. “There’s something magical about going back to the place where it all began … Everybody wants to turn back the clock. But I discovered the same thing that Ruth, Hornsby, and Mays did: you can’t do it.”
Henry, in his final year in the big leagues, with Willie Mays, then a coach with the New York Mets, at an exhibition game. The two held a fierce rivalry as players, but in the next chapter of their lives Henry would escape the shadow of Mays with significant successes in the business and philanthropic worlds.
Henry and Billye in front of his plaque at the Hall of Fame. Henry Aaron and the Hall of Fame did not enjoy an easy relationship. Following his induction in 1982, he would return exactly once over the next sixteen years. Only a greater appreciation of his skills and depth by a new administration healed the wounds.
Henry had always considered himself a mama’s boy, but while his features resembled those of his mother, Stella, his unpretentious approach to work was a paternal trait that would forever define the son.
Despite his accomplishments, Henry Aaron never wanted to be defined by baseball. “I want it,” he said, “to be a part of my life, not the whole thing.” It was his friendship with President Bill Clinton that began to elevate him from baseball great to American icon.
In June 2002, Henry flew to San Francisco to celebrate Barry Bonds’s 600th home run. The two had been cordial in the past, even friendly, but the growing scrutiny over Bonds’s use of performance-enhancing drugs in pursuit of the all-time home-run record forever strained the relationship.
For thirty-three years, Henry Aaron stood alone at the top of baseball’s all-time home-run record. On August 7, 2007, Bonds replaced him at the top of the numerical list, but not the emotional. “Bonds may have the record,” Reggie Jackson said, “but people still believe in Henry. He’s the people’s home-run champion.”
For much of his public life, Henry had been considered distant, brooding, and embittered, but it was his bursting smile, generosity, and dry wit—a side of him suffocated by the demands of fame and his discomfort with celebrity—that his inner circle of friends recalled fondly.
Henry Aaron
With that, Henry rejoined the Braves, but it likely would not have happened without Ted Turner. Henry, Turner told him, would have a job for life with the Braves. Henry’s official position was director of minor-league personnel. He would oversee the 125 players the Braves farmed out through the five clubs, from A ball to Triple-A. He would be paid fifty thousand dollars annually. Five years after Jackie Robinson’s death, Henry became the first black ex–major-league player making front-office player-personnel decisions for a major-league club.
Paul Snyder worked closely with Henry during those years as director of minor-league personnel. Snyder recalled that early on he sensed a certain tension between them, now that he was Henry’s peer. Henry, Snyder believed, understood that there were those within the Braves management who did not want him to have the job and thus were interested in undermining his success. Henry responded by being outwardly withdrawn—which is to say, polite but distant.
“We were sitting back in our conference room280 in our old stadium, at Fulton County. I was sitting straight across from him. He was being a little bit distant to me,” Snyder recalled. “I assured him I didn’t want his job. I had a job. I was strictly trying to help him. I was trying to make the best decisions for him and for the Braves. I had a department to run. We weren’t spending a lot of money on scouting, so we had to make the most of our decisions.
“From that day forward, I felt better. Inside of that first year, he was still trying to figure out who was on his side and who wasn’t. I was a minor leaguer. He didn’t have to worry about me.”
FOR A SHORT time, Henry seemed to embody the next stage of the Robinson mission. In addition to him, there was Bill Lucas, who was the Braves general manager. Lucas and Henry were not always on the best terms after the divorce, and Henry would admit that the relationship could be tense at times, but they maintained a mutual and professional respect. Meanwhile, Henry’s sister Alfredia had married David Scott, a rising member of the Georgia House of Representatives.
Not only was Lucas an executive; he had begun to create opportunities for others to have upper-management positions. Though Bill Lucas and Henry were no longer connected by marriage, they had known each other since Bill was a freshman in college in early 1953 at Florida A&M. After that, Lucas was a Braves prospect, until, during a minor-league game, he attempted to beat out an infield hit and crashed into the first baseman. Lucas blew out his knee and his career ended.
Then, in 1979, while watching a Braves game on television, Bill Lucas suffered a severe brain aneurysm. He was admitted to Emory Hospital for five days but never regained consciousness. He was forty-three when he died.
TOMMIE AARON retired as a player in 1971. He had played parts of seven seasons in the minors and had been named Most Valuable Player at Richmond in the International League in 1967. He had worked in the organization as a player, a roving hitting instructor, and a minor-league coach. Upon taking the job, Henry pushed for Tommie to become manager of the team’s top farm club, Triple-A Richmond. There was even talk that Tommie Aaron could become a big-league manager. By 1981, only three black men had managed a big league club and none of them—not Frank Robinson, nor Larry Doby, and nor Maury Wills—lasted more than three seasons.
Tommie had served as a big-league coach since 1979, first under Bobby Cox and then in 1982 under Joe Torre, another of Henry’s old teammates who became a manager. It was with Torre that Tommie headed for spring training as routinely as he had for the previous twenty-five years. Only this time, following his annual physical, it became apparent something was wrong.
“He went to spring training.281 They did the normal blood work, and something wasn’t right,” Carolyn Aaron recalled. “They told him he had a certain type of anemia. That turned into the leukemia.”
As much as Henry, Tommie Aaron was a member of the Braves family. Where Henry had been serious and unsure, Tommie Aaron was loose and gregarious, thought Paul Snyder.
“He played all over our system. He loved shooting craps. I remember him in that rinky-dink clubhouse in Eau Claire,” Snyder said. “He loved to roll the bones. Tommie had a lot of ability. He could play six or seven positions, everything but catch. He was very genuine.”
Tommie Aaron was the one person who had bridged that gap with Henry, perhaps, apart from Billye, better than any other person in Henry’s life. Henry possessed a deep laugh, and a broad, engaging smile, but it was Tommie who, friends said, was able to make Henry laugh from his insides, deep from his gut. Tommie could swear and joke and loosen Henry up in public to the point where, around Tommie, Henry Aaron was a different person.
“He was just so different from Hank. Hank was so reserved,” Carolyn Aaron remembered. “He was so outgoing. All the kids on our street in Mobile would come to the house and Tommie would be the one to take them to the Mardi Gras parade. He would be out raking the yard and the kids would always be there. He taught them baseball. The kids in the neighborhood talked to Tommie more than their own fathers.”
Every day for over two and a half years, both at home and at Emory Hospital, it was Henry who came by with food, who called every day. Periodically, there would be hope of remission, only to have the disease return anew. On August 16, 1984, eleven days after his forty-fifth birthday, Tommie Aaron died. Henry was at the hospital that day, broken. And it was there that Carolyn watched Henry Aaron burst, his right fist slamming into the reinforced hospital window.
“It upset Hank very much. Ev
erybody jumped when he hit that glass window,” Carolyn recalled. “It was normal to grieve, normal to cry. I can’t remember when I stopped crying, but when I was in public, no one knew my heart was just broken. Then, one day, you wake up and you say, ‘I didn’t cry today.’”
BY TEMPERAMENT, Henry was not an orator or an activist. He preferred to work through channels and to collaborate. His commitment was solid, but he did not need to be in front of the camera, at the top of the headlines. He had, in fact, discovered that very little good came from taking a personal, public stance, and his edgy relationship with the press always seemed to intensify. Behind the scenes, he lent his name and gave his time to fight teenage pregnancy, a topic most professional athletes would avoid. What made Henry’s approach even bolder was his announcement that he would do a speaking tour of high schools on behalf of Planned Parenthood. On a Sunday morning, April 30, 1978, Henry arrived at Grady Memorial Hospital to lend support to a national conference on teenage sex and sexuality. After the buzz caused by his presence had subsided, Henry listened attentively to the figures: The hospital had delivered an average of six hundred babies per year between 1967 and 1977 to girls whose age ranged from twelve to sixteen. The staff told Henry that two-thirds of teen pregnancies were unwanted and that a third of all abortions in the United States were performed on teenagers. At the press conference announcing his involvement, Henry took the podium and took a prepared text from its folder.
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