The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  “Something’s got to be done about it,”282 he said. “Young boys are talking about ‘scoring’ on dates every day. When you’ve gone all the way, you’ve scored. But I want to tell you something … you’re not a champion in my book if you cause a young girl who doesn’t want to become pregnant to become pregnant and have to drop out of school.” In meeting with the Grady doctors, Henry took a modern approach toward sex education. Kids did not need to be lectured about sex, he said. “They need to know what they’re doing when they do it, and accept the responsibility.”

  He was applauded for his principles and commitment.

  But when he stepped too far out on the ledge, he was not often deft enough to avoid trouble, for he had both crafted a reputation as the mild-mannered Henry Aaron and begun to challenge conventions during a time of transition. Baseball wasn’t yet prepared for this dimension of Henry. He was tired of being slapped in the face.

  In 1977, a month before Henry’s forty-third birthday, Fred Lieb, who had been writing about baseball since the Dead Ball Era, listed his all-time team over the past one hundred years. Lieb was white, born in the previous century, weaned on the game when it did not include blacks, and his list reflected as much: It did not contain the name of a single black player. Bill Dickey, Lou Gehrig, Eddie Collins, Honus Wagner, Pie Traynor, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and Babe Ruth represented Lieb’s position players. Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Bob Feller, Lefty Grove, and Sandy Koufax were his pitchers. As far as other writers were concerned, it was Henry who seemed the clearest omission, and they questioned Lieb about this.

  NO PLACE FOR AARON WITH ALL-TIME

  STARS. AARON NOT AN ALL-TIMER?283

  “I was fully aware of the racial question,” Lieb told the Chicago Tribune. “I had to ponder for a long time about leaving off such great players as Hank Aaron, who has broken many of the records of both Ruth and Cobb; the fantastic Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson. However, I have to be true to my convictions. Having seen most of the great players, past and present, I honestly believe this is the best team one could field.”

  While his friends could not understand why Henry would let a dinosaur like Fred Lieb—an unimportant man from another century—get to him, Henry broiled. And some friends also wondered why the attention of a stuffed shirt like Bowie Kuhn meant so much to him. There was one problem with that elevated logic: It mattered to him. To Henry, this was just another injustice, another way to slight him for surpassing Ruth. Billye would attempt to soothe Henry’s ire, but his anger was inspired not so much by Lieb as by an accumulation of slights.

  DAYS BEFORE Willie Mays was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1979, Henry gave an interview with Doug Grow of the Minneapolis Star Tribune regarding his pessimistic outlook about opportunities for blacks in baseball. Henry, perhaps thinking of Bowie Kuhn at the time, or the black players of his day who were now retired and could not get a job in the front office, was withering in his criticism of the sport.

  AARON HAMMERS AT RACISM284

  IN MANAGEMENT AND MEDIA

  Hank Aaron burns with a deep rage. It’s as simple as black and white….

  “Look around the stadium,” Aaron said. “There’s not one memento of what I did. There’s nothing about what I did in this stadium, but they’ve got a statue of Ty Cobb sliding into a base.”

  … he is baseball’s only black executive. The ball is white. The game is white…. It is because of all the whiteness around him that Aaron discourages young blacks from considering baseball.

  Then there was Kuhn, whom Henry had never forgiven for not appearing when he broke the home-run record. The wound bore deep, and it became exposed and raw at unpredictable moments. In 1980, Baseball Magazine named the night Henry broke Ruth’s record as the most memorable moment of the decade. The magazine also named Pete Rose the player of the decade. Kuhn would be on hand at a dinner in New York to present the award, but Henry had payback for 1974 in mind. He wouldn’t show up in New York. “If he couldn’t spare the time for a trip to Atlanta, I don’t have time to go to New York,” he said.

  He had said nothing that Frank Robinson had not said, nothing that Jackie Robinson had not said a decade earlier. The crime Henry had committed was not one of candor, but that he’d changed the perception of who and what he was supposed to be. He had also let his guard down. He revealed that streak in him that could not brook slights or disrespect. Wayne Minshew, the reporter who had covered Henry as a player when the team relocated to Atlanta, was now the public-relations man for the Braves. Minshew brokered an uneasy peace meeting in New York with Kuhn, at Kuhn’s Rockefeller Center office.

  These months were turbulent. Dick Young attacked Henry for being small in his attitude toward Kuhn and disrespecting an award in his honor. He had stepped outside of his public persona, and then came the backlash. Lewis Grizzard, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist, struck.

  WHEN DID “THE HAMMER”285 TURN

  INTO “BAD HENRY?”

  … Did Henry Aaron get hit in the head with a foul ball? …

  Maybe it’s his wife. You know how wives can be….

  The writers used to write of Henry Aaron, “This man quietly goes about the job of being everybody’s superstar.” But oh, Henry, how you have changed.

  … you sounded off because there was no … mention of … the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death. Suddenly, you’re Hank Aaron, activist? Who put you up to that? Jesse Jackson? …

  You could give us another great moment, Henry—a moment of silence.

  It was the part of the game at which he was the least adept. He spoke the truths of his America, of what he saw, yet he was especially sensitive to the backlash. At one point, Henry told friends in frustration, “They criticize me when I don’t speak,286 and then when I speak up, they say I’m talking too much.”

  CAUGHT IN THE drift, easing its force, was Billye. They had been together ten years, celebrating a decade of marriage in 1983. Henry had always been surrounded by strong women in his life, starting with Stella and his older sister, Sarah. His first wife, Barbara, had been direct, and in many ways she was placed in an impossible position. She was present for a wholly different and fundamentally difficult period, both for Henry and for America. The road for a black baseball player was a harsh one during the 1950s and much of the 1960s, a road even more difficult for a wife during those times.

  If there were cliques inside the clubhouse that left the black players excluded, black women often felt isolated from the social networking that took place among the wives. Barbara, Dusty Baker thought, in a sense got the worst of the deal: She endured the crushing period when black players, regardless of their skills, would never receive their full measure of respect. By the time society had changed, she wasn’t in Henry’s life to enjoy the benefits.

  “Any woman who had to go through287 what she went through, especially in the South during spring training,” Baker said, “well, I don’t have a bad word to say about Barbara. She took care of me like I was one of her own.”

  Billye did not have to make peace with the same debilitating societal forces as Barbara had, for Billye met Henry when he was Hank Aaron. His Legend and society in general had removed the barriers created by segregation, dissolving those harsh environments that had existed in the foreground of Henry’s first marriage. Those old, hostile spring-training towns had been integrated for years. The fans could be vicious, but Billye’s post–civil rights movement stadium environment was worlds apart from the stands in which Barbara had sat, both in Milwaukee and in the South. Both Billye and Henry were much older than most of the other families on the team, with more world experience and less necessity to assimilate. Billye attended games, but as a career woman, she wasn’t there as often as the other wives. Many of the players’ wives were young girls who had met their husbands early, in high school or in small minor-league towns. Many had not attended college and possessed a far different worldview than did Billye Aaron, who by the time she
had met Henry had already lived through the high-pressure, high-profile civil rights years in Atlanta with her first husband, Sam Williams. While many of the wives often saw themselves as rescued from the drollery of an average life by being married to baseball players, Billye had never considered herself a “ballplayer’s wife.”

  Billye struggled through her years in the public eye, but there was something stately about her. Her voice was lavender-soft, and she spoke with a disarming and melodic southern lilt. It was the contrast between Henry and Billye that strengthened them. Henry may have felt uncomfortable as a constant public figure, but Billye seemed the stylish natural extrovert, someone who enjoyed the perks that came with being at the very top of a world that received so much attention. She wore elegant, expensive jewelry and furs. She was tickled by the banquets and the balls and the travel. She did not avoid the spotlight, but, rather, embraced it. And that made public life easier for Henry.

  There was a part of her, she often felt, that had yearned for public attention as far back as childhood. She would refer to attaining such recognition, to actually realizing so many of her daydreams, “as a miracle.”

  “Maybe somewhere on the periphery of my personality288 I secretly wanted fame. Since I wanted to be a singer when I was young, I imagine that would mean that I wanted to be noticed. It would be hard to want to be a singer and not be noticed,” she said.

  Her ambitions stood in direct contrast to her realities. She had grown up Billye Suber in Palestine, Texas, the fourth of eight children—six girls and two boys. Her earliest memories were of desolation and segregation. Still, education was central to the family. Each of the eight kids attended college. Her mother left Butler High School in Tyler to marry Nathan Suber. She would always say her greatest regret was never finishing high school. Nathan Suber was a professor; he worked on the docks in Galveston part-time and was killed in an accident when Billye was twelve.

  The white high school in Neches had been closer to the family’s home, but Billye was bused to Clemons High School. “We got our books from the white high school and I remember that every book I got from Clemons had someone else’s name in it.” Billye had ambitions and wanted to go to college. Palestine, she recalled, was “too dark and isolated.” For her senior year, she moved to Dallas to live with her aunt, Reba Baker, on Pennsylvania Avenue. Billye was immediately taken by the size and energy of Dallas, especially when driving down Oakland Avenue, then the black thoroughfare of the city, in her aunt’s green Studebaker.

  “I wanted to be a singer. My name was Billye and I wanted to be Billie Holliday. I thought she was so pretty,” Billye recalled. “She had this voice and she wore a gardenia in her hair, and I just loved that. There was a theater on Hall Street, and it was for the colored people, so we didn’t have to go around the corner and up the stairs into the balcony. That was our theater. Looking back where we came from,” she said, “being here is almost miraculous.”

  In the summers as a teen, she would return to work in the fields, picking peas and cotton, laughing at her deficiencies. “I never could get the hang of it. The most I ever picked in a day was thirty-seven pounds. There were kids who could pick eighty pounds of cotton in a day.”

  She was adventurous. She attended San Francisco State University before receiving a fellowship opportunity in Atlanta. She felt trepidation about returning to the South. The early skirmishes of the civil rights movement had made a deep impression on her, especially the confrontation in Little Rock, as it occurred the same year, 1957, she set out for California. “It was a wonderful opportunity, but when I thought of Atlanta, all I could visualize were men hanging from trees,” she recalled.

  She met Samuel Williams in Atlanta, and after marrying both were active in the Atlanta civil rights movement of the early 1960s. At their house on Fair Street in Atlanta, she had dined with Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, James Bevel, and the other powerful figures of the movement. They had a daughter, Ceci, and in October 1970, five days before her birthday, Samuel Williams died suddenly, due to complications following surgery.

  At this time, Henry was also undergoing changes in his life, and this was the true source of their connection. When Billye met Henry on the set of WSB-TV, Henry had recently been divorced from Barbara, while Billye was in the throes of her own depression. Increasingly, during the time just prior to when she met Henry, suicide had been in her thoughts.

  “I can’t pinpoint how things happened in this direction except for the fact that I was very lonely. I found myself at thirty-four a widow and really thought for a short time that I wanted to die,” she said. “I saw no purpose in life, no purpose in going forward. Except, when I saw my three-year-old daughter needed milk or bread, then you had to snap out of it and say, ‘You have to take care of this child.’”

  One of her coworkers at WSB suggested she do a series of light features on the Atlanta Braves players. The assignment, she later thought, was an attempt by the station to help her begin her reentry into the world. She had interviewed Rico Carty before Henry and immediately realized that “those two didn’t want anything to do with each other.” She had little, if any, interest in sports. As part of her assignment, she was given two tickets to every home game, but she had trouble finding anyone to go with her.

  In 1971, when she was first scheduled to interview Henry, he did not show up for the interview, and he was late for the second. When the interview finally took place, Henry was embarrassed for Billye, due to her utter lack of baseball knowledge. He even offered to help her write her scripts for interviews with other players. Their dialogue had begun.

  Billye described Henry as kind and sweet but, in their early meetings, not terribly romantic. Billye recalled one of their first dates. “He asked me to meet him at this little soul-food restaurant across the street from the stadium. He wanted to go there because it was comfortable for him and because it was close, because he had a game that night. Let’s just say I was used to better. So I said to him, ‘Mr. Aaron, the next time you call on me, make sure it’s an off day so we could go someplace, well, a little nicer.’”

  He did not write letters or send flowers spontaneously, but he was grounded, and that was important. During those years, she did not need to be swept off her feet as much as she needed comfort and stability. “He always appeared to be a family man, and that was important,” she recalled. “I had heard stories about what ballplayers were like, having a woman in every port. And he could have been, but he didn’t impress me as a womanizer or whatever. When he approached me, I thought he was sincere.”

  She carried herself with confidence and elegance. She was disarming, but that did not mean Billye Aaron was any more forgiving of the racial climate than Barbara. Her demeanor may have seemed more polished, less confrontational, but she was, friends believed, far fiercer than Henry on most racial subjects. During the home-run chase, she was particularly sensitive when it came to the pressures Henry faced and how much of it was directly attributable to his being black.

  “I used to think being an athlete was the same as being an actor, but they are different. As an actor, you are playing a role. You are purposely playing someone else. As an athlete, Henry was simply expressing his talent, and the actor doesn’t have to get booed, every day, in living color. I think some people can’t wait for the spotlight. Either you have it or you don’t. Henry does not need one iota of it.”

  Though Billye appeared more comfortable at public functions and was able to mingle with a natural ease, she appreciated Henry’s reticence. Together, they had come to a conclusion: They would use Henry’s fame for something more than wealth. For years, Henry had talked about foundation work and trying to find the proper vehicle to set his philanthropic visions in motion.

  “You don’t grow up in poverty and want to see other people in poverty. You know what it feels like. You know what it looks like, and you see exactly what it does to people’s ambitions,” she said.

  WHEN IT CAME to the Hall of Fame, Henr
y played the waiting game on a different plane, in a reserved, exclusive strata. As they approach induction, even the best players wait and wonder about admittance. Joe DiMaggio was not inducted into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. Others worry about securing the 75 percent of the voters needed for induction. Jackie Robinson received 78 percent. Aaron’s old teammate, Eddie Mathews, corralled 79 percent.

  In 1982, when it came Henry’s turn, he was not worried about induction on the first ballot, but he was worried about the percentage of votes: He wanted to be the first unanimous inductee in history. In a sense, it was a cheeky thing to want, for nobody had been a unanimous choice. Ty Cobb, during the first induction in 1936, received the highest vote percentage, 98.2 percent. That was more than Ruth and Walter Johnson would get; Ruth received 95 percent, Johnson 84 percent. Mays had received 95 percent of the vote when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1979.

  The day arrived, January 13, 1982. Juan Marichal was on the ballot. So were Henry’s old teammates Lew Burdette and Orlando Cepeda, and another Mobile legend, Billy Williams. None of them would make it this day. Four hundred and fifteen ballots were cast. Henry received 406. He missed unanimity by nine votes. The 406 votes made him second only to Mays, who had received 409. Henry’s 97.8 percent of the votes was second only to Cobb’s.

  “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to be unanimous,289 but I realize nobody has been,” Henry said. “I’m happy with the number of votes I received.” He would be inducted with Happy Chandler, the commissioner who succeeded Landis and integrated the game, the old Giants shortstop Travis Jackson, and Frank Robinson.

  ON FRIDAY, JULY 30, Henry, Billye, Stella, and Herbert, as well as Gaile, Lary, Hank, Dorinda, and Ceci, arrived in Cooperstown and toured the Hall of Fame Museum. Stoic Henry Aaron was emotional. He slowly lowered his guard as he walked into the old museum and saw his Braves locker, which had been donated seven years earlier by Bill Bartholomay, and the symbols of his life’s accomplishments. He had long been used to being famous, but that did not diminish the feeling of seeing his life on display. He had his picture taken with his parents, with Billye, and with each of the kids. He joked with Dorinda, saying that she had always wanted to go into the locker room and now was her chance. He softened at the sight of his first pro contract, which called for two hundred dollars per month, and stared at a picture of himself when he was first called to the big leagues. Embarrassed by his youthful awkwardness, or pained by the years that had passed, he asked a Cooperstown official if the photo could be replaced by one “more recent.”