The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  Induction weekend called for the lowering of swords. At the Hotel Otesaga, Henry met Bowie Kuhn for breakfast. The history between the two had been bad for years, dating back to when Kuhn failed to send Henry a telegram congratulating him on his seven hundredth home run. “Only a sick man carries grudges,” Henry said. “And I’m not a sick man.” After a peace meeting, they played tennis and Henry destroyed Kuhn, with a smile. The day of his induction, he awoke at 7:00 a.m. and played tennis with Frank Torre, then prepared for his speech at the Hall of Fame Library.

  HAPPY CHANDLER, 84 years old, spoke first. The official transcript of his Hall of Fame speech filled three full pages. Frank Robinson’s was just as long.

  And then there was Henry. His speech lasted just eight minutes. Gaile, wearing a white dress dotted by a light floral pattern, wept as she mouthed parts of Henry’s speech:

  I also feel especially proud to be standing here where some years ago Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella proved the way and made it possible for Frank and me and for other blacks, hopeful in baseball. They proved to the world that a man’s ability is limited only by his lack of opportunity.

  The sheer majesty of this occasion and its significance overwhelms me. For truly I reflect on my life and particularly on my 23 years in baseball. I am reminded of a statement I once read, and I quote, “The way to fame is like the way to heaven. Through much tribulation.” It had been for me, to quote a very popular song, the long and winding road. Nevertheless, I have been extremely blessed.

  I stand here today because God gave me a healthy body, a sound mind and talent. For 23 years I took the talent that God gave me and developed it to the best of my ability.

  Twenty-three years ago, I never dreamed of this high honor would come to me. For it was not fame I sought, but rather the best baseball player that I could possibly be.

  I grew up in a home where there was little in the way of material goods. But there was an abundance of love and discipline. We, therefore, had much to share. And so too is this occasion an occasion for sharing, an occasion for thanksgiving. For I did not make this journey alone.

  Henry said he did not speak longer because he was on the verge of tears. If nothing else, he was generally overcome by the weekend, for he and the Hall of Fame had not enjoyed an easy relationship. Grievances rested on both sides. Henry felt the officials at Cooperstown had not treated him as they had the other greats. He believed he had donated graciously, but his items were not treated as carefully or respectfully as the donations from other great players. It started back in 1973, when the Hall of Fame published a flyer on its new exhibits. No mention was made of Henry’s donations, which included the ball and bat from his three thousandth hit, and the balls for his five hundredth and six hundredth home runs. “With all the things I’ve done,”290 Henry told the New York Times, “you’d think they could mention my name in the magazine.”

  And there was that eternal slight that pierced his pride the minute he walked into the building: the two statues—one of Ruth, the other of Ted Williams—that greeted each and every visitor.

  Meanwhile, the collective attitude of those at Cooperstown toward Henry over the years had been that he had no tolerance for honest, simple mistakes. Henry went public with problems that could have been solved with a phone call. He read malice into the relationship, and that made him difficult.

  But now he was officially a Hall of Famer. No player in the integrated era, not Mays, not Gibson, not Jackie Robinson, had received a higher percentage of votes. But Henry could not escape the nagging annoyance in his own mind that baseball had relegated him to a one-event player, and even that moment—breaking the home-run record—always came with a qualification. In a final interview in Cooperstown, Henry voiced an opinion that explained his unresolved turmoil.

  I’ve never been able to live down291 breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record. They say, “If Babe had played in this park … if Babe had not been a pitcher all those years.” But I personally had nothing to do with those things….

  I’m a little too busy and a little too old to have any bitterness about anything. I would like to remain in baseball the rest of my life. I would like to see the Braves, my club, win a championship, and then another championship. That’s the last thing I want out of baseball.

  Then he flew home to Atlanta, he said, unburdened, all hard feelings dissolved by his induction, or so he claimed. His actions told a different story, and actions were the defining trait of Henry Aaron. Over the next seventeen years—when living members of the Hall of Fame were invited to welcome in the new class of inductees—Henry would return to Cooperstown exactly once.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CARS

  OUT OF THE wasteland of the players’ strike of 1994—a strike that undermined baseball’s credibility and lasted 232 days—came an industry-wide gospel, one with which the sport had been unfamiliar since the dawn of the Dead Ball Era: Baseball would go into the nostalgia business. It would sell its moments, its heroes, its history, and itself. The strike served as a reminder that the resilience of the game, the fact that people cared so much no matter how dysfunctional its leadership, was precisely what had saved it. Gone (at least publicly) was the standard orthodoxy of tolerating the players as an unfortunate by-product of the owners’ moneymaking enterprise. Refusing to recognize the wattage of the players might have watered down salaries, but it also made for lifelong enemies, and enemies got in the way of business.

  The fact was, 150 years of infighting had obscured what baseball was supposed to be all about: making people feel good. A labor war had prevented baseball from making money off memories at a time when everybody else—card-show hawks, home-shopping and classic sports channels, book publishers, individual collectors—was making a killing in the memorabilia business. This was the 1990s, the information age, where promotion was not only a virtue but, in a stratified world of two hundred TV channels and the untamed Internet, an absolute necessity. The sport had already mastered warfare, its history built on grinding, century-long animosities, but now baseball had found its new religion. From now on, moments would be cherished. Players would be celebrated by the sport as the gods they were to the public. Records, milestones, championships—the history of baseball—were valuable commodities being squandered by three decades of infighting about labor.

  The Yankees, of course, had always known the value of hyperbole, of feeding the hero machine. They knew it better than anyone. It was history that separated your team from the rest, history that gave baseball its special currency, made you call it the “national pastime” even though football had long dusted the national game in television ratings and popularity since before men landed on the moon. It was history that gave you pride and pedigree and protected you from the lean times, kept you from being average. It served as the reminder that you stood for something permanent, something important, that you weren’t part of the latest popular fad, but the standard of a continuing tradition. Even the name Yankee Stadium had withstood that latest sign of the sports apocalypse—corporate naming rights for stadiums—which produced so much money that teams across all sports were willing to sell off their identity, their roots for the short-term gain. The great stadium names, the ones that gave the eye a picture of a city and a team—Comiskey, Candlestick, Tiger, Oakland, Veterans, Three Rivers—all got swallowed whole for the money. But not Yankee Stadium, even with all the money that the Yankees could have fetched by giving that piece of itself away. History was the reason the Yankees were the only team in the game never to change its home uniforms once the pinstripes and the interlocked NY became standard. It was the reason the great glories of Ruth and Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle, Reggie and Munson were passed down through generations of ticket buyers who wanted to identify with this New York family heirloom, fans who wanted to belong. Regardless of the team’s current record, a trip to Yankee Stadium meant being force-fed two heaping tablespoons of the dynasty, and that made everyone feel good and close. Pregame, postgame, and
in between innings, the Yankees reminded everyone in the stadium that there might be no time like the present, but yesterday, if marketed properly, was even more salable a commodity than the fleeting lilt of today’s pennant race. History only increased in value. The Yankees knew that they weren’t just in the business of selling hot dogs and home runs. They were in the business of selling memories.

  And as it turned out, nostalgia was big business. Baseball was about the generations, father to son, son to grandfather. But for all the sugary rhetoric of how baseball linked the generations as no rival sport could, the game had no mechanism to sell its most marketable quality. The plan been for baseball to partner with the corporate world to sell its history to the public, but even before the 1994 strike exposed baseball, insiders knew it was the marketing equivalent of the Titanic. After the strike, the depths of the disaster became frighteningly clear.

  To make it all work, baseball had to rebuild its marketing and promotions departments from within, no easy task when the talent and direction had been torpedoed by two unnatural disasters—a calamitous television deal with CBS and the mahatma of boondoggles, a failure called the Baseball Network. Both cost baseball a fortune, leaving the promotional end of the business in shambles.

  And it had to undo all the old rules. Baseball didn’t just play nasty with the players, but because its economy had been local for a century, it was every owner for himself. Publicity was not run from above, by the umbrella of major-league baseball. Rather, it was a mom-and-pop operation. The two leagues had been, aside from meeting in the World Series, separate entities. The American League marketed itself, as did the National. Publicity and promotions were handled at the local level, meaning the Red Sox and Yankees and Royals and Padres promoted their teams, but a coordinated national marketing for common projects—say the game itself—did not exist. Whatever national marketing did exist was left in the hands of the television-rights holders, who could choose to market selectively, or not.

  It was, in short, a complete and total mess. When veteran marketing and promotions man Bill Henneberry signed on as a consultant to major-league baseball, he used an old Yiddish word, fercockt, and when pronouncing it, he would say it meant just what it sounded like: fucked.

  Henneberry had started out in the business292 in the early 1970s, as a vice president of marketing for Hertz. One of his first accounts was the campaign that featured O. J. Simpson running through airports. He had worked for Colgate-Palmolive for eleven years before working with MNBA, striking upon an idea he believed was a winner: team logos on credit cards. A credit card with the San Francisco 49ers helmet on it? Here was a way for the fan to feel connected to his favorite team, Henneberry argued. The team could offer small discounts or points to be accumulated like frequent flier miles each time the card was used, double points if used at Candlestick Park or when purchasing tickets. Henneberry was twenty years ahead of his time. It was a moment of genius—the kind that can make a career—but the idea barely got off the ground. MNBA soon folded. Henneberry was out, smoldering mad that life wasn’t fair (you can’t copyright ideas, after all), when a bigger credit-card company, Visa, resurrected his idea and made a fortune.

  When Henneberry joined baseball as a consultant, he found a sport that was “virtually leaderless.” For its promotional budget, baseball produced less than four million dollars in revenue. By comparison, the promotional budget of a pro sports league tended to be nearly three times that amount. Sports advertising was all about beer and cars (Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, Chevrolet!), but when Henneberry arrived, baseball’s biggest sponsors were Scotts lawn fertilizer and Kingsford charcoal briquettes.

  “We had no car, no beer.293 We had nothing much above one million dollars,” Henneberry recalled. “We were walking into an empty room, a completely empty room. No one was running advertising that supported the theme of baseball and using baseball to build their brand. Licensing got hit like you wouldn’t believe. Trading-card revenues were cut in half. And on top of that you had the CBS and Baseball Network fiascos, and then the strike. Baseball left it to whatever television network gave it the most money to market the game. It was an absolute fucking disaster.”

  Two accounts—Pepsi at $1.2 million and MasterCard at a contentious $1 million—accounted for more than half of the total revenues at MLB Properties. There was no money, but worse, baseball had let its most marketable quality—its history—atrophy to a fatal point.

  In the years immediately following the strike, baseball got lucky, and as ballplayers always said, sometimes it was better to be lucky than good. Two strokes of good fortune hit almost simultaneously. First, the Yankees were good again, which always meant more money and more exposure for the game. As fashionable as it was to complain about the dreaded pinstripes, the facts were immutable: Good Yankee teams meant higher attendance throughout the American League, higher ratings, and increased interest. The Yankees were the rising tide that raised all boats.

  On top of that came another lucky bounce: Henneberry met with representatives from MasterCard, which had an uneasy relationship with baseball. It could, then, only be described as providence that it was the credit-card company that sought out baseball and presented a golden opportunity.

  The MasterCard reps unveiled a campaign they believed would work perfectly with baseball. They had even made a demo tape as part of their presentation. The video began with a young boy and his father attending a baseball game, a soft voice-over following each frame.

  Hot dog … $3.50

  Program … $1

  Pennant … $5

  Watching a game with your ten-year-old son … priceless

  MasterCard called it their “Priceless” campaign and wanted baseball, the American game, to be its centerpiece. MasterCard was eager, and there was no reason to shop for a better deal—neither football nor basketball could pull as powerfully on the emotional father-son heartstrings as baseball. Baseball, for its part, was already angry at Visa because, as part of its campaign to create exclusivity (and box out its rival, American Express), the company did not want vendors to accept American Express at its signature event, the World Series (“… and they don’t take American Express” went the ad campaign). So baseball had lucked out again; the sweetheart deal came to them. When the deal was finalized, MasterCard was in for $29 million.

  HAVING RECOGNIZED ITS good fortune (instead of noticing the suspiciously increased size of its players and their subsequently ballooning offensive numbers), baseball was now hugs and kisses and Kodak moments. When Lou Gehrig played in his 2,130th consecutive game, a ceremony did not mark the occasion. A later event, which included easily the most memorable speech in baseball history, was held July 4, 1939, because everyone knew “the Iron Horse” was dying. But in the new world, there were balloons and pageantry, game stoppages and handshakes (even from opposing players, in the middle of a game) that night in Baltimore when Cal Ripken broke Gehrig’s streak.

  During the apex of the resurrection—the home-run chase of 1998—two opposing players, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, held joint press conferences. When McGwire passed Roger Maris’s record, Sosa sped from his position in right field to give McGwire a hug. McGwire, nodding to history, reached back and embraced the Maris family. Roger Maris had been dead for more than a dozen years, but the family was able to enjoy a moment of closure and recognition.

  It was all so mushy—Sosa and McGwire even said they loved each other. Judge Landis may have rolled over in his grave, clutching his “no fraternization” rule to his breast. Bob Gibson may have looked at the sport he once dominated and thought it unrecognizable with all this lovey-dovey crap, but the cameras, the fans, and the country ate it up.

  Baseball had become the king of schmaltz. But to complete the circle, the contemporaries would not be enough. The legends had to be brought back, dusted off, and restored to their rightful place as the game’s living elders, as a link to the past, the conscience of the future.

  In preliminary meetings,
one man seemed unanimously perfect to be the centerpiece of the initiative, especially because 1999 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the all-time home-run record falling. Henry Aaron was the one the public relations and promotions departments wanted. He was, went the thought, perfect.

  Yet the marketing executives in the room generally viewed the prospect of approaching Henry with a certain amount of dread, because the word had been out for years, and, unchallenged, it became fact: Hank Aaron was too bitter, too angry about baseball to be the face of any kind of promotion. The word was that he was too difficult to work with. He had already soured on baseball because of the Al Campanis affair in 1987. Besides, he probably wouldn’t want to be part of it anyway.

  IN THE MONTHS following Tommie Aaron’s death, two major events occurred in Henry’s life, one by happenstance, the other by perseverance. In 1985, Henry attended a function in New York City where he met Frank Belatti, a native New Yorker who was an emerging power player in the Atlanta business community. Belatti stood in the lobby and the receptionist, not a baseball fan of any sort, asked Belatti if he was Hank Aaron, providing Belatti a natural icebreaker when they eventually met later that night. “Henry,” he said, “I’ve just been mistaken for you.”