The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  Bronx-born, and a lifelong baseball fan, Belatti had been chief operating officer and president of Arby’s, the fast-food chain. He worked with MLB properties on the RBI/Arby’s award, which had been given to each league’s leader in runs batted in. The two talked about business opportunities, specifically whether Henry was interested in becoming a franchise partner with Arby’s. Belatti recalled Henry demurring. The restaurant and real-estate failures of the past still carried a fresh scar, and Henry had decided he did not have the business acumen to try again.

  “He told me he hadn’t had much success in business,” Belatti recalled. “I asked him to think about it and also I remember asking him if there were any organizations that he felt strongly about. He said the United Negro College Fund. That started the business side of things.”

  Henry moved with trepidation, but over time Belatti learned how important it was for Henry to have success away from the ballfield. In many ways, being a baseball player was perhaps the only area in his life where he could assume success. He had always been self-conscious about his level of formal education, and his past business ventures were not fruitful. Even inside of the baseball world, he did not feel particularly comfortable off the field, he did not feel well-regarded for his abilities in teaching, talent evaluation, or motivating players, the elements that would have made him a good executive or field manager. Thus, it became clear to Frank Belatti that Henry did not view another foray into the business community cavalierly.

  Henry entered the world of fast food, obtaining his first franchise, an Arby’s restaurant in Atlanta. That was followed by a Church’s, the competition to Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  “It was clear that success away from baseball was very important to Henry,” Belatti said. “He wanted to raise money for children. I think in order for him to fill that gap in his life he needed to be, always wanted to be, more than just a former baseball player. I was very proud that Henry Aaron told me he had only done two handshake deals in his life,” Belatti said. “One was with Ted Turner, the other with Frank Belatti.”

  Belatti felt Henry’s distance, as had so many others. They came from two different worlds, Henry from the Deep South, Belatti from Arthur Avenue and 187th Street in the Bronx. Belatti recalled that the relationship warmed over time, mostly because of their conversation about ethics. Belatti impressed upon Henry that he was sympathetic to the notion of creating business opportunities for African-Americans.

  Trust was something Henry did not extend easily, and in his recollections Belatti does not remember a breakthrough moment between the two men. Rather, he recalls their relationship growing from business to friendship. “Why did he trust me? Hank is a very honorable man and while he is somewhat suspicious and rightfully so, he believes in people’s good nature,” Belatti said. “He accepted my gesture in good faith. He realized I was only determined to make him successful.”

  Belatti had been a Yankees fan all his life. He remembers respecting Henry and rooting against him in the 1957 and 1958 World Series. He had worked with baseball as an adult and thus was not necessarily awed by the size and aura of professional ballplayers.

  Then, on Opening Day 1986, Belatti asked Henry if he wanted to join him for a ballgame. Henry agreed and the two went to the game at Yankee Stadium.

  “We got out of the car, and of course, the masses started to circle. You could hear people screaming that Hank Aaron was here,” Belatti recalled. “That was when it occurred to me that this was no ordinary man. I saw how upset he got when these things happened. He just couldn’t go places. People wanted things from him. They weren’t there to give him respect. They wanted to get something from him. They wanted to touch him or get an autograph and he resented that. He would say to me, and he was serious, how dangerous people were, and how he did not feel safe. We realized that watching the game from our seats wasn’t going to work. I sat in my seat and George Steinbrenner wound up getting Henry a seat up in a luxury box, away from everyone.”

  The second event that began to change Henry’s outlook occurred without his knowledge. Over the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a chorus of people from far-flung areas of Mobile began unrelated campaigns to celebrate Henry. Kearney Windham, a diehard baseball fan and self-made sports historian, concocted the idea of a Hall of Fame for Mobile athletes. Henry would become a charter member of the Mobile Sports Hall of Fame. It was a significant start, for Henry and for Mobile, and endured a prickly relationship.

  During the same period, the city of Mobile, led by a new wave of younger, diverse politicians, began a drive to improve relations with Henry. In 1977, the city named a stretch of downtown after him, the Hank Aaron Business Loop. In 1991, Mobile mayor Mike Dow was pushed by city councilor Irmadean Watson to rename Carver Park, his boyhood playground, to Hank Aaron Park. After years of frost, the city’s political leadership had begun to reach out to Henry.

  Where Major League baseball was concerned, however, Henry had adopted the position that given the opportunity to do the right thing, baseball would disappoint him every time. It had been that way since Bowie Kuhn chose the Yahoo Club over him. The succeeding years hadn’t been much better, and the likelihood that baseball would approach him with good intentions and then do him dirt in the end became something of an expectation in his camp. His relationship with individuals inside of the game had always been solid. Ted Turner made sure he had a job for life, and Bill Bartholomay now spoke of Henry as one of his dear, dear friends. But whenever the commissioner’s office got involved, whenever he had hopes that the game would finally place him in his proper context, finally give him what he believed to be his due, his first reflex was to anticipate the very worst.

  For example, there was the time Henry met with Greg Murphy, the new head of MLB Properties, ostensibly baseball’s marketing and promotions wing. Murphy was considered by some coworkers to be a prickly, unpopular man, but he was passionate about the necessity to cultivate Henry. Murphy told Henry that he was a baseball treasure, a true living legend. He told Henry about baseball’s new initiative to revive the game’s heroes with a major public campaign. The two shook hands. Months passed. Nothing happened.

  Times, though, were different. After Fay Vincent’s successful ownership coup, Bud Selig, who still owned the Milwaukee Brewers, was now the commissioner of baseball. There was something else about the new baseball: The sport would no longer foster the charade that the commissioner was the objective protector of the game’s interest. Still, Selig at the helm meant Henry294 had a man in the top chair whom he absolutely trusted. Selig never missed an opportunity to elevate Henry, and the praise was genuine. It wasn’t lost on the major-league executives throughout the years that the commissioner’s office was supposed to give the impression of being impartial, yet Selig would routinely state publicly that Henry was the greatest player of all time. “If you noticed, he never even said ‘one of the greatest,’” Henneberry said. “It was always unequivocal.”

  That meant that anybody at MLB who wasn’t completely sold on Henry (and there were more than a few unconvinced that Henry was charismatic enough to be a leading man) now had to deal with the wrath of Bud. Mess with Henry, mess with the commissioner. Even worse for the unconvinced was the lurking notion that should things not progress to his liking, should someone at MLB treat Henry poorly, there was the probability that a phone call was being made from Atlanta to Milwaukee and that the offending parties would be swiftly punished. Selig made it a point to note that he and Henry spoke constantly, “almost daily,” the commissioner would say. That kept whatever hostile elements in New York on their best behavior.

  Henry also had some true believers at MLB in Henneberry, Bob Gamgort, and Kathy Francis, the lead marketing team that made the decisions on which players would become the official face of the game. The trio did not consider another legend, not Williams, not DiMaggio, not even Mays. To the group, Henry was the obvious choice, partly because it felt the need to honor Greg Murphy’s agreement with Henry, a
nd also because there wasn’t a time Henneberry would look at the record book and not be absolutely blown away by Henry’s career numbers.

  “Hank was the only choice.295 I think because the promise that was made to him by Greg Murphy. I always thought there was a little bit of guilt that they had never done right by this guy,” Henneberry recalled. “I mean, okay, he had the home-run record. Everybody knew that, but there was the stuff only a real aficionado would know. Thirty-seven hundred hits? First in RBI, first in home runs, first in total bases? Third in hits? I mean, come on. What else did this guy have to do?”

  One the other hand, the whispering campaign that Henry had turned crotchety was just prominent enough to give the marketing people pause. There had been talk that Henry had a reputation for being impossible to please. Baseball would accommodate him, make good-faith attempts to placate him, to close the wounds of 1974, but it was never enough, or so went the thought.

  The first meeting was in Philadelphia in mid-1998. Henneberry, Gamgort, and Francis met Henry and Allan Tanenbaum at the Four Seasons in Logan Square. The meeting did not exactly get off to a rousing start. Henneberry, like Frank Belatti, was Bronx-born, a diehard Yankee fan, tried to break the ice with Henry and was met with the sound of crickets.

  “I walked in, and I remember him being standoffish,” Henneberry recalled. “I made a comment about him breaking my heart in ’57.”

  More crickets.

  “I was fifty years old, and I was starstruck,” Henneberry said. “He didn’t give a shit about that story. He’d heard it a thousand times. What he wanted to know was if he could trust me. I think he was reassured that I wasn’t a kid, that we came to him and put serious, experienced marketing guys in charge of this. Baseball had not been doing much for him and he was a bit dubious about whether we could pull this off. He just didn’t trust baseball to do the right thing by his image. And you know what? He was right. Baseball never before had a plan.”

  Over the course of the meeting, Francis, Gamgort, and Henneberry laid out the ambitious multipronged strategy to market and promote the twenty-fifth anniversary of the record. A commemorative coffee-table book, Home Run, written by the respected Dick Schaap, was already in the works. Ted Williams had already agreed to put his name on the foreword. The trio told Henry the league would back a tour to a dozen parks, where, at each, Henry would throw out the first ball. There would be sponsorship and licensing opportunities, a radio and television tour. This time, they were going to do it right. He was going to be treated respectfully and regally, in the mold of DiMaggio.

  And then MLB unveiled the big one to Henry and his people: The Hank Aaron Award, a new award named after Henry, honoring the best hitter in each league. He already had peripheral involvement with the Arby’s RBI award, hardware given out annually to the league leader in runs driven in. Henry was, after all, the career leader in runs batted in, but his real affiliation with the award stemmed mostly from the fact that the acronym corresponded with his ownership of numerous Arby’s fast-food restaurants.

  The RBI award was a lesser award, a trinket few paid much attention to. The Hank Aaron Award, Henry was told at the meeting, would be different. It would be big. Henneberry’s original blueprint was wide in scope. In his vision, the Hank Aaron Award would represent the player leading or near the top in each of the chief offensive categories, which made sense, because for his career, Henry had finished in the top three in each of the categories: home runs, RBIs, and hits. Henneberry also thought the award should be interactive, meaning that players and fans would be able to track the major contenders for the award during the season.

  “My recommendation was a quantitative award. Most hits, HR and RBI together. We could track it throughout the year. I wanted to make a big deal out of it,” Henneberry recalled. “We had the greatest living iconic player. He was first in home runs, and RBI, third in hits, first in total bases? I mean, come on. It was so obvious.”

  The meeting ended in success. Henneberry recalled that Henry was “ecstatic.” By the end of the meeting, Henry had thawed. Where he had once been cool to the marketing group, he now told jokes, spinning yarns about the time he passed up a chance to go on The Ed Sullivan Show because Lew Burdette had begged him to be in the lineup so he could snare his twentieth win of the year. Cost him five hundred dollars, Henry said, and the biggest laughs came in the context of 1999, when a player’s average annual salary was well over one million dollars. Henry delivered the line perfectly. “Five hundred was big money back then,” he said.

  OVER THE NEXT five months came the hard part: selling Henry. The group first had to find a major sponsor that could back a major campaign, lest Henry get slighted again. Henneberry placed his target figure for the campaign between $800,000 and $1 million, but no one was biting at that figure. Over the years it would gall Henry that he was perceived as simply not charismatic enough to carry a promotion, or, worse, that he was a grumpy old man with little to offer. Henneberry accepted the talk because it was out there and the first thing a marketer does is deal with the situation instead of complain. What bothered him was how shortsighted the presumptions could be.

  “Part of it was because of the perception that Hank was difficult to work with. No one knew the value of what Hank would bring to the party,” he recalled. “But the big thing was this: Everything in baseball at the time was about labor and making money. MLB Properties was gutted and the baseball Network failed. No one was promoting the players that were gone. No one had touched them for fifteen years.

  “We were asking for a million bucks. A few years earlier, we were selling the whole league for a million. No one was tying the players of yesteryear to the current game. Nobody touched anybody. It wasn’t Willie, Duke, Stan, Hank, nobody. So, Hank was forgotten along with everyone else. It wasn’t that he was unpopular or cast aside. Nobody was getting any support. It had nothing to do with Hank.”

  So it came to pass that the year 1999 revitalized Henry Aaron. The promotions coalesced and, in the end, baseball did not betray him as he had feared. The book, Home Run: My Life in Pictures, was handsome and classy, first-rate all the way. The sponsor, Country Time Lemonade, came through. The numbers were not astronomical—the $450,000 it took to get the deal done was far below Henneberry’s seven-figure target—but Country Time treated Henry with the respect he believed had been nonexistent, and the executives at Country Time were delighted by his affability on the promotion trail, even if they winced each time Henry mangled the product’s name.

  “Hank could never say ‘Country Time.’ He would always say ‘Country Times,’” Henneberry recalled. “It was the southern way of saying it. I told him a hundred times to say it right, and he said it wrong ninety-nine times. It drove them nuts.”

  Henry turned sixty-five that February and was feted with a gala event that he would never forget. The Hyatt Regency Atlanta was packed, lined with limousines, luxury cars … and the Secret Service. President Clinton made a surprise appearance.

  That night, the Hank Aaron Award was unveiled (Manny Ramirez and Sammy Sosa would be the inaugural recipients), announced to a rousing ovation. Bill Henneberry wasn’t pleased, though, for his original concept never got off the ground. Baseball stepped in and took a scalpel to the idea. Rich Levin, baseball’s top public-relations man, thought Henneberry’s vision encroached upon sacred turf, which was the Most Valuable Player awards, given out to each league by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, the most prestigious awards, which went back to the 1930s. The MVP was the award of Williams and Mays and Mantle. Nothing could be introduced to reduce its impact. During that time, the players union tried to compete with the BBWAA by creating the Players Choice Awards, but it didn’t work. Players wanted to be associated with the hardware Hall of Famers held.

  Levin was also concerned296 that a quantitative award based on the top offensive categories was too close to the Triple Crown, which marked the leader in batting average, home runs, and RBI.

  “What we e
nded up with was different than what I had envisioned,” Henneberry said. “I have nothing but respect for Rich Levin, but I thought it got totally screwed up. I thought we could have done more. The Triple Crown? The Triple Crown is a total anachronism. I mean, who was the last guy to win it? Yastrzemski forty years ago? The award never became as important as it should have been.”

  Throughout the years, Henry had met presidents. It never failed to tickle Billye that she could say without exaggeration that she and Henry had slept at the White House more than once. They had traveled the world and dined with kings and queens and prime ministers. Usually, however, he went to them, the Home Run King as invited guest. But seeing Bill Clinton, a sitting president at the Hyatt, in town just for him, well, it touched a nerve in Henry Aaron that softened and humbled him.

  Bill Clinton traced the roots297 of his relationship with Henry to March 1, 1992, when the Democratic party was slugging it out in a primary with no clear front-runner. One day it was Tom Harkin, the next day Paul Tsongas. For a time, even Jerry Brown was leading in the polls. Not that who won would matter anyway, because the winner, the pundits said, would only get demolished by the invincible sitting president, George H. W. Bush, fresh and muscular after winning the Gulf War, his approval ratings making him, if numbers were to be believed, the most popular president in history.

  Still, in desperation, the phone call was made the way all important calls are made, through a maze of high-rent channels: a campaign operative called Sam Nunn, the powerful Georgia senator, who located the civil rights giant and former U.N. ambassador Andy Young, who found Henry. When he picked up the telephone, Bill Clinton, the Arkansas governor, still trying to gain a foothold in the presidential race, was on the other end, asking for Henry’s help.