The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  Clinton was holding a rally at Georgia Tech,298 he told Henry, and he was desperate to pump some life into his campaign. He had not yet won a single primary. Would the Home Run King allow the Clintons to use his name to raise the turnout, especially among the black voters, who, when properly motivated, could swing an election in Georgia? And one other thing, Clinton asked: Would he be willing to appear himself?

  Henry told the governor he would be honored to do whatever he could to help the Clinton campaign.

  On October 29, 1999, after he had won a second term, President Clinton regaled the audience at a Democratic National Committee function in Atlanta with his reminiscence of his 1993 comeback. According to the official White House transcript of the president’s remarks, Clinton was consistent in his praise for Henry:

  “Georgia was good to me.299 I remember when I ran in the Georgia primary, all the Washington experts said that Governor Clinton heads south to Georgia in deep trouble. If he doesn’t get at least 40 percent in the Georgia primary, he’s toast. By then, I’d already been clear dead three times. Now it’s happened so often, I’m going to open a tombstone business when I leave office. (Laughter.)

  “But anyway, and the people of Georgia in the primary gave me 57 percent of the vote in 1992, and sent me on my way. And I’m very grateful for that. (Applause.) And then I remember, we had a rally in a football stadium outside Atlanta, in the weekend before the election of ’92. You remember that, Max [Cleland]? And we filled it. And I think Buddy Darden was there. We filled the rally. And I remember Hank Aaron was there, and there were over 25,000 people there. And we won the state by 13,000 votes. So everyone who spoke at that rally can fairly claim to have made me President of the United States, since there were twice as many people there as we won the state by. But we made it, and the rest is history.”

  Over the years, President Clinton would use his oratorical masterstrokes to massage his message to fit the contours of his audience, but Henry always found his way into every anecdote, and in return, Henry and Billye would give the Clintons their loyalty.

  “We were in a tough, tough campaign,”300 Bill Clinton recalled. “Hank Aaron had always been a hero of mine, and at the last minute he and Sam Nunn organized a rally. It turns out that we get twenty-five thousand people to fill a football stadium, mostly, I believe, because Hank Aaron was there. We held a tremendous rally and went on to win fifty-seven percent of the vote, and later I became the first Democrat to win the state of Georgia since 1976. And no Democrat has won it since. So, when I tell everyone that Hank Aaron is a big reason I became president of the United States, it’s not just hyperbole because I love the man. I say it because it’s true.”

  At his birthday party, Henry was tearful when the president spoke, and so many emotions over the past year seemed to rush for space behind his eyes at exactly the same time. There was, always, the simple triumph of his life, but this time combined with the losses, losses he dealt with quietly and stoically. There was the photo of Henry in black suit, wearing dark sunglasses at the funeral of his father, Herbert, who had died quietly May 21, 1998. Herbert was eighty-nine years old and through his son had lived the triumph of the American story. As times changed, Herbert had been a legend in Mobile, the father of Mobile’s most famous man. He had been visible around town, always known as “Mr. Herbert” or “Mr. Aaron.” He had been fastidious and proud of his son. At the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Henry eulogized Herbert. “He was poor and unlearned,”301 Henry said. “Yet he was rich and wise. You might say he had a Ph.D in common sense … we should all be so blessed to live a long and successful life. He did his share of bragging about me. Now, I’m bragging about him. Farewell, Dad.”

  A little more than two months later, on August 1, Henry held a family reunion in Atlanta. Three hundred relatives attended. Two days later, Henry’s youngest brother, James, and eldest sister, Sarah, drove back to Mobile, while Henry and Billye flew to Tokyo to attend the World Children’s Baseball Fair.

  The next day, Sarah complained that she had trouble lifting her leg. She was admitted to the hospital, where she suffered two heart attacks. Following the second attack, Sarah slipped into a diabetic coma and never regained consciousness. She was seventy-one when she died.

  Henry’s brother Alfred never survived past birth. Tommie had died fourteen years earlier. Over a sixty-day span in 1998, his father and eldest sister were also gone.

  The president of the United States however, had held the microphone at his birthday party, and the big man began to crack, puffy with tears. Periodically, he would talk about how fortunate he had been to be born with ability and the desire to hone his talent, but at the birthday party the words were distilled into something tangible, something real. The party would be the highlight of his life, providing him a certain energy, from which he would often draw. The emotions of the evening reinforced his desire to build a foundation that would have impact. And that wasn’t all. Before President Clinton left, his presence had generated more than a million dollars for Henry’s foundation.

  “You never know what it means to me302 to have the president say those things about me,” Henry recalled. “I think he was exaggerating, because he didn’t need me, but it gives you a warm feeling that the president of the United States would take the time. It told me that what we were trying to do for young people was the right thing to do.”

  Henry sought to capitalize on his momentum by strengthening his philanthropic mission. All professional athletes touted their charitable foundations, but few of them did more than host an annual golf tournament and fly their friends around the country, tax-free. Henry felt an opportunity existed to create a model that would be truly lasting. It was, thought Frank Belatti, an opportunity for him to fuse together his two passions: separating himself from being just another ballplayer and taking an interest in the future of children, particularly children of color, who often lacked the parental guidance and educational opportunities to have a real chance in the world.

  “Henry would always say, ‘If you’re going to influence a child, you have to do it early. Even high school is too late,’” said Allan Tanenbaum. Four years earlier, Ted Turner had provided the seed money, $100,000, for Henry’s original foundation idea, but having raised another million dollars when Bill Clinton crashed his birthday party, Henry and Billye wanted to sharpen their vision. They met with Allan Tanenbaum and Frank Belatti and began to form a plan to help children. At the All-Star game in Boston—Ted Williams’s last triumphant public appearance—Tanenbaum, Henry, and Billye met on behalf of the newly named Chasing the Dream Foundation. Bud Selig and his deputies, Bob Dupuy, Tim Brosnan, and John Brody, were presented with a one-page proposal that contained six bullet points. The foundation was created to help 755 children—symbolically, one for each of Henry’s home runs—with educational and financial support from grade school through graduation.

  It was an ambitious project, and an expensive one that required corporate partnership. The Boys and Girls Clubs of America were in. Henry turned back to baseball, to his relationship with Bud Selig. Times had changed: the corporate and sports worlds relied heavily upon each other. The foundation needed to raise $2.5 million.

  Selig was in, and not for a portion of the $2.5 million, but the whole thing. The Boys and Girls Clubs would be the administrator. Eventually, the project would be expanded to be named 44 Forever, which meant the foundation would be funded by baseball and its corporate partners in perpetuity. This would not be a fly-by-night endeavor but a project that would outlive Henry.

  “Bud had a year left on his contract. The Hank Aaron Award was special to him,” Tanenbaum recalled. “This wasn’t a project you could execute on your own. It was more challenging. The baseball partnership recognized it’s potential.”

  Billye had always described the motivation behind the foundation work as an opportunity to balance the scales.

  “Both Henry and I had come up303 always being on the receiving end,” she recalled.
“When I look back on my life, I had someone helping me at every turn. I remember being called the teacher’s pet, always into things. I remember wanting to be part of a production at school and not having the clothes. A woman named Mrs. Phillips bought me clothes. And I remember saying, ‘One day, I’m going to have so many clothes.’ We believed that in this position, we had a responsibility.”

  Henry said he knew it years before, but after the birthday party, when the president and the Secret Service and all the guests had left, his vision had crystallized: He would immerse himself in his foundation work.

  PERHAPS JUST SLIGHTLY, Henry felt a certain satisfied restitution. The night did not change the hell he had endured while seeking to break the home-run record, or cure the wounds that had been so deep, but 1999 represented a breakthrough for Henry.

  “I wouldn’t say that the twenty-fifth was a major success304 for baseball, but it was a major success for Hank,” Bill Henneberry said. “People said, ‘We can use him,’ because he can speak. He can’t speak for five minutes, but he can do Q and A for an hour. He’s funny, had a great sense of humor. It rebranded him. People began to find out: ‘Hey, he’s a wonderful guy.’ He’s sweet more than anything else. People didn’t know that.”

  MasterCard hadn’t backed Henry’s anniversary rollout, but now it had a problem and needed help: what to do about the end of the century. The millennium was coming and baseball’s biggest sponsor didn’t have a plan. The year 2000 was a tailor-made marketing opportunity, and MasterCard, with $29 million invested in baseball, needed to hit a tape-measure home run. Kathy Francis went back to Bill Henneberry and asked for a concept. The result was the All-Century Team, where fans would choose the greatest lineup of the century. But there were two problems. The first was that baseball, parochially clannish to the end, could not reach a consensus on this promotional idea. The Red Sox wanted to do their own all-century team, with Red Sox players only, and Ted Williams as the centerpiece. The second problem, from a national standpoint, was finding the right person to be the face for this promotional campaign.

  “The question was, Who was the most marketable? Who was still alive? Ted was sick. Musial was one hundred and five years old. So we came up with Hank, and Willie Mays and George Brett and Barry Bonds,” Henneberry said. “But Brett wasn’t on the All-Century Team, and nobody wanted to work with Bonds.”

  Henry would spend part of the year doing public appearances with Bonds and Brett and Mays. The All-Century Team was a great thing for fans, debating players of different eras. It was all fun, the preferences for one player over another as harmless as choosing Kobe beef over caviar, or a Bordeaux rather than a Burgundy. But the old wounds were always close to the surface, especially when it came to competition with the two professional baseball players who always seemed to define Henry’s time: Ruth and Mays.

  Bill Henneberry had come a long way with Henry since their first conversation in Philadelphia. Now, when MasterCard wanted Henry to appear during the All-Century campaign, Henry would specifically request that Henneberry be the representative who traveled with him. The two crisscrossed the country.

  And then, days before the public announcement of the All-Century Team, Henneberry received a phone call.

  “We’re driving back from the airport. MasterCard did this silly online promotion, not well publicized. Only ten thousand people or so voted for the thing, and Hank had gotten the second-highest number of votes, behind Ruth. MasterCard hadn’t yet announced the starting lineup, but they had told me that it was going to be Ruth, Willie, and Ted Williams. I’m sitting with him when I get the call. So when I told Hank the news, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t make a sound. But you could see it in his face, that I’d hurt him, that it hurt. And I immediately wanted to take it back. I ruined his afternoon.”

  IT WAS THE corporate world that had resurrected Henry. During a period of less than three years, he had undone twenty years’ worth of public perception about him. He had shown that he could be funny and engaging. His was a modest balance. In the right environment, he could take the floor. He had to open up, relax, for his true charisma to show through. During the mid- to late 1990s, he had assuaged whatever doubts existed among the sales and marketing people. He could be, in his own way, a leading man. In sporting parlance, he had made the adjustment. It was either that or the scouting report on him had been dead wrong all along.

  And in so many ways, it was fitting that his revival occurred only within a particular corporate setting: He thrived behind the scenes. He still did not do many commercials, did not hawk products, did not offer his personality to every living room in America. Unlike Joe DiMaggio with Mr. Coffee or George Foreman with an electric grill, Henry would never become synonymous with a single product. He cultivated the corporate types in small gatherings, often private or semipublic. It worked better that way. Henry had always remained not only close to power but on the right side of it, and now his pragmatism was being rewarded. It was pragmatism that made him different from his idol Jackie Robinson. In Robinson’s time, the issues were clear and Robinson was uncompromising: equal citizenship, nothing less. Henry took the responsibility of carrying the Robinson mantle seriously, as his politics and public statements often reflected, but his manner had always been different. Henry had always been methodical in dealing with the men in suits who controlled the money. It was not only political passion but also money that allowed projects to progress beyond the idea stage, and if Henry did not inspire in the Robinson mode, he nevertheless possessed a deft touch, to which executives tended to respond. He made the money men comfortable, and such a disposition had two consequences: The first was that he would often be exposed to the charge that he did not use his influence. The second was that making powerful men comfortable often led to financial opportunity. Now that he had been resurrected, the offers started coming in: fifty thousand for this, twenty-five grand for that. He was now part of the inner circle.

  He had always loathed public speaking, but now when some corporate giant wanted him to come speak to the sales force about how to be home-run hitters in business (and in life), Henry was commanding upward of $35,000 per appearance. His foundation was growing, the backbone of his philanthropy, and lucrative invitations to serve on corporate boards followed. Ted Turner had contributed to making Henry a very rich man. Henry had served on the board of directors of TBS Broadcast Systems for a decade and a half, and he was also on the board of directors of the Braves, the Atlanta Falcons, the Atlanta Technical Institute, and Medallion Financial Corporation (“In niches there are riches,” so went the company motto).

  So much of it all was happening the way Bud Selig had believed it would, if baseball could just stop fighting with itself over money. Big corporate sponsorships would lift the game out of the haze of the strike. Baseball would do its part by putting a dynamic face on the game—less Bud Selig and Don Fehr, more Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. The game was fun now, built on an anabolic cocktail of muscles and home runs and scripted Hallmark moments, mandated directly from the commissioner’s office, moments that took the rough edge off of the game and replaced sharp elbows with a “field of dreams.”

  The highest (players would later call it the lowest) point came during the 2003 World Series, when Roger Clemens, who said he was leaning toward retirement, left game four after the seventh inning. Clemens, pitching on the road against the Florida Marlins in a World Series game, walked off the mound to a standing ovation from both teams…. And that was the first time baseball may have overdone it with the orchestrated moments, because after the tearful, hackneyed good-bye, Clemens changed his mind. He wound up pitching for four more years.

  There was the money, and the feel-good mandate, but during the great home-run chase of 1998, the summer of Sosa and McGwire, both men with different but equally powerful appeal, USA Today released a poll that revealed 75 percent of the country preferred that McGwire break the record, rather than Sosa. Henry appeared on an ESPN interview program soon after the poll n
umbers were released, and he said publicly what blacks and Latinos were saying to one another.

  “It’s just absolutely ridiculous that you could have that lopsided an opinion about who should break the record,” he said on the air. “And I’ve seen other little things that happened that make me believe that McGwire was the favorite rather than Sosa. And I think the reason for that is because he’s from the Dominican [Republic] and also happens to have black skin. I just don’t think it’s fair to him or his family or his country.”

  What followed was the requisite beat-down: that Henry Aaron was bitter after all. And how dare he inject race into the home-run race?

  “I received hundreds of calls to do interviews,”305 he told the Mobile Register. “I turned them down because I was afraid if I did it, I would be misquoted. Finally, I said yes to one, and, lo and behold, I was misunderstood.”

  The point was it wasn’t a question of the public, or the press, misunderstanding Henry. There could be no misinterpretation of what Henry had said or what he had conveyed during the interview. Even though McGwire hit home run number sixty-two during the first week of September, the general reaction was that the record belonged to him, simply because he had surpassed the sixty-one milestone first. Three weeks still remained in the season, and for one afternoon, Sosa had tied McGwire at sixty-six, but the story line had been set: The record belonged to McGwire. Sosa would have to be content to play the stereotypical sidekick, the happy Latin.

  The problem was that Henry had the temerity to talk about a real issue in this land of make-believe. He had sparked a fire with a Robinson-like resolve, and gotten smacked down for it. He had found out what was being discovered across the country: Dissent, whether it was right or wrong, was unacceptable. It got in the way of the money machine.

  Henry responded to the backlash by saying nothing else on the subject. Despite the criticism, Henry held firm privately: McGwire was the chosen one because he was white, and that’s the way it was in America. Publicly, however, he rushed back to the reservation, reprogrammed. “It couldn’t have happened at a better time for baseball,” he later said of the home runs of 1998. “Baseball had some problems because of the strike and this has helped. It’s been great.”