The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  Though it had been Henry who defended Sosa, it was Sammy who eventually ran afoul of Henry. This happened a couple of years after the 1998 frenzy, when John Hancock, another big baseball sponsor, announced plans to sell its stock to the public. To commemorate the occasion, it wanted a big name to ring the bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, one of the fun perks that came with being the person of the hour. It was an honor designated for visiting dignitaries, Super Bowl winners, and famous sluggers, to name a few.

  Hancock, naturally, wanted McGwire, but he said no. But Sammy Sosa said yes, as did Henry. The deal was going to be simple: Two legends from their respective eras would celebrate Hancock’s IPO. They would shake hands, sign autographs, and have lunch with the big shots, who then could brag to their friends. Bill Henneberry brokered the deal. Henry negotiated his usual fee, and agreed to a couple of additional events to push the numbers above a hundred grand.

  But to the surprise of the Aaron people, Sosa cut his own deal: $135,000 for just the one afternoon. The day before the event, Sosa canceled, telling the firm he wouldn’t be attending. Stiffing Hancock meant stiffing Henry, who was left alone to carry the event.

  “So, we’re going to meet and sign306 a hundred bats, then go to breakfast with the market makers,” Henneberry recalled. “Then we get a call from Sosa’s agent, who says, ‘Can we do this another time?’ ‘What do you mean? We’re going public tomorrow!’ The John Hancock guy is freaked. There’s all kind of shit flying around. They come back and say Sosa isn’t showing. He had a signed contract. He doesn’t show. I know I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but people think he’s this great guy. He’s not.”

  And for the entire next day, a solo act instead of a duo, Henry was the star. He rang the bell on the exchange floor. He had them eating out of his hand. He told stories about the old days and gave that big laugh and made the executives enjoy being around him, their silvery hair turned dark and youthful for one afternoon. Everyone was taken by Henry’s gentleness and humor.

  “Hank had to do the whole thing, and he was delightful,” Henneberry recalled. “He shook hands. He was great.”

  IT WAS A piece of popular fiction that Bud Selig was responsible for initiating Henry’s second act. Selig’s family roots were in the car business and thus it made sense to think that when Henry created the Hank Aaron Automotive Group, the umbrella for a string of car dealerships he would begin in 1999, Selig had been the inspiration.

  Not only was that not the case but Selig recalled warning Henry to think twice, and then think some more, before entering the car game. “Everybody was going to blame me307 if it didn’t work,” Selig said. “So I wanted him to know exactly what he was getting into.”

  It was Henry’s old friend Jesse Jackson who indirectly got Henry involved in cars. It turned out that, even as the millennium neared, not a single American distributorship of Bavarian Motor Works, the great BMW, was owned by an African-American. When this situation came to light, the corporate types at BMW grew skittish, at first denying the charge, while refusing to name the black-owned distributorships. This was embarrassing, even more so when Jackson began to advertise the fact. Like other status symbols, owning a BMW meant you had made it. It meant class, speed, and enough disposable income to accept no substitute. An African-American who owned a BMW represented a significant financial achievement; thus Jackson did not relent in his criticism of the company. The criticism of BMW resonated especially in Atlanta, the city that came, not always accurately, to symbolize the success of black capitalism. That meant in Atlanta, a lot of successful black people were driving BMWs, and they could afford to change allegiances, switching to, say, Mercedes-Benz. Offending such an influential constituency was not good business.

  And thus it came to pass that Henry Aaron became the first black majority owner of the first BMW franchise in the country, Hank Aaron BMW, located in Union City, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. Vic Doolan, an important man in the Atlanta auto business, understood the necessity of being on the right side of a potentially explosive issue. He reached out to Henry and his people, and from protest came progress.

  As a condition of ending the pressure, which had first been exerted on luxury import car makers for years by the National Association of Minority Automobile Dealers, BMW agreed to attract black ownership of BMW franchises, starting with Henry.

  That was sweet, but not as sweet as the deal Henry received. Allan Tanenbaum brokered the deal. He wanted two things, the first being choice of location. The second was that Henry would not have to put up any of his own money. BMW had come to him. The name Hank Aaron was currency enough.

  Initially, not everyone was happy with the deal. The fact that Henry was receiving such a golden deal ruffled the minority professionals who had struggled and sweated in the low margins and glass ceilings of the car business. To them, it was just another example of a celebrity handout.

  HANK AARON GOES TO BAT FOR BMW308

  But while industry insiders don’t necessarily begrudge Aaron’s accomplishment, some question the wisdom of appointing a high-profile franchiser with little to no automotive experience.

  “Quite frankly, we were surprised,” says Sheila Vaden-Williams, executive director of the National Association of Minority Automobile Dealers. “Especially since we’ve provided BMW with names of established dealers with an interest in the Atlanta market.”

  Undaunted, Henry almost immediately recognized how powerful an asset the Hank Aaron name was. He had impressed skeptics by choosing a location, Union City, that had no previous client base. He hadn’t cherry-picked a ripe location, but he was determined to build a business. In the first twelve months, Hank Aaron BMW raked in $32.9 million in sales. Fans wanted to be associated with Hank Aaron, and for every new BMW he sold, he gave the buyers a Hank Aaron–signed baseball. Hank Aaron Toyota followed. As did Hank Aaron Range Rover.

  Henry was vindicated, but some of his people seethed at what they considered to be more jealousy on the part of fellow professional blacks, the crab-in-a-barrel mentality that often stifled success. “There were some black folk309 that he knows who were calling him ‘Uncle Tom’ behind his back, and he wanted to prove them wrong,” Allan Tanenbaum said. “He wasn’t trying to prove anything to the white man; he wanted to prove it to other black people. I really resented that.”

  And it was a family affair. The kids never went into baseball, except for Lary, who became a scout with the Braves. Henry Aaron, Jr., became part of the business, running the Toyota dealership. And Henry’s son-in-law Victor Haydel oversaw most of the company.

  “Why was I chosen?”310 Aaron said in an interview in the magazine Black Enterprise. “Just because I had been a baseball player didn’t mean I didn’t know how to run a business. I have 17 successful fast-food restaurants with Church’s, Popeye’s, and Arby’s. They knew I had some experience running a franchise operation. I accepted the challenge that I could put minorities in charge and run a dealership.”

  When the business press came to him, it found a different Henry from the one the sporting press had been accustomed to. He was still not particularly talkative, but he seemed to regard his business successes with a heightened pride. Perhaps the reason was that because he had been so comfortable in the sports world, he now enjoyed the challenge of succeeding in business. It was this success that allowed him the opportunity to disabuse whites of the notion that blacks could not succeed in business. He found himself more engaged with sports figures who had made the transition to real business ventures (as opposed to lending their names to a product and leaving the daily operation to others). He was particularly impressed with the basketball player Magic Johnson, who had parlayed his on-court success into a financial empire of banks, movie theaters, and restaurants. Johnson did not merely own the local movie theater; he had used his clout to appeal to corporations to invest in areas heavily populated by African-Americans. Henry had done the same with his fast-food chains, but an upscale operation such as BMW wo
uld require a different approach. The result was that, as Magic Johnson had done, Henry traded off of his name to create scholarships and internships in the auto industry. Three years after entering a new business venture, BMW had (with a significant nudge from Henry) launched its first minority training program.

  ON OCTOBER 10, 2002, HENRY had purchased a house at 2029 Embassy Drive in West Palm Beach, Florida—more than 3,500 square feet, nestled on the golf course of the President Country Club—for $461,250 from Anthony and Patricia Lampert. Presidents had grown upscale and exclusive, emblematic of the real estate boom sweeping the country. Just four and a half years earlier, the Lamperts had purchased the house for $97,500, but West Palm, despite an unusually high crime rate, featured enclaves of star power. Tiger Woods, Venus and Serena Williams, and Tommy Lee Jones all owned houses in the area. Henry was sixty-eight at the time and intimates knew the West Palm purchase was part of his master retirement plan. Periodically, he would drop hints that his active participation in all of his business interests was finite. In interviews, he would say that he expected to be less involved, that “he wouldn’t stay in the car business forever.” He remained fourth on the Braves masthead and still maintained an office at Turner Field, but even though his title grew in importance, Henry hadn’t been involved in the daily operation of the Braves in years. In addition to the 755 Restaurant Corporation, he was part of various business partnerships, but in many of those he was being paid for lending his name to bring prestige to the enterprise.

  His longtime assistant, Susan Bailey, who had worked with Henry since she was a teenager, was so successful at shielding him from requests (and even from people who knew him best) that she was often nicknamed “Dr. No” or “Horatius at the Bridge” by the foiled. Her stance represented Henry’s increasing need for distance. And these days, Henry was saying no more than ever: no to most honorary degree offers (yes to Wisconsin’s Concordia University—anything for Wisconsin; yes to George Washington University, no to Williamette College), no to speaking engagements, no to most interviews, no to commercials. You didn’t see Henry pitching products as other players might. His schedule was still full, but to his inner circle, the signals were clear: He was ready to leave public life.

  What was there left to prove? As he approached seventy, he had grown in stature and status. The decade had been a total success. The drift and pessimism from the 1980s were gone. The Henry Aaron of the millennium was now a regal figure. In 1997, the Mobile Stadium, which Henry could not enter as a kid and which housed the team the Mobile Bears, on which he could not play, was renamed Hank Aaron Stadium. The people in Mobile told stories about seeing Henry’s dad around the ballpark, as if it were a celebrity sighting.

  It was never going to be possible that Henry would be as well known for his cars as he was for his home runs, but he had nevertheless succeeded in his second act, a feat that most celebrities found increasingly elusive. He had become a wealthy man in two fields. It was during this time that even his greatest lament—that he had been rendered one-dimensional by the hate mail and the home runs and his fame—had been overcome. During the All-Century Team campaign, MasterCard ran a contest, the grand prize being dinner with Hank Aaron. The winners, a husband and wife with a couple of older children, met with Henry at the 2000 World Series.

  “Hank asked what they did, and as it turned out, they owned car dealerships,” Bill Henneberry recalled. “It was the perfect match. They sat down in a small conference room at Shea Stadium before one of the games and neither mentioned a word about baseball. I’ll never forget the look on their faces. Their eyes were as big as saucers. They asked Hank about cars and he asked them about their dealerships. They thought they’d died and gone to heaven.”

  Twelve days before he left office for good, President Clinton invited Henry to the White House to honor him with the Presidential Citizens Medal for “exemplary service to the nation.” A new generation of politicians—and it helped that the two most important, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, were southerners—had recognized him in his fullness. The Citizens Medal, Clinton told Henry, was for his non-playing contributions as much as for hitting home run number 715.

  “In the spotlight and under pressure,” Clinton said during the ceremony, “he always answered bigotry and brutality with poise and purpose.” He had always burned that his interest in the world outside of baseball never seemed to translate, but apart from Muhammad Ali—who also received a medal that day—no other recipient was affiliated with sports. Henry sat next to Fred Shuttlesworth, the civil rights leader whose house was bombed by segregationists on December 25, 1956, and Dr. Charles DeLisi, the first government scientist to outline the feasibility of the Human Genome Project. Henry had become transcendent.

  Eighteen months later, Henry was at the White House again, before another president, George W. Bush, to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian award.

  The truth of it all was that Henry was never completely comfortable with the cloying demands of public life. Unassailable as he was in his position as public treasure, close friends noticed that he still never talked about 715, even though at every public appearance he signed eight-by-ten glossies of the Moment, the day he’d not mention. No one brought it up, nor did he volunteer, and that was fine, because he seemed to have softened as the years mounted.

  “I don’t want to say that all the wounds311 from what he went through were healed, but definitely it had eased some,” said director Mike Tollin, who was one of the few people Henry said yes to (he allowed Tollin into his inner circle for a 1995 documentary). “I can’t say for sure, but I think the way he had been so totally embraced, that times were finally different, helped a lot.”

  Dusty Baker would see Henry a couple of times a year, at a celebrity golf tournament or some other function, and he could sense that Henry was shifting down. One day in 2006, during his final, turbulent days managing the always tempestuous Chicago Cubs, Baker tried to explain the Aaron paradox: “The thing about Hank is312 that he really doesn’t need any of this. There are a lot of guys who say they don’t need the attention, but then you see them get mad every time someone gets mentioned ahead of them. Then all of a sudden they start giving interviews and now they’re all over the place. Hank is content with what he did. He doesn’t need to defend it, to compare it, nothing. He did what he did and that is enough for him.”

  If the private Henry sought solace as he always had, the public had one last job for him.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  756

  WHEN A TRAIN comes speeding right at him, engines roaring, exhaust choking the easy blue sky, the instinctive man leaps blindly, hoping he will be fast enough and lucky enough to find safety. The hopeless man stands firm in the face of onrushing violence, resigned to his grisly fate. But the truly confident man, the man who knows himself, lies flat between the two rails, convinced the train will pass him by.

  Beginning in 2005 and intensifying over the next two years, a locomotive of circumstances not of his own making headed directly toward Henry Aaron. And over the course of those two years, he would have to decide which of the three men he was going to be.

  The amount of money was bigger than ever, and yet Bud Selig’s master plan of rehabilitation through corporate synergy, orchestrated set pieces, and runaway profits, had, in less than a decade, collapsed. That great elixir, the home run, was now baseball’s most discredited commodity. The cacophony about performance-enhancing drugs and loss of integrity was very real, even though the players, the union and the owners, all grew even richer. Alex Rodriguez earned $22.7 million in 2008, but Bud Selig was not so far behind, at $17.5 million. But because they chose money over authenticity, the heroes once credited with bringing the game back, well, they didn’t look so heroic anymore.

  By the time Mark McGwire had been retired a measly five years, the period most Hall of Fame–level players prepare for a lifetime of bronzed immortality, McGwire was a six-foot-five-inch, 245-pound
symbol of fraud. Baseball’s most carefully constructed monument, the home-run summer of 1998, was no longer a baseball heirloom, but the family disgrace, the open secret no one dare mention, in the hope it would just fade away.

  No home run could ever cleanse McGwire’s disastrous public appearance March 17, 2005, in front of the House Committee for Government Reform, when he was reduced to a buffed-out con man, his magical summer rendered inauthentic. The train sped toward McGwire, too, and it overwhelmed him. McGwire was unable to defend—in front of his government and his country—the outsized feats of his career that once had been celebrated. He had nothing to say, repeating the phrase that would become a punch line as well as an epitaph: “I’m not here to talk about the past.” He had nothing of which to be proud, nothing at all to add. When he left room 2154 of the Rayburn Building that windy March afternoon, only the tatters of what was once his reputation remained.

  Sitting next to McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro famously pointed at the committee and swore, under oath, that he’d never taken steroids. “Period,” he said, only to test positive for steroids two months later. As the afternoon wore on, Sammy Sosa, McGwire’s 1998 accomplice, feigned he understood not a single word of the English language, and did not answer a single question. In 2009, Sosa’s name was leaked as one of dozens of names to have tested positive for an anabolic substance in 2003.

  In one afternoon of stunning, devastating clarity, the years that built a renaissance not only came completely undone but proved fraudulent; a Superfund site sold as beachfront property.