The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (30 page)

Frank Torre, the Milwaukee reserve first baseman, was one of the few white teammates to spend time with Henry, and what he saw was a man who was sensitive to slight but who also kept his emotions regarding segregation buried. Henry did not want to be a burden to his teammates, Torre thought, so he often remained solo, preferring to spend time alone. “He went through terrible times.
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We used to go to the Milwaukee Athletic Club, used to go there all the time, and people would make a big stink because he was a Negro,” Torre recalled. “And that was here, where the Braves were heroes.”

Alcohol provided a subtle yet vitally important subtext of race relations. Black players were often wary of drinking around whites because of its potential dangers. The clubhouse, a relatively controlled environment, was one thing. Being away from the park, in bars that may not have been friendly to blacks, when players unwound and released their inhibitions, was quite another. It was when the alcohol flowed that the real danger lurked, and all it took was one drink, one shot too many, for a potentially explosive situation to develop. The writer Roger Kahn recalled that when Jackie Robinson was playing cards with his Dodger teammates, Hugh Casey, a big right-hander from Georgia, said he fought losing streaks—both on the field and at the card table—by “rubbing the teat of the biggest, blackest nigger woman I could find.” Scenes could be bad enough among teammates when a player got drunk, but add to it the simmering tensions and resentments that existed just under the surface during the first decade of integration and the decision on the part of many black players not to mix socially seemed a wise one.

Gene Conley saw Henry socially on similar terms as Johnny Logan. “He really was all business.
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He had a job to do and he did it. Then he was out of there.” Conley had competed with and against blacks for years. The racial codes, both real and clumsily ignored by the Braves players, made him uncomfortable even decades later. Conley would be especially aware not because he was a social activist but because he was a basketball player.

“I just didn’t go for that stuff. I didn’t make a big deal of it then or now,” Conley recalled. Logan, too, who came from upstate New York, was not uncomfortable or distant with his black teammates, but he wasn’t unaware of the difficulties.

There were days when Conley seemed intrigued by Henry, but he also knew the strict codes about mingling socially with his black teammates. Conley recalled knowing specifically that during spring training, when teams developed their collective personality, hanging out with blacks in town after games was prohibited. More than his other white teammates, Gene Conley found he was uncomfortable to the point of anger when discussing the racial questions of the day. Conley recalled that later, when he joined the Boston Celtics, he often spent more social time with Russell than with Henry. It all seemed so stupid, he thought. “The 1950s,” Conley said ruefully one day a half century later, “were hard.”

The other power brokers on the team were less predictable, which made the concept of drinking with them less palatable. Spahn wasn’t from the South, but nevertheless he held racial attitudes not always considered progressive. Spahn and Aaron had something of an odd relationship. Throughout the league, Spahn had developed a reputation for being, if not a strident racist, a man who was less sympathetic toward the black situation and, despite his education and combat service in World War II, less willing to change. Both Spahn and Aaron would profess respect for each other’s Hall of Fame talent, but Spahn was glib and aloof, while Henry was known for his deliberate and shrewd assessment of people. Henry, like Bob Gibson, was constantly, if not openly, measuring what kind of men the white people around him were. Spahn could make a joke and if you didn’t get it, well, that was
your
problem. If it offended you, then maybe you were just being too sensitive, like the time he offered and answered a riddle in the clubhouse. This was during the season the Braves were receiving national attention for being the first big-league club to field an all-black outfield. There was Bruton in center, Wes Covington in left, and Henry in right.

“What’s black and catches flies?” Spahn asked one day in the clubhouse.

“The Braves outfield.”

In the baseball culture, that was Spahn’s right. He had been a star pitcher for so long that he did not have to adjust to his teammates as much as they needed to learn about him, a dynamic especially true in the case of Spahn’s black teammates.

Burdette was from West Virginia, and his hostile attitude toward blacks had been well established, while Adcock and Henry already knew where they stood. Some players engaged in a spirited talk about “niggers” without realizing Henry was within earshot. The Braves may have been teammates, determined to win the World Series together, but Henry did not assume he was necessarily welcome in every situation.

“You had to remember that integration
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was a new thing,” Henry said. “We had players coming from places where that wasn’t accepted. Everybody had to learn to live differently.”

With the Braves grinding through another tight National League race with four other teams, the national press descended on Henry for a closer look at the man who was, even in July, the leading candidate for Most Valuable Player and the Triple Crown, goals he had set for himself back in spring training. And that wasn’t all. Two days after he joined the All-Star Game, the Associated Press announced that Henry had invaded the thinnest airspace possible for a baseball player.

HANK AARON TIES RUTH HOMER
MARK
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AFTER 77 GAMES

With the 1957 major league season at the halfway mark, young Hank Aaron is even with Babe Ruth’s record home run pace. Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees is four behind.

Aaron, who also leads the National League in batting (.347) and runs batted in (73) has hit 27 home runs in 78 games, the same number Ruth totaled in the same number of games en route to his record 60 in 1927 with the Yankees.

On Monday, July 29, the Braves enjoyed one of their most rousing wins of the season, a 9–8, tenth-inning affair over the Giants at County Stadium. Spahn, taking a terrible pounding, couldn’t get out of the fifth, while Willie and Henry played tit for tat. Mays was thrown out while trying to steal home in the third; then Aaron beat him deep with a triple over his head, and scored when Covington drove him in, to tie the game at 4–4. Willie broke the tie with a long homer off Pizarro in the seventh, and the Giants broke it open in the eighth with three more.

Down 8–4, with one out, in the bottom of the ninth, Crandall homered and started a four-run rally that tied it at 8–8. With two out and the bases loaded in the bottom of the tenth, Al Worthington walked Mantilla home for the victory.

That morning, the latest issue of
Time
magazine hit the newsstands, a sultry illustration of the actress Kim Novak on the cover. Inside were 589 words under the headline
THE WRIST HITTER
.
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In the wildly unpredictable street fight for the National League lead, the Milwaukee Braves were last week’s team to beat…. But the man mainly responsible for the Braves’ surge into first place was a lithe Negro outfielder named Hank Aaron, who is hitting the baseball better and more often than any man in the National League.

The story recounted the old Aaron chestnuts—his days with the Clowns, Dewey Griggs scouting him in Buffalo, the Mobile beginnings—but in the final section of the piece, the subheadline referred to Aaron as “The Talented Shuffler.”

Aaron claims to enjoy playing right field … because “… I don’t have as much to do, especially not as much thinking.” Thinking, Aaron likes to imply, is dangerous. But by now everyone knows that Aaron is not as dumb as he looks when he shuffles around the field (“I’m pacing myself”), and some … think he will … rank among the game’s great hitters.

In later years, when the country’s attitudes shifted and talk that had been common for centuries became socially unacceptable, Henry would gain an annoying reputation among writers for being bland, the same writers who would later attempt to deify him. More likely, Henry had erected a wall around himself, a protective barrier designed to prevent, or at least minimize, the lasting damage of the words written about him.

“I wouldn’t have taken that shit,”
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Bill White recalled. “I would have had to have a talk with a lot of people had they said those kinds of things about me. But you also have to remember that a lot of those first black players were from the South, and this is what they knew. It had been reinforced in them and their families for so long and they had been taught not to fight back. That’s why it used to anger me when people accused Willie of not saying enough. The reason why Henry is a man of respect is because of things like this. He did not respond with words, but with his bat. But Henry Aaron took a lot of crap.”

The press had traveled to Milwaukee to see Henry before. It was in 1956, when Charlie Grimm was still managing the club and the Braves were the fashionable choice to end the Dodger reign. A month before Haney took over,
The Saturday Evening Post
ventured to Milwaukee to profile Henry. Like every top prospect or signature player on a club, he had been featured in the local papers, but
The Saturday Evening Post
, with its Norman Rockwell covers and decades-long residence on American coffee tables, was another matter altogether.

Even in the mid 1950s, as
The Saturday Evening Post’s
influence had begun to wane and television accelerated its final demise, few magazines reached the heart of America like it did. Its interest in Henry represented his arrival in just his third season, but it also seemed to validate the Perini claim that Milwaukee would one day become the country’s baseball capital.
Sports Illustrated
and
Sport
, the two national sports magazines that would carry the industry for nearly a half century, were still in their infancy.
The Sporting News
had not been surprised by Aaron, but the Baseball bible in those days was more a trade magazine for the industry. A feature in
The Saturday Evening Post
meant Henry would be introduced to the mainstream. This form of recognition was reserved for only the most gifted players, the ones who either had transcended their own sport or achieved a degree of cultural significance beyond the limits of the batter’s box.

Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio had been on the cover of
Time
and
Life
, as had Jackie Robinson. Willie Mays made the cover of
Time
in 1954 and would win the cover of
Life
for the first, but not the last, time in 1958, as the Giants arrived in San Francisco. With the interest in him expressed by
The Saturday Evening Post
, Henry would have two important breakthroughs: He would begin his ascent into the ruling class of baseball players, and for the first time in his career, he would be introduced to a larger American audience interested in reading about important people.

The writer of this profile was Furman Bisher, a thirty-seven-year-old reporter, whose full-time job was covering sports for the
Atlanta Journal
. Bisher had been raised in Denton, North Carolina. A speck of a town in the central portion of the state, it claimed just six hundred people. As a boy, when he was not milking cows and completing his farming chores, Bisher had longed to be a third baseman, a dream only enhanced when one of his high school friends, Max Lanier, went on to pitch in the major leagues, primarily for the St. Louis Cardinals. Through good luck and good connections, Bisher landed a freelance writing contract with
The Saturday Evening Post
to write periodic sports pieces. He had gained the trust of a top editor at the magazine after a pair of profiles of college football coaches were well received by the New York office.

Bisher knew Henry from years before, having covered the Sally League in Atlanta when Aaron played for Jacksonville. Bisher liked to tell the story that he supplied the great New York columnist Red Smith with a variation on one of the more memorable lines regarding Henry Aaron. Smith wrote that in Jacksonville, Henry “led the league in everything except hotel accommodations.”

For the better part of a week, Bisher absorbed the life of Henry Aaron. He dined at the apartment on Twenty-ninth Street and watched television with Barbara and little Gaile. Bisher would recall particularly enjoying the company of Barbara, whom he would refer to as “shy,” “trim and pretty,” with a “great personality.” “We got along quite well,”
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he recalled. Early during the visit, he decided that Henry wasn’t equipped for the fame that his talent would ultimately create, but Barbara seemed more readily inviting and eagerly curious about the life of a sports star, a life that was beginning to define their environment.

Bisher talked to Grimm, who told him that Henry was “one in a thousand. You can’t make a Willie Mays out of him. He’s not that spectacular. He does things in his own way. But he’ll probably be around a long time after Willie’s gone.” He retold the few chestnuts about Henry’s early life that became boilerplate for every writer attempting to shape Henry Aaron for the next half century: his brief time with the Indianapolis Clowns, Dewey Griggs’s signing him with the Braves, his brief and wondrous play at each level in the minor leagues. Bisher recalled being taken by the Aaron family and considering Henry a friend.

When the Bisher profile appeared in the August 25, 1956, issue, Henry’s introduction to America in
The Saturday Evening Post
would not be the triumphant moment that trumpeted his arrival onto the national scene. Instead, it was the most influential and devastating piece of journalism ever written about Henry Aaron.