The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (48 page)

Henry bought a handsome brick rambler that somewhat resembled the house in Mequon. It was set on two sprawling, shady acres and the address was 519 Lynhurst Drive. Almost immediately, Henry was invited to a series of informal meetings at the Braves offices, welcoming him to Atlanta. He had integrated the Sally League and now he would be the first black baseball player to be the signature attraction on a team in the Deep South. Bartholomay and members of the Atlanta business community were at one meeting. At another, he met a young progressive politician named Jimmy Carter, who was running for governor against the eccentric segregationist Lester Maddox. Carter told him then and would tell him in later years, when the two men became friends, that it was not merely the arrival of the Braves that legitimized the South but the Braves specifically being led by Henry Aaron. At another meeting was a group that would not forget Henry: Martin Luther King, Sr., Martin Luther King, Jr., and Andrew Young.

“Martin was a big baseball fan,”
¹⁸⁹
Young recalled, adding that he remembered Henry being somewhat embarrassed that he wasn’t more publicly visible in the front lines of the civil rights movement. “We told him not to worry. When you talked to Henry Aaron, you knew how he felt about civil rights. We told him just to keep hitting that ball. That was his job.”

In early 1966, the city held a parade to welcome the Braves. Against the backdrop of triumph, the story seems apocryphal, but Andy Young recalled the moment clearly.

“I can remember standing out at the parade. The parade came down what is now Spring Street and I was standing in front of the American hotel, which is now a Marriott Suites. It was an old hotel and I was standing behind a bunch of rednecks and I kind of moved in amongst them to see what was happening,” Andy Young recalled. “Each of the major players was sitting on the back of a convertible, and when Hank came down, one guy said, ‘Now, if we’re gonna be a big-league city, that fella’s gonna have to be able to live anywhere he wants to live in this town.’ And I said, ‘Oh, shit
… They
said that? This must
mean
something.’”

CHAPTER TWELVE
WILLIE

A
S YOU ENTERED
the Braves clubhouse, an oversized refrigerator loomed to the right, a frosty glass door revealing shelves of Fanta grape and orange soda distributed by the Coca-Cola Bottling Company. Next to the fridge sat the cigarette machine and a tub filled with ice and Piels beer. A side table housed assorted sundries—sunflower seeds, tobacco, bubble gum—and a jar, about ten inches high, brimming with amphetamines.

Wire-mesh dressing stalls lined the far right wall, leading to the trainer’s room, the ultimate safe haven, where players got taped and massaged, and, most importantly, could hide from the press. The center of the room featured two long rectangular folding tables that stood next to the pre- and postgame spreads. The tables served as the social epicenter of the Atlanta Braves clubhouse. It was where the Dominican Rico Carty, the self-nicknamed “Big Boy” (or “Beeg Boy” if you happened to spell his moniker as he did, phonetically) preened and boasted and flexed. Felipe Alou and Felix Millan played hearts on those tables with Dusty Baker and Phil Niekro. The tables also doubled as a makeshift dais, where Joe Torre rallied support for a radical concept quickly spreading through big-league clubhouses: the creation of a strong players union to protect their interests against the owners, led by a man Torre deeply respected, Marvin Miller.

And then there was Henry, away from the tumult, at a safe distance from the rest. His locker was located along the far left wall from the clubhouse entrance, second to last from the showers. In 1968, there was no bigger, more formidable player in the Braves clubhouse than Henry Aaron, the last link to the great old days of Spahn and championships, free-flowing beer and promise. Henry could be melancholy with his role as a bridge between eras. Eddie Mathews was gone, shipped to the Houston Astros the year before. Joe Torre, eight years in the big leagues, was a perennial all-star, but it was his brother Frank who had played with the Milwaukee pennant winners. Carty could hit with anybody in the league and cut a dashing and colorful, if not annoying, figure in the clubhouse. But Carty was talent without profile, having joined Milwaukee after the glory, having never played in the postseason, having never been there when things were in full flower. Niekro was just a kid who showed immense promise, and Tony Cloninger couldn’t get the pain out of his right arm after winning twenty-four games in 1965—the Braves last, lost year in Milwaukee. Henry was surrounded by good players with fine futures, professionals certainly, but he was set apart by his history and by his numbers, the great calling card for every player in major-league baseball.

As the 1968 season began, Henry was thirty-four, and enjoyed a position unique from that of anyone else playing big-league ball at that moment: He was the guy whose name invariably arose when the writers were sitting around during the interminable downtime of spring training, discussing just who might be up for the challenge, the long climb to the top of Mount Olympus, the summit, of course, being Babe Ruth and his 714 home runs. Maybe they had forgotten about Henry as Milwaukee grew irrelevant and the Braves sank from the annual pennant races, but without much warning, the gas tank on Willie Mays seemed near empty. Willie just wasn’t Willie anymore. He was thirty-seven years old and 172 homers shy of Ruth, but 1967—just twenty-two homers and a career-low .263 batting average—represented an obvious distress signal. The writers and the fans (and most likely Mays himself) did the math and realized that the expected narrative of Mays passing Ruth was most likely not to be. Mays would have had to average more than forty home runs through the 1971 season (when he would be forty) even to come within breathing distance of the record. Frank Robinson was fierce and dominant and heading for Cooperstown as surely as Henry and Willie, but he was never close enough to Ruth on the home-run list ever to threaten. Killebrew? Banks? Great players, Hall of Fame–bound were each, but they had no chance. It was Henry, not yet thirty-five years old, with 482 home runs and a career batting average still over .315, who had the best shot of reaching the big guy. It was Henry, therefore, who would undergo a national reassessment. With Aaron, the calculations weren’t so daunting. His back and knees were starting to give him trouble, but he was in shape. He played in Atlanta, where the ball carried, and, most important of all, he did not have to
increase
his production to reach the Babe. If he played seven more seasons, until he hit forty, in 1974, he needed to average thirty-three homers a year, one homer less than the thirty-four he had averaged over the fourteen years he had already played big-league ball. All he had to do to take a shot at Ruth was just be himself, be as consistent as he’d always been.

Even as he stood apart, the Braves were increasingly his team. Bobby Bragan and Billy Hitchcock were bounced as managers, and Bartholomay handed the reins to an Alabaman, Luman Harris, who held authority as manager but had no stature. Harris had pitched during the war years and held the distinction of losing big on a bad team, once posting a 7–21 record for the 102-loss Philadelphia A’s in 1943. Henry was the best player, with the longest résumé, the greatest accomplishments, and the most respect. The veterans admired how he played so well for so long, and the kids, who not too long ago had owned his baseball card, idolized him, mesmerized by the idea that they were now not just big leaguers but shared the room with the great man himself. Respect was the proper description, for Henry did not pretend that he was anything like the younger players. He lived at a distance.

Despite their admiration for him, Henry maintained a certain curmudgeonly contempt for the new generation, by which he was now surrounded. They did not study the game as his generation had, nor did they seem to play when hurt, and to Henry Aaron, playing regardless of pain represented the ultimate mark of professionalism. After the first day of spring training, pain was a part of the game, and yet younger players seemed unaffected by sitting out a day or two until their injuries healed. And yet, this new era of modern player would earn more money than he and Spahn and Burdette and Mathews—tougher players from a tougher generation—ever saw at a similar point in their careers, either individually or, for the most part, combined.

Henry had no illusions about the power of management. He had fought every year with Bob Quinn and Birdie Tebbetts, sending back his contract every January for an extra dollar. He had been in the league thirteen seasons and still wasn’t close to making $100,000.

Yet Henry could not envision baseball without the reserve clause. He believed what the owners had been telling the players and the public for a century: that free agency would destroy baseball. The league would not be able to function if players were allowed any form of free agency. Henry attended Marvin Miller’s meetings. He was generally supportive of the nascent union’s initiatives, but in interview settings and public statements, he would repeat various versions of the same theme: teams needed to control the players.

The center of the room was where the good players, the stars, the scrubs, and even the bug-eyed clubhouse kids commiserated. It was where a fifteen-year-old high school infielder named Stewart “Buz” Eisenberg had the greatest job in the world.

Eisenberg was a Braves batboy
¹⁹⁰
during the first two years the Braves were in Atlanta. While Bartholomay had been concerned how the big-league, integrated Braves would play in a region that for generations had remained strictly segregated and Jimmy Carter hoped that the arrival of the Braves would legitimize the South, Buz Eisenberg, throughout his high school years, lived out their macro concerns on a daily basis. His father, Dan Eisenberg, was a traveling salesman and had moved with his wife, Gloria, from Philadelphia to Atlanta in 1963. One of three children, Eisenberg attended North Fulton High School and later graduated from Lakeside High. He recalled that the family did not have much money and that they lived in Shallowford Downs, a brick-faced apartment complex on the northeast side of town. He was Jewish in the Deep South and remembered getting into countless fights for being called a “dirty Jew” on a daily basis, the worst of this occurring during his junior high years. Through Eisenberg’s experiences, it became clear that the laws might have changed but that attitudes had not, and those attitudes were held by the very people Bartholomay needed to attract to his ballpark. These people, who were unused to interracial competition, would decide if they’d allow Henry Aaron to be their hero.

Eisenberg recalled how deeply racial attitudes defined his upbringing. As a kid in Philadelphia and, later, when the family moved to Atlanta, he did not have a black friend. He made the high school wrestling team and recalled that no one on the team wanted to pair with a talented black teammate named Jack Jones.

“There were four blacks in our high school in eleventh grade. That was the first year we integrated. The kids used to say that the black kids smelled like fish. They used to say that they ate fish because they couldn’t afford meat,” Eisenberg recalled.

There was the disturbing incident as a member of the junior ROTC. The instructor in charge was Sergeant Conley (“Sergeant Conley’s turning green/Someone pissed in his canteen/Sound off … one two … sound off … say it again!”) and one afternoon the sergeant hosted a first-aid seminar in the high school auditorium.

“I remember having to go to mandatory junior ROTC, back before it was ruled unconstitutional. It was totally unfair, three days a week, weapons training and things like that,” Eisenberg recalled. “First aid was not integrated yet. Sergeant Conley showed us a short film and then gave us a scenario: ‘You’re in a truck and there’s an accident. You see the victim is a black man lying in the street unconscious. So what do you do?’

“He told us, ‘The first thing is you check to see if he is breathing. You find out that he isn’t and you must perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.’ And on it went. ‘Look into the mouth and throat to ensure that the airway is clear. If an object is present, try to sweep it out with your fingers. Tilt the head back slightly.’ Then he moved closer to the imaginary victim, approached his mouth, and instead of showing us how to give mouth-to-mouth, he yelled into it, ‘GOODBYE, NIGGER!!!’ I’ll never forget that, because all the kids in the auditorium were laughing.

“For me it was different. Being with the Braves helped me out a lot with that, because in the clubhouse you talked to everyone, so when you got back to school, everything they were saying about blacks didn’t make a lot of sense, because the Braves were all in the same room together.”

He would remember virtually every detail of those two years with the total recall of a teenager surrounded by his heroes: how being a batboy for the Braves turned a self-described “nerdy kid” into a “hot date,” both because he was associated with the hottest thing in town, the new baseball team, and because the generous tips the players bestowed upon him meant he always had more cash to take the girls out than some of his rivals at school. He remembered how the lower guys on the team, younger guys who were often closer in age to the batboys than some of their teammates, would prefer to hang out with the kids than with the established ballplayers, and how the Braves mascot, Chief Noc-A-Homa, headdress, feathers and all, always had the best weed at the ballpark, right in his tepee beyond the centerfield fence. Eisenberg was particularly taken by a young pitcher named Clay Carroll, who used to go over to Shallowford Downs and swim in the pool, and how Buz and his mother, Gloria, would laugh together at just how much food Carroll could eat.

Eisenberg lived a dream. There was the time he was sitting there eating with the other clubbies when a naked Joe Torre sneaked up behind him and stood stealthily above, his penis dangling over Eisenberg’s right shoulder, dangerously close to Eisenberg’s right cheekbone. Upon noticing the laughter in the room and then recognizing why the team was busting up, Eisenberg kept eating, appearing not to notice Torre’s dangling manhood nuzzling his cheek, before quickly striking his left hand across to his right shoulder, as if he were trying to swat a fly. Torre had by then backed away, and the room was bathed in laughter at the kid’s expense, but Buz Eisenberg loved every minute of it—that just meant he was one of the guys. There was no better feeling on earth for a teenage kid who wanted to grow up to be a baseball player than to be included in the good feeling and the easy humor of the men he idolized.

He remembered Henry Aaron as a brooding figure, who always smoked and often drank a beer before and after games, at a distance from the rest. Eisenberg would recall that Henry rarely took his place in the social bazaar in the middle of the Braves clubhouse.

“Hank Aaron never even looked at me. Of all the guys, Aaron was probably the only one who I never made eye contact with, and he was the only one I really wanted to pay attention to me. I mean, here I am, fifteen and a half years old, and you’re within three feet of Hank Aaron every day. He was the guy you idolized. At the end of every season, guys would tip you fifty or a hundred dollars, and Aaron stiffed me, totally. I wasn’t sure if he didn’t see me. But he did stiff me.” The next year, as the Braves returned from spring training, Henry called out to Eisenberg and tossed him a warm-up jacket, an item that, forty-one years later, Eisenberg still owns, the jacket in beloved, precious tatters.

“I was there for eighty-one games for two seasons and Hank never, ever came over to the middle of the room. I can’t say I never saw Hank Aaron smile, but I can say I never saw him belly-laugh, rap someone’s ass with a towel … be one of the guys. I never heard what Hank Aaron’s laugh sounded like, and I was aware of it because he was such a presence. I could see if he was just another guy, then maybe I never would have heard it because I wouldn’t have been paying full attention. But
I was
paying full attention, because
he
was Hank Aaron.