The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (51 page)

There was one other thing: Henry hated the word
nigger
. Whites had used it his entire life as a way of reducing black ambitions and self-esteem. But now in the 1960s, as blacks grew more empowered and less fearful of the old guard, many young blacks called each other “niggers,” if not always as a sign of camaraderie, then certainly of familiarity. Joe Torre recalled Henry tensing whenever Carty tested the limits of obnoxiousness.

Then came the famous day, June 18, 1967, when it all erupted. It was on the team plane, flying from Houston to Los Angeles, the Braves collectively smarting after being no-hit by the Astros Don Wilson. Mike de la Hoz, Henry, and Carty were sitting in the back of the plane, while Tito Francona dozed in and out of sleep, vaguely interested in their game of hearts. De la Hoz always kept a bottle of rum in his satchel and during the game got a little rowdy. Henry told de la Hoz to put the bottle away, or some words to that effect. Francona, who had been with the club for less than a week, recalled the precise moment when the gunpowder had been sparked: Carty mumbling words in Henry’s direction to the menacing effect of “I wish that bottle was mine.” Somewhere during the exchange,
²⁰³
Joe Torre recalled hearing Carty refer to Henry as a “black slick.”

And in a flash, Henry Aaron and Rico Carty were throwing haymakers, big punches from big men with bad intentions, Henry an overhand right that dented the overhead luggage compartment above Carty’s head, Carty connecting with a shot that struck Henry’s forehead, Henry returning the favor. Tito Francona, now awake, stood between the two punching teammates, along with the traveling secretary, four-foot-two inch Donald Davidson, trying to keep from getting slugged.

“Then the copilot comes rushing back and wants to know what the hell is going on,” Francona recalled. “He said he thought there was an emergency, because all the weight of the plane had shifted to the back. It wasn’t an emergency. It was the whole team trying to keep those two guys from killing each other.”

That was it for Carty and Aaron. No more mentoring. No more cards. From that day forward, Ralph Garr recalled, “Rico was just another teammate.”

“A lot of guys would brag about the fight, or keep it alive,” Francona said. “But you know what Henry said about it? Henry said the thing that upset him the most was that he embarrassed himself. He used to say it was the most embarrassing moment of his life.”

T
O THE GUYS
who mattered, the ones who played the game and bled the game and, as the bars closed, wept drunkenly because their passion for baseball was far greater than their actual ability to play it, the word
superstar
was no easy term, cavalierly tossed around like a Player of the Week award. In later years, when Marvin Miller broke management’s hold over the players and the baseball free market became the envy of athletes (and union members) everywhere, money was often seen as the determining factor of worth. Even the average player who signed deals with too many zeros on the check to count believed that being paid like a superstar offered instant membership to the club.

They were dead wrong, of course, and deep down in their collective heart, they knew it: There was room for only a handful on the A-list.

Superstars, the precious ones who lived in the penthouse of the Hall of Fame, were different, and with the word came a responsibility that went far beyond just talent. Being in the Hall of Fame wasn’t enough, and the players themselves were the best (or worst) at parsing and policing. Nellie Fox would enter the Hall of Fame, and so would Don Sutton. But that didn’t make them peers of Rogers Hornsby or Christy Mathewson.

The A-listers were different, went about their business differently, from the silent sweat of Musial, the power and bombast of Ruth, the demanding elegance of DiMaggio to the furious pride of Robinson and Clemente. They could simply do things on a baseball diamond that defied the abilities of the other 99.9 percent. But the A-listers all had one thing in common: Each went to the World Series. If they didn’t play for the big prize every year like the New York stars, then at least once in their careers the best of the best turned into a pack mule, carrying the franchise and the city to the top of the sport. They were the ones whose talent placed them in the millionth percentile, the ones who by simply being on a team meant the difference between winning and losing.

The experts would always say that for this one sport, baseball, one man could never be a true difference maker. How, then, to explain why in baseball the cream of the game, virtually without exception, always played for a championship? All of the New York superstars, from Ruth, DiMaggio and Mantle of the Yankees to McGraw and Mays of the Giants to Robinson and Koufax of the Dodgers played in the World Series multiple times. Hornsby? Cobb? Wagner? Greenberg? Foxx? Killebrew? Frank Robinson? Check. Stan Musial played in the Series in 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1946, Feller in 1948 and 1954, and Walter Johnson in 1924 and 1925. Clemente went twice, won twice. Even the big-spending, no-result Red Sox went to the Series in 1946, and MVP Ted Williams was the engine. Henry Aaron played in consecutive World Series before he was twenty-five.

There were more A-listers in football (Simpson, Fouts, Sanders, Sayers, to name a few) who never played for it all than there were in baseball, so the facts trumped the folklore after all: Top-shelf baseball greats took their teams to the heights. Past or present, sixteen teams or three divisions and a wild card, the era did not matter: Carlton, Schmidt, Jackson, Rose, Morgan, Kaline, Brett, Yastrzemski, Clemens, Henderson, Jeter, Maddux, Winfield, Pujols, and Alex Rodriguez—all of them played for a title at least once.

History wouldn’t yet be finished with Ken Griffey, Jr., but for the guys who hung up the spikes for good, the great exception was Ernie Banks. Banks was the smiling ambassador of Chicago baseball, and he had toiled diligently, never once having a team rally around him in return for his years of goodwill. For Banks’s first ten years in the big leagues, the Cubs never even finished .500, never better than fifth place. In 1967 and 1968, with Leo Durocher revived and running the show, the Cubs finished third, and thus it was with shock and amazement throughout baseball that during the 1969 campaign it was the Chicago Cubs who were running away toward the pennant.

T
HE YEAR
1969 was all about change and reaction, from a nation still reeling over the Kennedy and King assassinations to protesting (or avoiding) the war in Vietnam to a man walking on the moon. And this was time for baseball, as well. The combination of television, football, and its own slow morass had rendered baseball yesterday’s game. With baseball in desperate need of a paint job, the powers gave the grand old game a makeover: an east and west division in both leagues, with a best-of-five round of play-offs between the divisions’ winners for entry into the World Series, plus a lowering of the pitcher’s mound to give the hitters a better chance to hit the ball, an essential act of the sport that occurred less frequently during the 1960s of Gibson, Marichal, and Koufax.

There were cosmetic nods to the future and one concrete sign of change: Those perennial punch lines, the Mets, were lurking, within striking distance of the Cubs at the all-star break.

But the rest of the year was all about the past. Banks, now in his seventeenth year, in his eighth year as a full-time first baseman, reached back into the vault to fish out one last vestige of what he once was. He would strike out more than one hundred times—a great stain on the players of that era—for the first time in his career and would hit just .253, the lowest he had ever hit up to that point. But Ernie Banks was in a pennant race. And nobody thought that the running joke—“We could put a man on the moon before the Cubs reach the World Series”—might actually end in a tie.

On August 31, after the left-hander Ken Holtzman beat Niekro 8–4 and completed a three-game sweep of the Braves at Wrigley, the Cubs held a four-and-a-half-game lead over the Mets entering the final month of the season. Twelve days before Holtzman beat Niekro, he was no-hitting the Braves at Wrigley when Henry stepped up in the seventh. The wind was blowing in, and Henry still rifled a drive to left that cut through the wind, seemed to bolt out of the park, and broke up the no-hitter and the shutout. Holtzman turned and watched it head toward Waveland Avenue. Billy Williams, the left fielder, stood against the ivy. So much for the no-hitter, Holtzman thought. At least he still had the lead.

But suddenly
, the wind began chopping at Henry’s ball, beating it back down to the earth and into the field of play. Williams remained leaning against the wall, and the ball, which thousands of eyewitnesses say had once been physically out of the field of play, blew back in, landing in Williams’s glove. Holtzman retired the remaining hitters of the final two innings and recorded his first no-hitter.

N
EIL
A
RMSTRONG
and Buzz Aldrin, alas, could relax after all. September, and the Cubs had never come along; eight straight losses to welcome the month later, it was the Mets, who for seven seasons had never done anything but lose, who were in control of the division, staring at the play-offs. New York would win one hundred games, win the division by eight over the broken Cubs, and Ernie Banks would be gone two years later to the land of handshakes and autographs for a living, having retired without ever visiting the promised land.

Another heirloom dusting occurred during the 1969 season. Nestled amid the Braves’ new pinstriped home uniforms, the trading of Joe Torre to the Cardinals for Orlando Cepeda, and the inaugural, geographically challenged National League West, where two of its six teams—Atlanta and Cincinnati—were based in the eastern time zone, was the return of another oldie: Henry Aaron and Willie Mays fighting it out for a pennant.

So much of their circling over the years had been about ability and a place in the pantheon, air most mortals would be grateful just to breathe—Willie always on top in the public imagination, the pay scale, and the proximity to immortality by way of Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record, refusing to make even a little bit of room for anyone else, with Henry unfazed by Mays’s poetry and stardust, convinced of his ability to chop the wood with anyone (“No way was Willie a better hitter than me,
²⁰⁴
no way,” he would say) while consistently diffusing the very obvious and very real rivalry that existed between the two men (“I consider us the best of friends,”
²⁰⁵
Henry would tell the
Wall Street Journal)
.

Mays began the season with 587 home runs, Aaron 510, and the narrative that Willie Mays remained the unquestioned leader of his generation still held. The Braves, meanwhile, tore apart their new division during April, with Henry hitting .397 for the month. The Braves held on to first place, though periodically relinquishing the lead to the Giants, Dodgers, and Reds as if handing off the baton during the 4 x100 relay.

Then, near Memorial Day, Henry suddenly and completely transformed the summer. On May 30, Bill Hands of the Cubs shut out the Braves 2–0 at Wrigley, the continuation of the common summer theme of the Cubs pounding Atlanta into the dirt. But the next day, after a driving rain held up the game and turned the Wrigley turf into a dishrag, Henry started matters by hitting a two-out homer off Fergie Jenkins in the first. Jenkins and Niekro would engage in a numbing stare-down that wet afternoon, until the ninth, when Niekro blinked—a Ron Santo leadoff triple and a game-winning base hit by Don Young—and the Cubs had won again.

Another day, another loss, but this time without tension: In the finale, Pat Jarvis couldn’t get out of the third inning and the Cubs pounded out sixteen hits and three home runs in a 13–4 blowout.

The Braves were dropping games and the race grew so tight, four teams could soon fit in the phone booth, as if all of baseball popped in new contacts, rubbed its eyes, and for the first time saw the sharpness and burst of colors, the baseball world in true focus, all in the Technicolor form of Henry Aaron.

He had homered in four consecutive games, would hit twelve homers during June off big cats like Jenkins, old friends like Tony Cloninger (who surrendered home run number 531), and the usual assortment of unlucky no-names. By the end of June, Henry had twenty-one home runs, but it wasn’t the impressiveness of his single-season total that had brought him attention, but a quick recognition among those in the sporting world that Henry, not Mays, would be yelling “Timber” when the time came to shout at Ruth.

In the span of forty-five days, after Henry had hit his twenty-ninth home run of the year, a low, serious liner off Tom Seaver, Henry had passed Mel Ott, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Eddie Mathews, and Jimmie Foxx on the all-time home-run list. There were only two men left, Mays, still playing at 596 home runs, and Ruth, at 714.

The writers calculated that Henry would also reach the coveted three-thousand-hit plateau inside of a year, a milestone only Musial had reached over the past half century. Before that, you had to go back into the scrapbook forty-four years, to Eddie Collins in 1925. Henry had been abandoned when the Braves wheezed during those past summers in Milwaukee and Atlanta and the club was out of the money, but they were alive again, and so was he, rewriting the record book each day he woke up. The Braves barreled into September, unable to shake the Giants but tough enough to avoid swooning themselves, and
Sports Illustrated
first came looking for Henry, and this was just the start.

HANK BECOMES A HIT
²⁰⁶

For years, Henry Aaron performed in comparative obscurity while compiling a record that makes him one of baseball’s all time hitters. Now, as Atlanta fights for a pennant, he finds he is famous at last.

And it was there, with the arrival of the austere
Sports Illustrated
, that the stage for the next act began to take shape, and this stage would be a solo one. Mays would certainly reach six hundred home runs before Henry, but implicit in the story, for the first time on a national scale, was the inevitable passing of the torch: Pursuit of Ruth belonged to Henry, not Willie Mays. It was very clear that even when he reached six hundred, Mays certainly did not have 115 more home runs left in him.