The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (57 page)

Given the kind of reaction Bartholomay would receive, he would have been better off fixing the World Series. The outcry would have been less. When Kuhn stepped in and ordered Henry to play in at least one of the remaining two games, which he would do, that only made matters worse, since Henry had never quite gotten over the commissioner refusing to acknowledge his seven hundredth home run. “For that,” Bartholomay would recall thirty-four years later, “I got really pounded in the press, but I thought our fans deserved to see the record. I thought it was only fair to Hank, after all he went through to have the opportunity to break the record at home.”

Henry’s ball burned through the crisp Cincinnati air like a comet, over the heads of Billingham, Dave Concepción at short, and Pete Rose in left, before returning to earth somewhere in the seats in left center. Cornered by the press hours later, Billingham would explain his yielding a home run to Henry Aaron with a forlorn inevitability, a guy who had left his umbrella at home during a rainstorm. “I was behind three and one, so I wanted to come to him. Well, I came to him, but it didn’t come like I wanted it to. It didn’t sink. That was a mistake and a mistake to Henry Aaron is a home run.”

The game was being televised on Channel 17,
²²⁶
and for the people of Atlanta, Milo Hamilton was on the call.

Base hit for Lum. He gets the first base hit of the ’74 season. This is the only game today. So Darrell Evans, who last year moved into superstar status—41 home runs, 104 RBIs, he led the club in spring homers with four. Jack Billingham in first inning trouble … walked Garr, Lum got a base hit through the left side with the runner going and pulled the shortstop over. Lum hit it perfectly through the vacated spot…. Darrell Evans the batter with two on as you look down the first base side and Joe Morgan is coming in to talk to Billingham … already on deck is the man of the hour, Henry Aaron. It’s the biggest sports story in a quarter century. One away from the Babe, two to set the all-time new record … two balls and no strikes … the crowd starting to buzz. Could Henry Aaron come to bat with the bases loaded? There’s nobody out, opening inning. A fly ball, left field. Pete Rose waiting … easy play. One out …

Jack Billingham was already shaken, having slept the night before on a mattress on the basement floor of his home in Delhi, Kentucky, huddled with his wife, Jolene, and his two children, John and Jennifer, as tornadoes ripped through town.

He would not fall asleep until nearly 3:00 a.m., and when he awoke, he learned that the storms that rattled his house and nerves had already killed five people.

Now the crowd warming to the introduction of Henry Aaron. Henry Aaron has three spring homers, last year hit 40…. Drove in 96 runs … had a batting average of .301. Steps in for his first at-bat of the season with two on and one down. You can actually hear a buzz in the crowd. The excitement is here, and Aaron can put on the finishing touch. Ball one … and the disappointment as a groan goes through the 50,000-plus crowd. They want him to be thrown something over the plate…. Checked his swing, missed with a curve ball. Two balls and no strikes … Dignitaries here from all over the country … some 250 writers are here from the sportswriting fraternity…. Stee-rike across the letters on the inside corner … if there’s a seat empty, I can’t find it…. Ball three! Three and one to Henry Aaron … We play three games here. Tomorrow is an open date…. We’ll be home Monday night to open a big homestand with the Dodgers on Monday the eighth. Three-one pitch … THERE’S A DRIVE INTO LEFT FIELD…. THAT BALL IS GOING … GOING … AND OUT OF HERE! HENRY AARON HAS JUST TIED BABE RUTH IN THE ALL-TIME HOME-RUN PARADE….

Jack Billingham was now, in his words, “salty as hell” as he stood on the mound, crouched at the waist in disgust as Henry rounded the bases, around the dirt cutouts and along the hard artificial turf. Frank Hyland, the
Atlanta Journal
beat writer, was in the press box, brimming with errata: He noted the time it took Henry to round the bases as sixteen seconds and reported that in his twenty years in the big leagues it was the first home run Henry had hit on opening day, and that the ball was the first ball in the nearly one hundred years of National League play to be made from cowhide. Horsehide was now a relic.

The game was stopped for six minutes. Vice President Ford took the microphone, and Billingham was frothing. He had not been warned that the game would be halted in the event of a home run by Henry, and now it would take little effort to fry an egg on his head. “Sure, it was irritating. It’s bad enough to throw but then you gotta sit there and watch ’em give away all those trophies and listen to Bowie Kuhn throwing a few words around,” Billingham said. “Seems to me they could have picked a better time to do it, like maybe between innings.”

Billingham would last five shaky innings, giving up five runs, walking four, then be bounced, with Cincinnati trailing 6–2. The Reds, with their championship pedigree and hunger, plus Pete Rose (three for five, three runs scored) and Joe Morgan (two for four, and a stolen base)—would win the game in eleven innings, 7–6, but afterward Billingham was still boiling.

“I’m happy for Aaron and all that, and don’t get me wrong. I’m not badmouthing and all that, but it was embarrassing. Hell, it was frustrating enough to have to change balls every time he came up, but then to have to stand out there and go through all that. You don’t know what to do.”

Henry was removed in the seventh inning for the rookie, Rowland Office. In the eighth inning, a harbinger of Bob Hope’s nightmare was realized. Naked people! A young boy tore off his clothes and ran naked through the aisles of the left-field upper deck to an ovation. He streaked for three minutes before being apprehended by four policemen and forced to dress. He was escorted out of the stadium, but before he was taken away, he received a louder second ovation and signed several autographs.

The specter of racial tension was never far from the chase, and for the rest of Henry’s life, race would always play a determining role in his memory of that day and his inability to enjoy his accomplishments.

Before the game, Henry spoke with Jesse Jackson, who suggested that on opening day, with a chance for Henry to tie and perhaps surpass Ruth’s record, the Reds should, as a courtesy, acknowledge the day, April 4, 1974, the sixth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, with a pregame moment of silence. The Reds were angry and refused, even though the club had asked Henry before the game if there was anything the team could do for him. Cincinnati, better known for its conservatism than its progressiveness in race relations, solidified its reputation with its refusal, as did the Reds.

“It should not even have been necessary
²²⁷
to request it,” Billye Aaron would say later about the moment of silence. She would receive ample criticism herself for her politics, and learn a bitter lesson. “After that, I figured I would just keep my mouth shut.”

O
N THE AFTERNOON
of April 8, 1974, Henry Aaron was resting at home in southwest Atlanta, lying on his living room sofa, watching
The Edge of Night
. In his two years of isolation, locked away in hotel rooms, Henry had become familiar with and addicted to soap operas. He also followed
As the World Turns
, and was somewhat disappointed that one of his favorite diversions,
The Secret Storm
, had been taken off the air. He had outlived another one.
The Secret Storm
debuted as a fifteen-minute soap opera on February 1, 1954, on CBS, four days before Henry’s twentieth birthday and a month before he stepped on the field for Milwaukee that first time in Bradenton, and was canceled three days after his fortieth birthday. At 1:00 p.m., Henry slept for a couple of hours, then drove alone to the ballpark, arriving at 4:00 p.m.

For perhaps the first time during the chase, Henry was calm, uninterrupted by reporters before the game. That was because the Braves (Eddie Mathews, in particular) had decided to violate the standing agreement between the league and the Baseball Writers’ Association of America and close the clubhouse an hour before game time. Usually, the clubhouse was open to the press until thirty minutes before the game began, but Mathews, whose protection of Henry was both “fatherly and brotherly,” according to Bob Hope, decided the writers had asked enough questions for the last two years. Mathews had retired six years earlier but still possessed a ferocious, erratic temper, one that left younger players on edge and gave pause to anyone not seeking immediate confrontation. Earlier, he had been set off by a reporter who asked Henry which shoe, right or left, he put on first each day. “Enough of this goddamned circus,” Mathews roared. Henry thanked his old teammate and told him, “It allowed me to get some of my sanity back.”

Henry stretched and walked around the clubhouse, and his teammates gave him a wide berth, no one quite willing to initiate a conversation with him. No one knew if Henry wanted to be approached or if he should be treated with total silence, like a pitcher who was throwing a no-hitter. Henry walked over to Garr, who was dressing for the game.

“Ralph,” Henry said at his locker.
²²⁸
“I’m gonna break it tonight. I’m tired. I’m going to break the record so we can get down to serious business.”

“I think you are, Hank,” Garr responded.

L
ATER IN THE
afternoon, Billye arrived at the ballpark with Herbert and Stella. By the time they took the field, Henry’s parents were surrounded by writers from around the globe, as important to the story as Henry. “I just feel good and happy,
²²⁹
just to be here and see him this close to it. I saw Babe Ruth play an exhibition game once when he came through Mobile,” Herbert said. While he spoke, the writers were looking for genetic clues in the father’s body that would unlock the gifts of the son. Henry was known for his wrists, but it was Herbert’s wide hands and long, tapered fingers that betrayed some form of athletic bloodline. With his hands, Herbert could have been a pitcher, or a pianist. Amid the crush of photographers and writers and dignitaries, it was not lost on Herbert that until his son grew into manhood, white men were an entity that required careful negotiation. Now he was shaking hands with a sitting president and future ones. Herbert was energetic that day and would spend the rest of his life in the proud position of being a celebrity dad, telling tall tales in the spirit of the moment. “I remember he hit a ball over the fence and into a boxcar. Somebody found it in New Orleans.”

Henry’s parents were feted as celebrities, pioneers of the American dream. They would sit next to Bill Bartholomay and Governor Carter, who was formulating a bid to rescue a wounded presidency, but amid the festivities, while Herbert offered levity, Stella was too focused on the miles she had traveled and their unique, bitter terrain—her own as much as Henry’s—to be folksy.

“I’m just proud of the whole black race,” she said to an interviewer. “That’s what I’m really proud of.”

W
ALTER
A
LSTON DID
not say a word to his team about the record during the pregame meeting. The Dodgers were a stoic team, unwilling to play the role of stick figures in Henry’s potential night of drama. As was the baseball custom before the first game of any series, the Dodgers went over the Atlanta scouting report with the pitching staff, and Al Downing, the night’s starter, winced at what he perceived to be a whiff of the old racism that had been an insuperable ingredient of baseball soil. With regard to each of the black players in the lineup, the report echoed variations on the same theme, to pitch them in, on the hands. Invariably, someone in the meeting would say, “Garr, he doesn’t like being pitched high and tight,” or “Make sure you crowd Baker. That makes him uncomfortable.” To Downing, the words were another
²³⁰
insinuation that black players, even twenty-seven years after Robinson’s big-league debut, were somehow less mentally and physically tough than their white counterparts, that black hitters could be intimidated in ways whites could not, that their wills, even after all this time and so much truth to the contrary, were easily broken. He asked himself, Which hitters out there
do
like to be pitched high and tight? And for the life of him, Downing couldn’t come up with an answer.

Like Jack Billingham and Henry, Downing and Henry had a history. Downing had surrendered home runs number 676 and 693 to Henry. The two had met eleven years earlier, in Florida during spring training, when Downing was a rookie with the Yankees. Elston Howard, the Yankee catcher, had introduced Downing to Henry, who by that time was already a big star. Henry sized up the young pitcher quietly, shook his hand, before calling out to a reporter for a spare piece of paper and a pen. Henry scribbled quickly on the paper and handed it to Downing. “If there’s anything I can ever do for you,”
²³¹
Henry told Downing that day, “give me a call. Good luck to you.”