The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (72 page)

“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 folk
³⁰⁹
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 would 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.

O
N
O
CTOBER 10, 2002,
H
ENRY
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 wounds
³¹¹
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 is
³¹²
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

W
HEN 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.

The toxicity levels of what was now being called the “Steroid Era” were lethal, and it was the numbers, always the lifeblood of the sport, that contained the most cancerous cells. From the time not long after California had still been part of Mexico until 1997, the sixty-home run mark had been reached just twice, by Ruth in 1927 and by Maris in 1961. Yet between 1998 and 2001, while the profits soared, sixty had been topped
six times
and the seventy
—seventy—
home-run mark reached twice. The top six single-season home-run seasons had been recorded over a four-year period. In a four-year period, Sosa hit sixty home runs
three times
but
didn’t
win a home-run title in any one of those years. Meanwhile, the cash registers
ka-chinged
melodically and the people cheered, while men like Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson, Reggie Jackson, and Mike Schmidt did a slow burn.

McGwire had hit seventy home runs in 1998, and after the last one, he said in an interview room, arms puffy and eyes shifty, that his record would
never
be broken.

But three years later, Barry Bonds hit
seventy-three
home runs.

Baseball had gotten other numbers it liked—revenues from $1.2 billion in 1994 to $6 billion in 2007 and $6.6 billion in 2008—and the public had gotten its thrills. If Bill Henneberry remembered when baseball was radioactive to advertisers and sponsors, nobody else did. But suddenly—or maybe not so suddenly—it had all gone too far, the joyride topped by one ice-cream scoop too many. McGwire-Sosa 1998 was supposed to be that ridiculous, magical year that made no earthly sense, wouldn’t happen again, and gave the people who saw it that special generational unity, like DiMaggio-Williams in 1941 and Mantle-Maris two decades later. Instead, as the numbers kept increasing, one fraudulent scoop after another, the authenticity of the game seemed increasingly remote. And now, chasing Aaron, there was Bonds, already viewed suspiciously by the public for his obdurate disposition and growing head size, chased by the federal government because it believed he’d lied to a federal grand jury about taking muscle-making drugs. Bonds was so dominant and so prolific when it came to hitting the ball out of the ballpark that by 2005 he had become Henry, circa 1969: the guy for whom breaking the home run record was no longer a question of
if
, but
when
.

Historians had clung to the Black Sox—the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox team that had thrown the World Series—as the standard of malfeasance in professional sports. They claimed that this was the cataclysmic moment when the game had been wrenched from its moorings. Steroids, they said, weren’t nearly that disastrous in terms of historical importance. The contemporaries liked to point to Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time leader in hits, now reduced to a cheap Las Vegas sideshow, as being worse than the rampant drug use that undermined the game.

But neither came close.

The apologists in the locker room, the front offices, and, worst of all, the press box said there was nothing in a bottle that could help you hit home runs. They demanded proof that their golden heroes would do something,
anything
, to run faster, hit harder, play more, earn more. When the information finally appeared, in the form of positive tests, grand jury investigations, sting operations, federal indictments, and empty, implausible lies, the apologists spun deftly, claiming that drugs were old news, that
everybody knew
players were using, and asking,
Couldn’t we just move on?
In the face of crumbling reputations and laughable, desperate denials, the apologists turned off their brains and their intellect and their enthusiasm for the great glory of the pastime, vigorously and petulantly shaking their heads in denial.

T
HE PUBLIC DIDN’T
want numbers anymore, not with the IRS and the federal government hunting down MVPs and Cy Young winners as though they were La Cosa Nostra. Numbers were too suspicious. Numbers just confirmed the con game. Now they wanted a hero, someone who could remind them that the currency of baseball wasn’t something as unimportant as the number of times a man could hit the ball over the fence, but about the value systems and virtues that worthless feat once represented.

Reaching back into the past wasn’t going to be enough. Ted Williams, the cantankerous but hearty, authentic American, was gone. So was the immigrant hero DiMaggio (though it was virtually impossible to envision the embittered, mysterious Joe leading a public debate on values). Jackie, of course, was long gone, while Willie was making more a fool of himself every day he opened his mouth about a subject he knew little about.
(I just don’t think steroids help you at all. They just don’t do anything.)
Mays exhibited a combination of loyalty to his godson, Barry Bonds, and a severe tone deafness to the severity of the public breach. Star power and nostalgia alone weren’t going to do it this time. The word
integrity
was back in vogue, even if it was needed less as a guide and more to assuage the collective guilt. The public, as much as some of the people associated with the game, realized too late, and without enough response, that what had been lost—the belief in the difficulty that came with the game—was the very quality that gave the sport its power.

The apologists and the disbelievers and the ones who couldn’t be bothered, they all tried to minimize the effects of a game without integrity. Those effects, for once, could not be measured by money, but by numbers that could not be argued: McGwire, Palmeiro, Sosa, Clemens, and Bonds, one hundred combined seasons, forty-seven all-star appearances, 2,523 home runs, 354 wins, nine MVPs, seven Cy Young Awards, two single-season home-run records, and the most famous sports record in the history of the country, all publicly disgraced during the same era by the same issue.

No other sport, at no period in the history of the republic, could ever say that. No other sport could point to half a dozen of its greatest players, and a dozen more of possible Hall of Fame caliber, all from different teams, who couldn’t show their faces in public. And now the greatest record in the country was about to fall. Another tainted record. The public wanted someone who could provide a moral compass, someone who could bring them and their game back into the light.

So they turned to Henry.

There had always been a gap between Hank and Henry. Introverted and unsure in large settings, Henry thrived in tightly controlled private gatherings. There, he could relax and allow his natural suspicions to melt. He would be genuinely warm and funny and gentle, disarming his audiences with his easy laugh and quickness, like when he would take his grandson, Victor junior, to school every day. Friends would marvel at how he hated public speaking and yet shone so well in those small-group Q and A sessions, when members of the audience would file out, feeling as though they’d been talking to a familiar uncle. It was in these settings, with corporate executives, manageable groups of lucky fans, and children, where his charisma flowered.

But now, with the sport in moral crisis, the public wanted the other half of the man, not intimate-chat Henry but the great Hank Aaron, the leader of men, out in front and in public. They wanted his presence to make them feel better about a sport he hadn’t played in thirty years. In the months following the 2005 congressional hearings, the number of times the public yearned to hear the voice of Henry Aaron were too numerous to count.

The old guard came out, crotchety and indignant, in defense of their time.

“Go ask Henry Aaron,”
³¹³
Jim Bunning, the Hall of Fame pitcher turned Kentucky senator, thundered. Henry had worn out Bunning, hitting .323 against him in sixty-five at bats. In the first game of a doubleheader, May 10, 1967, in Philadelphia, Bunning gave up home run number 448 to Henry. “Go ask the family of Roger Maris,” Bunning said. “Go ask all of the people who played without enhanced drugs if they would like their records compared with the current records.”

On the face of it, one might have thought that Henry would have welcomed the attention, his inner desire for respect finally converging with the public’s appreciation of him. For years, Henry would argue that records were always valued until they landed in his hands, the hands of a black man. He used to say the all-time home-run record was the most hallowed in all of baseball—until he broke it. Then it wasn’t so important anymore. Later, he would say with no shortage of acidity that Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak seemed to carry more value to the establishment than his record. Yet as Bonds approached, Henry only grew in stature. The
New York Daily News
, once the home of one of Henry’s great journalistic nemeses, Dick Young, now referred to the record,
his
record, as “sacred.”

After years of being dismissed as bitter and largely incurious, or disparaged and accused of being easily led by the more dominant female figures in his life, he was now an important man, the person who was being asked to be the voice of authority on the most important subject of the times. During the Steroid Era, there was no person in baseball whose word was more anticipated or carried greater moral weight than that of Henry Aaron. He had reached the position Jackie Robinson had so many years before, an athlete sought out more for his moral standing than for his past heroics.

And it was there, at the precise moment when he finally had the floor all to himself, that Henry Aaron chose not to engage. Henry’s old contemporary Frank Robinson was fierce and unequivocal. “Any player found to have used steroids, well, I don’t think their records should count,” Robinson said. “I think they should be wiped out.” It was a powerful, direct statement, emblematic of the uncompromising Robinson, who had been fourth on the all-time list for what felt like forever, with 586 home runs. “Pretty soon,” Robinson said, “I’m going to be way, way, way down the list.”

Robinson, Bunning, and so many of the old-timers were fierce, not just because their places in the continuum were being erased but also because for this generation of Americans, drugs were about as low as a person could go. Henry himself had been driven to action by what he saw drugs doing to black communities. He had struggled with his own brother James’s drug and alcohol addictions. James was the youngest of the Aaron siblings. He had remained in Mobile and at one point was living at the Salvation Army building.

But Henry was evasive on the ethical question of steroids, about whether he believed using performance-enhancing drugs was cheating, and nobody could understand why. He refused to engage about his feelings toward specific players and their chemically enhanced accomplishments, offering vague statements about how “unfortunate” the current situation was. Henry distanced himself. Even Bud Selig had reversed field, acknowledging the degree to which his sport had been derailed. In the spring of 2006, Selig announced he would launch an investigation, headed by former senator George Mitchell, into the use of performance-enhancing drugs.