Associated Press - Henry Aaron hit home run No. 715 on April 8, 1974, breaking Babe Ruth's record.
Off Al Downing. We were in the DC suburbs; it was a rainy day. Now that Barry Bonds has come along, carrying his steroids and his reputation, Hank Aaron seems a decent fellow who does deserve to replace the Babe as homerun king. It wasn't so in 1974: many people questioned his legitimacy in a number of different ways, ugliest of all racially.
I’m not sure what this says about America, or about publishing or baseball or sports writers, but it has taken 36 years for a proper full-dress biography of Henry Aaron, the man who, in 1974, broke Babe Ruth’s home run record, and did so as a black man playing for Major League Baseball’s first franchise in the Deep South. His is a great American life, and Howard Bryant’s “Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron” rises confidently to meet it.
Mr. Bryant’s book can be read as a companion piece, and a reply of sorts, to “Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend,” the recent biography by James S. Hirsch. These two ballplayers were both born in Alabama during the Great Depression (Mays in 1931, Aaron three years later), and both were among the last Hall of Famers to have played in the Negro Leagues. Their years on the field overlapped almost exactly. But they could not have been more different as personalities. Mays was joyous and electric, on the field and off, while Aaron was introverted, sometimes painfully so. They became lifelong, if low-key, antagonists.
A Life of Henry Aaron 796.3570 B or B Aaron
By Howard Bryant
Illustrated. 600 pages. Pantheon Books. $29.95.
Mr. Bryant, a senior writer for ESPN magazine, quotes the sportscaster Bob Costas as remarking, about Mays, that we “associate him with fun” and remember him with fondness. With Aaron, he added, “it is all about respect.” That quotation lingers like wood smoke over “The Last Hero.” These biographies of Mays and Aaron, taken together, are a striking and elegiac assessment of race relations in America during the 20th century. They are elegant portraits, as well, of two different ways of being a man. Wrap them both up for the 14-year-old in your life. The volume that’ll be left standing when the major book awards are handed out, though, is Mr. Bryant’s, I suspect. His is the brawny one, the one with serious and complicated swat.
Henry Aaron ... was a proud man who built and owned his own house, a rarity for African-Americans in Mobile at the time. Henry hated to see his father humiliated because of his race. He would watch, Mr. Bryant writes, “as his father was forced to surrender his place in line at the general store to any whites who entered.” Baseball seemed like a way out. Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line in 1947, when Henry was 13. Henry, who idolized Robinson, began practicing relentlessly, hitting bottle caps with a stick when there was no other equipment around. In a typically perceptive line, Mr. Bryant writes, “Hitting, it could be argued, represented the first meritocracy in Henry’s life.”
Aaron was a loner and a mediocre student, and it’s unclear if he graduated from high school. “Henry would never answer the question directly,” Mr. Bryant writes. (Aaron cooperated with this biography, Mr. Bryant writes, even if he was “never overly enthusiastic” about it.) In 1952, when he was 18, he left home to join the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro League, baseball’s equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters. He played only a few games with them before joining the Milwaukee Braves farm system, ultimately playing in the South Atlantic League, better known at the Sally League. The Sally League operated in the Deep South, and Aaron was among its first black players, a breakthrough Mr. Bryant likens to that of Jackie Robinson’s. It was a difficult time for Aaron. When he left home, he had never been far outside of Mobile except on horseback. He had never had an extended conversation with a white person or been in a white person’s home. Suddenly fans were calling him “alligator bait” and telling him to “go back to the cotton fields.”
Aaron’s first season with the Milwaukee Braves was in 1954, and he led the team, which included the pitcher Warren Spahn, to the World Series twice, winning one, before he was 25. (He didn’t know then that he would never play in another.) He was criticized for his casual style, which some found to be lazy. He didn’t “move with the frothy enthusiasm and frightened eagerness of most rookies,” Mr. Bryant writes. One teammate began calling him Snowshoes because of his stiff-legged running style, and his manager likened him to Stepin Fetchit.
They got on Clemente's case also, because they didn't like his style. Now, of course, everyone loves him.
Word also spread, among some in the press, that Aaron, who was not comfortable speaking in public, was not overly bright. He chafed at these characterizations, and at what he saw as a lack of respect from his manager, who kept shifting his playing position and place in the batting order, something that never happened to other stars. It wasn’t until people began to realize that it was Aaron, and not Mays, who had a shot at breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record of 714 that they began really giving him his due.
Reluctantly, and some not at all. He was not given his due universally.
Mr. Bryant writes alertly about Aaron’s dogged pursuit of Ruth’s record with the mediocre Atlanta Braves, about the hate mail he received and about the hand-wringing from some pundits about whether he was a worthy heir to Ruth. He writes even more vividly about how Aaron has often seemed an enigma, failing to speak up loudly during the civil-rights era, and uttering evasive comments about Barry Bonds, who would break his home-run record in 2007, a record tainted by allegations of steroid use. “Baseball fans would call on him,” Mr. Bryant writes about Aaron, “and he would confuse them.”
Aaron is clearly a hard man to get to know, and I’m not sure Mr. Bryant entirely does. His life off the field is detailed haphazardly: his two marriages, his children, his passions. His own words, quoted here, are mostly unmemorable. But “The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron” had the forceful sweep of a well-struck essay as much as that of a first-rate biography. In an era in which home runs are now a discredited commodity, Henry Aaron looms larger than ever: a nation has returned its lonely eyes to him.
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