A chilly glare and an accepting shrug

My two close encounters with Henry Aaron, who died today at age 86

Encounter One: Shea Stadium, Queens, New York, June 1974

My assignment, which I had no choice but to accept, was to seek out Henry Aaron, confront him, and annoy him with a “gotcha” question.

This was not going to be fun.

I was 19 years old, a summer intern for Long Island Newsday, in the Atlanta Braves’ Shea Stadium locker room, surrounded by a pack of otherwise portly New York sportswriters, and I was to put the greatest home run hitter ever on the spot.

And not just any spot. The racism, political, why-did-you-sell-out spot.

It was June 20, 1974, 11 weeks after he broke Babe Ruth’s home run record of 714, three weeks into my internship, seven weeks shy of Richard Nixon resigning. I’d been to Shea Stadium once before, in the nosebleed section, watching the Miracle Mets during their 1969 championship drive.

Now I stood just feet from the sport’s greatest slugger as he sat on a stool and pulled up his Braves’ blue, high stirrup stockings.

Hank Aaron, who died today at the age of 86, must have thought I was the third-string batboy muscling in for an autograph. Instead, I was the pushy, ambitious bad boy sliming in for a quote and a juicy headline.

A week earlier in Washington, D.C., Aaron was the honorary Flag Day speaker at the U.S. House of Representatives. That day, he said, in part: “Old Glory is forever the essence of our native land and the emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and purpose as a nation.”

It was a sappy message crafted, I learned through my reporting, by the 24-year-old son of the super heavyweight Los Angeles public relations guru Norman Brokaw, the flak for Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Bill Cosby, to name a few. But he’d farmed out Aaron’s Congress speech to his kid, Sanford.

Before I met with Aaron, the elder Brokaw told me: “I feel that anything we sell him for must measure up to the man. It must have dignity . . . You see, he’s been chasing the flag since he hit his first home run. Do you understand? That’s Henry Aaron.”

As seen by my aggressive sports editor and dutifully adopted by this smart-aleck kid writer, the problem was that a year earlier, in 1973, as Aaron chased after Ruth’s home run record, the Atlanta star was inundated with hate mail and death threats.

No Black man was going to dethrone the hallowed Babe, or, at least, not without a couple of credible death threats.

The problem, for those who wanted to challenge and trap Aaron, was that he and his handlers were walking back some of his pronouncements of just 12 months before when he was on Ruth’s doorstep, and when he was mad as hell and didn’t want to take the racism anymore.

“I just want [fans] to respect me like a man, the same way they respect any common white man,” he said a year earlier. “When I was a kid, I realized that if your skin is Black, you’re not going to be on equal terms . . . The Negro man has been the lowest creature on earth. Even a dog gets better treatment.”

So, I was assigned to ask the question: “How do you reconcile your comments in front of Congress with your comments during the home run campaign about rampant racism in the United States? Aren’t they contradictory?”

Aaron wasn’t thrilled with me. The other men with notepads, who wanted to ask about sliders and RBIs, weren’t thrilled with me. I was barely thrilled with me. I was just following orders.

“I’m not in politics,” he said, with a chilly glare but with a professional answer. “I don’t think anybody really enjoys speaking in front of a lot of people. As far as that speech goes, I was speaking about what the flag means to me on that day. That’s all. What I said last year has nothing to do with what I said in Congress.”

OK, got an answer. Not the one I wanted, but something.

Question Two: “Are you still receiving hate mail, still getting insults from the stands?”

He said: “I don’t read much of my mail, I guess. But most of those people said all they had to say last year.”

Mission accomplished. A New York tabloid story to the hilt. Gotcha. Even chased after and landed a great quote from Harry Edwards, the leader of the 1968 Black boycott of the 1968 Summer Olympics and University of California, Berkeley, sociologist. Why not pile on a bit?

“They invite a baseball player to speak where Martin Luther King wasn’t invited, where Malcolm X was never invited,” Edwards told me over the phone about Aaron’s Congress appearance. “What else would [Aaron] say? What else could he say if they invite him? Would they invite him to tell the truth? . . . All the more reason for that 24-year-old white boy to write a PR speech for his Negro.”

So ended my first encounter with Hank Aaron.

Encounter 2: Mankato, Minnesota, February 23, 1981

What a difference seven years makes. I was now working for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and no longer in the business of the occasional drive-by gotcha story to compete with the New York Post or Daily News.

Aaron was retired and on a speaking tour of college campuses. I was assigned to cover his visit to Mankato, where he spoke to students at what was then Mankato State University, to the MSU Athletic Boosters, to kids at North Mankato Junior High, and to an audience on a local radio station.

He was no longer in the bright spotlight of a Babe Ruth chase or an obnoxious gaggle of bonehead sportswriters. He was relaxed and liberated. No PR-guy-generated scripts. An honest and vulnerable Hank Aaron sat in a Mankato Holiday Inn room, eager to talk, ready to explain, volunteering, “I was hurt during those years” of his 1973–74 home run campaign.

I can’t remember if I told him of our first encounter. I wasn’t sure if he’d throw me out the door toward the ice maker and vending machines down the hall. I didn’t want to break the mood or his desire to just talk to anyone during a break in his day being “Hank Aaron, Number 44, The Slugger.”

(I was delighted that the Star Tribune reposted my 1981 story on its website today.)

Besides, he was sentenced to sign his autograph to baseballs. Lots of them. The radio station had asked him if he could sign “a few balls” that they’d use as prizes over the next couple of days. Sure, he said. Soon after, a knock came on his hotel room door, and it wasn’t just a few. It was a couple of boxes worth, like 48 of them.

He chuckled, shook his head, and offered an accepting shrug. While he signed, this sports icon, stuck in a Holiday Inn in Minnesota on a winter’s day, was eager to be hanging out with anyone, even me. He expressed himself in a way he wouldn’t or couldn’t in Shea Stadium during my first encounter.

“My values have changed,” he said, five years after retiring from playing, thirty pounds heavier than the last time he put on a uniform, a Milwaukee Brewers uniform, by the way, which I’d forgotten.

“Before, I was strictly baseball. Kind of like a horse with a harness on. You know, you put a harness on a horse, and you look straight ahead. I was a baseball player for 23 years and thought nothing but baseball from January to January. But there are an awful lot of problems in the world other than baseball. Baseball is a minor thing compared to some of the things that exist in this world, and it’s too bad I didn’t see these things when I was playing. There’s a lot of injustice in the world.”

He went on to criticize President Ronald Reagan’s cuts of social programs. He blasted former Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who didn’t attend the game in Atlanta on April 8, 1974, when Aaron took an Al Downing fastball beyond the left-field fence to break Ruth’s record. He spoke about the dangerous racial tension in Atlanta.

“I’ve got five children, and if I don’t speak out it’s like me telling them, ‘Hey, keep your mouth closed. Be like your old man.’ I don’t want them to do that. This is the United States, say what you think. It may hurt somebody. It may not . . . I’m not going to ever think I’m going to please everybody.”

So ended my second encounter with Henry Aaron.

I liked that one better than the first.