There were a few things, if only a very few, that Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth had in common. They were obviously linked by home runs, although there was little resemblance in the geometry and physiological dynamics that the two of them applied to send balls into the seats. They both played with the Braves, although Aaron devoted twenty-one years to the team and Ruth but twenty-eight games. Their fathers both ran neighborhood taverns, although George Herman Ruth, Sr., was the bartender, not the proprietor, and Herbert Aaron sold more booze out of the stash hidden behind the loose board over his front door. They both left high school early to embark on their careers, although Ruth went into organized ball and Aaron the Negro League. And as they tried to make their ways in the game, both players were referred to publicly and frequently as “nigger,” although Aaron was black and Ruth wouldn't have been allowed to play big-league ball if he had been. Ruth did, however, sport certain facial features that some regarded as Negroid, and when some bold antagonist such as an opposing player would speak up with this observation, as many did, the Babe would fly into a rage, becoming so palpably angry that he was liable to do something like wave at the center-field bleachers and then hit the ball there, which was the sort of thing that went into the legend of baseball's most romantic, colorful, conspicuous, influential, historic, epic, and legendary figure. The man was so distinct that he became an adjective. He was Ruthian.
There would never be such a thing as an Aaronian clout. There would never be another baseball player who could foster the language and legacy that Ruth did, because there cannot be. It was his lot to be the symbol and savior of the game, its slugger, its prototypical Yankee, its beloved Bambino. Some guys are pitchers, some are second basemen, some are real estate developers, some are night managers at Burger King, and Babe Ruth is the most romantic, colorful, conspicuous, influential, historic, epic, and legendary figure in baseball. It's just what he is. In the History of Baseball, he is lesson number one.
Ruth is one of two players whose legacy to baseball was both indispensable and inimitable, with Jackie Robinson being the other. Unlike Robinson, though, there was nothing sociological about Ruth's contribution. In fact, there was little that was even logical about what he did. He was a ponderous-looking man, practically an oaf, a graceless, bawdy, overindulgent fellow whose peculiar speciality was something that had not previously been contemplated; at least, not in Ruthian terms. In the days before Ruth, a home run was something to be sampled, an hors d'oeuvre at which a few notable players nibbled. But the Babe came along and cleaned off the tray. Then he had some beer, belched, and wolfed down some more. He was a study in conspicuous consumption, an unfettered basher whose disrespect for the home run paradoxically raised it to a level of reverence. They say he invented the home run, and to pass off that statement as hyperbole is to be tediously technical. In the same way, he invented the Yankees.
It seemed that the grandest things of baseball were the manifestations of Ruth. He was the potbelly of the world's fattest batting order, the swaggering Sultan of Swat. To many baseball fans, Ruth meant everything. He was the Babe, babe. There would never be another.
This was the message that was shoved into Henry Aaron's face as his home run total approached 700. It was all too true…and all too irrelevant, because Hank Aaron never desired to be Babe Ruth or to take his place. He had no interest in bringing down anybody's hero. All of that was somebody else's business. The fact is, Aaron had very little feeling at all about Babe Ruth. Ruth was practically finished with the Yankees when Aaron was born in 1934, and as a child Aaron had no particular affinity for him or any other white ballplayer. They were of another world. Even when he began appearing in the same sentences, Aaron knew instinctively that he was nothing like Ruth. On a personal level, they were as different as their batting styles. Aaron was a man who ate in his room and called home every night, Ruth a social glutton who held curfew in contempt and wore out waiters' shoes. Ruth told dirty jokes to the social matrons of New York; Aaron was uncomfortable hearing them from his closest teammates. Ruth was a backslapper who accumulated friends he couldn't even name, Aaron a loner who observed people with canny suspicion.
On the more pertinent level, Ruth was a swashbuckling home run king of bigger-than-life proportions, Aaron a humble man who happened to hit balls over fences. The two had very little to do with each other, in any capacity, except for the number 714, which happened to be the amount of home runs Ruth hit before he retired in 1935. It was a total that so exceeded the sum of any other player's home runs as to seem eternally unapproachable, which was a sensible assumption in light of the fact that, indeed, no one would threaten Ruth's transcendent status among home run hitters. By definition, it was impossible for that to happen, because Ruth would always be the original, the great man whose example engendered descendants of the home run who would compete with each other in a way the Babe never had to.
Aaron was the survivor of that competition. And a survivor is generally what he was, a player who simply kept swinging longer and more effectively than all the others. It puzzled him that few could see or respect that. And it angered him that he could not go about his private quest without being compared, criticized, cross-examined, and cussed out in the context of a broad-nosed white man he cared little about.
It was a tragic winter. On New Year's Day, word came that Roberto Clemente had been killed in an airplane crash after taking off from Puerto Rico in bad weather. He had been on a mercy mission, flying supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. I was shaken when I heard the news. For several days, I kept believing that they would find Roberto and he would be all right. And the whole time, I kept thinking about how trivial our little rivalry seemed about who was the best right fielder.
Roberto was six months younger than I was, and he was still at the top of his game when he was taken from us. Incredibly, he had finished the 1972 season with exactly 3,000 hits. It wouldn't have been right for him to have even one fewer, which made me realize that we should take nothing for granted in life or in baseball. Clemente's death also made me realize how precious my opportunity was—the privilege of setting a new record for home runs.
With all that had happened in the previous year, I was probably never as eager and ready for a season to begin as I was in 1973. Willie Mays was behind me, Mathews and Billye were alongside, and Babe Ruth was straight ahead. A ballplayer needs something extra to keep him going at the age of thirty-nine, and no player ever had as much to play for as I had that year. I was on the verge of doing something that would give me a place in baseball history, and I couldn't wait to do it. I had been waiting and waiting all my life for something or other; now it was up to me. Unless you grew up black in the South, I don't think you can imagine the surge of freedom and power I felt just knowing that I controlled my own destiny.
My high lasted for about a month, maybe less. Ironically, the thing that brought me down was hitting home runs. It wasn't that I couldn't hit them; the problem was that I couldn't hit them; the problem was that I couldn't hit anything else. Seven of my first nine hits in 1973 were home runs, and for several weeks my batting average was down around .200. That was all the critics needed to see. It was plain to them that I was no longer a complete hitter, I was concerned only with the record, and I had lost all interest in the good of the team. They made that clear in their letters to me.
Dear Henry:
First I would like to say you are regarded by many as a good baseball player and a good hitter. To even remotely suggest that you are a great player or hitter, a person would have to be judged insane.
I went into the season wanting to break the record that summer, but it wasn't long before I changed my goal. I still wanted the record, but I didn't want to do it batting .240. I wanted to hit .300, and if the record came along the way, great. If not, it would come the next year. There was no time pressure. Only two things could keep me from breaking the record—a serious injury or a terrible batting average. If I couldn't get my average up to a respectable level, there was a chance I would stop short, because I'd never been a one-dimensional hitter and I didn't want to be one at the moment history came knocking. So, as far as I was concerned, everything was fine and dandy as long as I stayed healthy and the base hits fell in.
Not everybody shared that opinion, however.
Dear Nigger,
Everybody loved Babe Ruth. You will be the most hated man in this country if you break his career home run record.
Dear Nigger,
In my humble way of thinking, you are doing more to hurt Baseball than any other that ever played the game. You may break the record and you may replace Babe Ruth in the hearts of the liberal sportswriters, the liberal newspapers, TV and radio, as well as in the hearts of the long-haired Hippies. But you will never replace the Babe in the hearts of clear-thinking members of our Society. So, roll on in your undeserved glory, Black Boy.
Friend Hank,
If you should “break” Babe Ruth's record of 714 home runs, remember the Babe averaged a home run for every eleven times at bat. For several years he was pitching. If the Babe had been playing every day possible, his home runs would be close to 900.
I believe you are a man of high morals and wouldn't want to be the holder of a title that could be later classified as being tainted. Think it over Hank.
Dear Black Boy,
Listen Black Boy, We don't want no nigger Babe Ruth.
Dear Super Spook,
First of all, I don't care for the color of shit. You are pretty damn repugnant trying to break the Babe's record. You boogies will think that you invented baseball or something.
Dear Mr. Nigger,
I hope you don't break the Babe's record. How do I tell my kids that a nigger did it?
In May, when our crowds were so pitiful that you could practically hear somebody crack open a peanut, there was a small group of rednecks who sat in the right-field stands and heckled me for three straight nights. At first, it was the same stuff I was used to hearing, mostly about all the money I was making for striking out and hitting into double plays, but as they became drunker and louder they became more obscene and personal, and I became angrier and angrier. They were using Sally League language, and I wasn't going to let anybody take me back to the Sally League. Finally, in the ninth inning of the third night, I walked over to the stands and told them I was going to come up there and kick their asses if they didn't shut up. But before I could do anything I would later regret, the security police arrived and escorted them out of the park. I really can't say what might have happened if security hadn't come. All I know is that I was fed up.
I didn't expect the fans to give me a standing ovation every time I stepped on the field, but I thought a few of them might come over to my side as I approached Ruth. At the very least, I felt I had earned the right not to be verbally abused and racially ravaged in my home ballpark. I felt I had earned the right not to be verbally abused and racially ravaged in my home ballpark. I felt I had earned the right to be treated like a human being in the city that was supposed to be too busy to hate. The way I saw it, the only thing Atlanta was too busy for was baseball. It didn't seem to give a damn about the Braves, and it seemed like the only thing that mattered about the home run record was that a nigger was about to step out of line and break it. I was angry enough that I made a public statement in which I charged that America was still a racist country and all that Atlanta had to offer was hatred and resentment. I knew, of course, that there were plenty of good people and at least a few good baseball fans in Atlanta, but I was mad at the whole South. Later, I backed off a little and said that the only thing wrong with Atlanta was that it had Georgia sticking out of it. The fact is, I like and admire Atlanta now, and in many ways I'm proud to live there, but I sure didn't feel that way in 1973.
And believe me, the feeling was mutual. All year long, Atlanta overwhelmed me with its indifference. Early in the season, we averaged less than 8,000 fans at home and more than three times as many on the road. I would get standing ovations in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and St. Louis, and I couldn't make it through the hotel lobbies for all the people wanting autographs; but it seemed like Atlanta frankly didn't give a damn. It was true that we didn't have a contending team, but we had the kind of team that fans usually like to watch. We led the league in home runs.
Three of us were among the home run leaders from the beginning of the season—myself, Darrell Evans, who had become our regular third baseman, and Davey Johnson, a second baseman we got from Baltimore in a trade involving Earl Williams. Johnson was a good glove man who had never been a home run hitter until he came to Atlanta. In Baltimore, most of the players used heavy bats because that was what Frank Robinson used, but I convinced Davey that he should use a lighter bat in the National League because there were more fastball pitchers. He started popping those fastballs into that hot Atlanta air, and the results amazed everybody, especially Davey. At one point, an old lady in tennis shoes stopped me at our hotel in Los Angeles and asked if I were the home run king, and I told her, no ma'am, Davey Johnson was up in his room sleeping.
It was all I could do to stay close to Darrell and Davey in home runs, because I was only playing about two thirds of the time. My knees and back were feeling every bit of thirty-nine, and my throwing arm had weakened so much that I asked Mathews to move me from right field to left. He had already given up on the idea of me playing first base—he said he moved me back to the outfield to save my life. It was obvious that I wasn't the all-around player I'd been ten or five or even two years before, but I did have the best home run percentage in the National League. My batting average also climbed steadily starting in the middle of May. All things considered, I thought I was having a hell of a year.
Dear Nigger,
You can hit all dem home runs over dem short fences, but you can't take dat black off yo face.
Dirty old nigger man,
Had Ruth played and been at bat as many times as you, old nigger, he would have hit just short of 1100 home runs. I hope lightning strikes you for trying to blemish Ruth's record. Retire old man. I repeat I hope lightning strikes you old man four-flusher. The worst to you old black man.
Dear Hank Aaron,
How about some sickle cell anemia, Hank?
Dear Jungle Bunny,
You may beat Ruth's record but there will always be only one Babe. You will be just another Black fuck down from the trees. Go back to the Jungles.
Dear Brother Hank Aaron,
I hope you join Brother Dr. Martin Luther King in that Heaven he spoke of. Willie Mays was a much better player than you, anyway!
Dear Nigger,
You're a real SKUM. You should still be in the Nigger Leagues.
Dear Jungle Bunny,
You have the nerve to try to break the Babe's record. 1st of all you're black so you have no business even being here. Go back to Coonsland. You and your people always talk about be treated bad. Well look what the Krauts and the Romans did to the Jews and Christians, never giving them a chance. In America we gave you niggers everything and you want more. Personally I like you because I don't think your prejudice like them bigots but cause your black you're un-equal to me the King. In closing I hope you hit 713 and get a heart attack on the field but your a nice jig.
Dear Nigger Scum,
Niggers, Jews, Yankees, Hippies, Nigger Lovers are the scum of the Earth. Niggers are animals, not humans. Niggers do not have souls because they are animals, have strong backs and weak minds. The time has come to send the niggers back to Africa, there is an animal shortage over there. You niggers are no good, sorry, dirty as cockroaches and a dead nigger is a good nigger. The nigger loving Jews are sorry as niggers, and a disgrace to the White Race. These scum should be sent back to Israel.
Boy, I despise, hate and detest you scum. The world is better off to get rid of you scum—scum—scum—scum—scum.
As the hate mail piled up, I became more and more intent on breaking the record and shoving it in the ugly faces of those bigots. I'm sure it made me a better hitter. But it also made my life very, very difficult. A lot of the letters threatened me, and it got to the point that the FBI was reading and confiscating some of my mail before I ever saw it. My secretary, Carla Koplin, was going through almost 3,000 letters a day at one point. Most of the mail was supportive, and the encouraging words people wrote helped me fight through the hate. The good fans helped keep me going, and I was grateful to them, but in a different way, they could be as hard to deal with as the bad ones. In Los Angeles, the Braves arranged for the bus to pick us up in front of the dugout, because I could never make it through the autograph hounds to the parking lot. All over the league, I had to register at our hotels under fictitious names. I would reserve one room in my name, where the operator could put calls through and let them ring, and another in a name like Diefendorfer, where I actually stayed. The problem was that sometimes my children couldn't get through, and that worried me because they weren't safe.
My oldest daughter, Gaile, was a student at Fisk University in Nashville, and she was receiving strange, unsettling phone calls. Other students told her that a man had been asking them about her schedule and her habits. One morning, Billye and I were having breakfast at home when an FBI agent knocked on the door and told me there were reports that Gaile had been kidnapped. It turned out that she hadn't been, but an informer told the FBI that the kidnapping had been plotted and attempted. It was enough to scare the hell out of me, and, needless to say, it was a horrifying experience for Gaile.
My dorm mother came and got me one day and brought me to a room where four FBI men were waiting for me. That was when they told me they had received a report that I might be kidnapped. They told me what to do if it happened, and they told me how they planned to protect me. There were FBI agents all over the campus, disguised as yardmen and maintenance men. That whole year at Fisk, I was never by myself. It was pretty frightening, and I know my father was worried sick about it. He flew up to Nashville to visit me almost every time he had an off day.
—Gaile Aaron
We were able to keep closer tabs on the other kids, who were living with Barbara and going to private schools in Atlanta—Hankie and Lary at Marist High School and Dorinda just down the road at a Montessori elementary school. The schools were very strict about keeping strangers and visitors away from the kids, but we couldn't protect everybody all the time, and there were enough crackpots out there to make us constantly nervous. Once, when the newspaper ran a picture of Dorinda and me at a Braves father-kid game, somebody clipped it and sent it to me with the words, “Daddy, please think about us. Please, please!” Nobody close to me was off limits. People would even call my parents in Mobile and tell them that they would never see their boy again. My father would tell them to go to hell and then hang up.
I tried not to take the threats on my own life too seriously, but they were always in the back of my mind. As preposterous as it seemed that somebody would want to kill a ballplayer for breaking a record, I knew that an aroused bigot is capable of almost anything. There were too many chilling examples out there for me to ignore the situation entirely. Now and then, when the FBI would advise me of a threat on a particular night, I would tell my teammates not to get too close to me in the dugout. One night in Montreal, I was standing out in left field with my hands on my knees when a fire-cracker went off in the stands. It sounded like a gunshot, and I thought, uh-oh, this is it. I kept my eyes straight ahead and didn't move a muscle until I realized I was still in one piece and breathing.
A lot of the threats came through phone calls to the Braves. Donald Davidson was the man in charge of my contacts with the outside world, and he was a good man for the job because nothing fazed Donald. One time there was a rumor that I had been shot, and when a reporter reached Donald to inquire about it, he said, “I'm sure if Henry had been shot he would have called and told me.”
But the danger was real enough that the Braves and the city of Atlanta arranged to have a policeman named Calvin Wardlaw escort me to and from the ballpark and make sure I was tucked in at night. I saw as much of Calvin that year as Billye or Mathews or anybody. Whenever we were together, he carried a binoculars case with his badge and a pistol inside. He never had to reach for the pistol, but I felt better having him around. One time, he accidentally left a package on the seat of my car that I wasn't supposed to see, and inside was some toilet paper with a picture of a gorilla and a note to me that said, “This is your mother.” It didn't take much to figure out what kind of people we were dealing with, and as a result we were always on the lookout. Calvin and I almost never made eye contact when we spoke to each other in public, because I was always looking over his shoulder and he was always looking over mine. To this day, I'm still that way.
Dear Hank,
You are a very good ballplayer, but if you come close to Babe Ruth's 714 homers I have a contract out on you. Over 700 and you can consider yourself punctured with a. 22 shell. If by the all star game you have come within 20 homers of Babe you will be shot on sight by one of my assassins on July 24, 1973.
Dear Hank Aaron,
Retire or die! The Atlanta Braves will be moving around the country and I'll move with them. You'll be in Montreal June 5-7. Will you die there? You'll be in Shea Stadium July 6-8, and in Philly July 9th to 11th. Then again you'll be in Montreal and St. Louis in August. You will die in one of those games. I'll shoot you in one of them. Will I sneak a rifle into the upper deck or a .45 in the bleachers? I don't know yet. But you know you will die unless you retire!
Dear Hank Aaron,
I got orders to do a bad job on you if and when you get 10 from B. Ruth record. A guy in Atlanta and a few in Miami Fla don't seem to care if they have to take care of your family too.
Hey nigger boy,
We at the KKK Staten island Division want you to know that no number of guards can keep you dirty son of a bitch nigger mother fucker alive.
Dear Nigger,
Beware of the white man's wrath [with picture of Klansman's hood].
Mr. Aaron,
We the Ku Klux Klan Knights of America are now going to make this something you better pay attention to. If you do not retire from the baseball seen (QUIT) your family will inherit a great bit of trouble. We can't make this sound any clearer (DEATH). We will be in touch later with something more CONVINCING.
Dear Nigger Henry,
It has come to my attention that you are going to break Babe Ruth's record. I don't think that you are going to break this record established by the great Babe Ruth if I can help it. Getting back to your blackness, I don't think that any coon should ever play baseball. Whites are far more superior than jungle bunnies. I will be going to the rest of your games and if you hit one more home run it will be your last. My gun is watching your every black move. This is no joke.
Dear Nigger,
You black animal, I hope you never live long enough to hit more home runs than the great Babe Ruth. Niggers are like animals and have a short life span. Martin Luther King was a troublemaker, and he had a short life span.
Dear Hank Aaron,
I hope you get it between the eyes.
Dear Hank Aaron,
I hate you!!!! Your such a little creap! I hate you and your family. I'D LIKE TO KILL YOU!! BANG BANG YOUR DEAD.
P.S. It mite happen.
I was the only one of the Braves' officers who actually lived in Atlanta, so I was technically in charge of Henry's situation that year. I met with him early on and said, “Look, a lot of this stuff is going to be coming.” He asked me if we would just handle it for him. He didn't even want to know about the threats unless we thought there was one serious enough to get the FBI involved. You could tell that most of the letters were cranks. There was a guy from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, who wrote him all the time with filthy racial remarks, and another one from Victorville, California. There was a lot of KKK stuff, much of it from the North. The FBI told us that if anybody was going to do something to Henry, they probably wouldn't write him first, but we had to take it seriously when there was a specific threat. When we would get a letter like that, we would stick it in a plastic bag and turn it over to the FBI. There were a lot of crazies out there.
When I look back on that whole episode of Henry going after the Ruth record, that's the most amazing part of it to me. People had no idea what he was going through. Nowadays, a player will get one threat and he won't even go out on the field. Henry had them practically every day, and for a long time he didn't say a word about it.
—Dick Cecil, former Braves vice president
I asked Carla to save the hate letters that she didn't have to turn over to the authorities. I didn't read most of them, but I wanted to have them as reminders. I kept feeling more and more strongly that I had to break the record not only for myself and for Jackie Robinson and for black people, but also to strike back at the vicious little people who wanted to keep me from doing it. All that hatred left a deep scar on me. I was just a man doing something that God had given me the power to do, and I was living like an outcast in my own country. I had nowhere to go except home and to the ballpark, home and to the ballpark. I was a prisoner in my own apartment. Outside my apartment, I could see a hotel sign that blinked on and off, and it got to where I could tell you how many times that sign blinked in a minute. That whole period, I lived like a guy in a fishbowl, swimming from side to side with nowhere to go, watching everybody watching me. I resented it, and I still resent it. It should have been the most enjoyable time in my life, and instead it was hell. I'm proud of the home run record, but I don't talk about it because it brings back too many unpleasant memories.
You find out who your real friends are during times like that. Ralph and Dusty always lifted my spirits, and Billye really came through for me, talking me through a lot of tough times, helping me keep things in perspective and showing me that there was still some love in the world. And I don't think a manager ever meant more to a player than Eddie Mathews meant to me during those times. He knew me and understood me as well as anybody in baseball, and he did all he could to take the pressure off me. Also, one of Eddie's coaches was my old teammate, Lew Burdette, who had a reputation as not being the biggest ally of the black ballplayer; but Lew was there for me when the going was rough, just like he had been when he was pitching and the other team was throwing at my head. One more fellow I couldn't have done without was a veteran catcher named Paul Casanova, a big Cuban who had a good grip on things and was a trusty companion for dinners and drinks and long flights. I needed somebody on the team to pour out my troubles to when I couldn't keep them inside any longer, and Cassy was the man.
Hank kept almost everything to himself. You couldn't read him, because he wouldn't let anything show. It was the same as when he was batting. If he hit a home run or struck out, there was no difference. If he was in a slump, you knew it had to be killing him, but he would just walk to the dugout and sit down, or maybe go in the tunnel and have a cigarette and think about what he had to do the next time. He would never let the pitcher know how he felt. That was part of his strategy.
One time that relief pitcher for St. Louis, “The Mad Hungarian,” Al Hrabosky—the one who was always strutting around the mound and talking to the baseball—one night he struck out Hank in a big spot to win the game, and he was jumping up and down and making a big show. The next time we saw him, Hank hit one into the upper deck, and when he got to the dugout, he said, “Let's see the son of a bitch find that one and talk to it.” But he wouldn't say anything like that to the pitcher. He would never do anything to show up a pitcher.
I've never seen a man who could control his emotions like Hank did. We had bad teams in those years, and there was a lot of pressure with Hank going for the record, but he was the one taking the pressure off us and keeping us loose. One night in Montreal, we'd lost eight in a row and Hank came to bat in the ninth inning with two men on and us down by two runs, and he hit one that was headed way out of the park. Everybody in the dugout jumped up and started screaming because our losing streak was finally over, and all of a sudden the wind caught hold of the ball and brought it all the way back into the ballpark, and the left fielder caught it standing against the fence. We got on the bus to go to the airport, and nobody said anything for thirty minutes. We felt terrible. Finally, Hank stood up in the back of the bus and said, “I'll bet any amount of money that damn Babe Ruth was up there blowing that ball back.” It loosened everybody up, and we started playing better ball after that.
He almost never mentioned Babe Ruth, though. One time, he said to me, “Cassy, I'm not trying to break any record of Babe Ruth. I'm just trying to make one of my own.” It was terrible the way people hated him for trying to break the record. The whole thing must have been eating him up. One day in Philadelphia we walked across the street from the hotel to eat breakfast and that was the first time he told me about the letters he had been getting. I couldn't believe what he was telling me. I said, “What?” He said, “Cassy, these people are crazy. I don't know what's going on, I really don't.” But he was worried. As hard as he was to read, you could tell he was worried.
—Paul Casanova
It was in Philadelphia in May that I finally mentioned to some sportswriters about the hate mail. One of them made a note of it at the bottom of a baseball story, but then the story was picked up in Atlanta and New York and the whole thing broke open. From that point on, the mail turned. I guess people were stunned by what they read, because thousands and thousands of them started writing me positive letters. One of the sports-talk radio shows in New York conducted a campaign to get people to support me. It was especially nice to see kind words coming out of New York, because that seemed to be where the greatest number of hate letters came from.
Dear Hank,
I understand you get a lot of crank letters concerning breaking Ruth's record. Enclosed is something [matches taped to the page] that will take care of those letters.
Dear Mr. Arron,
For years sports fans have been waiting for the right man to come along and break that record. You, Henry Arron, are that man. You are the MESSIAH that has finally arrived.
Dear Mr. Aaron,
I'm glad your catching up with Babe Ruth. By the way, can you tell me who Joe Shlabotnik is? I read Charlie Brown and his favorite ballplayer is Joe Shlabotnik.
Dear Mr. Aaron,
I am twelve years old, and I wanted to tell you that I have read many articles about the prejudice against you. I really think it's bad. I don't care what color you are. You could be green and it wouldn't matter. These nuts that keep comparing you in every way to Ruth are dumb. Maybe he's better. Maybe you are. How can you compare two people 30 or 40 years apart? You can't really. So many things are different. It's just some people can't stand to see someone else more like them set. I've never read where you said you're better than Ruth. That's because you never said it! What do those fans want you to do? Just quit hitting?
All over the National League, the fans started yelling encouragement to me. At the Astrodome, they even flashed a message on the scoreboard saying that despite the feelings of those who wrote the hateful letters, the good fans of Houston were behind me all the way. Meanwhile, the mail was flooding in. I received so much of it that the post office didn't even need an address. Letters would arrive in my mailbox with Hank Aaron written on the envelope—one of them just said “The Hammer”—and nothing else. At the end of the year, the U.S. Postal Service calculated my mail at 930,000 letters and gave me a little plaque for receiving the most of any nonpolitician in the country. Dinah Shore was second with 60,000. Several newspapers and magazines carried pictures of Carla surrounded by the sacks of letters that filled her office. After that, though, she started getting hate mail herself from people who couldn't accept the fact that a white woman would work for a black man in the South and assumed there must have been more between us.
The overwhelming majority of letters were supportive after the news of the hate mail got out, but to the bigots it was just another reason to rip me apart. If there was a recurring theme to the negative mail—other than the fact that I was just a nigger—it was the tired old argument that I was no Babe Ruth. The same points were brought up over and over and over—that I had batted so many more times than Ruth, that I played with a livelier ball, that Ruth had been a pitcher for part of his career, that pitchers were better in Ruth's time, that travel was tougher in Ruth's time, that Ruth had a higher batting average than me. I heard them all, and I respected them all; and I thought that none of them made a damn bit of difference because Babe Ruth was Babe Ruth and I was just a man trying to do my job. I never got into the arguments over Ruth versus me, or Ruth's time versus my time, because I knew that nothing would ever be solved. If people want to hear me say that Babe Ruth was the greatest home run hitter, fine, Babe Ruth was the greatest home run hitter.
But I do want to get my two cents in once and for all. I don't like to get involved in the common arguments that support me and modern players—the fact that I had to fly all over the country and play night games in bigger ballparks while facing fresh relief pitchers who threw sliders, which is the nastiest pitch of all and hadn't even been invented in Ruth's day—but there is one point that I do care about because it hits close to my heart. That's the fact that Ruth played in a time when there were no black players. To me, that's the most relevant point of all, because it stands apart from the changes that reflect the natural evolution of the game—things like new facilities and better equipment and modern innovations. This goes deeper than the other changes because it has to do with the people who play the game. It goes right to the foundation of the Babe Ruth legend, which is the fact that he towered over all the other hitters of his time. He did that, and there's no denying it. There has never been a more dominant hitter. But it should be understood that he dominated a very weakened field. If black players had been allowed to play in the major leagues at the time, it is highly unlikely that Ruth would have dominated in the manner that he did. Think about it. What would the National League have been like in my time without black players? Who would have been the greatest home run hitters if I had not been in the league, or Mays or Banks or Frank Robinson or Willie McCovey or Orlando Cepeda or Willie McCovey or Orlando Cepeda or Willie Stargell or Billy Williams or Richie Allen? I'll tell you. The white player who hit the most home runs in the National League in the 1960s was Ron Santo, who was almost fifty ahead of the next white player, Eddie Mathews. With no black players in the game, Ron Santo—who is not in the Hall of Fame—would have stood well above all the other home run hitters in the league during his time. By the same token, if I had played with only whites, as Ruth did, I would have outhomered every other player in the National League in the sixties by more than 120 (although Harmon Killebrew hit more than I did in the 1960s while playing in the nearly all white American League). In addition, it would have been significantly easier to hit in the National League if there hadn't been black pitchers like Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal, Ferguson Jenkins, and Bob Veale. By all of this, I certainly don't mean to imply that Babe Ruth was no better than Ron Santo, or that I was better than Ruth, or that Ruth was anything less than his legend. Like I said, I'm willing to call him the greatest home run hitter. I just want to show that comparisons go around in circles. They're like weeds—as soon as you deal with one, another one pops us. And I got damn tired of them.
There was no escaping them, though. One of the popular bumper stickers around Atlanta said, Aaron Is Ruth-less. On the radio sports shows, it seemed like every other caller was under a deep moral obligation to give his reasons why I couldn't carry Ruth's bat. And the newspaper writers were as bad as the fans when it came to making comparisons. It seemed that whatever town we were in, some writer was taking me to task for not being Babe Ruth. Without meaning to, they only aggravated an issue that did nobody any good. In general, arguments and comparisons are good for baseball. They show the diversity and depth of opinion that makes the game great. But this was a different case, because it wasn't harmless, as baseball arguments generally are. It wasn't just an argument over two players. It wasn't DiMaggio versus Williams or me versus Mays or even Mays versus Mantle. This went a lot deeper than that. It was a case of people preserving their legend. It was a case of people defending their turf.
Dear Mr. Aaron,
I just can't bring myself to rooting for you, Mr. Aaron. I pray that you let the record books stand.
When a little kid thinks of baseball he thinks of home runs. And when a little kid turns the page in a record book and looks for home runs, and sees at the top of the list: Babe Ruth 714, he asks, “Who's Babe Ruth, dad?” After the father tells the child that Babe Ruth was such a dominant player a town had to build the biggest stadium to date in order to compensate for the hundreds of thousands of people who would flock to Yankee Stadium just to see him hit a baseball out of the park; that Babe Ruth was the one ingredient that led to the most powerful dynasty in the world of sports, the Yankee dynasty, which lasted four decades; that Babe Ruth had a lifetime batting average of .342; that Babe Ruth would do anything for a kid; and after that the father tells the child that in one of those World Series, Babe Ruth pointed to the spot in the centerfield stands where he was going to send the next pitch—and then went ahead and did it! After the father tells the child all of these god-like events by a warm, beautiful human being like Babe Ruth, the child's mind is now permanently set on admiration for this giant of a man named Babe Ruth. It is what is commonly known as a hero.
Therefore, how could you, Mr. Aaron, ruin, destroy, and shatter to pieces the one record which separates Babe Ruth from any other man to play the great game of baseball? How could you do it, Mr. Aaron? Are you ready to destroy that child's dreams? Because that's what you'll do, Mr. Aaron. If not for that child, then for the children of the future. And you know what that means to the future of America. So what it all boils down to is this: when my son turns the page in a record book and looks for home runs, and sees your name at the top of the list, he's not going to care one bit about Babe Ruth, Mr. Aaron, because Babe Ruth isn't going to be there. Is that what you want, Mr. Aaron? When you and I are dead and gone, do you want the world to know nothing about Babe Ruth because you took the one thing away from him that the world today still remembers him by? I hope and pray that you reconsider.
Now, of course, you know, Mr. Aaron, that this is not one of the thousands of hate letters you are receiving every day. Instead, this is a pleading letter. I would also like to point out that I wouldn't care if you were white as a sheet. The fact that you are black is totally irrelevant to the subject at hand. As a matter of fact, if my favorite player of all time, Mickey Mantle, were in your shoes, there is no doubt in my mind that this letter would be going right to him.
In closing, Mr. Aaron, I cannot wish you good luck. I can only remind you to think for the future, if, indeed, you do break the record. I dread the day it happens. I pray it never does. The decision is yours.
Mr. Hank Aaron,
One week ago I sent you a letter re Babe Ruth's Home Run Record. Since then I have talked to younger fellows about you and what they thought about the whole thing. This is what they said. “We don't think Aaron will live long enough to break the record. Somebody will get him one of those days or nights if he gets close. And if he does break the record by hitting more than the Babe's record he will be in danger of his life all the time.” They also said what I said in my letter, nobody wants to see you or others harmed, but that does not rule out some nut who goes berserk and might reach you when you least expect it. Look what happened to George Wallace. Dr. King. And the cities you visit with your club, the race problem is so intense in all those places, you'd be smart by just coasting along without hitting homers. I'm sure the baseball public would be pleased with your decision. For your own safety let the Babe's record stand as a LEGEND. It would stand as a peaceful gesture and a contribution to Society on your part. It would make you a giant amongst blacks and whites.
My only answer to all of this was to do what I was there to do, which was hit. The home runs were coming at a rate that would put me very close to Ruth by the end of the season. Number 700 came in Atlanta late in July against Ken Brett of the Phillies. It was a 400-footer that gave us the lead in the game, but we lost, which took the thrill out of the whole thing. After the game, I had my picture taken with a high school kid who won 700 silver dollars for catching the ball. I got the ball back, and this time I did not send it to the Hall of Fame because it had never acknowledged receiving the balls from my five hundredth and six hundredth home runs.
The Hall of Fame thing might seem trivial, but there was a larger pattern developing. Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner, had not been in Cincinnati when I got my three thousandth hit in 1972, and he didn't even send a telegram when I hit my seven hundredth home run. I spoke out about it, because I believed he would have shown more interest in the record if a white player had been involved and I also believed it was my duty to call attention to discrimination in baseball. The commissioner's response was that he had been waiting to congratulate me personally at the All-Star Game, which was a few days away. He also said he would be in the stands ready to jump out on the field when I hit my 714th and 715th home runs. I still wasn't satisfied, and Kuhn made a trip to St. Louis to talk to me about the situation. He said that it was his policy not to send telegrams for personal feats because there were so many of them that he might overlook somebody. I didn't think he had to worry about missing somebody who hit 700 home runs, though, since the only other person to do it had been dead for twenty-five years. Our little tiff got a lot of attention in the papers, which naturally prompted another round of letters.
Dear Nigar Aaron,
It's too bad that the commissioner of baseball didn't send you a telegram or come over and kiss you for hitting the 700 home run big deal why you dirty nigar you should thank God that the white man let you play period. The white people don't owe you filthy nigars nothing.
Dear Mr. Aaron,
How could a person be a star and great for so many years then become just another nigger?
Dear Hank,
When I was a doctor in Montgomery I used to attend Braves games in Atlanta and was a fan of yours. But after hearing you lately, I think you should give thanks to your God for the gifts he gave you and be thankful for every home run and be less critical of the things that you think should come your way and do not. Examine yourself and ask yourself the question if you just might be partly to blame for the situation you are in. Unless you have a change of heart I would not drive across the street to see you play or even to see you hit that 714th home run.
Hank Aaron,
With all that fortune,
and all that fame,
You're a stinkin nigger
Just the same.
Dear Hank,
On the day you hit your 700th home run, my sister in Dayton, Ohio, had a baby boy. Because of our great respect for you as a ballplayer and as a person we have chosen the name Aaron, in your honor.
I was affected in a lot of ways by reaching 700. There was something about getting there that made me feel I was almost at my destination, like I had been traveling the back roads for twenty years and suddenly I was on Ruth's street, turning onto his driveway. One of my teammates said he actually saw me smiling a little when I came around third base on number 700, which was something I probably hadn't done since the pennant-winning home run in 1957. I was excited about it, and I guess I had expected other people to be excited with me, which was why it was so disappointing not to receive a telegram from the commissioner. The whole situation took something out of me. I think I let up for a little while after that, and suddenly I stopped hitting home runs. It was ten days before I hit my 701st and more than two weeks after that before I hit number 702, which tied Stan Musial's all-time record of 1,377 extra-base hits.
I was beginning to wear down. It's always hard to keep up your energy level through the muggy summer in Atlanta, and on top of that I wasn't getting much rest. As much as I tried to fight off my anxieties and fears, they hounded me at night in lonely hotel rooms. I started coming to the ballpark a couple of hours early to catch some sleep on a cot in the trainer's room, knowing there would be no more peace the moment I poked my head into the clubhouse. The camaraderie of the clubhouse had always been an important part of my baseball life, and although I realized it wasn't their fault, the news people had taken that away from me. I missed my teammates.
Newsweek called me the most conspicuous figure in sports, and Lord knows I felt like it. When we had a day off once I went home to Mobile to fish in the bay, and three boats full of reporters and photographers cruised alongside mine. A camera crew from NBC followed me for weeks to shoot a primetime television special. I saw Tom Brokaw more than Eddie Mathews. It was impossible to give personal time to every reporter, but I tried to do as many interviews as cordially as I could, and generally the press was appreciative of my cooperation. The last time a player had been through something like I was going through was when Roger Maris broke Ruth's single-season home run record in 1961. Maris was like me in some ways, a private person who didn't relish the limelight. He accommodated the interviews, but he was testy and became so unnerved by the whole ordeal that his hair fell out in clumps. I guess the writers were looking for the same sort of reaction from me, but I knew what was coming and was determined not to let it get the best of me. I coped by playing little games with the reporters. I knew they were watching every move I made to see when they could swoop down on me, so I'd come out of the clubhouse and walk over the foul lines onto the playing field where the press couldn't follow me. Sometimes I would just walk all the way up the baseline to the outfield fence and then turn and walk along the warning track. I could feel all the eyes in the park trailing me every step of the way.
My teammates and the Braves also did what they could to keep the media off me as much as possible. At one point a horde of about a dozen Japanese reporters showed up unannounced for an interview, and for some reason I couldn't accommodate them. So our public relations director, Bob Hope, stepped in and said he would answer their questions as if he were me. The Japanese writers were thrilled—some of them said it was the best interview they'd ever had.
The media swarm was heavy for my seven hundredth home run, but then it slacked off for a while until I got close to 714. The crowds slacked off at the same time—at least, in Atlanta. When school and football games begin late in August, you can forget about drawing crowds to baseball games in Georgia. It didn't matter if we were playing for a pennant or if somebody was trying to break the home run record. There were nights when high school football games would outdraw the Braves…and I mean single high school football games. On the night I hit my 711th home run, we had all of 1,362 people at the ballpark, the smallest crowd in Braves history. That was a pretty strong statement of what Atlanta thought about me and my record.
Henry didn't stir the emotions. He was aloof. He did things so much easier than other ballplayers that he didn't get people excited when they watched him. Also, there's no question that Henry spoke out on things that a lot of people didn't want to hear—especially in Georgia. He took a leadership position in regards to racial things in a time when blacks weren't supposed to speak out. Henry suffered a lot of that backlash. You've got to realize, too, that in Atlanta a lot of our crowds came from small towns around the South. Those people were accustomed to blacks behaving a certain way, and that wasn't Henry. Henry did not shuffle.
—Dick Cecil
It was peculiar that while Atlanta was folding its arms and turning the other way as I approached Ruth, the chase was a national event in the rest of the country. Preachers in black churches gave sermons on me. Time and Newsweek raced to see who could get me on their cover first—Newsweek won. There were five or six ballads written about me and more than a dozen books. I was offered movie parts, and when the soap operas found out that I spent the afternoons watching them—“Days of Our Lives,” “The Edge of Night,” “All My Children,” “The Secret Storm”—I was invited onto their sets. People wanted to put my name on pens and pins and cups…one guy even suggested a Hank Aaron Gear Shift Knob. It was enough to make me feel like a big deal—until we got back to Atlanta.
Occasionally, I would catch little glimpses of things in Atlanta that let me know a few people cared, at least. I came out of a game once late in 1973 after a collision at first base, and as I ducked into the dugout I noticed a lady in the box seats looking at me with a horrified expression and sobbing. A tombstone maker named E. M. Bailey who lived near the ballpark built a little statue of me for his front yard. Mr. Bailey was interviewed by one of the newspapers, and he said that it brought tears to his eyes to think of all the things that I had gone through, and black people had gone through, to reach the point where a man like me could break a record like Babe Ruth's.
The people who cared most about the record were black people, and for the most part they were not the ones who had money to spend at the ballpark. The fans who could afford to come wouldn't and I believe they missed a lot that year. The only thing ordinary about our team was our record. Phil Niekro pitched a no-hitter in August, and Evans, Johnson, and I hit home runs at an unprecedented pace. All the while, I had a chance to catch Ruth by the end of the year, and my 712th came in Houston against Dave Roberts on our last road trip. When the Astros came to Atlanta for the final series of the season, I needed two homers in three games to tie the Babe.
I did nothing Friday, but on Saturday I hit a slow curve from Jerry Reuss for number 713. It was also my fortieth homer of the season, and since Evans and Johnson had gotten there ahead of me, it marked the first time that one team ever had three players with forty or more. There were a lot of reporters in town because I was so close to Ruth, and the Braves held a press conference for the three of us after the game.
Davey and I knew that the only way we would be in the Hall of Fame was if we all hit forty homers. Hank was the last one to do it, but of course he was the one all the attention was on. When we had the press conference, nobody asked Davey or me a single question. Finally Hank said, “Look, I wanted to share this with these guys. If nobody is interested in that, then the press conference is over.” And he got up and walked out. End of press conference.
—Darrell Evans
Sunday was cool and wet, and the Houston pitcher was Dave Roberts, who didn't throw particularly hard but was the kind of guy who gave me a lot of trouble because he kept batters off balance. Roberts was quoted in the paper as saying that he had been thinking about me for days and it bothered him to be consumed with me while I probably never gave him a second thought. He was wrong about that. I always thought long and hard about the next pitcher I had to face, and before going out there against Roberts I thought longer and harder than usual. I wanted badly to tie the record so it wouldn't be hanging over my head all winter. I had other plans that winter—mainly, to get married. I knew that the record would come quickly in 1974 if I didn't get it on Sunday, but I hated the idea of coming so close and not making it. It sounded too much like failure to suit me.
At the same time, I knew that I'd had a successful season whatever happened Sunday, and I'd proven that I wasn't just hanging around to get the record. My 40 home runs had come in fewer than 400 times at bat, and I nearly drove in 100 runs. I also had an outside chance to reach .300. As far as I was concerned, that would be my biggest accomplishment for the season, because it was what I had set out to do early on. It had seemed impossible to hit .300 when I was still in the low .200s in June, but I kept chipping away and went into the final Sunday at .296. If I'd had to choose on Sunday between getting one more home run and hitting .300, it would have been a tough call. The best plan was to hit the ball where nobody could catch it, the best place being the other side of the left-field fence.
I'd pulled a slider for a home run against Roberts the last time we faced him, so I knew not to look for a slider to pull. In fact, I could count on Roberts to give me nothing on the inside part of the plate or above the knees. As much as I wanted to tie the record, he was probably more concerned with a home run than I was, and it would be impossible for him to forget about it. Every time I came to bat for the last month or so of the season, the pitcher was reminded about the record because the umpire would put the game ball in his pocket and toss the pitcher a different one. The Braves put infrared code numbers on balls that were to be used when I batted, so that my home run souvenirs could be identified and collected. As a result, the main thing on every pitcher's mind when I stepped into the box was to keep that infrared ball in the park, because if it went out, it would have his brand on it, too. Roberts was trying to win the game on that last Sunday, but he was also trying to keep his name out of the record books—which meant that I had a better chance of batting .300 than I did of hitting my 714th home run.
I couldn't believe it the first time up when I got a pitch to pull. I was so surprised that I jumped at it and fouled it off. From that time on, I saw nothing but off-speed stuff around the edges of the plate. But I managed a single, and then another one. The second hit put me at .300, and Mathews might have been tempted to pull me out of the game right there if it had been any other day. As it was, Eddie didn't have to ask me.
Roberts was still on the corners when I came up for the third time. I'm not sure I've ever had a battle quite like the one I had with him that day. When I singled the third time, I was three-for-three, and yet I felt, and I'm sure he felt, that he was doing a hell of a job on me. Still, I knew I'd get one more shot, and my average was high enough that I didn't have to worry about falling under .300. I didn't have to worry about slow stuff on the corners anymore, either, because Roberts was gone by the time I batted in the bottom of the eighth. He pulled a muscle in his back—I'd like to think it was because of nerves—and was replaced by Don Wilson…which was the worst news I could get.
There was never another hard thrower who gave me as much trouble as Don Wilson—not Gibson or Drysdale or Koufax or anybody. He was the pitcher who put me in a bad mood by throwing a no-hitter on the night I fought with Rico Carty. What made Wilson so tough on me was that he had a cut fastball that would sail right away from my bat every time. It made me mad that I couldn't hit him, and what aggravated me even more was that Ralph Garr knocked Wilson around like he was nothing. Ralph just wore him out. When Wilson was scheduled to pitch against us, I'd moan and make a fuss, and at the same time Ralph would be saying, “Bring him on! Bring him on!” Then Wilson would throw one up in Ralph's eyes, and Ralph would reach up and smack it into center field. And I'd go out there and look like a damn fool. Don Wilson was the last man in the world I wanted to see in the eighth inning that Sunday. But I got to him this time. Yeah, I got to him good—popped that ball all the way out to second base, where Tommy Helms caught it. My season was over. Babe Ruth would have to wait until the spring.
But there was one more thing yet to come in the 1973 season, and it caught me off guard. When I got out to left field for the ninth inning, the fans out there stood up and applauded. Then the fans on third base stood up to applaud, and the fans behind home plate, and right field, and then the upper deck. There were about 40,000 people at the game—the biggest crowd of the season—and they stood and cheered me for a full five minutes. There have been a lot of standing ovations for a lot of baseball players, but this was one for the ages as far as I was concerned. I couldn't believe that I was Hank Aaron and this was Atlanta, Georgia. I thought I'd never see the day. And, God Almighty, all I'd done was pop up to second base. I looked up at that crowd and I took off my hat and held it up in the air, and then I turned in a circle and looked at all those people standing and clapping all over the stadium, and to tell you the truth, I didn't know how to feel. I knew I felt good. I don't think I'd ever felt so good in my life. But I wasn't ready for it. I didn't know how to respond to something like that, because it had never come up before. In all my years of baseball, I thought I was prepared for just about everything, but there was nothing in those years that prepared me for five minutes of standing ovation in Atlanta, Georgia, after popping up to second base.
I was severely disappointed to have to wait six more months before I had a chance at the record, but the send-off in Atlanta did a lot for my spirits. So did Billye, who would become my wife in November. And so did a telegram from a man named Al DiScipio. I received so many telegrams in those days that Mr. DiScipio's sat in the pile for a few days, unopened, before Carla could get to it. I was grateful to have a secretary like Carla, because if I hadn't I might have missed a million-dollar contract. Al DiScipio was president of Magnavox, and his telegram was an offer to become the company's spokesman on tours and television commercials. I immediately contacted my lawyer, Irving Kaler, and he started negotiations with Magnavox that ended up in the biggest endorsement deal ever given to an athlete. At last, my ship had come in.
Of course, Mr. DiScipio's offer was not the only thing that came in the mail.
Hi Hank!
I am a black man 20 years old and want to say that I'm very happy that you didn't tie or break Babe Ruth's home record. I think you just froze at the pressure. When you face real pitchers you can only hit singles. There is 6 months until the '74 season begins. Until then, one can break a leg, his back, develop sickle cell anemia or drop dead. Babe Ruth's 714 record will never be tied or broken. Babe Ruth was a white man and the greatest of all. In fact, there are presently at least 20 better ball players than Hank Aaron. Tom Seaver, Rose, Bench, Koozman, Mercer, Munson, Staub, etc, etc.
Dear Hank,
I hope lightning will strike you before next season.
Billye had announced our engagement on “Today in Georgia,” but we kept the wedding plans secretive and stole off to be married in a small ceremony in Jamaica. Billye was a godsend to me, and our marriage really put my life back in order. After being a lost soul for a couple of years, I finally had a home again. Not only that, but there was a child in it. Ceci was seven years old when her mother and I were married, and it wasn't long before I adopted her.
We tried to keep our wedding quiet, and gave Jet magazine exclusive photo rights, but it made the newspapers anyway. As a result, Billye and I didn't have much of a private honeymoon. Besides that, I was thinking about Jack Billingham half the time. We were scheduled to open the 1974 season in Cincinnati, and I knew Billingham would be pitching for the Reds. I thought all winter about what he would throw me on Opening Day, even lying on the beach in Jamaica with my bride.
There was plenty to keep me busy in the meantime, though. The off-season began when I went to Oakland and became the only active player to throw out the first ball at a World Series. After that, I was honored at banquets in Atlanta, Mobile, Milwaukee, Chicago, Boston, Washington, Denver, and New Hampshire. I appeared on “Hollywood Squares” and the Flip Wilson, Dean Martin, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, and Dinah Shore shows all within a couple of weeks. Billye and I put on aprons and cooked with Dinah Shore, and Flip Wilson pitched me an oversized mush ball that I swung at and missed.
While we were in Los Angeles, I went over to Sammy Davis Jr.'s house to talk about a movie he wanted me to be involved with. I got there at about ten in the morning, and Sammy was sitting at his kitchen counter drinking martinis. He was depressed in those days because he had been ostracized over his friendship with Richard Nixon. He pointed to his door and said, “Through that door used to walk Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, all the greatest stars. Now nobody will speak to me.” While I was there, Sammy got on the phone with somebody at the Rolls-Royce dealership and told him to come pick up his new Rolls because he didn't like the color. He must have had four or five big luxury cars outside. I'm thinking, damn, here's this guy with this huge house and all these fancy cars, and he thinks he's got problems. Then he took me upstairs and I looked in his closet and there must have been a thousand suits lined up one after another in there. I couldn't believe how those Hollywood people lived. It was impressive, but it wasn't quite my style, which was why I was never too interested in doing movies. Around that time, I had been offered a part as a bartender in a film with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, but I didn't want to spend that much time on the West Coast. Sammy was tired of all the “Superfly” movies going around at the time, and he had asked me out to his house to talk about a movie he wanted to make about a black jockey. It wasn't for me, though. Sammy was also interested in buying the ball from my 715th home run for $25,000, but since Magnavox was paying me a million, I figured Sammy was a little short.
As much as Billye and I were traveling, I was happy to get back home for a few days now and then. But when we did, there were always reminders that it was still Georgia and I was still black. Billye and I stopped at a vegetable stand in the country one afternoon, and the farmer, with a big wad of tobacco in his mouth, said to me, “Hey, boy, I sure wish you'd have broke that record last year.” He probably thought he was being friendly, but I was past the point of being called “boy,” and I got so mad I had to go sit in the car until it passed. It helped to be with somebody as calm and gracious as Billye. Those days were hard on Billye, because when we were out together I was always on edge, and when I was out by myself, she was always worried.
Even now, I still worry about Henry if he doesn't check in with me periodically or let me know when he's going to be late. Since the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedys, I've been aware of how vulnerable anybody can be, particularly a public person and one who might have enemies, for whatever reason. There was an image I couldn't get out of my mind in those days: When my first husband was living, he was on a program at Atlanta University with Martin and a young African leader named Tom Mboya. There was a picture taken of the three of them up on the stage together. Later, Tom was killed, and then Martin was killed. Samuel wasn't killed, of course, but when he died after surgery, I kept thinking of that picture and how all three of them in the picture had passed from the scene. It gave me an eerie feeling of foreboding. That picture kept coming back to me like a nightmare when Henry was receiving hate mail and death threats.
—Billye Aaron
After thinking about Billingham all winter, it looked for a while as though I might not even face him. In February, I had a meeting with Bill Bartholomay, the Braves' owner, and he told me that the Braves wanted to hold me out of the three games in Cincinnati so that I would have a chance to tie and break the record when the team returned to Atlanta. I might not have been willing to go along with it had it not been for that great ovation during the last game of 1973. That made me feel a little different about Atlanta, and if the Braves wanted me to hit the home runs there, I didn't have any objections. I sort of liked the idea of being able to show my grandchildren the spots where 714 and 715 landed.
The commissioner didn't see it that way, though, and neither did the New York sportswriters—although I'm not sure I have the right order there. As soon as Bartholomay announced his plan, the New York press ripped into the Braves like lunch meat. Dave Anderson of the New York Times wrote that keeping me out of the lineup was “a brazen defiance of baseball's integrity.” Larry Merchant of the New York Post wrote that the whole thing was an “insidious fix.” But the ringleader, as usual, was Dick Young of the Daily News, who wrote, “Baseball has gone crooked. There is no delicate way of putting it. There is no other interpretation to be placed on the Braves' announced intention of playing their first three games without Henry Aaron in the lineup. I would feel slightly better, and so would the fans, if the Commissioner of Baseball had come out with a blistering order to the Braves that Hank Aaron must play the first three games, under threat of forfeit.” Sure enough, a few days later Bowie Kuhn told Bartholomay that I had to play two of the first three games in Cincinnati, which was at about the same rate I had played the year before. It was the first and last time I can ever think of that a player was actually thrown into a game.
There were plenty of precedents in which players going for milestones were held out of road games. After Ted Williams hit a home run in his last time at bat in Boston, he sat out three games on the road. Clemente's three thousandth hit was saved for Pittsburgh, and Stan Musial's would have been saved for St. Louis except that the Cardinals needed him as a pinch hitter in a key spot against the Cubs in Chicago. Bartholomay and Mathews were willing to do it that way—to hold me out unless the situation cried out for me to bat.
The debate carried on through spring training, which was a nightmare anyway. The press was so thick in the clubhouse that I had to dress in the coaches' room so that we wouldn't crowd out the other players. There were media from all over the world. A reporter from Tokyo wrote that I was the most popular man in Japan. A TV executive from Venezuela dropped a wad of $100 bills on Bob Hope's desk, thinking it would buy broadcast rights. The whole thing was a circus. To have a moment of peace and to keep the crowds away from the rest of the team, I had to live separately in a penthouse apartment. Even so, the autograph hounds always found me. I knew that it all came with the territory, of course, and I could tolerate it except for when I couldn't get where I was going or when people would act like they owned me: “Aaron, over here! Hey, Hank, sign this one! Hank, give me an autograph!” Fans kept jumping out of the stands to get their picture taken with me in the on-deck circle. It was a little disconcerting, because I was never quite sure what to expect when somebody came running at me. Every time it happened, Calvin Wardlaw had his hand on that binoculars case. The Braves had arranged for Calvin to stay with me through spring training, and although it seemed silly that a ballplayer would need a bodyguard, I wasn't going to argue.
One day, Calvin and I were at my apartment when the police came and told us there was a report that Billye and Ceci were missing. They were searching all over the area for them, and I was pretty frantic when suddenly Billye and Ceci walked through the door. They had been shopping on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach.
I was relieved when spring training finally ended. By that time, it had been decided that I would play on Opening Day in Cincinnati and we would take it from there, which was fine with me because I was eager to get the whole damn thing over with. I knew it wouldn't take me many swings of the bat, because I simply couldn't let it go on any longer. The writers were saying that it would be tough for me to break the record because of all the pressure, but they had it wrong. I felt the pressure, all right, but the only way to deal with it was to put an end to it. Pressure never bothered me at home plate because nothing ever bothered me at home plate. When I went up to hit against Billingham, I wouldn't be thinking about Babe Ruth or hate mail or TV cameras or autograph hounds or boarding the train in Mobile with my sack of sandwiches; I would be concentrating on the ball in Billingham's right hand.
We stopped in Birmingham to play an exhibition game against the Orioles on our way to Cincinnati, and after the game Hank and I went back to the hotel to get ready to go out for dinner. We were in the room talking and jiving for a while, and when we opened the door to leave, there were two big policemen standing outside. They said they didn't want Hank going anywhere because there were rumors he would be killed or something. We went out anyway and had dinner and a couple of drinks, and when we got back to the hotel, Hank said, “Cassy, I'm sick and tired of this. When we get to Cincinnati, I'm going to tie the record in the first game. Then I'm going to take a little rest and when we get to Atlanta I'm going to break the record in the first game there.”
—Paul Casanova
When we arrived in Cincinnati, all bets were off. It was the day before the opening game and the day that Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana were clobbered with some of the worst tornadoes in American history. We flew into Cincinnati in a terrible thunderstorm, and when I picked up Daddy at the airport late that afternoon, I saw funnel clouds in the distance. That made me forget all about Babe Ruth and Jack Billingham for a while. More than 300 people died from the tornadoes, a lot of them within an hour or so from Cincinnati. A town called Xenia, Ohio, right up the road, was practically destroyed. As I read the paper Thursday morning, the home run record didn't seem so important in the big picture. There was disaster in the Midwest and another kind of disaster in Washington, where Watergate was closing in around President Nixon. Suddenly, I didn't feel like the center of the world anymore.
I have to admit, though, it was hard to stay humble in those days. When I went downstairs to leave for the ballpark, I was met by a man who called himself Fabulous Howard, who escorted me to a huge black Cadillac limousine. Fabulous Howard said that he had driven all the way from Chicago just to carry me from the Netherland Hilton to Riverfront Stadium. He told me he had chauffered Babe Ruth, but I wasn't really impressed until he told me he had also chauffered Joe Pepitone. Pepitone had been with the Braves briefly, and I knew he had style. In fact, Pepi had left behind a nice pair of baseball shoes, and I had snatched them up. Those were the shoes I intended to wear when I broke the record. When Fabulous Howard told me he had driven Pepitone, I was sold. I started to get in the car, but Fabulous Howard wasn't ready for me yet. He reached into his trunk and took out a red carpet that I had to walk on. After I sat down in the backseat and he started the engine, bagpipe music came blaring out of the outside speaker. Then, as he drove away, Fabulous Howard picked up a microphone and started shouting: “Feast your eyes on royalty! The king is in this car! The king of baseball!” When we pulled up at the ballpark, I couldn't get out until Fabulous Howard stretched out that red carpet from the car to the clubhouse door.
I got to the ballpark early for a press conference to announce the Hank Aaron Scholarship Fund, which would be started by one dollar that Western Union would contribute for every telegram I received after tying or breaking the record. I also mentioned that I had requested a tribute to the memory of Martin Luther King. Ralph Garr had called it to my attention that Opening Day was on the anniversary of Dr. King's assassination, and I had asked the Reds' front office about providing a moment of silence. I should have known better. If nothing else, though, I got the message across that we should be more concerned with Dr. King's legacy and less with Babe Ruth's. I was doing my best to keep things in perspective.
My teammates helped in that respect. They kept me from taking things too seriously. When I got to the clubhouse, Ron Reed, a pitcher who also played professional basketball, had taped a can of Raid to my locker to ward off the press. When Dusty Baker saw me, he said, “Supe”—Baker and Garr and some of the others called me that, short for Superstar—“you playing today, brother?” Then Garr pulled me aside and said, “We'll sure be glad when you get this thing over with.” I promised him I'd do it that day.
I lifted a lead ball in the clubhouse for a while, and when I went out to the field there were about 250 reporters waiting for me. There's something about being so conspicuous that makes a person feel cut off from everybody else. At one point, when the writers were about ten-deep around me, I called over to Davey Johnson by the batting cage and said, “Davey, come talk to me. I'm all alone here.” I asked Davey if I looked nervous, and he said yes. Davey was no liar.
Billingham was obviously nervous, too, because he walked Garr leading off the first inning. Billingham was a control pitcher and Ralph was a very, very tough man to walk. It could have been that Billingham had a hard time loosening up, because it was a cold, damp day. Mike Lum got to him for a single with one out, which brought me up to bat with two men on base. It was a good situation to hit in, because Billingham couldn't walk me and I knew he would throw me sinking fastballs to try to make me hit the ball on the ground for a double play. Along with the other records I set, I also hit into more double plays than anybody else.
I went up there looking for the sinker, and I wasn't going to swing until I saw it. Fortunately, Billingham's pitches were just out of the strike zone, and the count went to three-and-one. I couldn't ask for a better setup: Billingham had no margin for error, and I knew what he had to throw me and where he had to throw it. It was all just as I had imagined it on the beach in Jamaica and in the penthouse at West Palm. The three-one pitch came in low and hard, and instinctively I turned into it for my first swing of the season. It was like about 600 of my other 713 home runs, just high and far enough to drop over the fence. Babe Ruth's were so long and high that people talked about them for the rest of their lives, but here we were, both with 714.
I managed to keep my composure as I trotted around the bases, except that my eyes were moist and I made it around a little faster than usual. This time, there was no thought of Bobby Thomson, like there had been when I hit the home run to win the pennant in 1957, or even Ruth. I just wanted to find home plate somewhere in the middle of the mob that was waiting there, because when I did, the long, excruciating chase would at last be over. I still had one more home run to go to set the record, but for the first time in several long years, I wasn't chasing anybody. It was like I had landed on the moon. I was there. All I had to do now was take the next step. From that point on, every home run I hit would set an all-time record.
Johnny Bench congratulated me as soon as I touched the plate, and all my teammates were out there shouting and grabbing at me. There's no greater feeling in sports than the one a player gets when his teammates are genuinely excited over one of his own personal accomplishments—excited just to be his teammate. In baseball, it happens on no-hitters and almost no other occasion except all-time records, and in other sports it happens even less frequently. Words don't matter much at moments like that—I couldn't hear anything anyway, and wouldn't remember it if I had. What I remember is that everybody was right there celebrating with me, as if my record was their record, too. A player can't ask for any more than that.
After I went to the stands and hugged Billye and my father—my mother was waiting to meet up with us in Atlanta, and my children were at their great-grandfather's funeral in Jacksonville—Gerald Ford, Nixon's vice president at the time, came onto the field and shook my hand. Bowie Kuhn did, too, although in retrospect I have to wonder whether he would have been there if it hadn't been Opening Day in Cincinnati, the first game of the season in either league. Since it was the first game, incidentally, it meant that at the moment I caught Ruth, I led the league in home runs and RBIs. It also meant that number 714 was the first cowhide home run in major-league history, since the leagues switched that year from horsehide to cowhide baseballs. The only thing wrong was the main thing—after leading 6-2 going into the bottom of the eighth, we lost the game in extra innings. Pete Rose tied it with a double in the ninth, then doubled again with two outs in the eleventh and scored from second on a wild pitch to beat us, 7-6.
At the press conference afterwards, the reporters asked me about the pitch from Billingham, about the pressure, about what I'd been thinking at the plate and going around the bases, about what I did that morning and what I was going to do that night, and they even asked about the moment of silence for Dr. King. I was glad that they gave attention to my request, but there didn't seem to be a lot of sympathy for it.
I was standing next to Henry when they were asking him these questions, and it almost seemed as though they were attacking him about the moment of silence. Before I knew it, I was talking. I blurted out something to the effect that he shouldn't have even had to ask for the moment of silence and that we should take the occasion to remember Dr. King. It was probably the biggest mistake I ever made in regards to Henry. As soon as I said it, I realized, “Hey, you should stand up here and be seen, not heard.” But they were coming after him. It was an instinctive reaction.
Looking back, I think that incident planted the seed of suspicion that maybe I was putting ideas into Henry's head. From that time on, we kept hearing and reading that I had changed Henry, that I had made him speak up more about social issues. I don't particularly mind being held responsible for that, but the fact is, I didn't have a thing to do with his speaking out. I was proud and pleased that he did, but it was not at my urging. Anyway, I learned my lesson from that incident. Since then, I've never offered any more unsolicited comments.
—Billye Aaron
I couldn't seem to stay clear of controversy. The wet weather continued in Cincinnati, and Eddie Mathews said that he didn't intend to play me in either of the two remaining games there. He knew he was in defiance of the commissioner, and also of Bartholomay and Eddie Robinson, our general manager, both of whom had reached an understanding with Kuhn about me playing two of the Cincinnati games, but Mathews wasn't the kind of man who would be pushed around. He resented the fact that he was being told whom to put in his lineup. He knew that there were plenty of precedents for what he was doing, and it irked him not only that he was being dictated to by the commissioner, but that the commissioner was being dictated to by the New York sportswriters. He also recalled a rainy night in 1973 when the umpires asked him if I was in the lineup that night, and when they were told that I was not, they went ahead and called off the game. Eddie was battling everybody that weekend—the commissioner, our own management, and the press. Part of it was that he was truly upset about being told how to manage, and part of it was that he was taking the heat off me. It's not often that a manager is such a loyal friend of a player.
There was no game Friday and no objection Saturday when I was on the bench. But Kuhn still insisted that I be in the lineup on Sunday, and Saturday night he called Eddie to tell him there would be serious repercussions if I did not start Sunday. Eddie had no choice but to go along, but he didn't have to like it.
Naturally, I wanted Hank to break the record at home. All the New York writers were saying how terrible it was to be thinking of the gate, but to me, it wasn't a matter of money. It would do our ball club a lot of good to play in front of big crowds at home, because we didn't see them very often. I was thinking of Hank and the ball club. The whole thing wouldn't even have come up if the people who scheduled the damn season hadn't started us out with three games in Cincinnati. I knew Hank was only going to play ninety or a hundred games that year, so why should I put him out there in the cold weather in Cincinnati to break the record? Then the commissioner got involved and I had to play him, and I'll be damned if he doesn't tie the record the first time up at the plate on Opening Day. On the day off Friday, I said to him, “Damn, Hank, if you don't break the record in Cincinnati, we've got an eleven-game homestand coming up, and we can put a lot of people in the stands.” So I said I wasn't going to play him anymore in Cincinnati, and that's when the commissioner got pissed. And I mean pissed. He was gonna suspend me, suspend the owners, the integrity of baseball was at stake, blah blah blah. So I had to play him Sunday. Knowing Hank, I figured he'd probably break it then, and even if he didn't, he was bound to do it in the first game back in Atlanta.
—Eddie Mathews
A right-hander named Clay Kirby pitched for the Reds on Sunday. Kirby was not one of the best pitchers in the National League, but he had one of the best sliders, which was a pitch that consistently gave me more trouble than any other because it was hard to identify as it came toward the plate. I struck out twice against Kirby and grounded out a third time. By then, we had a good lead and Mathews sent somebody in for me. I couldn't believe it after the game when the writers suggested, and later wrote, that I might have deliberately struck out against Kirby. The last thing I wanted to do was to look bad in that situation, or, worse yet, ruin my reputation by going into the tank. If I was going to do something crooked, I sure as hell wouldn't do it with 250 reporters watching every move I made. I had always taken a strong stand against anything that wasn't within the spirit and rules of the game—like spitballs. I believed in the integrity of the game as strongly as anybody, and it irked me to have my own integrity assaulted. The fact is, on both strikeouts I was called out by John McSherry, and one of them was a bad call that I argued. Even Kirby said that he thought the pitch was a ball.
I was in a foul mood when we got back to Atlanta, but Atlanta was in a good mood. The annual Dogwood Festival was going on, and the Braves had planned a big Hank Aaron Night for the home opener on Monday. There were almost 54,000 people at the ballpark that night—still the biggest crowd in team history. Bob Hope, the Braves' publicity man, had been working on the special night since the year before, not knowing that I would be tied with Ruth at the time. There were balloons and cannons and marching bands and a program that was like the old “This Is Your Life” television show. Important people from my past took their places on a map of the United States that covered the outfield—Ed Scott, my manager with the Mobile Black Bears; John Mullen, who signed me; Charlie Grimm, my first big-league manager; Donald Davidson, who had seen more of my home runs than anybody. Pearl Bailey sang the national anthem because she wanted to. Sammy Davis, Jr. was there and also Jimmy Carter, who at the time was still governor of Georgia. It seemed like the only people not there were the President of the United States and the commissioner of baseball. Nixon had a pretty good excuse—Congress was on his back to produce the Watergate tapes—but I couldn't say the same for Bowie Kuhn. He was in Cleveland speaking to the Wahoo Club. Kuhn sent Monte Irvin to stand in for him, and the Atlanta fans just about booed poor Monte out of the park. Kuhn knew that he would have been the one getting booed if he had come to Atlanta, because the whole town was mad at him for intervening in Cincinnati. He said later that his presence at the ballpark would have been a distraction and he stayed away so as not to blacken the occasion, but his absence was a much greater distraction. I was deeply offended that the commissioner of baseball would not see fit to watch me try to break a record that was supposed to be the most sacred in baseball. It was almost as if he didn't want to dignify the record or didn't want to be part of the surpassing of Babe Ruth. Whatever his reason for not being there, I think it was terribly inadequate. I took it personally, and, even though Kuhn and I have met and talked about it since then, I still do.
I thought the commissioner was way out of line on the whole sequence of events. First of all, to dictate our lineup in Cincinnati was a big overstep on his part. After that, he felt awkward about coming to Atlanta. In fact, we never saw much of him in Atlanta. Since he had been baseball's lawyer in our move to Atlanta, I think he was concerned about his involvement with our club and went overboard to disassociate himself with that. I could understand his feelings in that regard, but he was way out of line on the Aaron thing. I think he missed the moment.
—Bill Bartholomay
My father threw out the first ball, and then we took the field against the Dodgers. Their pitcher was Al Downing, a veteran left-hander whom I respected. Downing always had an idea of what he was doing when he was on the mound, and he usually pitched me outside with sliders and screwballs. I crowded the plate against him to hit the outside pitch, but at the same time, I knew he would be trying to outthink me, which meant that I had to be patient and pick my spot. It didn't come in the second inning, when Downing walked me before I could take the bat off my shoulder. I scored when Dusty Baker doubled and Bill Buckner mishandled the ball in left field. Nobody seemed to care too much, but my run broke Willie Mays's National League record for runs scored—Willie had retired at the end of the 1973 season—and put me third all-time behind Ty Cobb and Ruth. I had always put great store in runs scored ever since Jackie Robinson pointed out that the purpose of coming up to the plate was to make it around the bases. The way I saw it, a run scored was just as important as one batted in. Apparently, though, Jackie and I were in the minority on that score.
I came up again in the fourth, with two outs and Darrell Evans on first base. The Dodgers were ahead 3-1, and I knew that Downing was not going to walk me and put the tying run on base. He was going to challenge me with everything he had—which was what it was going to take for me to hit my 715th home run. I knew all along that I wouldn't break the record against a rookie pitcher, because a rookie would be scared to come at me. It had to be a pitcher with some confidence and nerve—a solid veteran like Downing.
Downing's first pitch was a change of pace that went into the dirt. The umpire, Satch Davidson, threw it out, and the first-base umpire, Frank Pulli, tossed Downing another one of the specially marked infrared balls. Downing rubbed it up and then threw his slider low and down the middle, which was not where he wanted it but which was fine with me. I hit it squarely, although not well enough that I knew it was gone. The ball shot out on a line over the shortstop, Bill Russell, who bent his knees as if he were going to jump up and catch it. That was one of the differences between Ruth and me: he made outfielders look up at the sky, and I made shortstops bend their knees.
I used to say that I never saw one of my home runs land, but when I see photographs or films of myself hitting home runs, I'm always looking out toward left field. I never realized I was doing it, though, and I still don't think I was watching to see the ball go over the fence. I think it was just a matter of following the ball with my eyes. From the time the pitcher gripped it, I was focused on the ball, and I didn't look away until it was time to run the bases. Anyway, I saw this one go out. And before it did, I saw Buckner run to the fence like he was going to catch it. During the pregame warm-ups, Buckner had practiced leaping against the fence, as if he planned to take the home run away from me, and I believe he was thinking about doing that as he ran back to the wall and turned. But the ball kept going. It surprised him, and it surprised me. I'm still not sure I hit that ball hard enough for it to go out. I don't know—maybe I did but I was so keyed up that I couldn't feel it. Anyway, something carried the ball into the bullpen, and about the time I got to first base I realized that I was the all-time home run king of baseball. Steve Garvey, the Dodgers' first baseman, shook my hand as I passed first, and Davey Lopes, the second baseman, stuck out his hand at second. I'm not sure if I ever shook with Lopes, though, because about that time a couple of college kids appeared out of nowhere and started running alongside me and pounding me on the back. I guess I was aware of them, because the clips show that I sort of nudged them away with my elbow, but I honestly don't remember them being there. I was in my own little world at the time. It was like I was running in a bubble and I could see all these people jumping up and down and waving their arms in slow motion. I remember that every base seemed crowded, like there were all these people I had to get through to make it to home plate. I just couldn't wait to get there. I was told I had a big smile on my face as I came around third. I purposely never smiled as I ran the bases after a home run, but I suppose I couldn't help it that time.
Since I was hitting third ahead of Hank, I knew there was a good chance that I'd be on base when he hit the home run to break the record. You get fantasies about things like that. My fantasy was that I would be on first base and the home run would be about twenty rows up in the stands so that I could stay near the base and be the first one to congratulate him. But with two outs and the ball hit on a line the way it was, I had to be running hard. I was already past second when it went out. I stopped right away and figured maybe I still had a chance, but by that time Garvey and Lopes and all the coaches and everybody had already gotten to him. After that, I just wanted to get to home plate and turn around and soak up the whole picture. I'm still in awe of that whole thing. To know how hard it is to hit a home run in the big leagues, and for him to do it in those circumstances…
I was on deck before him when he tied the record in Cincinnati, and when he came out of the dugout he said to me, “I'm gonna do it right now.” I was on deck when he came out before he broke the record in Atlanta, and he said the same thing that time. He said, “I'm gonna get it over right now.” He didn't say it the first time he batted that night, when he walked. But he said it before he went up there and hit number 715.
—Darrell Evans
As I ran in toward home, Ralph Garr grabbed my leg and tried to plant it on the plate, screaming, “Touch it, Supe! Just touch it!” As soon as I did, Ralph and Darrell and Eddie and everybody mobbed me. Somehow, my mother managed to make it through and put a bear hug on me. Good Lord, I didn't know Mama was that strong; I thought she was going to squeeze the life out of me. About that time, Tom House, a young relief pitcher, came sprinting in with the ball. He had caught it in the bullpen and he wasn't about to give it up to anybody but me. When he got to me, he stuck it in my hand and said, “Hammer, here it is!” Then they stopped the game for a little ceremony, and I stepped up to the microphone and said exactly what I felt: “Thank God it's over.”
It started to rain while the ceremony was going on. Since it was only the fourth inning, the game would have been wiped out if it had kept raining. That would have meant that the whole moment never really happened and I still had 714 home runs. But the fates were with me that night. The rain stopped, and we went on to win the game, 7-4. By the look of the crowd, though, you'd have thought there had been a flash flood in the grandstand. By the next time I batted, there couldn't have been more than 20,000 people left in the park. It seemed more like a Braves game. I guess that's when it hit me that the whole thing was really over. As I walked out to the on-deck circle, Ralph Garr said, “Come on, Supe, break Hank Aaron's record.” God, that sounded good. But I couldn't do it.
All the sportswriters were mad at me that night because they wanted to get to Hank after the game and I closed the clubhouse to everyone but the team and families. At that point, I didn't give a damn about the sportswriters, the way they had treated Hank and me and the Braves in Cincinnati. I cared about Hank. When everybody was in and the door closed, I stood up on a table and said what I thought about Hank, which was that he was the best ballplayer I ever saw in my life. Then we had champagne and everybody toasted him.
—Eddie Mathews
There were already hundreds of telegrams piled up by the time the game was over. And President Nixon had called. I suppose with all that he was going through, he welcomed the chance to talk to a ballplayer for a few minutes. He phoned when I was in the outfield, and Donald Davidson disconnected him while they were trying to patch the call into the clubhouse. Donald tried to call him back, but the operator at the White House wouldn't let him through. Finally, Nixon called again and said some nice things and invited me to the White House. If I'd known he was such a baseball fan, I might have voted differently.
After the party in the clubhouse, there was one more press conference. It was a happier one this time, except that the reporters had to ask about Bowie Kuhn's absence and I had to tell them what I thought about it. And I had to have one more say about the Clay Kirby game. I wanted no misunderstanding about what had happened Sunday in Cincinnati. I had to get that off my chest before I could take my record home.
We had a little party at the house that night, mostly family and close friends. Billye and I were alone for a little while before everybody arrived, and while she was in the bedroom getting ready, I went off downstairs to be by myself for a few minutes. When I was alone and the door was shut, I got down on my knees and closed my eyes and thanked God for pulling me through. At that moment, I knew what the past twenty-five years of my life had been all about. I had done something that nobody else in the world had ever done, and with it came a feeling that nobody else has ever had—not exactly, anyway. I didn't feel a wild sense of joy. I didn't feel like celebrating. But I probably felt closer to God at that moment than at any other in my life. I felt a deep sense of gratitude and a wonderful surge of liberation all at the same time. I also felt a stream of tears running down my face.