The man played in the major leagues from Williams to Yount, from Kiner to Schmidt, from Eisenhower and Khrushchev to Carter and Khomeini; from Hemingway and Steinbeck to Woodward and Bernstein; from James Dean to Jack Nicholson, Elvis to Elton John, Nat Cole to Natalie, and Sugar Ray to Sugar Ray; from Jackie Robinson to Jackie Onassis; from the fifteen-cent hamburger to the fifteen-cent stamp; from the four-minute mile to the four-minute dinner.
The baby boomers grew up and the modern social movements—peace, women's, and civil rights—dashed and bobbed along the national landscape all the while Hank Aaron was grazing the tops of fences with his low-slung home runs. The country changed much more than he did in those twenty-three years. To the deep chagrin of the Home Run King, it changed more than baseball did, as well.
By the time Aaron retired as a player, there was a black manager in Cleveland and two black executives in Atlanta, counting him. There were black infielders and outfielders all through the American League, including a few who were not required to hit .305. Millions of dollars were being paid to black sluggers and base stealers. In visibility and impact, the black presence in baseball was sufficient to enable the game to applaud itself as a model for reform in civil rights, and yet, appearances and public relations notwithstanding, its record in that arena reflected a pattern that had little do to with progressive leadership and much to do with reluctant pragmatism. Baseball accepted Jackie Robinson only because a visionary from Brooklyn and a commissioner from Kentucky wouldn't take no for an answer, and proceeded haltingly from here. By and large, major-league teams integrated only as fast as competitive and/or social pressures mandated it.
Owing to roots, customs, and baronial ownership, the process was ponderously slow—much slower than its occurrence in sports such as basketball, track, and boxing. Boxing and track, by their individualistic natures, have invited the most autonomy and consequently the least discrimination, not depending on franchises to hire and designate. Basketball has been the least encumbered by tradition, and its racial amalgamation happened so swiftly and thoroughly—embracing coaches, chief scouts, and general managers—as to leave baseball embarrassed in comparison.
But it is to baseball, the most institutional of American sports, that the country looks for symbols of social progress. Who was the first black player in the National Basketball Association? The first black coach? The first black player in the National Football League? There are answers to these questions (Chuck Cooper, Bill Russell, and, arguably, Bill Willis), but they certainly don't leap to mind as fast as you can say Jackie Robinson. Baseball is the game that tells America about itself, its social commentator. There are no television news specials to discuss the effects of Chuck Cooper on the anniversary of his signing and no national crusades if a football executive makes a misguided racial remark on the air. Significance of this sort is reserved for the national pastime. It is from baseball that America expects the best of itself.
In the more winsome particulars, the game has met the challenge famously. It has succeeded as no other pastime in its service to a season, its devotion to drama, its enhancement of hot dogs and regional beer and AM radio and rocking chairs and potluck suppers on the lawn. But while all of this would represent a spectacular final score for most sports, baseball's unique responsibility goes beyond the aesthetics. It goes into the streets and issues.
As the great populist sport, baseball has obligations. Its mandate calls for more than reluctant pragmatism; it calls for conscience, vision, and rolled-up sleeves. It calls for the national pastime to be an example, to give back something that really matters, and, most urgently, to deliver on the trust that is bestowed upon an august, metaphoric, and inherently public institution.
Ted Turner was the best thing that could have happened to me. As much as I had wanted the Schlitz deal to work out, I doubt that I could have been happy out of baseball. Now, maybe, but not then. I was too attached to the game. A sudden split might have left me exposed and tender.
Frankly, I wasn't prepared for the world outside baseball. I had left Mobile as a teenager who still answered to his daddy and mama, and my whole adult life I had never been anything but a ballplayer. A ballplayer doesn't have to be self-sufficient, because most of the day-to-day details are taken care of by business managers and clubhouse managers and traveling secretaries. Besides that, in my early years as a player my color kept me out of the mainstream of society, and in my later years my notoriety did the same thing. I lived on an island, and the only thing there was baseball.
The job Turner offered me was ideal. It carried real responsibility, although nobody seemed to believe it. My bailiwick was the Braves' farm system, and I was accountable for coordinating the reports, organizing the teams, and signing the players. Invariably, though, when an agent or an official from another team would contact us about a player, he would assume that I was just a figurehead and take his business to Bill Lucas—who had held the job before I took it—or somebody else in the front office.
But I took my job seriously, and to get off to a good start, the first thing I did was recommend that my brother Tommie be promoted to manager of our top farm club at Richmond. I could do that without being accused of favoritism, because everybody agreed that Tommie was one of the bright lights in the organization. I trusted Tommie's judgment, and he helped me in an area where I needed it—making player evaluations. That was the most difficult aspect of the job for me, because I couldn't go to Durham or Savannah or Greenville or Richmond and quietly watch a ball game without being distracted by fans or reporters. As a result, I sometimes stayed away from the minor-league ballparks or looked at a few innings and left early.
I took some criticism for that—especially from Jim Bouton, who ripped into me in an article he wrote for Sports Illustrated—but it was a fact of life. I didn't pay much attention to what Bouton had to say, anyway, because there was nothing we agreed on—especially his value as a thirty-nine-year-old knuckleball pitcher trying to make a comeback fifteen years past his prime. I have to admit that it didn't upset me to release Bouton. I respected the fact that he had once been an outstanding pitcher for the Yankees and had kept himself in good shape—especially for a writer—but he didn't seem to understand that my job was to develop promising prospects just out of high school and college. I suspected that Bouton was working on a scheme to land a job with WTBS, and I didn't appreciate him taking up roster space at the expense of a young kid trying to make his way up the ladder.
Another criticism I sometimes heard was that I was jealous of Bill Lucas, who became our director of player personnel when I joined the front office—in effect, the general manager. The fact was, I believed there was no one in baseball more deserving of his job than Bill and no one I would rather see as a general manager. I was thrilled every time a black man was appointed to a position like that. When Frank Robinson was named manager of the Indians in 1975, I was so excited that I found myself shaking. My only difficulty with Bill was that he was the brother of my ex-wife. When Barbara and I were going through rough times in our early years in Atlanta, it naturally caused some tension between me and Bill. He was very loyal to his family—just as he was very loyal to his employer. Professionally, I never had a minute's trouble with Bill, and neither did anybody else with our ball club.
Bill was a college student when I spent half the summer of 1953 on his family's front porch. Before he went off to Florida A&M, he used to hang around the Jacksonville ballpark, which was just across the street from his house, and do any odd jobs that needed to be done. He swept the aisles, wiped the seats, sold peanuts, and counted tickets shoulder-to-shoulder with Spec Richardson, who was general manager. When he got out of school, he signed with the Braves and was a pretty good minor-league player until he hurt his leg and had to quit at Triple-A. Everybody in the organization respected Bill for his intelligence and work habits, and when the Braves decided to move to Atlanta, John McHale got in touch with him to help lay the groundwork for the move. At first, Bill's job was essentially to be a liaison between the team and the black community. He was hired because he was black, but he was promoted because he was good. He worked his way up through the departments of the front office, and after Turner took over, Bill became his top baseball man. I think Ted trusted Bill more than anybody he ever had in the front office, and by 1979 the organization was really on the rise.
One night in May that year, when the team was in Pittsburgh, Bill watched on television at his home while Phil Niekro chalked up his two hundredth victory. He sent a bottle of champagne and a dozen roses to Phil's wife and telephoned Niekro in Pittsburgh to tell him to celebrate at the Braves' expense. A short while later, he had a brain aneurysm. I got a call around midnight, and I threw on some jeans and spent the night and the next day at the hospital. Bill was unconscious for five days before he died at the age of forty-three. The players were so upset that we didn't win a game the whole time he was in the hospital. Bill had been everything to the Braves—a brother to some of us, a father to others, and a friend to everybody.
I asked not to be considered to fill Bill's job, and the Braves brought John Mullen back to the organization to take it. Meanwhile, Ted Turner made sure he took care of Bill's family. He sent a check every month to Bill's wife, Rubye—he still does—and she used the money to send her three kids to college. Eventually, he put Rubye on the board of Turner Broadcasting.
I was already on the TBS board when Rubye joined it. Turner has never been reluctant to give opportunities to blacks, but our appointments actually came as the result of some racial pressure. About the time he was thinking about putting WTBS on the satellite, a TV station he owned in Charlotte was running into some trouble with the black community there. The controversy got a lot of local publicity, and a group of black preachers took up the cause. They were talking about a big lawsuit and causing such a fuss that one of Ted's big backers, Westinghouse, was thinking about pulling out of the deal. So Ted called me in to talk to them and appease them. I went down there and had some discussions and called Ted to report that we were making progress. That wasn't good enough for Ted, though, and he said he was coming down. I told him that wasn't a good idea, but the next day Ted showed up carrying a big box of plaques and commendations from the NAACP. He started going on about how he loved the NAACP. I told him those people didn't want to hear that, but Ted kept going on about the NAACP. They were just watching him, not saying anything. Finaly, I got him to leave and we worked out a settlement. The deal was that two blacks would go on the board of Turner Broadcasting, with me going on immediately. Ted named Rubye as the other, and we've both been on the board ever since.
Ted is one of the most enlightened and fair-minded business tycoons I've ever seen, but that hasn't kept him out of his share of racial situations. He had a dinner appointment once with Jesse Jackson at the Atlanta ballpark, and when Jesse showed up about an hour and a half late, Ted became very agitated. He and Jesse got into one of the damndest arguments in front of me and a whole room full of people. Jesse was trying to persuade Ted to do business with black-owned companies, but every time he would try to make his point, Ted would cut him off and yell at him for being late. Finally, Ted got up in the middle of the salad and said it was too late to carry on a conversation because he had to get down to his seat to watch the ball game. After the incident, Jesse wrote Ted a very strong letter—and sent a copy to me—saying, among other things, “Your irate and bizarre behavior was a source of embarrassment to everyone present. As your consumption of alcohol increased, your personal obsession drowned out your rational processes, and you cancelled our dinner abruptly…” Later, Ted visited Jesse's office in Chicago to straighten things out, and they've been friends since then. At one point, Jesse even presented Ted with an award for his efforts on behalf of equal opportunity.
In 1977, my first year in the front office, Turner was suspended by Bowie Kuhn for tampering with a player on another team. That was the year he won the America's Cup with Courageous. Since then, Ted has been blamed for much of the ridiculous escalation of player salaries, but I don't think he is nearly as responsible for that as George Steinbrenner. Of course, I can't deny that Ted has made his share of colossal mistakes. As far as I'm concerned, the worst thing he ever did was to fire Donald Davidson as traveling secretary because Donald made a practice of reserving a suite for himself, which he also used as team headquarters in the hotel. I think that was just a case of Ted being unfamiliar with baseball and insensitive to the legend of Donald. But whatever mistakes he has made, I still believe that Ted is in a class by himself as an owner—that he has done more for the game than any other. I'm certainly biased about this, but I've seen firsthand what Ted Turner has done for Atlanta and for the television industry and, in turn, for baseball. I think that if the Bartholomay group had not brought the Braves to Atlanta, another team would have come, but if Turner had not bought the Braves and promoted them on his superstation, they might be gone by now, leaving the South without a team.
Ted is a brilliant man, committed to his goals and always poised to make a fast decision. I don't know where he finds time for hobbies, but he has plenty of them—sailing and fishing and hunting and ranching and who knows what else—and he takes his leisure time very seriously. He has large ranches—plantations, he calls them—all over the country. I spent a weekend with him on one of his plantations in South Carolina, and while we were there we went deer hunting together. After a while I spotted a deer and got him in my sights, but before I could shoot, Ted pushed my gun down and said, “No, that's Janie's favorite deer.” Janie was his wife. We went on a little ways, and I spotted another deer and lined him up to shoot, and when I did, Ted pushed my gun down again and said, “No, no, that's Janie's favorite.” After two or three times, I got the message and started wondering why we had brought guns.
Something interesting usually happens when you're with Ted, and I've learned a lot about business just by being around him. More than that, he has always treated me like a man, which is the best thing I can say about anybody. I don't know what role, if any, baseball might have had in store for me if he hadn't come along with the Braves' job, and I only hope that the Braves have benefited from having me in the organization. A lot of people seem to have their doubts about that. Our farm system has been taken to task over the years for not producing enough big-league stars, and I certainly have to answer to that, but I'd like to think that people can look a little deeper before they judge my years as director of player development. While it's true that we were not as consistently successful as I would have liked, there are a lot of things that go into the equation—scouting, trades; it all works together. We developed several good players that we traded away—guys like Brett Butler, Brook Jacoby, and Steve Bedrosian. When I finally gave up the job in 1990 to move over into a vice president's position under Stan Kasten, our farm system was considered to have the best pitching talent of any in baseball. We also produced the National League Rookie of the Year in 1990, Dave Justice. And again, just like our failures have to be shared, much of the credit for that has to go to the scouting department.
I do know and appreciate the fact that Turner trusts my baseball judgment. Since I've been in the front office, he has twice offered me the manager's job. Near the end of my first year, 1977, he called me into his office and said, “Why don't you go down and manage the damn team?” I was just getting acclimated to my new job and hadn't been thinking in terms of managing, so I didn't take him very seriously. Ted actually went down to the dugout and managed one game himself that year. He offered me the job again a few years later, but I wasn't really interested. By that time, I was thinking in terms of becoming a general manager. In retrospect, though, it's probably best that it hasn't happened, because I would have some conflicts with a job that's so demanding on my time. I make a lot of speeches and charity appearances and do a lot of business traveling, and I wouldn't want to give up any of that. The way I look at the situation now is the same way I looked at the prospect of being a manager in 1974: I'm not seeking to be a general manager anymore, but if I felt at the time that it was important to get a black man into the position, I'd have to consider it.
Because I've been in the front office for such a long time, and because I haven't been timid about expressing my views in recent years, it has worked out to my satisfaction that whenever a racial issue comes up in baseball, the press turns to me as an unofficial spokesman. To his credit, Ted Turner has never tried to censor me. I appreciate that, because I feel very strongly about the need for baseball to employ more blacks in the front offices and also the need to speak up about it. There is no acceptable excuse for the fact that there have only been a handful of black managers and no general managers since Bill Lucas. As I write this, the integration of baseball's coaching staffs and front offices is probably further behind than was the state of player rosters when I broke into the game almost forty years ago. Progress seems to be a dirty word in baseball circles. It makes no sense whatsoever that black players are still systematically excluded from key executive positions four decades after they began dominating on the playing field. How long is this going to take?
I've heard all kinds of lame reasons why retired black players have a harder time finding work in baseball than retired white players. The reason you hear most often is that black players are often stars who are unwilling to take pay cuts to start out at the lower levels of an organization. First of all, that only emphasizes the point that black players are generally required to be better than white players to stay in the big leagues, the effect being that fewer of the fringe players are black. I don't believe that one discrimination is an excuse for another. Second, it's simply not true that black players are unwilling to start low and work cheap. I have too many friends with different stories.
I've sent letters and resumes to everybody I know in baseball. Some answer, some don't. One of my friends sent back a little two-line letter saying there was nothing available right now but he would keep my name on file. Two or three weeks later, he goes out and hires somebody.
The Dodgers gave me a shot at managing a low minor-league club in Arizona. They gave me the shittiest club they had, but I believe you can make chicken salad out of chicken shit if you play baseball the right way. We kicked ass and took names, won the league with that team. I proved to myself that it could be done, but it didn't seem to mean a tinker's damn to the powers that be. I was also a minor-league hitting coach for a while until my director, Bill Schweppe, invited me to lunch to fire me. When he said they were not going to renew my contract, I just laid my credit cards on the table and said no thanks to lunch. Afterwards, Peter O'Malley, the club president, called me in and asked me why I reacted that way. They might have had another spot for me in the organization at some point, but I said that I wasn't going to sit around for ten or twelve years and keep watching less qualified people jump right over me. I said, “Peter, they're not going to kill me the way they did Jim Gilliam.” Gilliam was one of the headiest baseball men there ever was, and they put him on first base and left him there for ten years while they brought in guys like Danny Ozark and Preston Gomez to coach third base and then Tommy Lasorda to be manager. Gilliam was still a first-base coach when he died. I told Peter I was getting to the point where I was about to kick somebody's ass, and if I did that, I would be out of baseball for good. So Peter said, “John, if you feel that way, maybe it's best that you do leave.” But I still can't get it out of my system. My wife tells me to give it up, but I can't. My fantasy is to manage a major-league ball club before I die.
—former Dodger John Roseboro
I played professional baseball for twenty years, and when I was done, I wrote to every club in the major leagues for ten straight years seeking some kind of employment. I was willing to do anything, because baseball is my life. I'd have gone to work for $15,000, maybe less, just to be in baseball. Even today, I'd take a job in baseball for a lot less money than I'm making out of baseball, working for Amtrak. I understand that not everybody is going to be a manager, but do you mean to tell me that I played twenty years and I can't stand next to third base waving my arm around for somebody to score? You mean to tell me there aren't more than two black guys who can swing their arms around and tell runners when to run? It's just like quarterbacks in football. Black quarterbacks can throw the damn ball, they can think, they can read defenses. It wasn't that anybody thought they couldn't do it, but it was a case of, well, we'll give you running back, and we'll give you wide receiver, and we'll give you defensive back, and we'll let you play the line, but we're not gonna give you quarterback. It's the same thing in baseball. They figure, give the blacks too much rope, and pretty soon they'll be buying teams.
How do you think it makes you feel to keep applying for jobs and then see them hire somebody who never even played professional baseball? You give your life for something you love, and it gets you nowhere. If I had to get out of bed in the middle of the night to help kids learn to play baseball, I would. I love it that much.
—former Brave Lee Maye
I keep waiting for the opportunity to get back in baseball in some capacity. Hitting instructor, coach, scout, whatever. I just want to get back in baseball. I've talked to every general manager, every farm director, every scouting director, and I haven't gotten a call back yet. I'm going to hang in there, though, because sooner or later the time will come. I'm a baseball man. You cut me open right now and I bleed baseball. If somebody got on the phone right now and said, “George Scott, we need a scout in Mississippi,” I would not ask the man how much the job pays. I would say, send me a contract, and I would sign it.
God knows, I hope baseball is not keeping me out because I'm black. Many people tell me the reason I don't get a job is the color of my skin, but I swear I don't want to believe that. Some times you're better off not knowing the truth, but I don't even want to think about the possibility of that being true. I just don't want to believe it.
—George Scott
When it comes to being managers and general managers, you're always hearing that this black guy wasn't hired or that black buy wasn't hired because he didn't have the experience. But I can't figure out why it is that only black men need experience. You see Lou Piniella step right into a manager's job with the Yankees and Ted Simmons walk off the field into a big front-office job with the Cardinals, and guys like Dal Maxvill and Tom Grieve and Lee Thomas land general manager's jobs with little or no experience. That really hurts. When the Blue Jays fired Jimy Williams as manager in 1989, they did all they could to keep from giving the job to Cito Gaston. When Cito kept winning as interim manager, they had no choice. There were two black managers in baseball that year—Gaston and Frank Robinson of the Orioles—and they went down to the last weekend of the season battling for the division title.
I sometimes think how easy it would be to staff a team with black coaches and executives. If I owned a team, I wouldn't go out of my way to hire only blacks in those positions, but I would see to it that everybody got an equal opportunity. If you did select from blacks only, though, there would be an incredible supply of talent to choose from. It would almost be like Branch Rickey having his pick of black players before the rest of the teams integrated. All of this great talent is just sitting there waiting to be utilized.
Hardly a week goes by that I don't talk to some old baseball friend who is either looking for a job in the game or depressed because he has just been fired or passed over. Billy Williams was barely considered for the Cubs' managing job the last time it opened up, despite the fact that he was their hitting coach and knew the players as well as anybody in the organization. Billy was so discouraged that I had to talk him out of quitting. I happen to think it's important not to get mad and leave baseball over these injustices, because we'll never get anywhere unless we stay with it. I've even had to give pep talks to Ernie Banks, if you can believe that. Ernie is the most optimistic, enthusiastic man who ever played baseball, but after he retired he couldn't seem to find the right niche with the Cubs. We'd talk at my apartment in Atlanta, and I'd say, “Ernie, you've got to tell them what you want to do. You're Mr. Cub! Don't let them shove you around!” Eventually, he did some speaking for the Cubs, but after the new owners took over, they let him go. After all that Ernie has done for that organization, it's hard to imagine that the Cubs can't find a place for Mr. Cub.
I feel a responsibility to help my friends and I do what I can by speaking publicly about the situation and working behind the scenes, but I'm not in a position to find jobs for them and don't believe I should, anyway; there would be too many personal and professional complications. Occasionally, a different kind of opportunity will come along for me to include an old buddy or two, but even then I have to be very cautious—which I learned after I took Ernie and Billy on a trip to play a series of exhibition games in Korea in the late seventies. The team I took was made up primarily of players from the Braves' farm system, but the Koreans wanted a couple of big names for the tour. Ernie was pushing fifty at the time and Billy was over forty, but the promoters were thrilled when they agreed to come along.
I knew we were in for a long trip when we got to the airport in Korea and the local authorities broke open the big trunk that we carried our equipment in. I said, “Wait, I'll get a key,” but they just busted it open. I guess they thought we were smuggling drugs into the country. They turned that thing inside out looking for drugs and cut open every one of our baseballs. I should have put the team back on the plane and gone back home right then, but things started looking a little better after we got settled in at our hotel. The Koreans have a way of making their guests feel awfully comfortable. It wasn't my style, but I got a kick out of watching Ernie sitting back like a king as the Korean girls dropped grapes in his mouth.
After a few days, though, our hosts stopped being so hospitable. Our players weren't very good, and neither were the crowds. When they saw that, the promoters started putting pressure on us. One night in my hotel, the phone rang and a man told me in a very urgent voice to come downstairs. When I got down there I found a man in a blue suit pacing the floor waiting for me. He told me in no uncertain terms that I had to play Billy Williams and Ernie Banks every day—especially Ernie. I told him that Ernie couldn't play every day because he was almost fifty years old. He said, “No, no, Ernie Banks, every day, every day.” A couple days later, I got another call in the hotel, and the man in the blue suit told me he had a big bet on the game the next day and we had to lose. I told him if I did something like that I'd get thrown out of baseball. He kept saying, “big bet, big bet,” and I kept telling him no way. The next day we went out there and, wouldn't you know it, we started pounding the ball for the first time on the whole trip. Before you could turn around we were ahead 12-0. Ernie even had a grand slam. After that, the guy in the blue suit said he wanted to stay with me because he was afraid for his life. I said, “Hey, if you're afraid for your life, what do you want to stay with me for?” When it was finally time to leave the country, the promoters wouldn't give me the money they owed me. I'd put up my own money to pay for the trip, and I couldn't leave without being paid back. They kept giving me excuses, but when I finally said I was going to contact the U.S. Embassy, my money was waiting for me the next day.
About the only good thing that came out of that trip was that it gave me a chance to spend some time with my son Lary, who was one of the players on my team. Lary had just signed with the Braves out of Florida A&M, even though he'd had a late start as a ballplayer. In high school, he had been a better football player. So had Hankie, who was all-city in Atlanta and played college football at Tennessee-Martin. But Lary wanted to concentrate on baseball in college, and he and Bill Lucas, Jr., had done well as teammates at Florida A&M. The Braves drafted them both in the low rounds after they graduated, and they were eager prospects. But after two years, they were still in Class A ball, and it was obvious they weren't going any further. I had to release them. They were both hurt by it, and naturally it hurt me, too, but it really wasn't that difficult a decision. If there had been any earthly chance that they could have made it to the big leagues, I would have kept them. But it was time for them to get on with their lives. A year or two later, both of them thanked me.
Except for moments like that, I enjoyed being a farm director. I realized I was the exception to the rule of black players being unable to find places in the front office, and I didn't take my position for granted. After Bill Lucas died, I was the highest-ranking black in baseball until Bill White was named president of the National League. It was a quiet job, which was a pleasant change after so many years of facing the press and public. Actually, the job was so quiet that I felt forgotten sometimes. When the Atlanta newspapers held a contest a couple of years ago to determine the most popular Atlanta Brave of all time, the winner was Dale Murphy. I'd be lying to say that didn't bother me a little, but I guess I made a career decision a long time ago that popularity wasn't the thing I was after—especially not in Atlanta. Anyway, my job provided other rewards, the best of which was watching kids develop into big leaguers. Sometimes, you could almost see them change from spring to spring.
Spring training is the most important time for a farm director, and I developed my own routine in West Palm Beach. I stayed at the Days Inn with the minor leaguers, the only difference being that I reserved an extra room for my work table and my microwave oven. Most of the players were just a few rooms away, and I was like their house father. I had to keep the guys in after curfew and out of trouble, which was almost a full-time job in itself. In fact, keeping Steve Bedrosian out of trouble was almost a full-time job. Bedrosian had a big painted-up van that he would park out in the lot, and every time I'd walk by that van there would be a party going on inside. But he was the best pitcher we had in the system and nothing seemed to slow him down. The problem was that his buddies tried to keep up with him and they just couldn't do it. Over the years, I had to cut three or four guys who did themselves in trying to stay up with Bedrosian.
My own pace at West Palm Beach wasn't quite so fast. There were a few restaurants where I liked to go for a quiet dinner—I ate at the Okeechobee Steak House eighteen nights in a row at one point—and after dinner I'd just return to the Days Inn to keep watch over my boys. At the spring-training complex, where we spent our days, I stayed in my office most of the time because the autograph hounds made it impossible for me to walk freely around the fields. My office was just an empty little room in the back of a low cinder-block building a couple hundred feet from Hank Aaron Drive. After a while, people figured out where I was, and they would walk right up to my window and stare in at me.
I was sitting in that office one day in 1982 when my brother Tommie walked in and told me that he had some kind of blood disorder. They didn't know yet that it was leukemia, and I didn't think anything of it until I was in New York several months later and received a message to hurry back to Atlanta because Tommie was in the hospital. At that point, he had about another two years to live. He stayed in the hospital the last few weeks, and I used to cook fish to bring down to him. We'd just sit there eating fish and watching the Braves on TV. I'd tell him that Dale Murphy was up, and he would try to answer, but you couldn't understand him. The whole time, Tommie never demonstrated any pain until the very last night before he passed away. I was there with his wife, Carolyn, when he died. It was the hardest night of my life.
Ralph Garr was one of Tommie's pallbearers, and the rest were from Mobile—Cleon Jones, Tommie Agee, and an old Toulminville friend named Robert Driscoll. At the funeral, John Mullen said, “We will miss him more than anybody we could have lost. If there ever was an organizational person, Tommie was it.” They named the indoor batting cage facility at West Palm Beach for Tommie. He was a very popular and respected man in the organization, and I'm certain Tommie would have managed in the big leagues if he had lived. I'm just as certain that he would have been an outstanding manager.
I was glad, at least, that Tommie got to see me inducted into the Hall of Fame. I was elected in 1982, nine votes short of unanimous. Ty Cobb was the only player to ever get a higher percentage of the votes than I did, which made me feel for the first time that I had really been accepted by the baseball community. My old nemesis Dick Young even tore into the nine writers who didn't vote for me: “I am going to plead temporary insanity for the nine numbskulls. It can't be a racial matter. Nobody can be that blindly bigoted. The grand-dragon of the Ku Klux Klan would have voted for Hank Aaron.” It puzzled me why anybody wouldn't vote for me—or for Frank Robinson, who was elected at the same time—but it didn't upset me, because eleven writers hadn't voted for Babe Ruth, and forty-three for Mickey Mantle.
The Hall of Fame weekend was one of the most satisfying occasions of my baseball life. It especially pleased me to be inducted along with Frank Robinson, who was in our little fraternity of black All-Stars back in the fifties and sixties and had been the first black manager. It also warmed me to see Happy Chandler inducted at the same ceremony, elected by the veterans committee. Chandler was the commissioner who went against fifteen of the sixteen major-league owners to put Jackie Robinson on the Dodgers, and I was very interested in what he had to say about it at his induction. He said, “I felt I was doing what justice and mercy required. I knew one day I would have to face my maker and He would ask me why I wouldn't let this black man play baseball. If I said it was because he was black, I didn't think He would feel that was a satisfactory answer.” My speech was the shortest, as you might expect, but I said what I came to say. I said it was true, as I once read, that the way to fame is through tribulation. I said that it wasn't fame I had pursued, but to be the best player I could be with the generous talent that God gave me. I said that I was standing up there only because players like Jackie Robinson had paved the way, and that my presence there, and Frank's, proved that a man's ability is limited only by his opportunity. Then I introduced my family and friends, thanked everybody, and sat down before I started crying in front of all those people.
When I sat down, by the way, I sat down next to Bowie Kuhn. I had played tennis with him the day before—beat him badly, I might note—and we were learning to respect each other a little more. Even so, I still couldn't swallow any reason he could give for missing my 715th home run. My feelings about that were so strong that they had led to a nasty incident a couple of years before. It started when Baseball magazine voted the home run as the most memorable moment of the 1970s and invited me to receive an award that would be presented by the commissioner. I sent back a telegram saying that I would not be there to accept an award from Bowie Kuhn. The New York press seemed to think that I was avoiding the ceremony because I was offended that Pete Rose had been named Player of the Decade instead of me. That wasn't it at all. I was clearly and simply returning a favor that the commissioner had extended to me six years before. If he hadn't thought that the home run was worth a trip to Atlanta in 1974, why should I go to New York in 1980 so that he could give me a plaque for it? I didn't see the logic. I would have felt like a hypocrite receiving an award from Bowie Kuhn for the best moment of the decade.
The writers, as usual, had no sympathy for my position. A columnist in Florida wrote that “Henry Aaron has chosen to wallow in the clutches of tastelessness…Those close to Aaron suggest this is no longer Hank Aaron speaking, but rather his wife Billye, formerly married to a militant civil rights leader.” Will Grimsley of the Associated Press jumped in and wrote, “It was a thoughtless, ugly act. It was ill-advised and unwarranted and only sullied Aaron, not the commissioner. The commissioner deserved better.” Back home, Lewis Grizzard of the Atlanta Constitution really let me have it: “Did I miss something? Did Henry Aaron get hit in the head with a foul ball?…Too many days in the hot sun of West Palm Beach? Too many lunches with Captain Dingeroo, Braves owner Ted Turner? Maybe it's his wife…Oh, Henry, how you have changed…Suddenly, you're Henry Aaron, activist. Who put you up to that? Jesse Jackson?…Frankly, Henry, why don't you cool it?…You have a terrific job because you really don't have anything to do. Show up at an occasional minor-league game, pop a beer, watch an inning or two, and take the rest of the day off. You could give us another great moment, Henry—a moment of silence.” The way it came down was that the commissioner was excused for snubbing the record, but I was thoughtless, tasteless, and out of line for snubbing his banquet.
While all of this was still brewing, I was in New York for another purpose and ran into Monte Irvin at a crowded restaurant. Monte had accepted the brunt of Atlanta's hostility toward Kuhn when he showed up in the commissioner's place on the night I broke the record, and I was sorry about that. I had no beef with Monte. But when I declined to go to the banquet, he thought it made him look bad, since he had been the liaison between me and the commissioner. My conversation with Monte that night reminded me of the one I had with Mrs. Gibson after we moved out of her house in Bradenton to be with the white players. I told him that sometimes you just have to make a statement. Monte didn't think it was the right statement to make, though, and we had a pretty strong difference of opinion. I shouldn't have taken my anger out on Monte, but I did. In turn, he cursed me, and we got into a ferocious argument, which left neither of us feeling any better. It was a regrettable night, because Monte Irvin is a good man who has done a lot for baseball and for blacks in baseball.
The early 1980s were a turbulent time for me. I was trying to carve out a role as some sort of leader, trying to do and say things that would make a difference, but everything seemed to backfire. At one point, I spoke to a writer for a newspaper in Minneapolis and poured out some of my feelings about the bigotry in baseball. Among other things, I said that I would not recommend to young black boys that they pursue baseball as a career. I had made that statement in a speech to college students, and I believed it. I thought they would be better off studying to be doctors or lawyers or teachers and that if they entered baseball, they would be setting themselves up to be shafted one way or another. When the article came out, it was as if I had burned down the commissioner's office. A young, ignorant columnist in Chicago wrote that I had suddenly discovered that baseball was racist and that I hadn't noticed this in twenty-three years of playing. He posed the question of where I was when Dr. King marched on Washington and Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were murdered in Mississippi? Then he criticized me for doing so little to change the country when I could have done so much. In the same column, he managed to damn me for speaking out and damn me for not speaking out.
I was getting it from all sides. In Atlanta, somebody called the FBI and told them that I was the one responsible for the string of child murders that devastated the city. That was around the time that a group of private citizens formed a committee to erect a statue of me in front of Atlanta Stadium, commemorating my 715th home run. It was an undertaking that flattered and humbled me and also embarrassed me a little before it was finished.
The statue project was initiated by Bob Hope, who was the former public relations director of the Braves, and my old teammate Pat Jarvis. They got the idea that it would be appropriate to put up a memorial similar to the one of Stan Musial at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. Already, there was a statue of Ty Cobb in front of Atlanta Stadium. Cobb never played for the Braves, but one of the Atlanta civic leaders had decided it would be nice to have a series of statues at the stadium honoring Georgia-born athletes. Most of them would have been of football players like Fran Tarkenton and Charlie Trippi. Putting one of me out there would have changed the concept, which made it more difficult to raise money. But the NAACP jumped in and held a fundraising dinner that got the project rolling. With that to start on, the committee hired a sculptor from Denver named Ed Dwight, who had also been the first black astronaut. But they still needed more than $100,000, and Bob Hope got on the telephone and started drumming up individual donations. I was a little uncomfortable with the idea of private citizens being solicited to pay for a statue of me, but I was touched and honored that so many people contributed. The committee received checks from hundreds of people—from everyday baseball fans to former teammates like Felipe Alou, Tony Cloninger, Eddie Mathews, Warren Spahn, Lew Burdette, Johnny Logan, Joe and Frank Torre, Bob Uecker, Tom House, Dusty Baker, Ralph Garr, and Davey Johnson. The Dodgers even sent a check, and, in a great show of sportsmanship, so did Al Downing. My nemesis in the front office, Paul Richards, made a contribution. So did my secretary, Susan Bailey. And my father and my brother Tommie. Money came in from celebrities like Bill Cosby and Flip Wilson and Burt Reynolds and politicians like Andrew Young. Bert Lance was even on the list. For some reason, so was Vidal Sassoon. So was Bowie Kuhn. But even with all those contributions, it took a painfully long time to raise all the funds that were needed, and all the while there were articles in the newspapers about whether the project would ever be completed. It dragged on for so long that at one point I thought about paying the rest myself just to get the thing done and over with. Ultimately, Ted Turner said he would put up the last $10,000 if necessary. But the checks kept trickling in, and the statue was erected on the stadium plaza just before I was inducted at Cooperstown.
Everybody agreed that the statue itself was perfect, and in the end, I was profoundly grateful that it was done. Occasionally, when I'm feeling down about something, I'll drive around the stadium to look at the statue from the car, and it picks up my spirits. It reminds me that I've accomplished something and that people appreciate it. I'm indebted to all my friends who were so generous, and especially Bob Hope, Pat Jarvis, and the NAACP.
The statue is only one of many reasons why I'm so loyal to the NAACP. There are plenty of social organizations that do a lot of good in the area of civil rights—including Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition—but I've always felt closest to the NAACP because it was there at the beginning. I had been involved off and on with the NAACP ever since Mal Goode took me to a meeting in Pittsburgh back in the late fifties, and for the past several years I've been on the national board. Billye also serves on the national board of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund. My connections with the NAACP keep me in regular touch with the chairman, Dr. Benjamin Hooks, who tries to stay abreast of the baseball situation.
I'm fortunate to work for an organization that has a very good record in racial matters, but there are still occasions when I get caught in the crossfire between my job and my extracurricular commitments. That happened in 1987, when the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP, for which I served on the board of directors, began pushing the Braves, the Atlanta Hawks of the NBA—which Turner also owns—and Turner Broadcasting to sign a fair-share agreement. At that point, no sports franchise in the country had entered into a fair-share agreement, which is a contract stipulating that the organization will grant minorities a fair share of everything from executive positions to professional services. As accommodating as Ted Turner is, a man in his position naturally doesn't like an outside organization dictating to him, and the whole thing turned into a real knockdown-dragout fight. It came to a head during basketball season, late in 1987, and the NAACP called a press conference to announce that it was going to boycott one of the Hawks' biggest games of the year. In NAACP affairs, the local chapter generally works independently in its own community—Jondelle Johnson was the executive director in Atlanta and she spearheaded the drive—but the Atlanta situation was so explosive that Dr. Hooks flew in from Baltimore to be there. Finally, they hammered out an eleventh-hour solution. When it was completed, I was proud to work for the only baseball team with a fair-share agreement.
Through the years, I've found that it's almost futile to try to accomplish anything constructive for minorities without the clout of a group like the NAACP. Not long after I retired as a player, I got involved in the formation of an organization called the 755 Foundation, which was created primarily to help place more blacks in baseball front-office jobs, but without the brand of the NAACP, it just wasn't taken seriously. That's why I haven't been involved in the Baseball Network, which was also formed with the purpose of securing more front-office jobs for blacks. A lot of good friends and good men signed up with the Network, however—Frank Robinson, Willie Stargell, Dusty Baker, Don Baylor, Curt Flood, Vada Pinson, and many more—and because of the quality of their membership, they have a chance to make a difference. I applaud their efforts. I also sympathize with them because of the resistance they have met. They have found, as I have, that baseball is a lot like the ivy-covered wall of Wrigley Field—it gives off a great appearance, but when you run into it, you discover the bricks underneath. At times, it seems that we're dealing with a group of men who aren't much different than others we've all run into over the years, except they wear neckties instead of robes and hoods. A black woman who works for the Oakland A's named Sharon Richardson Jones was talking on the phone with an owner of another ball club once about the racial situation, and the owner, not knowing Sharon's color, said, “I'd rather hire a trained monkey than a black in my operation.”
I really believed that baseball was going to address its discrimination problem when Peter Ueberroth came in as commissioner. I met with him just a few days after he took over and offered him tangible ideas about how he could implement some necessary changes, including the creation of a position in his office to oversee a program of hiring minorities. We kept up the communication, had another meeting or two, and he listened politely to all of my points and grievances. I told him he was sitting on a time bomb—which is exactly what Al Campanis turned out to be.
I was just relaxing at home watching “Nightline” with my wife one night. Al Campanis was on talking with Ted Koppel about the fortieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson. I knew Campanis well from my days with the Dodgers. He was as good a man as any. Well, I was just watching quietly and all of a sudden Campanis made his statement about blacks not having the necessities for certain baseball jobs. When I heard that, I sat straight up in my chair and said, “Goddamn, the door just swung open, babe.”
—John Roseboro
I could have gone on “Nightline” every night for a year screaming about the bigotry in baseball, and it wouldn't have done as much good as those two minutes from Al Campanis. The script couldn't have been written any better. Campanis was a high-ranking official of the team that integrated baseball—the most progressive and respected organization in the game. He wasn't a backward bigot. Just the opposite, he had known Jackie Robinson since the minor leagues and been one of his biggest allies. Once, when an opposing player tried to get rough with Jackie in the minors, Campanis said the guy would have to go through him to get to Jackie. The Dodgers had numerous blacks in their front office—Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, a former basketball player named Tom Hawkins, and others—and a solid record in the treatment of minorities. Campanis was on “Nightline” because he represented the organization that had led the way when it came to opportunities for blacks. That was the amazing irony of the whole thing. And that's what made it so powerful. Campanis was only saying what so many other baseball officials believed and practiced. It was a shame that he was the one who had to take the fall, but I've always said that God works in mysterious ways.
The Campanis incident put the spotlight on baseball's racial problem. It was all over the news for quite a while, and it rallied the activist groups. Jesse Jackson and I met with Ueberroth in New York, and then I attended a meeting with Jesse in Chicago, where he assembled athletes from every major sport in an effort to form an alliance and exert some pressure on the owners. Jesse also met with the commissioners of pro basketball and football, David Stern and Pete Rozelle. After he met with them, he told me he could give each one of them a grade: Stern would be an A, Ueberroth a B, and Rozelle an F. But the heat was on Ueberroth, and everybody was waiting for him to do something. He responded with a grand stroke, hiring Dr. Harry Edwards and Clifford Alexander as consultants with the alleged purpose of addressing baseball's hiring practices toward minorities—essentially, the kind of position I had discussed with him a couple of years before. I was skeptical about the timing and motives behind the move, but hopeful that it might be a step in the right direction. Harry Edwards, in particular, had a history of making noise and getting things done.
As it turned out, though, I honestly believe that Edwards and Alexander were hired as buffers to keep the activist groups off Ueberroth's back. They couldn't hire anybody. They had no real power whatsoever. At one point, Dr. Hooks and some other NAACP officials and I made an appointment in Washington with Alexander and Janet Hill, whom he worked with. Alexander couldn't tell us a single thing that he had done on behalf of blacks. When we pressed him, he said he didn't have to answer to us because he was employed by the owners. All he would give us was name, rank, and serial number. It was as if we were the enemy.
When all was said and done, I don't believe Alexander and Edwards made one damn bit of difference. After a couple of years, Ueberroth gave a report about the increased percentage of minorities in the front office, but his figure only reflected the women who had been hired as secretaries and a few blacks in low-level positions. The only significant hiring of a former black player in that whole period was when Houston signed Bob Watson as assistant general manager. Ueberroth was a terrific public relations man, but as far as I could tell, all he really did on the minority issue was a lot of shucking and jiving.
The worst part of it was that the owners didn't care. They were looking for a marketing man as commissioner, and Ueberroth was perfect for the job. They certainly weren't looking for a baseball man or a champion of minorities—which I had found out firsthand when I met with Bud Selig and two other search committee members to interview for the position before Ueberroth was hired. For a long time, I was the only one who stepped forward publicly as a candidate to replace Kuhn. But I was never a serious candidate in the committee's eyes, or in the media's. A lot of people seemed to be amused by the thought of me as commissioner. I didn't happen to think it was so outrageous. Certainly, I would have needed help in a lot of areas, but so did Ueberroth, and so did Bart Giamatti. I would have needed help in the business areas; they needed it in the baseball areas. It struck me as ironic that baseball was always saying blacks didn't have the experience for front-office jobs, and yet they hired consecutive commissioners who had no background in baseball.
I never heard back from the search committee after my interview. We talked for two hours at O'Hare Field in Chicago, and I told them then, as I'm sure they knew, that naturally I would be strong on the minority issue. I would advocate not only a program of equitable minority employment, but also contracting. Baseball is a very broad industry, and it could perform a valuable and crucial service by providing opportunities for black doctors and announcers and concessionaires and advertising agencies—not only at the major-league level, but throughout the system. Naively, I believed the members of the search committee might think that was important for baseball. But that wasn't my only priority. I proposed a plan to place a cap on salaries to stop men like George Steinbrenner from putting other owners out of business or driving them out of the game. I also lobbied for mandatory drug testing and for inter-league play. One of the things that had impressed me during my two years in the American League was that fans were hungry to watch a famous player they had never seen before in person. It's a shame that National League fans never got to see Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle or Bob Feller and American League fans never saw Stan Musial or Willie Mays or Warren Spahn or Sandy Koufax. When a team like the Braves is twenty games out of first place in September, you might get some people to the ballpark if you give them a chance to see Wade Boggs or Jose Canseco. Inter-league play would also create regional rivalries like the Reds and Indians, the Cardinals and Royals, the Giants and A's, the Dodgers and Angels, and the Rangers and Astros, not to mention the Cubs and White Sox and Yankees-Mets. I'm not talking about integrating the leagues entirely—just crossing over for a few games, maybe on an alternating home-and-home basis, like college football. It's staggering to think of the money that could be saved on travel expenses. The only downside is tradition, which baseball too often gets stuck in.
Although I had serious reservations about Ueberroth, I thought Bart Giamatti was on his way to becoming an excellent commissioner before his tragic death. When I met with him in New York and he told me he intended to improve baseball's hiring practices, I had faith he would. And, of course, I was thrilled when Bill White was named president of the National League. As far as I was concerned, White's appointment ranked right up there with Jackie Robinson breaking the color line. This was a man who had fought with bush-league fans in the South and had pushed for the desegregation of Florida hotels. He had seen it all. He was also the man who I thought might easily have become the first black manager. But this was even better. I made sure that I put aside a dozen of the first batch of National League baseballs with Bill White's signature. He made a collector out of me.
When Bill was named, I couldn't help but reflect back a couple of years to when I had seen him at an old-timers' game in Washington, D.C. It was shortly after the Campanis incident, and Bill had walked up to me that day, shook his head, and said, “Do you think these people are ever going to change?” I said, “Yes, sir, I do. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but they will.” Even in my best moments of optimism, though, I couldn't have imagined I was speaking to the next president of the National League.
With White in office, I began to reconsider my own future in the game. It seemed that there were fewer and fewer reasons for me to remain. After more than a dozen years in the same job, I was getting a little bored with it and more than a little discouraged that I had not moved up the ladder. At the same time, I was becoming increasingly occupied with activities outside baseball. In recent years, I've served on committees for leukemia and cancer research and executive boards of PUSH, the NAACP, and Big Brothers/Big Sisters. Through Big Brothers/Big Sisters and Arby's, I've been involved with a Hank Aaron Scholarship Program that has raised more than $5 million to send kids to college. I've also joined up with Sadaharu Oh in a program to develop baseball in Third World countries.
After we met in Japan, I maintained communication with Oh and taped a message to be played in Tokyo when he hit his 756th home run to set the international record. We have a lot of respect for each other and both believe that, through baseball, we can make a big difference for a lot of underprivileged kids—not to mention the enormous benefit that a worldwide program can have for the sport. Oh has inspired me. He is a very influential man in Japan and an entrepreneur, besides. Along the way, he and I have also begun to team up in business matters. We made a commercial together for a new coffee product in Japan, and the product soon became number one in its market.
Gradually, I'm becoming less dependent on baseball for income—mostly due to my involvement with Arby's. When Arby's was a sponsor of major-league baseball, I was their baseball spokesman. One thing led to another, and we worked out a franchise contract whereby Hank Aaron Enterprises would establish at least a dozen Arby's restaurants in Milwaukee and Wisconsin over a period of five years.
Although my baseball accomplishments haven't produced the bonanza that they might have for other players—white players, to be more precise—I've certainly been able to cash in on my name to a certain extent. Like most well-known athletes, I've had the benefit of making money simply by lending my name to a product or company. For instance, an automobile dealer in Atlanta issued a special edition Hank Aaron Cadillac—even though I usually buy less expensive cars. I also had an arrangement with Coca-Cola for several years in which I made two or three appearances a year and received an annual check for $30,000. Jesse Jackson had been on Coke's back about hiring minorities, so they put me under contract just to have me under contract.
Then, of course, there is the money that has become so available to ballplayers through autograph shows. I don't care for autograph shows in principle, because they bring out a greedy side of the souvenir industry that doesn't help its image—but I haven't always been above doing a few for the payday. A player who is in demand can make as much as $50,000 in a weekend. One of the last shows I did was Pete Rose's in Atlantic City, which brought together all of the living players with 500 home runs. At one moment during that weekend, I looked around the room at Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Harmon Killebrew, Frank Robinson, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Eddie Mathews, Reggie Jackson, Mike Schmidt, and Willie McCovey, and I thought, “Damn, I hit more home runs than all of these guys. I must have been pretty good.”
While I was in Atlantic City, I also managed to win a few thousand dollars at the slot machines. I love playing the slot machines—I also enjoy buying tickets for the state lotteries—and, in fact, I love Atlantic City, because everybody is watching their money so closely that I can walk around without being disturbed. But I don't enjoy card shows, and I decided after that one that I wouldn't do more than one or two a year. Instead, I entered into an arrangement with a company in Philadelphia named Scoreboard that sells memorabilia on TV. I sign so many balls and bats for a fee—it can go as high as six figures—and they take care of the rest. I have to appear on television occasionally, but the agreement is that I don't have to do any hard selling.
I've also decided to retire from the old-timers' tour. Those games depress me. I understand that the whole purpose behind them is to get everybody together and have some fun, but I can't have any fun playing baseball the way it's played in old-timers' games. When you get to the clubhouse, there are so many baseballs to sign that it seems like you never get out of your locker. When you finally make it to the field, everybody wants you to pose for pictures with their arms around your shoulders. All of that is fine, except that there's no chance to warm up and get ready to play. Then you go out there stiff and cold and make a fool of yourself. Maybe I have a different idea of fun than most guys, but I take baseball too seriously to enjoy playing it that way.
I also take football seriously—especially the Cleveland Browns. I've been a Browns fan ever since I used to watch Jimmy Brown play. I admired him as much as any athlete I ever saw. I also related to him, because Jim Brown played with absolutely no wasted motion. He ran as fast and hard as he had to, and when he had to come up with a little extra, it was always there. After the play, he would pull himself up and straggle back to the huddle like he would never carry the ball again, and on the next play he'd knock over three more tacklers. Like Sandy Koufax, he was still at the top of his game when he retired. By that time, I was hooked on the Browns. Several years ago, I found out that I could hop on a plane in Atlanta on Sunday morning and make it to Municipal Stadium in Cleveland in time to catch the game. I would dress up in ratty old clothes and a stocking cap, put some dog bones in a paper sack, and sit in the Dawg Pound with all of the crazies. Nobody ever recognized me—except possibly one time, when an older fellow looked over at me, did a double take, and looked again. I was afraid he had figured me out, but then I started barking and I'm sure he thought, “Nah, it can't be.” I stopped going to the games when I got my satellite dish and found I could watch them every week from my easy chair at home. But now I try to visit summer training camp for a few days every year, and during the season I talk once a week to Ernie Accorsi, the Browns' director of football operations. When the baseball season is over, I live and die with the Browns.
For the most part, though, my life is no longer divided between the baseball season and the off-season, like it was for twenty-five years. These days, I get to see my family in the summertime. Ceci stays with us when she is not off at college, and all of my kids except Lary live in Atlanta. Hankie works for Delta Air Lines, Dorinda works for Southern Bell, and Gaile recently moved back from Los Angeles—with a little persuading from me—and took a job as an insurance analyst. Lary got married not long ago in Milwaukee, where he teaches school and does a little coaching. My only grandchild is Dorinda's boy, Raynal, who is in grade school in Atlanta. I frequently pick him up at school and take him to dinner or baseball practice or just hang around with him. He calls me Papa Henry, just like I called my granddaddy in Camden, Alabama.
My sister, Alfredia, also lives nearby, married to a state senator named David Scott. With so much family around, I'm very comfortable in Atlanta now. Not long after I took the job with the Braves, Billye and I moved into a Colonial-style home in southwest Atlanta, a very nice black neighborhood where a lot of ministers and civic leaders like Andrew Young and Maynard Jackson also live. Our house is low-key, and Billye has decorated it in an interesting way that is still comfortable. She collects cultural artifacts—mostly black art that she picks up in her travels. She has figurines and pictures from Africa, Haiti, Nassau, St. Thomas, Japan, Spain, and anywhere else she has been. Her collection also includes three paintings by Romare Bearden, a black artist whom she admires very much and happens to be a big baseball fan.
There's a five-acre lake behind the house where I can catch a fish now and then—actually, Mama does most of the fishing out there every time she visits Atlanta—but the best feature, as far as I'm concerned, is the tennis court that was built for us by Bud Selig and the Brewers as a gift from Hank Aaron Day in Milwaukee. Tennis is my sport now. Except for an occasional catch with Raynal, I don't play baseball at all anymore. After I retired, I tried playing on a softball team, but I couldn't hit that big, slow thing. I also found that you're expected to sit around and drink beer after every game, which means that you lose three pounds and then gain about nine in the same night. That wasn't doing me any good. But tennis is a game that makes you feel like you're really playing something, and I love every minute of it. I'm involved in an informal league in my neighborhood, which is the most competitive thing I do these days. Playing the game has also made me a fan, and I have come to respect professional tennis players as much as any athletes for their conditioning and mental toughness. For some reason, I seem to most appreciate the bad boys—guys like Lendl and McEnroe. I was talking to McEnroe's father once at a party at Madison Square Garden during the U.S. Open and mentioned that I would like to meet John some day. He said to wait a minute, then went over and picked up the phone. I could hear him telling John to come over because there was somebody who wanted to meet him. Then I heard him say, “You get your ass over here right now!” McEnroe was there within the hour.
If I hadn't discovered tennis, there would have probably been something else. I just don't feel right unless I have a sport to play or at least a way to work up a sweat. I love to tie on the tennis shoes, if only to jog. On days when I'm working in my office—it seems like I'm on the road about half the time—I run for forty-five minutes around the top deck of the stadium. I'm not in bad shape for a guy fifty-seven years old, although I probably eat too much ice cream and fried fish. In the summertime, I love to fry up a mess of fish and take it out on the patio, in front of the lake. That's my idea of a pleasant evening.
At times like that, I sometimes sit back and reflect on the nice life I have now, which, of course, I owe to baseball. I reflect on baseball, too, and my relationship with it. I finally feel that my place in the game is secure. The home run record will last at least long enough to suit me; recently, there was a national contest in which number 715 was voted the most memorable event in baseball history. My name is also on an award that is to be presented to the RBI champion of each league for the rest of baseball history. With all that in the bank, I wonder if I really need baseball anymore…and if it really needs me. But whenever I wonder about it, I usually come to the conclusion that I do, and it does—at least for the time being. Baseball needs me because it needs somebody to stir the pot, and I need it because it's my life. It's the means I have to make a little difference in the world. I made a decision at the age of eighteen to devote myself to baseball, and at the age of fifty-seven I have to live with that decision. I step outside of the game now and then to try to make a political statement—endorsing candidates or working through the NAACP—but I know that the only reason anybody listens to me is that I had 3,771 hits and 755 home runs. I also know that while it's great to help a politician and to maybe have a small part in a little civil rights strategy, my field is baseball. And that's okay, because people pay attention to baseball. Baseball counts. It counts a lot.
Some day, I might get out of the game. Maybe even soon. But I know that even if I do leave baseball in an official capacity, I'll still be in it up to my neck. I'll still love it as I always have and want to strangle it sometimes. And whatever I'm doing, I'll still be trying to carry on the job that Jackie Robinson started.
I once read a quote from Jackie that speaks for me, too. He said, “Life owes me nothing. Baseball owes me nothing. But I cannot as an individual rejoice in the good things I have been permitted to work for and learn while the humblest of my brothers is down in the deep hole hollering for help and not being heard.” All I can add to that is, Amen.
Maybe the day will come when I can sit back and be content with the changes that have taken place in America, or, at least, in my part of it, which is baseball. Maybe in a few years, baseball won't need somebody like me anymore. But until that day comes, I intend to stay in the batter's box—I don't let the big guys push me out of there anymore—and keep hammering away.