May 1974 (Buy this cover)

So eager were they to find their own special approach to the Henry Aaron story a reporter and a photographer From The Atlanta Journal stationed themselves outside a men's room at Atlanta Stadium throughout the Braves' final game of the 1973 season. If some poor man's body had betrayed him, if he had been forced by nature to abandon his stadium seat at the very moment Aaron delivered his historic 714th home run, the reporter and photographer were going to have that exceedingly personal tragedy as their exclusive story.

The vigil was wasted. The Aaron story, with all its excesses and frequent absurdity, was pushed back till this season. Reporters, stone-eyed and babbling from writing about Henry's quick wrists, his consistency, his concentration and his quiet manner, had a chance to sit back and catch their breath before Aaron would finally depose Babe Ruth as the leading home run hitter of all time.

The Braves' front office prepared for the inevitable event as though a virgin birth were scheduled at borne plate. In an exhaustively detailed media guide, you could learn everything about Hank Aaron. You could learn that through 1973 Hank had hit 128 first-inning home runs, one 14th-inning home run, that Don Drysdale had served the most gopher balls to Hank (17), and that Hank had hit more home runs (36) on the third and 21st than any other days of the month, and the fewest (13) on the sixth day of the month. If this did not satisfy your need to know, you could find "Notable Quotes By Hank Aaron," "Notable Quotes About Hank Aaron," and "Fun With Hank Aaron." Under the magnifying glass of total coverage, Aaron could not pick his nose with-out it becoming a minor statistic, a footnote in the morning news.

There is something natural about all this. Baseball fans love numbers. They like to swirl then. around their mouths like Bordeaux wine. Most statistics are modest, unassuming and without presumption. Other statistics have more body, and by their richness and bite, provide a substantial addition to the satisfaction and mystery surrounding the game. But of all the tonnage of statistics gathered and disseminated about baseball, one number has long stood out, a corona of achievement by which the sport defined and measured itself. The number 714 glowed in the consciousness of American sport like a pale ring around a planet. It was one of the inviolable, unreachable records, woven into the poetry and mythology of baseball, largely because the jockstrap hanging from this totem belonged to George Herman Ruth.

June 1962 (Buy this cover)

It is not that Hank Aaron is hitting 715 home runs that is news; the news is that Hank is toppling the colossus, surpassing that strangely built and powerful man who extended the limits of this game to its furthest frontiers, the man who gave baseball its largest definitions and stretched its mythic dimensions. Hank is usurping the kingdom of the home run from the man who invented the home run. There is something about the home run that belongs uniquely to Babe Ruth and always will. If a man in 1913 could hit 12 home runs and be tagged with the sobriquet "Home Run" Baker, what do you call the man who in 1920 hit 54 home runs? You call him one of the greatest sports nicknames ever conjured up in a press box. You call him the "Sultan of Swat."

The stunning fact about Aaron's assault on The Babe was that he came on so suddenly. For years, Willie Mays was the leading pretender to the throne. Willie made a hard run for it until time sent its battalions up against his flesh. Those of us who loved Willie watched our hero backed against the outfield wall by the caprices of old age, by that semi-death of extraordinary athletes who dance too long, then stumble home in a last graceless waltz that is the cruelest, most public humiliation of sport. Years ago, the world knew that The Babe was safe from Willie. But in 1971, a 37-year-old man hit 47 home runs and the chase was on again. The next year Aaron hit 34. Last year he hit 40 and at the end of the season was staring eyeball-to-eyeball with Babe Ruth.

Aaron is 40 now. A 40-year-old man, in baseball time, should be caring for his sores and drooling in his spikes. But time has treated Aaron like a handmaiden. He, in turn, has taken very good care of his body. His career has been an extended lesson plan in the long-range benefits of consistency. He has always hit well, fielded well and run well. Never has he been flashy or electric. He has retained an animal's sense of pace. Hunters tell us that a pack of wolves can run down an elk, not because of greater speed, but because of a powerful endurance. For years, Aaron was the invisible man of the National League. He played the game extraordinarily well, but nobody seemed to care that much. But now, because of the number 714, and because of the oft-invoked ghost of Babe Ruth, Henry Louis Aaron is one of the most visible athletes in the world today. Even Pravda has taken note.

The breaking of the record is pure show business, an event orchestrated by Jaycees, PR men, writers, photographers, agents, owners and men who think they know instinctively that it is good for the grand old game. In the middle of February, the Atlanta front office announced that Aaron would not start in the opener at Cincinnati. "We owe the fans of Atlanta the opportunity to see Hank break Ruth's home run record," they announced. What they were really saying was, "We are going to make a hell of a lot of money during the 11-game home stand of the Braves." If Hank failed to break the record in those first 11 games, the Braves would conceivably pull in 500,000 fans. Furthermore, the event had profitable historical significance: Wherever Aaron's 715th home run landed, that stadium would gain an indelible position in the history of baseball. The exact spot the ball hit was assured of a bronze plaque. If it hit a seat in the left-field bleachers, then that seat would become a number on a tour guide. The pitcher who gave up that most famous of pitches would be a name prized for centuries by trivia aficionados and would probably even be good for a shaving cream commercial or two ("I got creamed"). An Atlanta bank paid 700 silver dollars to the boy who returned the baseball bruised by Hank's 700th home run. The ball that broke Ruth's record would be a far larger piece of history, and a considerably more valuable piece. In the mind of every fan sitting in the left-field stands would be the thought that maybe, just maybe, he would walk away from the park with the most famous baseball ever hit. It would ignite the fiercest scramble in bleacher history. For that ball could be a down payment on a condominium at Costa del Sol. It could send a kid to Harvard. The name of the man or woman who retrieved that ball would be a household word for a day or two. There was that much frenzy approaching the event.

July 1968 (Buy this cover)

It was also in many ways, one of the most boring sports stories of the century. Every sportswriter in the country searched the rills and slopes of his brain hoping to find the different angle, the fresh approach or a new way of looking at Hank's assault on Babe Ruth's record. They asked Hank every conceivable question. They interviewed every person who had known Hank in the past 40 years, from Vic Raschi, who surrendered Hank's first home run, to Aaron's daughter, sons, sisters, brothers, mother, father, managers, coaches, players and friends. There was something about the obscenely crowded press conferences with Hank that made a reporter feel like a participant at an orgy. After each game last season, the flock gathered to ask Hank the same watered-down questions and Hank, salivating on cue, would render the same colorless, good-natured answers he had delivered the day before and the day before that. The chase ate up a lot of good words, and left a lot of semi-burned out reporters staring into the outfield lights.

Last summer the hate mail made a good story. When the epistilatory Klansmen took up their pens armed with malevolent rhetoric about a black man surpassing Babe Ruth, it was a grand focus that brought a cataract of mail from well-wishers rooting for Hank and the American way. It is hard to dislike Hank Aaron. Even Richard Nixon said on film that Aaron is what this country's all about. One thing sportswriters agreed upon was that what this country was not about was calling Hank a nigger.

Then the hate mail ended, stopped completely, and there was nothing much to write about anymore. You can describe a home run in just so many ways. And Hank is not the kind of athlete that generates stories by the nature of his personality. He does not get naked and dance on tables. He does not say things that provoke controversy or stimulate fever in the national press. It has become almost a game among sportswriters to farm the dry plains of Hank's personality for a memorable quote, a pungent one-liner or the quiet stinger that would flavor a news release or support a feature.

But Aaron is composed. As he talks to the press, his quotes are redolent with bland, undetectable smells; no condiments or sauces add dash to his spoken prose. He speaks carefully, modulating each word, a soft American voice coming out of the greatest smile in sports. It is a voice that would serve well at SALT talks, behind conference tables, in confessionals or at funerals. It is a voice that has peddled Brut, praised Life Buoy and savored Oh Henry candy bars. It is a voice that has joked with Flip Wilson, sung with Dinah Shore and philosophized with Mike Douglas. It is a voice without blood pressure, reduced and filtered to a cool drone, a voice acutely aware that each time it speaks, 100 typewriters hammer into action and invisible words hum through unseen wires and through the airspace of the world. Hank has a quiet elegancy rare in the kingdom of the jock. He has prepared long and hard for his entrance into the limelight and the selling of Hank Aaron.

His chase of Babe Ruth's ghost is going to make him a remarkably wealthy man. In a year's time, he has become a conglomerate. The newly formed Menke-Riback Financial Corporation in Atlanta advises him on land purchases, cattle, office parks and other tax shelters. After last season, Hank informed a press conference that the William Morris Agency would be handling everything else; they would have prime responsibility for turning Aaron into a national resource. They promised that in the next two years Hank would make more money than in his 20 previous years of baseball. They can afford to talk in such grandiose terms. Hank is the third major athlete William Morris has deigned to touch, following the luminous trails of Mark Spitz and Secretariat. The trinity will make a lot of money, but you have to wonder at what price. Thus far William Morris has taken man and beast and turned them into straw. Despite what you see in commercials, you hold fast to the theorem that Mark is a more interesting, complex guy than he seems selling Schick razors, that he does, indeed, have a brain larger than a wood tick. You suspect that the William Morris people search for small pieces of personality in their clients and like, bone fragments, have them sur­gically stripped away. You can only cling to the hope that after Hank has been packaged, programmed, ticketed and punched, a little of Mobile, Alabama, will lin­ger along with a lot of the quiet, decent man who played this game so patiently and so well for so long. But even if Hank does undergo a William Morris lobotomy, the agency does a splendid job of making their clients very unlike you and me. At a winter ‘press conference, Hank announced that he had sold himself lock, stock and jockstrap to Magnavox Corporation for one million dollars. Magnavox, in turn was humbly grateful to have purchased Hank to peddle their TV sets and record players. In the publicity release trumpeting their deal with Aaron, Magnavox said, "Perhaps most importantly, Henry Aaron is the type of person with whom Magnavox would be proud to associate in its business activities had he never hit a home run." Sure, Magnavox. After the consummation of that deal, no one except William Morris and perhaps Menke-Riback knows how much Hank Aaron is actually worth, but rumor has it that he has entered secret negotiations to buy England.

During the celebrated long winter, Hank was in the news every couple of weeks. Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia, made Hank an official Admiral in Georgia's unofficial Navy. Sammy Davis Jr. brought Hank to Hollywood to talk about a movie based on Aaron's life. Mobile, Alabama, the city that spawned Hank, embraced him in a joyous Henry Aaron Day which seemed both ironic and hopeful a decade after Selma. Somehow, all these stories, no matter how yeast-less, helped us pass those months when Hank was not in uniform, when the quick wrists were not swinging a bat and when those dark eyes were not glowering at a pitcher 60 feet away. It is not in print but in the batters' box that Henry Aaron is finally interesting and devastatingly articulate. It is on the field that he lends his quiet fury to this often bloodless sport. The memory of the final Braves game of last season is one that goes a long way in explaining what the furor is all about.

On the last day of the 1973 season, 40,000 men, women and children came to Atlanta Stadium to cheer for Hank Aaron, to watch his last attempt to overtake Babe Ruth before the winter gap. The atmosphere hummed with excitement and each person in the ball-park caught the invisible vibrations that trembled through the crowd as though each fan were a tuning fork, sensitive to what only could be felt and not seen. In the press box, 200 reporters, infected by the audible enthusiasm of the crowd, hunched over typewriters. It was an overcast day, but everything in Atlanta seemed clear and bright as though the William Morris Agency represented the entire city and Mark Spitz was smiling just before sliding the whole city into a Schick injector razor.

August 1970 (Buy this cover)

At times, rare times, a crowd can sing with one voice, cry for the same thing, chant in the same tongue and hunger for the same moment. That is how it was on this day, when the crowd of 40,000 came to honor Hank Aaron. When he came to bat in the first inning, they rose to greet him in a delirious chorus. The city gleamed. The sportswriters tensed. He hit a slow roller between third and short that took a high, corpulent bounce. Aaron looked toward third and raced to beat it out on swift 39-year-old legs. He beat it out and the crowd sang a hymn of joy.

The crowd relaxed after Aaron had hit. It became a party where people talked to each other. They barely watched the game. In the press box, the reporters fiddled with long columns of numbers like accountants.

"He'll go over .300 if he gets a hit next time," one reporter said.

"Hey," another one asked, "I bet no one can tell me how many home runs Aaron has had rained out."

"That's easy," he was answered contemptuously. "Six. And he was called out for one when he hit it with his foot on home plate."

"The next time up will be his 11,286th time at bat."

"He's second to Cobb."

"Big deal."

Aaron singled twice more that day. Then in the eighth inning, he walked to bat for the last time in 1973. This was the moment of denouement when he would have his last chance before he turned 40 to tie Babe Ruth. The crowd tensed as one. The press box was a place of concentration and silence. Some people in the crowd could not bear to look, but looked anyway. Some screamed just to relieve the pressure. When Hank swung, the whole crowd and every reporter knew that the season had ended. That the chase of the Babe would have to wait until April of 1974. It was a lifeless, wooded pop-up that any of three fielders could have caught. But no one cared who caught it. Every eye on the stadium was fixed on Hank Aaron. Hank slowed up at first base, went past the bag, then ran toward the dugout. It was the final out of the inning. A team-mate threw him his glove just as he passed the coach's box on the first-base line. Then Hank turned toward left field and jogged slowly toward his position with extraordinary dignity and grace.

It began in left field. The entire left-field bleachers leapt to their feet in a deafening ovation for this man who had just popped up. Aaron looked up appreciatively and smiled his magnificent smile. It was a moment when men realize why sport is such a powerful metaphor. Then the third base side of the field was on its feet screaming out their appreciation. Then the upper mezzanines rose until in a matter of seconds 40,000 people had risen to honor this grand statesman of the game. There was an unimpeachable beauty, an untarnished moment' when the game stopped and applause thundered in counterpointing waves around the stadium. Hank took off his cap and waved it first at left field, then spinning in a slow, unchoreographed circle he acknowledged the homage of the fans that had come to see only him. It was a translucent moment when a crowd decided to make love to an athlete and the athlete had the superb style to respond in kind. Without question, a man has never received so much applause for a pop-up in the history of baseball.

So the world looks and writes about Henry Aaron and Babe Ruth and this much is certain: A man's life is measured in many ways and all men come to demarcations, those profoundly meaningful points of reference between birth and death which provide memory a place to go back to. Some men remember where they were when they heard the news of Pearl Harbor or when they saw their first convertible. This generation will remember a window on the Texas School Depository and the triumph of the first men on the moon. But the people in the stands the day Henry Louis Aaron hit his 715th home run will bear witness to that moment for the rest of their lives. The memory will sustain and enrich them until that day when some unknown, perhaps even unborn, man who, because of his quick, powerful gifts, begins a long, tortuous chase of what will then be called the ghost of Henry Aaron.

© SPORT Media Publishing

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