What You Don't Know

On January 22, the great Hank Aaron died. If you didn’t know the story of Aaron’s struggles on his path to breaking Babe Ruth’s career record for home runs before he died, you certainly learned about them following his death. In 1973 and into the beginning of the 1974 season. Late in the 1973 season, as he inched closer to breaking the most hallowed record in sports, the road became harder and harder for Aaron, up to a point where he was receiving over three thousand pieces of hate mail per day- many of which threatened his and his family’s life.

All for threatening a meaningless (in the course of life) record held by a white man.

Racial animus was not new to Hank Aaron. He came into “organized baseball” from the Indianapolis Clowns of the old Negro Leagues in 1952- playing for Eau Claire in Wisconsin. He was among the second wave of blacks to come into white baseball, after Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, Monte Irvin and Don Newcombe. Like Robinson, whose first year in white man’s baseball was relatively free of abuse (he played for Montreal in Canada, a nation much more enlightened than the United States). Eau Claire was much more accepting than where Aaron would find himself in 1953, where he became the first black person to play in the South Atlantic League (Sally League) for Jacksonville, Florida. There he suffered the barbs and arrows you would expect from the Deep South in the 1950’s.

In 1954, Aaron graduated to the major leagues, with Milwaukee in the National League. Both Aaron and the Braves were an instant hit. Robinson and the others had taken some of the sting out of the experience for the new group that included folks like Aaron, Frank Robinson, Ernie Banks and Bill White. Still, there were places you could and couldn’t go and cities such as Cincinnati, St. Louis and Philadelphia remained overtly racist.

The Milwaukee Braves were the darlings of the NL, having moved to Wisconsin from Boston (another overtly racist town) in 1953. Formerly the doormats of the league, the Braves, with stars like Eddie Mathews, Warren Spahn and Joe Adcock, began winning and drawing huge crowds form the first day in town, and by 1957, with the addition of other stars such as Del Crandall, Lew Burdette, Johnny Logan and Red Schoendienst, they were poised to win not only a pennant, but a World Series, and leading the lot was Henry Louis Aaron, who not only won the league’s Most Valuable Player award, but crowned the regular season by hitting the only walk-off home run to win a pennant in the non-playoff era to clinch a pennant. Aaron went on to hit .393 in the World Series as the Braves toppled the vaunted New York Yankees.

Through 1965, Aaron was a well-respected, if not underrated player. He was simply the best hitter in the game at the time, but he was a low key, humble player who was not flashy like the media darling, Willie Mays. Mays, who had the outgoing personality, the flashing smile and who plated with panache (often losing his hat as he ran the bases or chased fly balls), was adored by the press, and he also played in bigger markets- starting in New York with the Giants, then moving to San Francisco in 1958. Aaron kept his head down in Milwaukee and quietly and humbly went about being the best, often dodging sportswriters’ attempts to stir things up with Mays. Once a sportswriter asked him why he never lost his hat running the bases or chasing fly balls. Aaron’s response: “Because my hat fits.”

Aaron’s solitude in Milwaukee came to an end at the end of the 1965 season, when the team announced that it was moving the franchise to Atlanta. Once again, Aaron would be in the Deep South, where Strange Fruit could still be found swinging from southern trees. Atlanta was the center of the storm. It was in Atlanta that Martin Luther King Junior was the pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. It was in Atlanta that the noted segregationist Lester Maddox would become governor in 1967. Atlanta was ground zero for the Civil Rights movement.

And as the years ground slowly by, it was in Atlanta where Hank Aaron would approach the most hallowed of all sports records- Babe Ruth’s 714 career home runs. Along the way, Dr. King was assassinated, Maddox came and went, the country erupted in several race-related riots and Hank Aaron kept his head down and kept knocking the ball out of the park.

By 1973, Aaron was closing in. The closer he came to the hallowed milestone, the more the thinly suppressed racism that is the hallmark of American culture, eroded and became replaced by vitriol, hate and death threats to Aaron and his family. George Herman Ruth remained the singular biggest hero in the history of the nation’s sports, and white folks were not taking the thought of a black man erasing the Bambino’s singular accomplishment well.

As an aside, two things to note. First, I have read that to Ruth, the 714 home runs and the 60 home runs in a season were not his most cherished record. The record he was proudest of was the 28 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings he recorded in the World Series as a pitcher. Second, during his playing days, Ruth himself had been subjected to derogatory nicknames such as “Nigger” and “Nigger Lips” due to his facial features and their resemblance to the white man’s racial stereotype of the black man at the time.

As Aaron closed in, he received, on average, 3,000 letters a day- many of which were full of vitriol. These were letters- hand-written, put in an envelope, licked and stamped and sent to the Braves’ stadium and Aaron’s own home address. Many threatened death to him and his family. Many were simply rude and despicable. In a video, I saw Aaron read one that said: “What are three things you can’t give a nigger? A black eye, a puffed lip and a job.” Aaron had to be smuggled in and out of the ballpark. He had to stay at different hotels than the rest of the team.

And he had to perform.

Here’s a challenge. Go to your local batting cages. Take a wooden bat with you and a helmet. Step into the fastest cage, where you know you will be getting nothing but fast balls straight down the middle. See how well you do. Then try to imagine what it must be like to step into that same batter’s box with 6’5 side arming Don Drysdale throwing fastballs at your head, or Bob Gibson, who will put your ass on the ground as soon as looking at you, or Sandy Koufax with his 100 mile per hour fastball and his overhand curve that broke from 12 to 6 or Juan Marichal, the man with a hundred deliveries, all while wondering if some crazy guy in the stands was going to execute you.

How well do you think you would do?

Well, as we all know, Hank Aaron persevered, broke the record, retired and led a long productive life after baseball, dying a revered human being, as much for his post-baseball life as his accomplishments in the game.

My friend Glen Hall’s mother used to tell him, “Every day, someone’s got to be Jackie Robinson”, meaning that every day, someone has to be the first black person to accomplish something that has heretofore not been accomplished by a person of color.

Well, here’s an adjunct to that from Fred Crans: Everyday, someone is a Hank Aaron. It may be the person who goes home every night to take care of his mother who has Parkinson’s disease, or worse yet, the guy whose wife and mother both have Alzheimer’s, or the woman who is the sole breadwinner and also is raising her grandchildren because her own child is a drug addict and cannot be trusted.

People tend to carry their burdens quietly and personally. Unlike Hank Aaron, whose every move was chronicled and reported on, most people carry their burdens alone, not wanting to share- whether out of fear or embarrassment.

My advice is this: If you have problems that are eating you up, find someone to confide in and share. It may be a professional or it may be simply a good friend. You can achieve excellent outcomes either way. If you are a manager or leader, get to know your employees well enough that you can tell when they are not acting normally. Talk with them. Make them feel comfortable in your presence. Their problems are every bit as important to them as Hank Aaron’s were to him.

If you want to break a record, make it the record for kindness and understanding.