Henry Aaron's Golden Autumn

The spring of 1954 was a memorable season. After seven years of fighting, the French were ready to pull out of Viet Nam. Gamal Abdel Nasser took over as Premier of Egypt. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. And on an April afternoon when the Army-McCarthy hearings were dominating network television, a slender black teen-ager from Mobile, Ala., named Henry Louis Aaron hit his first major league home run.

The world has turned. New wars have been fought and settled, dictatorships established and overthrown, but Hank Aaron endures. The wonder is not only his staying power but his amazing consistency, which has won the Atlanta Braves outfielder 14 major-league records. Even so, it is his relentless pursuit of the record that has made him at age 39 the single most conspicuous figure in American sports. Last week, 20 seasons older, 30 Ibs. heavier and 2,953 games more experienced than when he hit home run No. 1, Hammerin' Hank drove No. 710 over the left-centerfield wall at Atlanta Stadium. Going into the weekend, with 13 games remaining on the schedule, he was within suspenseful reach of what is being billed as the greatest moments in sports history: the instants when he hits Nos. 714 and 715 to tie and then break Babe Ruth's home-run record.

Flesh and Blood. On one level, Aaron's reach for the record is a consummate professional's personal quest for immortality. For years he was underrated, and that still rankles. "I've always read Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Roger Maris -then Hank Aaron. I've worked awfully hard to get my name up front. I've waited for my time, and it's just now coming," he told TIME Correspondent Paul Witteman.

Aaron's pursuit of the Babe's magic number has other meanings as well. Ruth was larger than life, (see box next page) a carefree superman in a giddy era. Aaron cannot depose him no matter how many home runs he hits. But Aaron, by comparison merely a flesh-and-blood Everyman, demonstrates that a hero need not be mythic.

Ruth used the home run to transform baseball. In the process, he made the homer a part of American culture, a symbol of the country's affection for the fast, decisive stroke that can determine the outcome of a contest. Aaron, Ruth's heir if not his rival, has kept that drama alive. Baseball may no longer be the national pastime. But when a slugger steps into the box to face a good pitcher, it is man-to-man combat, and the possibility of a home run still carries excitement. With Aaron, year in and year out, the expectation has always been present. Now, with the record so close at hand, there is an exquisite tension.

Sleeping Lion. Will he or won't he do it this season? In spring training, Aaron himself allowed that at best he had only an outside chance. At an age when most of his contemporaries are breaking into the insurance business or learning microphone manners, he confessed that "I can't play every day anymore. It's not that you get tired, but your body just doesn't come back as fast as it did. You think you can swing the bat, but you're just a fraction off. The balls you used to hit out of the ballpark you're fouling off. I need more sleep now. Sometimes I'll lie down at 9 p.m. and sleep till 9 a.m."

Once the season began, opposing pitchers felt as though they had awakened a sleeping lion. Though he has sat out 39 games so far this season, Aaron has been belting the ball as if a time machine had somehow subtracted ten birthdays. As of last week, the man who said that he would be satisfied with 30 home runs this year already had 37 -the fourth highest total in the majors. Going into the 1973 season, Aaron was averaging one home run for every 16 at-bats. Now he is hitting one round-tripper every nine times he goes to the plate. The old man, in fact, is having a golden autumn. In his last 14 games, Aaron hit six homers, drove in 17 runs and batted a lusty .510.

Now that Aaron is closing in on 715, his fans are growing restless. Two weeks ago, after Aaron hit Nos. 708 and 709 against the San Diego Padres, the California crowd roundly booed Padre Pitcher Mike Caldwell for striking Henry out on his last time at bat. After a rash of racist hate mail early this year, Aaron has been receiving nearly 2,000 letters weekly from such varied admirers as moonstruck teen-agers ("We love you, Hanky-poo") and Alabama Governor George Wallace. NBC stands ready to interrupt its regularly scheduled programs to show Aaron hitting Nos. 712 through 715. Computer analysts, astrologists and assorted clairvoyants are issu ing almost daily predictions on his chances for the record this year (latest consensus: a cliffhanger until the season's last day, Sept. 30). Aaron himself says: "I don't know. I can't predict. I just want to keep messing up that computer."

On the road Aaron draws up to 10,000 additional fans to the host team's ballpark. Last weekend in Cincinnati, the leftfield seats were pregame sellouts. At home, attendance remains woefully low because Atlanta is pre-eminently a football town, because the Braves are nowhere near being pennant contenders and because an Aaron home run is a common occurrence in a stadium that the players call "the launching pad." Nonetheless, the Braves and the city fathers are beating the promotional drums. Giant billboards have been erected to give Aaron's latest homer total. A street and school will be renamed for Aaron. Cash rewards for returning Aaron home-run balls have attracted loyal bands of fans equipped with everything from catchers' mitts to lacrosse sticks and huge nets attached to fishing poles. "Of course, I'd like to hit 'em in front of 50,000 fans," says Aaron. "But when I cross the plate, I don't care if it's 2,000 or 50,000. It counts."

What makes his success this season all the more remarkable is that many teams are defending against him by using an "Aaron shift" -moving the second baseman and the rightfielder to the left side of the diamond to counter his pull-hitting power. Pitchers are giving him nothing but bad stuff or walking him intentionally. "Hell," says Aaron, "I don't even see good pitches in batting practice anymore."

When Aaron first came up with the Braves, he was a notorious bad-ball hitter. On one occasion, he reached out and poked a high outside pitch over the wall and then was called out for having stepped beyond the batter's box to hit the ball. No more. Now, he says, he has to discipline himself "to wait for good pitches. I eventually get them, but I have to be patient."

More perhaps than any other hitter in the league, Aaron has the time to look over a pitch hi the half-second or so that it takes to reach the plate. Blessed with wrists eight inches around -as thick as the business end of his 35-in., 34-oz. bat -he has the strength to lean into a pitch and then, if it is not to his liking, snap his bat back at the last possible instant. It is an advantage measured in milliseconds, but it is one reason why Aaron does not strike out as often as most other long-ball hitters. "It's fantastic how long he can look at a pitch before he decides whether to swing," says former Teammate Warren Spahn, now a pitching coach. "It's as good as giving him an extra strike."

Aaron wisely refuses to give advice on hitting because "I really can't describe my way to anyone. Just be quick with your hands and your belly button." Adds Bill Lucas, director of the Braves' farm system: "When we are teaching young players to hit, Hank Aaron is not the example we use."

In his matter-of-fact way, Aaron admits to having an encyclopedic knowledge of pitchers. "The moment I leave the dugout," he says, "I'm concentrating on that pitcher. I never take my eye off him. If I see a pitcher once, I'll never forget the date or place. If I see him more than once, I can tell you exactly what kind of pitcher he is. At the end of the season, I can tell you who I hit every home run off of."

Aaron's overall cool on the field borders on the comatose. He rarely if ever argues with an umpire. When he strikes out, he walks impassively back to the dugout, places his bat in the rack, puts his helmet on the shelf and quietly sits down or steps into the clubhouse ramp-way to smoke a cigarette. When patrolling leftfield, he never runs faster than he has to, never throws the ball harder than is necessary. Even so, his minimum is good enough to have won him three Golden Glove awards as the National League's best fielder at his position. When asked why he does not attempt the flashy Willie Mays type plays, he says, "I'm pacin' myself."

Rag Balls. When he was a boy, the third of eight children, Henry's pace never varied. Every day, his mother Estella recalls, he and his brothers* made a beeline for the baseball diamond a block away from the family's one-story frame house in Toulminville, a black section of Mobile. But never on Sunday; Estella ruled baseball unfit for the Sabbath. Father Herbert, then a $75-a-week rivet bucker for a shipbuilding firm, kept his boys supplied with homemade baseball gloves and rag balls tied together with shoestrings. "When Hank was a youngster," recalls his father, "I carried him over to watch Jackie Robinson play an exhibition game in Mobile. Hank told me he would be up in the major leagues with Robinson before Jackie was through. He was too."

Aaron played high school football well enough to be offered a college scholarship, but books were not his speed. At 18, with $2, two pairs of pants, and two sandwiches in a brown paper bag, he took his first train ride and joined the Indianapolis Clowns, a barnstorming black team. He played shortstop for $200 a month. Looking Aaron over one month later, Braves Scout Dewey Griggs was startled to find that he was batting cross-handed, a handicap that every schoolboy learns to avoid. The scout advised Aaron to switch to the standard grip, then watched as Henry collected seven hits, including two home runs, in nine times at bat.

"I don't know what it would take to get this guy," Griggs told the Braves' management, "but I'd pay it out of my own pocket." It took, as it happened, just $350, or $50 more a month than the New York Giants were offering Aaron at the time. That paltry sum, recalls Aaron, "was the only thing that kept Willie Mays and me from being teammates." And the Giants from winning untold World Series.

Verbal Abuse. Aaron then took his first plane ride -to join the Braves' farm team in Eau Claire, Wis., where he hit .336 and was named rookie of the year. Next season he moved up to Jacksonville and led the Sally League in everything but hot-dog sales. He was named the league's most valuable player, and he also committed more errors than any other second baseman. It was then that the Braves decided to put him in the outfield. The first black to play in the Sally League, Aaron could not eat or stay in the same hotels with the white players; he had to find lodgings in black homes. Aaron got a lot of verbal abuse during games,"recalls one of his former Jacksonville teammates, "but I never saw him react to it. He'd come to the park by himself, never joining in the clubhouse kidding and agitating. He was like a phantom. You never heard him, and away from the park, you never saw him."

Aaron was equally inconspicuous when he joined the Braves for spring training in 1954. "If I said three words," he says, "it was an upset. I just wasn't any kind of talker." The anonymity soon faded when Braves Outfielder Bobby Thomson broke his leg in an exhibition game and Aaron was told, "Kid, it's your job until somebody takes it away from you." No one has.

Today there is no removing Aaron, the private person, from the public eye. Ironically, the acclaim that was denied him through much of his career now threatens to overwhelm him. In defense, he has developed stock answers for the stock questions that he hears every day. What do you have to do to break Ruth's mark? "Hit more home runs." How do you feel about Ruth? "I'm not trying to make anyone forget Babe Ruth. I just want them to remember Henry Aaron." What is your reaction to the hate mail? "The more they push me, the more I want the record." How are you holding up under the pressure? "Frankly, I don't think about it."

But he must. Though the hate mail has tapered off, armed bodyguards are still close by. When he is on the field, plainclothes detectives patrol the left-field bleachers, their pistols hidden in binocular cases. On the road, Aaron sticks close to his hotel room and has all his calls screened. In Atlanta, he parks his car in the stadium tunnel rather than in the players' parking lot. He often eats in the clubhouse to avoid the crush of autograph seekers. And every chance he gets, he slips away and goes fishing on his 27-ft. cabin cruiser, where "no phones can bother you."

Never Flashy. Aaron's lifestyle, subdued to begin with, has grown even more so. Divorced from his wife Barbara in 1971, he lives alone in a five-room high-rise apartment in Atlanta, within view of the stadium lights. Often a couple of his four children stay with him. He is engaged to Billye Williams, an attractive and articulate widow who is a hostess on an Atlanta TV talk show. Fastidious but never flashy in his wardrobe, Aaron is proud that he was named one of the ten best-dressed men in the U.S. two years ago. He drives a 1973 Chevrolet and often eats lunch in a tiny diner in the black section of Atlanta. Otherwise, says a friend, "Hank's idea of a big night out is dinner at a Polynesian restaurant."

Though he generally shuns the banquet circuit, Aaron has become increasingly active in various black causes, and he counts the Rev. Jesse Jackson as one of his closest friends. "It's just like a man going to school," he says of his change from reticent rookie ballplayer to outspoken social critic. "When a man gets a Ph.D., he's more qualified to speak, and more people listen to him. I decided that whenever I got into a position to speak out more, I would."

Recently, when asked what advice he would give black children about going into sports, Aaron said: "Until we crack the area of managers, front-office personnel and coaches, there's really no hope for black kids coming into sports. We're giants on the field for 20 years. Then they're finished with us. What baseball needs to do is to give blacks an opportunity to show their ability to lead in other places than just the field."

That is precisely what Aaron plans to do when his $200,000-a-year contract expires next season. "I'd like to stay in baseball," he says. "All I want is a chance like Stan Musial got, a chance to prove myself in the front office." As for his pursuit of Ruth's record, he says: "To be frank, it is not as important to me as to baseball. The only thing I ever thought about was to be as good as I could. I never thought about being the greatest ballplayer or anything, just to be as good as I could." In Aaron's case, good has been more than great.

* Tommie Aaron, 34, who played for the Braves in the late 1960s, is now managing the club's farm team in Savannah.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.