(4 of 5)
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."