Hammer Time : Testimony, Tribute, Torment: Finally There Is a Baseball Show Hank Aaron Deems Worthy to Watch

A tape is popped into a VCR. The man in the den sits directly in front of the television. Jimmy Carter is on screen, talking about him. Gerald Ford, talking about him. Jesse Jackson, talking about him. One after another after another.

Thumb beneath his jaw, finger stroking his cheek, Henry Aaron has the best seat in the house. The next famous face and voice belong to Harry Belafonte, the singer and civil rights champion. Same as the others, talking about him.

“Had Hank Aaron been white,” Belafonte is saying, “he would be the fifth face on Mt. Rushmore.”

Who next? Aaron is eager to see. He is viewing some of this footage for the first time. A handsome young man appears on screen. “My son,” Aaron says. Now a lovely young woman. “My daughter,” he says. They are talking about their father. A teardrop is rolling down his daughter’s cheek.

Who next? A cavalcade of all-stars, that’s who. Mickey Mantle. Sandy Koufax. Willie Stargell. Bob Gibson. Yogi Berra. Twenty of baseball’s Hall of Famers in all. Like seeing Kevin Costner’s cornfield come to life. Followed by the up-and-comers. Frank Thomas. Ken Griffey Jr. Barry Bonds.

“What Hank Aaron did,” Bonds is saying, “was impossible.”

Who next? Look, it’s those crazy kids. Those two happy teen-agers who hopped onto the field as soon as Hammerin’ Hank hit his 715th home run, passing Babe Ruth. Those kids who chased Aaron around the bases. Except they aren’t kids now. They’re 37. Cliff Courtnay is an optometrist in Georgia. Britt Gaston runs a business in South Carolina. Neither knew how close they came that night to getting shot.

Hank Aaron laughs.

“That would have put a damper on the festivities,” he says.

Every scene on screen is an inning from his life. He is watching a work in progress, “Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream,” a documentary for TBS that will be shown in April. It is being written and directed by Michael Tollin, in whose Sherman Oaks home we are witnessing a virtual “This Is Your Life, Henry Aaron.”

Entertaining viewing.

A film clip from Dinah Shore’s TV show, on which she and Hank sing a duet.

“Oh, my,” Aaron says, astounded that anyone found this. “Singing in the kitchen with Dinah.”

Instructive viewing.

Buster Haywood harks back to an 18-year-old Hank Aaron playing baseball for the Indianapolis Clowns. Children would approach players to feel their skin, to see if the blackness rubbed off. Tollin re-creates this moment, using actors and monochrome film. It is wonderfully done, comparable to Ken Burns’ 18-hour baseball documentary--and certainly superior to the 18 seconds or so that show devoted to Henry Aaron.

“Did you see yourself on Ken Burns?” Tollin inquires of his house guest.

“Yes,” Aaron says. “Good thing I didn’t go to the bathroom or I would have missed me.”

Compelling viewing.

Hank’s former wife, Barbara: “A man sitting directly behind me kept calling Aaron a . . . . I got up and went to the concession stand. I got a hamburger and loaded it up with mustard and ketchup. And when he said it again, I put it in his face.”

Aaron nods. He remembers. All those people who cursed him for breaking Babe Ruth’s record. Who could forget?

All that hate mail he still hasn’t thrown out.

“There are three things you can’t give a . . . --a black eye, a fat lip and a job.”

Aaron kept it. Lent it to the film makers.

If you’re going to tell a story, tell it right. Aaron has agreed to narrate this one himself.

This documentary doesn’t scrimp. TBS is seeing to that. Henry L. Aaron is a member of the network’s board of directors. He is also a senior vice president with the Atlanta Braves, who are owned by TBS. If any place can do justice to his story, this place can. And Tollin and his co-producers, among them Denzel Washington, have. Theirs is a very special special.

It opens with Aaron at bat, April 8, 1974, Atlanta Fulton County Stadium, Al Downing of the Dodgers on the mound, Joe Ferguson behind the plate, Milo Hamilton’s voice on the broadcast, “MOVE OVER BABE HERE COMES HANK” on a bedsheet, Tom House in the left-field bullpen with a baseball mitt, about to catch home run No. 715.

Aaron kept almost nothing in the way of souvenirs, but he kept that ball.

“I gave everything to the museum (at Cooperstown),” he says. “I let Mike go up in my attic to look for stuff, though.”

“Useless,” Tollin says.

“Eventually I’ll also give Cooperstown the ball,” Aaron says. “They were worried about fakes and impostors, so they used infra-red to stamp ‘715’ on the baseball. That’s how we knew House had the right one.”

They were worried about more than that. They were worried for Aaron’s safety, so worried that an armed Atlanta police officer, Calvin Wardlow, followed him everywhere.

The pressure mounted. All winter long, Aaron had to wait. He had 713 homers and needed one more to tie Ruth’s record. When the 1974 season opened in Cincinnati, there was such a desire to see Hank break it at home that the commissioner had to threaten to suspend Aaron and his manager if he didn’t play on the road.

Gerald Ford threw out the first ball. Jack Billingham threw for the Reds. When he ran the count on Aaron to three balls and one strike, he got booed by his own fans. Aaron hit the next pitch for No. 714.

He went to Atlanta for the Babe-breaker. Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner, was too busy to attend. He sent Monte Irvin and regrets. Aaron never forgave him for that. Later on, when Kuhn wanted to present him a special award, Aaron said he was too busy to attend.

Hank’s current wife, Billye: “White America would have preferred that someone else do it. If it had to happen, I think a lot of people would have preferred that someone more flamboyant would have done it.”

As one man in the film says, Henry Aaron was Willie Mays, except his cap never fell off.

Oh, what he did, including out-doing Sadaharu Oh. Twenty-three years in the majors. Home runs: 755. Runs batted in: 2,297. Previously unlisted numbers. Still unsurpassed numbers. Even the Japanese hero, Oh, a man who was in a league of his own, lost a contest to Aaron, 10-9, on the day they got together to play home run derby.

Hank came carrying his hammer, five years after Jackie Robinson broke down the door. He played during the “I Like Ike” years, during Camelot and during Watergate. He broke in during Brown vs. Board of Education, won a pennant while federal troops went to Arkansas to integrate a school, hit his 500th homer the year Martin Luther King was assassinated and became the highest-paid player in history ($200,000 a year) a few days before Jackie Robinson’s death.

“This is not a movie about some baseball player,” Aaron says. “This is a movie about a time in the history of America.”

Aaron hasn’t seen many baseball movies of which he is fond. His favorite by far is “Field of Dreams.”

There was a funny moment recently in Pasadena, when by chance he found himself at a hotel at the same time as the actors John Goodman, who was making a film, and Tommy Lee Jones, who was attending a separate function. Tollin laughs and says, “So there they all were at the same time, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Hank Aaron.”

On his flight to Los Angeles, the movie was one with a baseball theme called “The Scout.” Aaron slept through it. But his name was mentioned in the film and he thought he was dreaming. The passenger beside him said, “How can you sleep through this?”

“It’s easy,” Aaron said.

Asked if he ever did any acting himself, Aaron says, “No, never did.”

“Oh, you didn’t?” Tollin asks.

Into the VCR pops another tape.

In a tuxedo, Hank Aaron is doing a skit on Flip Wilson’s TV comedy show. Aaron leans forward in his chair. He is taken back to 1973, to the winter when he had 713 home runs and needed one more to catch Babe Ruth.

Swinging a bat, Flip Wilson says: “This could be a dangerous weapon in the hands of the wrong man.”

Aaron offers to buy the bat. But all he has on him is $7.13.

Hank: “Would you settle for seven-thirteen?”

Flip: “Would you? “

Viewing these vignettes from his life, Aaron begins to recall it all. The laughter, the anger, the 3,000 letters a day, the kidnap threats, his children wishing he would call home to let them know he was OK, the fourth inning on April 8, the homer off Downing, the fireworks, the two punks running alongside him.

Courtnay and Gaston were 17-year-olds from Waycross, Ga., who sneaked down to the box seats each time Aaron came to bat. They patted him on the back as Hank approached third base. He elbowed them aside. Cops dragged them to a paddy wagon, fingerprinted them at the Decatur Street station, then threw them into a holding cell with 40 other guys. Aaron told a judge to let them off, and he did.

Having met them recently for the first time in 20 years, Aaron was genuinely delighted. “I always wondered what happened to those guys. Looks like they turned out OK.”

The film is reuniting him with his past. Maybe by the time it is shown on April 12, there will be real baseball on TBS as well. Having been both labor and management, Henry Aaron can see the ongoing strike from both sides of the plate.

He doesn’t care who wins. He knows who’s losing.

Aaron says, “Who this strike is really hurting are the little people. They’re the forgotten victims. The vendors who sell the peanuts. The people who sweep up the park.

“I wonder if anyone appreciates how much money can be generated for an entire city, just by a baseball game being played. A family of four might come to town just for the baseball, but go shopping at the shops, eat at the restaurants, spend their money. Baseball is beneficial to the whole community.”

Baseball means more than home runs. Hank Aaron sits back and watches an interview with Jimmy Carter, filmed hours after the former President’s return from a diplomatic mission to Haiti. He didn’t want a postponement. He wanted to talk about Hank Aaron. Everybody wanted to talk about Hank Aaron.

“I can’t believe you got all these people,” Aaron says.

“What do you mean?” Tollin reminds him. “You’re Hank Aaron. “