The Hammer : Remembering When an American Hero Chased the Dream

The way Hank Aaron sees it, America would have preferred someone else to break Babe Ruth’s home run record.

Someone white.

“No question about that,” Aaron said, chuckling a little. “Back then, if they had a choice, they would have preferred Mickey Mantle. Or Stan Musial. Or Ted Williams. If it had to be someone black, I think they would have preferred Willie Mays.”

Instead, they got Aaron, a low-key slugger with lightning fast wrists who, one writer observed, did everything that Mays did and kept his hat on, too.

As he chased the home run record, Aaron got letters, ugly letters, threatening letters, hate-filled letters, letters that are a permanent embarrassment.

And he saved every one of them.

“I had a lot of problems,” Aaron said, understating the anguish the hate-mongers put him through. “It was something that happened and it happened not that long ago in America. People say, ‘Why do you keep the letters? Why not tear them up?’ You can’t do that. Eventually, my children and my grandchildren should see them because they are history.

“It’s like the Holocaust. People hear the story and they say, ‘Show me evidence.’ Well, this happened to me and here’s the evidence. All the letters are in a safe deposit box.”

The story of Aaron’s long, lonely pursuit of Ruth’s record is revisited in “Chasing The Dream,” a documentary produced by Turner Broadcasting and premiering Wednesday. Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington was one of the executive producers in the project.

Aaron’s career began at a time when the civil rights movement was in its infancy. He came to the majors in 1954, the year the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the concept of separate but equal in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education.

Integration would be the law of the land. Segregation remained the law of baseball. Black players could not live in the same hotels as their white teammates. During spring training, Aaron recalls staying in black rooming houses across town from the club headquarters.

In 1957, Aaron won the National League pennant for the Milwaukee Braves with a dramatic home run. The town and the team went nuts. Aaron was carried off the field that day, the same day that Gov. Orval Faubus tried to prevent nine black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Federal troops were sent in. It was not a pretty time in America.

Producer Washington has interwoven shots of Aaron’s pennant-winning homer with the disturbances in Arkansas. It is stark, chilling, poignant.

Like most things, Aaron is low-key about it.

“Those things happened back then. It was sad. Here I was, a black player, being carried off the field by mostly white players in a mostly white town, and here were those black kids in Arkansas, just interested in an education, with tear gas all around them.”

Washington was a kid growing up during the years that Aaron became one of the most feared sluggers in the game. Not the most feared, understand. Just one of them. In a community that included Mays, Mantle, Frank Robinson, Roberto Clemente and so many others, Aaron was not a marquee guy. He just kept hitting homers.

“It was sort of like the tortoise and the hare,” Washington said. “The hare might get most of the attention. The tortoise just keeps plodding along, chopping wood.”

By the end of 1973, Aaron had 713 home runs, one short of the record. He had to wait through winter to finish the chase. It was no problem. “I got married that winter,” he said.

The following April, Aaron hit No. 714 on opening day in Cincinnati and then broke the record on April 8, 21 years ago. He would finish with 755 home runs, one of baseball’s safest records.

In the film, Ken Griffey Jr. mused about Aaron’s imposing total. “Well,” he said, “basically, I’m like 590 away.”

Washington laughed at that. “All it takes,” he said, “is 40 homers a year for 20 years.”