Friendship Outlasted the Game

Stick close, Joe Andrews would say, and grabbing a bat he would lead Hank Aaron out of the stadium and onto the streets of Jacksonville or some other Southern town the two had offended by playing on the same field together.

When pitchers brushed Aaron back; when hotels or restaurants refused to serve him; when fans let fly with garbage--verbal or otherwise--Andrews would come to Aaron’s defense. Three times, when racists threatened Aaron and two other ballplayers, Andrews was arrested for fighting on their behalf.

“Joe was our protector,” Aaron wrote in his autobiography. “We couldn’t talk back to the fans calling us names, but Joe could, and he damn sure did.”

Two bonus babies certain for stardom, one black and one white, Aaron and Andrews were teammates for just one year, on the 1953 Jacksonville Braves. But during that tumultuous season in the Southern League they forged a friendship that would outlast their careers.

You already know Aaron’s story: He hit 755 major league home runs, overcoming the hatred heaped on him to break Babe Ruth’s career record.

Andrews’ story has a little less gloss.

A three-sport star at Fall River’s Durfee High, Andrews’ No. 44--the same one Aaron would wear into the Baseball Hall of Fame--was the first the school ever retired.

But he traded a promising athletic career for emotional ruin, drinking himself out of baseball and his first two marriages. Then, after a drug habit added to his financial and spiritual distress, Andrews found redemption by helping others avoid the same mistakes.

And so, when Andrews died in the first hours of the new year, those in Fall River who remembered a young man’s promise came together to celebrate the extraordinary way in which he fulfilled it.

“Don’t be deceived by the notion that Joe would have been great if his athletic ability hadn’t surrendered to the punishment of addiction. Joe Andrews was great,” Bernard Sullivan, a high school friend, said in his eulogy.

“I defy you to show me any athlete, regardless of statistical accomplishment, who has done more for his fellow man than that man in that box right there.”

Jackie Robinson broke major league baseball’s color barrier in 1947.

But that was in Brooklyn.

Down South, integration was still a struggle in the spring of ’47. When the Dodgers brought Robinson to Jacksonville for an exhibition, they were shooed from the field because of an ordinance that banned interracial competition on city-owned property.

By the time Aaron and Andrews arrived to play for the Braves’ Class A team in ‘53, blacks had played in Jacksonville--but always for visiting teams.

“Jackie Robinson started opening up our eyes,” Aaron said. “But it didn’t start, nor did it end, with Jackie.”

Aaron was one of five blacks or Hispanics in the league that year, along with fellow Milwaukee Braves farmhands Felix Mantilla, who is Puerto Rican, and Horace Garner, who was black. Things were not easy for them.

At shortstop, Mantilla was a target for baserunners coming in spikes high, or beanballs from racist pitchers. But he didn’t have it as bad as Garner, who was in right field and within range of objects coming from the stands.

“They used to throw pillows from the grandstand, and they used to throw cups, and whatever, at the black players,” said Constance Andrews, Joe’s first wife. “It was like that all over the South.”

When restaurants wouldn’t serve Aaron, Garner and Mantilla, Andrews would take his food out to the bus to eat with them.

Mantilla remembers a road trip to Kissimmee when it had one hotel that didn’t allow blacks; the players were allowed to stay, but they had to eat in the back. That wasn’t good enough for Andrews, who led Mantilla by the hand through the dining room.

“The people looked at him like he was crazy,” Mantilla said. “Joe was a different guy. He was too advanced, I guess, for what was happening at that time.”

What’s most remarkable, perhaps, is not that Joe Andrews took a stand, but that he didn’t seem to consider any other option; he didn’t just stick his neck out for the future home run king, but for people you’ve never heard of, as well.

“It was not just because I was who I was,” Aaron said. “It could have been anybody, I’m sure. Joe was just that kind of person. Joe just cared about human beings.”

To Andrews’ high school friends, this was nothing more or less than they expected.

“He did the same thing for Jerry Diniz,” a Cape Verdean running back on the Durfee football team, said Jimmy Smith, Andrews’ classmate. “Remember, we were all poor. There was no racism. We all played ball together. And athletics gave us our mobility.”

Jut 50 miles south of Boston, Fall River could not be farther from the limousine liberalism of Beacon Hill and Harvard Yard that gives Massachusetts its progressive reputation. Growing up in this industrial port, Andrews developed his sense of justice not from any political dogma, but from an innate sense of right and wrong.

“Long before it was popular to be fair to minorities, Joe was. He did it not because it was the politically correct thing, but because it was the right thing,” Sullivan said. “He hated injustice of any sort. It happened to be black and white, but I think he would have done the same thing if it was, ‘We don’t like baldheaded guys.”’

Mostly blue-collar and white, Fall River is much the same today as it was in the years after World War II, when Andrews starred at basketball, football and baseball for Durfee.

At his funeral, Andrews’ friends swapped stories about the time he hit a 420-foot homer in the state championship game at Fenway Park--at age 14. Or the time he carried the ball on 23 consecutive plays for the Durfee football team, “and the coach told him he wasn’t carrying it enough,” said Skip Karam, later the school’s basketball coach and athletic director.

If Andrews’ athletic prowess revealed itself in high school, though, so did his problems. “The only thing wrong with Joe,” Smith said, “is he didn’t know what time to come home.”

The stories about Andrews are sometimes hard to pin down because so many of them are according to Andrews, a legendary storyteller and sometimes, his friends chuckle, a storied teller of legends.

When he graduated from Durfee in 1949, Andrews was offered spots on 52 college football teams. He chose the University of Washington, the scales tipped by the 1949 Buick Roadmaster he began driving shortly after he signed. But he left school during spring practice of his freshman year and signed with the Braves for what he would later claim was a $50,000 bonus. (“If so,” Aaron said, “that’s $49,000 more than I got.”)

Andrews played a year in Quebec City and another in Evansville, Ind., and did well enough to earn a promotion to Jacksonville in 1953. By this time, he had moved to first base.

“Joe Andrews was a very, very good ballplayer,” Aaron said. “He had all the ability to be a major league player. His problem was the drinking.”

Even in an era when boozing and brawling by athletes was winked at, it wasn’t long before Andrews’ carousing affected his play. In time, Jacksonville manager Ben Geraghty stopped playing Andrews on Sundays, to give him time to dry out from Saturday night’s binges.

“He was a fun-loving person,” said Jim “Shorty” Long, a utility infielder for Jacksonville in ’53. “But I thought he was a real fine man.”

There isn’t much to say about the rest of Andrews career. He played another 1 1/2 years in Jacksonville before he was sent down to Evansville in ’55. Seeing the direction his career was going, he left the game at age 24.

Andrews came home and parlayed his fame in Fall River into a successful car dealership, but all that did was give him enough money for the cocaine that hastened his collapse. He had to give up his dealership after a third heart attack; the money soon ran out.

And that’s when Aaron repaid his debt.

“I finally hit bottom, and when I did, I’ll tell you what brought me out of it. It was thinking about Henry,” Andrews is quoted as saying in Aaron’s autobiography, “I Had a Hammer: The Hank Aaron Story.”

“By this time, Henry was a superstar, going after Babe Ruth’s record and everything and it made me think of all that he went through in Jacksonville. I thought, if he can make it through all of that and do what he has done with his life, I sure as hell can do something with my life. That’s when I joined Alcoholics Anonymous and I haven’t had a drink since.”

Andrews joked to his friends that he quit drinking “to give the breweries a chance to catch up.” But the change in his life was sincere, and complete.

“I think that, deep in his heart, he lived in a world of what might have been,” Sullivan said. “He realized all that he did accomplish. But thinking about it also dragged him down, because it was a bittersweet thing to think about what he lost.”

Andrews began helping out at Durfee, throwing batting practice for the baseball team. Sullivan, who works for the Bristol County Sheriff, got Andrews a job counseling prisoners, where he used his own experiences with drugs and alcohol as fodder for their talks.

In 1998, Aaron pitched in by appearing at a campaign fund-raiser for the sheriff before going with Andrews to speak to the students at Durfee.

“The real hero that day, in many people’s opinion, was Joe,” Sullivan said. “I think in Henry’s eyes, too.”

“That’s true,” Aaron said. “It just happens to be the way of life in our country. They put a lot of emphasis on sports heroes. But you don’t have to score touchdowns, or make baskets, to be a hero.”

Andrews “had the biggest heart of anybody on our ballclub,” Aaron said. “He was just somebody that you meet once in a lifetime.”

That heart gave out on New Year’s Day.

Andrews, 68, was found on the floor of his house with his legs in running position. At Our Lady of Fatima in Swansea, a seashore church with weathered brown shingles and a whitewashed steeple, the old gang got together to remember.

In this crowd, Sullivan was just “Rocky,” and U.S. District Judge Edward F. Harrington was plain old “Ted.” “We don’t go by titles in Fall River,” said Smith, a retired magistrate judge.

In this crowd, it didn’t matter that Aaron outhit Andrews .362 to .311 that year in Jacksonville, or outslugged him in the major leagues, 755 homers to zero.

“I know he’s in paradise, a spot in the only Hall of Fame that matters,” Sullivan, a former Roman Catholic priest, said in a tearful conclusion to his eulogy. “I don’t give a damn about all of the athletic achievements in the world. When it really counted, you were the best, big guy. The very best.”