KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The home runs hid Henry Aaron's greatness. That is an audacious, ridiculous, outrageous thing to say. It is also true.
Aaron's legend will always be tied to the 755 home runs he hit, a number that baseball fans don't need to look up. That's more than any man before him, and even after Barry Bonds broke the record many still consider Aaron the real home run king.
Much of that is a reference to baseball's uglier side, of course. But some of it comes from Aaron's beauty.
"I guess you can call him the people's home run king," fellow Baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson once said.
Aaron died on Friday. He was 86. He had a baseball career unlike anyone before, or since. He hit his first major league home run at 20, his last at 42, and along the way he became the first Black star on the first major professional sports team in the South at the height of the civil rights movement.
When he signed his first professional contract at 18, he did not know if he would play against kids his own age or grown men. His teammates with the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro Leagues could see immediately that this young man had a gift.
He swung cross-handed at first — right-handed swing, but with the left hand on top. When someone taught him the better way, his first swing produced a home run. A theory developed that all those years of hitting the wrong way made his wrists unusually strong (another theory was it was the protein from all that gooey peanut butter he ate).
Even in the big leagues, Aaron said he never looked for a fastball because he knew nobody could throw one by him. Curt Simmons, who faced Aaron 124 times, said "throwing a fastball by Henry Aaron is like trying to sneak the sun past a rooster."
As a baseball player, Aaron will always be known first for the home runs. But if you erased each of his home runs — and his were rarely tape-measure shots; teammates used to say he knew exactly how far the walls were in every stadium — he still would have had piled up 3,016 hits.
He won two batting crowns, walked more than he struck out and was widely considered among the best defensive outfielders of his time. He drove in 2,297 runs, most in baseball history. His record of 6,856 total bases may stand forever.
Sports gives us legends and heroes and giants, and Aaron was all three. There is no way to do his life justice with words. This is one attempt of many, and perhaps collectively we can properly remember a man who conquered the country's most popular sport, becoming a role model for Black kids and a relentless challenger to the limitations that much of society wanted to place upon him.
He was a Black man in the deep South breaking the most precious record in professional sports, one held by a beloved white icon. He received regular death threats, and his family had to go into hiding. A police security team protected Aaron around the clock. In his autobiography, Aaron called chasing and breaking Babe Ruth's record the worst period of his life.
"All of these things have put a bad taste in my mouth, and it won't go away," he told William Rhoden of the New York Times in 1994. "They carved a piece of my heart away."
The vitriol was just as wicked as Jackie Robinson experienced when he broke baseball's color barrier in 1947 — a full generation, and no progress, with men and women who cursed Robinson's name raising kids who'd do the same to Aaron.
When Aaron made his first visit to Kansas City's Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in 1999, he told museum president Bob Kendrick he was only then able to exhale and enjoy the record.
"That was 25 years later," Kendrick emphasized Friday. "And here we are in 2021 and we're still dealing with many of those same issues."
Aaron's career and life were marked with a supernatural steadiness. Thirty men have hit 50 or more home runs in a season, but Aaron is not among them. Instead, he broke Ruth's record by hitting 40 or more in eight seasons — the first when he was 23, the last when he was 39.
When Aaron was 22, he won his first batting crown and led the league in hits, doubles and total bases. When he was 37, he led the league in slugging, hit the most home runs of his career and was walked intentionally more than anyone else in baseball. If a boy fell in love with baseball at age 8, when Aaron was a rookie, he celebrated his 30th birthday with Aaron still playing.
Aaron was never flashy as a player, and never overmatched, either. Whether by nature or circumstance, that steadiness came to define him as man, too. He felt the weight of his race, a pressure most of his teammates had no way to relate to, and he also had what Kendrick described as "the same innateness" of Buck O'Neil, Ernie Banks, Monte Irvin and others to cope and relentlessly move forward.
"Henry never considered himself as important a historical figure as Jackie Robinson," Harold Bryant wrote in the 2010 biography of Aaron entitled The Last Hero. "And yet ... his road in many ways was no less lonely, and in other ways far more difficult."
If Aaron carried sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion justified by his experience, he never showed it. Instead, he showed strength.
He campaigned for John F. Kennedy in Milwaukee in 1960 (the Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966), which some believed helped JFK win the Wisconsin primary. He frequently supported and spoke about issues of equality, seeing his stardom as a responsibility.
Later, he aligned with Bill Clinton, who said an Atlanta rally organized by Aaron helped him carry Georgia in the 1992 presidential election. In 2001, Clinton honored Aaron with the Presidential Citizens Medal.
Through his work with the museum, Kendrick has met presidents and dignitaries and some of the biggest stars in sports. But he has been starstruck only once in his life: when he met Aaron.
That's when he had the chance to tell Aaron about one of the best moments of his childhood, when he was 12 years old, in his mother's living room in Cartersville, Ga.
This was April 8, 1974, and the Kendricks' TV was on the Braves game when Aaron hit the record-breaking home run. Eighty miles away, in this small town, a boy rounded the bases along with his hero — the couch was first base, the TV second base, another couch third base and a recliner home plate. Kendrick was mimicking his idol, in that moment believing anything was possible.
That moment is Aaron's career and life — it was about the home run, but it was really about so much more.
