Happy Birthday Hank Aaron!

Happy Birthday Hank Aaron
by Mark Anthony Neal

It was July 8, 1973, and my father had taken me to New York's Shea Stadium, where the Mets were playing the Atlanta Braves. I was 7 years old and a big-time fan of Willie Mays, who was playing for the Mets in his last professional season. But most of the people who came out that day were there to witness another legend. And that legend didn't disappoint -- Hank Aaron belted two home-runs, bringing him that much closer to Babe Ruth's historic record of 714.

I left the stadium a fan of Hammerin' Hank.

Tom Stanton was 12 years old that summer, and as he recalls in "Hank Aaron and the Home Run that Changed America," he was among the tens of thousands of children who wrote to Aaron that year in an effort to "eradicate the evil heaped upon our hero." That so many children felt the need to reach out to Aaron has everything to do with why a single homerun is still seen as emblematic of America's changing race relations.

Racism may not have been wholly responsible for the hate mail Aaron received -- Roger Maris was treated harshly when he was breaking Ruth's single-season homerun record in '61 -- but the memory of Martin Luther King's assassination was still fresh and America was still in the throes of a social movement that was transforming how "race" was lived.

And, of course, Aaron plied his trade in the onetime heart of the Confederacy, a fact he was likely reminded of when he peered out at the empty seats in Atlanta's Fulton County Stadium as he drove toward the record. Sports may have been regarded as one of the arenas where America's racial tensions were defused, but Aaron himself might have disagreed with that premise; many whites moved out of his Atlanta neighborhood after his family arrived in 1967.

Though Aaron discussed his challenges in his '91 autobiography "I Had a Hammer," Stanton draws upon interviews and published comments from Aaron's friends, family, peers and teammates to fill in the blanks in ways that the intensely private Aaron never would have. The comments from former teammates Ralph Garr and Dusty Baker, both of whom Aaron mentored closely, are particularly helpful as they had a bird's-eye view of Aaron's daily state. Sharing the outfield with him, they were well aware that they, too, were targets.

Stanton begins his story not in the spring of 1973, when Aaron's quest began to make news, but the previous autumn, at the funeral of Jackie Robinson. Like many of the black players of his generation, Aaron viewed Robinson as a hero and a role model. And Robinson realized that Aaron was his heir-apparent in the task of agitating for better race relations within the league; particularly important to both men was the hiring of a black manager. Stanton writes that as Aaron sat in New York's Riverside Church, listening to Robinson's eulogy, he "realized that with the sports world focusing on his home-run pursuit, he would be in a position to push the issue."

Aaron didn't break the record during the 1973 season, ending the year two shy of his goal.

In one of the most moving passages of the book, Stanton details the outpouring of emotions that Braves fans -- more than 40,000 of them -- gave Aaron the last day of the season. "All season Aaron had been hitting home runs in Atlanta before sparse gatherings of 3,000 and 5,000 and 9,000," Stanton writes. "Now before this enormous crowd he had failed to hit one -- and still they cheered him."

"But, of course," he adds, "this wasn't about home runs. It was about something else. It was an embrace, an affectionate pat on the back, a way of telling Aaron that those hecklers and letter writers and furious little bigots didn't represent them."

Aaron himself was rarely vocal about the issues swirling around him, but he took stands with the same quiet intensity he brought to the batter's box. His record-tying homer occurred in Cincinnati the following April 4 -- which was, coincidentally, the sixth anniversary of King's assassination. Jesse Jackson, who eulogized Jackie Robinson two years earlier and had long provided spiritual support to Aaron, prodded Hammerin' Hank to ask Cincinnati Reds officials to honor King with a moment of silence before the game. They declined the request. "We don't get into politics. We don't get into race" was the official word from Reds official Dick Wagner.

Measuring Aaron's legacy, Stanton notes that an unusual number of players in his orbit went on to notable careers. Baker, Felipe Alou and Cito Gaston were all at the Braves spring training complex in 1968 and the trio became not only Major League Baseball's most successful minority managers of the last two decades, but arguably three of the best managers of the last two decades, period. (And, of course, a year after Aaron hit number 715, Frank Robinson became the first black manager in major league history.) Aaron's ability to stay focused amidst daily threats was clearly an inspiration to his black and Latino teammates. "My players tell me I can't give a speech without mentioning Hank Aaron," admits Baker. "There are not enough words to show my appreciation for the impact (he) has had on me."

The strength of "Hank Aaron and the Home Run that Changed America" is that you never get the sense that the 12-year-old Stanton we meet at the beginning is very far from the narrative. Aaron's homerun may have made just a small dent in America's racial quagmire -- though sports is a metaphor for America, it is not America itself -- but it clearly helped many young fans, including Stanton, imagine a more equitable world.

Stanton's last book, the well-regarded "The Final Season," was a lament for Detroit's now-gone Tiger Stadium, so it's no surprise that this one is steeped in nostalgia and fandom. But as American youth continue to turn away from baseball, which has been "defiled" by drug accusations and labor disputes, Stanton's book is a laudable attempt to make our passion for the game all right again.

*An earlier version published in the Austin Statesman (2004)

Do Black kids still like baseball?

Do Black Kids Still Like Baseball?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

It was one of the most memorable times I spent with my dad. Summer of 1973 and Hank Aaron was running down Babe Ruth’s career homerun record. The Atlanta Braves were in New York City for a weekend series with the New York Mets and my day surprised me with tickets. Hammerin’ Hank didn’t disappoint—he hit two homers that day. By the season’s end, Aaron had 713 homerun, two short of breaking Ruth’s record.

My dad couldn’t afford to take me to games often. Though we lived in the Bronx, literally minutes from Yankee Stadium, my dad was a Mets fan—a holdover National League fan from the 1950s before the New York Giants relocated to San Francisco and took my dad’s favorite player, Willie Mays. For my dad’s generation of Black men, Black baseball players, led by Jackie Robinson, Mays, Aaron and Frank Robinson, who would later become Major League Baseball’s first Black manager, were the realization of a world undergoing change.

When I first started watching baseball during the 1971 World Series, the sport was dominated by young Black ballplayers. The 1971 Pirates, who won the series that year, were the Blackest team in the league, in both style and substance, featuring future hall- of-famers Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente (whose running style everybody wanted to imitate), Dock Ellis, who the year before pitched a no-hitter while high on LSD, Al Oliver and Rennie Stennent. Not interested in political issues, the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates were my dad’s version of Black Power and he made sure I understood the significance of their ascendance as champions.

I was hooked, as many of my peers were, this in the era before the NBA had become an international brand and the New York Knicks were derisively described as the New York “N----r-bockers.” Part of the appeal was that many of the best baseball players in the 1970s and early 1980s were Black, and they were fundamentally changing the way the game was being played, whether talking about Lou Brock and Rickey Henderson on the base paths, Rod Carew, whose .388 batting average in 1977 was the highest in thirty years and Reggie Jackson, who became Mr. October.

Black dominance in professional baseball made sense in the 1970s, as the era marked the high-water mark of the percentage of Black players in the Major Leagues. For many kids in the hood, baseball was still a sport that could get you out of the hood, into college, the minor leagues and possible the majors. But something has happened along the way.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com

Fathers and Sons; Black Men and Baseball (for Byron Hurt)

Fathers and Sons; Black Men and Baseball (for Byron Hurt)
by Mark Anthony Neal

My father had gone home to glory, months before the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president. In the difficult days before his death, there was little opportunity even to talk about such a possibility, but I have vivid memories of my father’s reaction to another "Black first." It was the fall of 1974 when the Cleveland Indians, broke one of the last racial barriers in professional sports, by naming Frank Robinson their manager. My father’s joy was palpable—one of the lasting memories that I have of him.

It was only two years before Frank Robinson was named the Cleveland manager, that another Robinson, the legendary Jackie Robinson threw out the first pitch before a world series game between the Cincinnati Reds and Oakland Athletics. Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s infamous color barrier in 1947, becoming the first black to play in the league since Moses Fleetwood Walker was effectively banned from the American Association and National Leagues (precursors the current league) in 1889. Robinson took the opportunity that day in October of 1972 to announce his hope that one day he could attend such a game and see a black manager in one of the dugouts. It would be Jackie Robinson’s last public appearance; He died on October 24, 1972 at the young age of 53. I can remember my father, trying to get his 6-year-old son—oblivious to the Jim Crow segregation that defined his father’s existence—to understand the significance of Jackie Robinson’s life and death.

My father was never much of a race man, but his sense of racial accomplishment was intimately tied to the black men he watched play professional baseball. Born in 1935, my father was of a generation of black men who clearly smelled of freedom in ways that their fathers could never imagine, but were still reigned in by very real social constraints. In men like Frank Robinson, Jackie Robinson, Juan Marachial, Henry Aaron, Elston Howard, Bob Gibson, Roberto Clemente and especially Willie Mays—the first generation of Black superstars in baseball—my father saw the possibilities of that freedom, even if it could only then be realized on the playing field. Indeed Mays’s boyish swagger—the way he loped to the batter’s box, the casual style in which he employed his signature basket catch, the way his cap always came off as he ran the bases—was an inspiration for many a boy, regardless of race.

It was my father’s love of Mays that essentially made me a baseball fan. My father could barely contain himself when Mays was traded from the San Francisco Giants to the New York Mets in May of 1972. If I was gonna be a baseball fan, I had little choice but to be a New York Met fan, despite the fact that Yankee Stadium was less than 10 minutes away from our Bronx tenement building. In the early 1970s, the New York Mets had few black ball players and none that could be called major stars, but the names of Cleon Jones, John Milner and Tommy Agee, became part of my everyday vocabulary. Though Mays was well past his prime when he was traded to the Mets, he was still a marquee name for a team that would never quite escape the shadow of their cross-town rivals, The Yankees. Until George Steinbrenner took over the Yankees in 1973, the team seemed to relish in the whiteness of their legacy.

It was during this time that my father and I began our Sunday ritual; a morning spent listening to the music of Gospel groups like the Mighty Clouds of Joy and the Pilgrim Jubilee Singers and an afternoon of watching Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner announce Met games. The most memorable times though were the Sundays when we could head out to Flushing, NY and to see the team play in person. At the time I couldn’t fully appreciate what it meant to see Willie Mays in the flesh, despite his diminished talents. It was much the same way at a 1973 game between the Mets and the Atlanta Braves, where Hank Aaron hit two-home runs during his last push towards Babe Ruth’s career total of 714 homeruns. It was with my father that I watched Mays’s last hurrah, during the 1973 World Series, when the great player’s age finally betrayed him in ways that could no longer be ignored.

Though I have remained a baseball fan for much of my life, girls and hip-hop would capture my attention in the decade after Mays’s retirement. There were few games that my father and I watched together as time progressed, though we excitedly discussed the emergence of Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Godden as the New York Mets first homegrown black superstars in the mid-1980s. There was a silence between my father and I, when both of those men succumbed to the pitfalls of being young, black and famous in New York City; my father all too aware of the brutal ways that dreams were deferred for black men of his generation and I all too aware of the young black men of my generation, who lived tragic lives, far from the back pages of the New York Daily News.

I lament that my father and I never attended a baseball game together as adults—as men who could reflect on the beauty of the game along with the challenges that we faced as black men, fathers and loving husbands. My father’s absence hit home months ago, as I watched the opening of the New York Mets' new stadium Citi Field. On hand for the opening festivities was Rachel Robinson, the 87-year-old widow of Jackie Robinson. In tribute to Robinson, Citi Field features the Jackie Robinson Rotunda where visitors can view memorabilia and video presentations of Robinson during his playing days. Sometime this summer I hope to visit Citi Field with my own children and though my father will not be there, I know that he will be there in spirit, as I tell my daughters about this game of baseball and its importance to their grand-father.

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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books and currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for New York University Press. He is Professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University in Durham, NC.