Hank Aaron Story (Part One)

April 8, 1974. Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia. About six minutes past 9 o’clock in the evening eastern time. The sky was dark and the stadium lights glinted silver and glowed a fiery orange upon the field like a Roman coliseum. The dark green sea of grass in the outfield, the sanded red dirt diamond of the infield shaping the baselines.

Home plate sixty feet and six inches opposite the pitcher’s mound and 402 feet away from the centerfield wall. The ballpark was infamous by players from other teams as having the worst and most unmaintained field in the league. Its lousily cut grass had ugly patches that were missed when mowed. On this night, there was painted in centerfield the American Flag across the shape of the United States.

With 53,775 people in attendance—2000 over capacity—there was not a seat in the house unaccounted for, and all who bought a ticket stood on their feet, many with the metal poles of fishing nets in their hands.

Left-handed pitcher Al Downing for the Los Angeles Dodgers stood on the dirt mound risen about ten inches above the sharp blades of grass. He held the ball in his hand, behind his knee, leaned and scanned down the horizon of sixty feet before him.

In his sight and finishing his practice swings before stepping up to the plate stood the working class, mythological sports star in the vein of John Henry, number 44, Atlanta Brave Henry Lewis Aaron and known often by his nickname, Hammerin’ Hank.

Up to this point, Aaron had hammered out 714 career homeruns, tied with Babe Ruth for the most in Major League Baseball history, a record considered to be holy and unbreakable, sacred. Hank Aaron stood at the plate. Standing six-foot-tall, 180 pounds. Forty years on earth.

The closer he came to surpassing America’s ambassador of sport, Babe Ruth—the patron saint of baseball, the Great Bambino—then the more intense were the death threats addressed to him and they came, it seemed, in never ending quantities, and they had already reached almost a million in number. Calling him the N-word and describing how and in which game they’d kill him.