Hank Aaron

Twenty-five years ago tonight, I sat on the floor in the den of my family’s small rental house in Auburn, Alabama, watching TV. It was Monday night, and the whole world was watching.

I was going on nine-and-a-half, a fourth grader at the kind of school you might, or might not, expect to find in a Southern college town. It was both integrated – one of my classmates had the indelible name of Yolanda Zellers – and relatively progressive on racial matters. I remember a controversy one day between us fourth graders: on his postgame radio show Auburn University basketball coach Bob Davis had called mercurial guard Eddie Johnson a "boy," and some of my white classmates, no doubt echoing their parents, were upset. I couldn’t fathom exactly what they were talking about, but I got my first bitter taste of racial politics that day.

Hank Aaron by Don Northcutt
"Henry Aaron" by Don Northcutt

Of course, my school was also competitive and mad about sports. Those games in the playground meant everything – identity, pecking order, self-esteem. By some fluke of genetics and personality I was, until puberty, small and very fast, and I ran with such a distinctive, all-out style that they called me Rooster, a pun on my name that embarrassed me so badly that I am revealing it for the first time today. And if we weren’t engaging each other in personal contests of one sort or another, we were talking about our favorite teams, Auburn and Atlanta.

So it was that on Thursday afternoon, April 4, 1974, our teacher led us into another classroom so we could all stand in front of the TV and watch Hank Aaron, a fellow Alabaman and a black man hardly beloved in his own land, bat. Our guys, the Braves, were playing on a bright day in Cincinnati, and earlier in the game, in his first at bat of the season, Aaron had hit his 714th career home run, tying Babe Ruth. Alas, as we watched, Aaron did not hit a homer, and we were deflated, perhaps because we had to go back to class.

My next memory is of sitting on that den floor four days later, with my dad and mom and brother and sister in the vicinity, and watching someone pitch to Aaron. I remember thinking how convenient it was that the game would fall on a Monday, which was then a baseball night on network TV.

I now know the full circumstances of that at bat, Aaron’s second of the night: at 9:07 Eastern time (8:07 where I sat), Aaron stroked a fastball from Dodgers lefty Al Downing over the short plexiglass wall in Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium. A Braves reliever named Tom House caught the ball. Aaron was congratulated by two overly enthusiastic fans as he rounded the bases and was mobbed by his teammates as he reached the plate.

But that’s not really what I remember of Hank Aaron. What I remember is my experience, the odd moments when I obtained bits and pieces of the home run record for myself.

Sometime shortly before that famous night, my mom took my brother and me to a dollar store and bought us a 45, "Move Over Babe (Here Comes Henry)." We listened to and loudly sang the catchy tune so many times that years later I could instantly play it in my mind.

Another day, a man sat in the Opelika Mall drawing Henry Aaron portraits with a pen. My mom, probably giving in to our begging, put down something like four dollars – quite a sum in those days for a family of five scraping by – and got us an original Don Northcutt, which hung on our wall for years.

And then by some amazing fluke, my brother and I, who were peaking as card collectors, managed to get four identical Al Downing cards that year, a personal record for us. We were blessed.

The 45, the portrait, the Downing cards – if Hank owned the record, we were his co-owners.

Of course, I outgrew all of that. The 45 broke into a dozen pieces, the portrait was packed away, and the cards were alphabetized and put into a big box. And for the next couple of decades Aaron was a piece of history.

But yesterday, as I was walking past my TV, I heard Milo Hamilton’s famous and thrilling radio call, and it all came back to me. I put on my Baseball’s Greatest Hits CD and listened to "Move Over Babe" one more time. I spent 30 minutes in the attic and finally found the portrait by Northcutt. And I pulled out my Al Downing cards to see if they look the way I remember them.

As I sit here and struggle to figure out what these things mean to me, I realize that I now share Aaron’s record in brand new ways. I now have this essay, this struggle, to remember, and the hope that you understand. And I have a phone call to remember, for last night I found some of Don Northcutt’s other drawings on the web and called him at his home in Manchester, Tennessee.

He seemed pleased to talk to me. He remembered the mall tour of the early ‘70s and drawing Aaron from a photo, although he didn't have any more Aaron portraits in his collection. Don is 66 now, and for the last three years he has suffered from an eye disease called macular degeneration, which has eliminated his central vision and forces him to use only his peripheral vision – it's the opposite of tunnel vision. He can’t draw, and much worse, he says, he can’t drive: "Can you imagine if you couldn’t just get in your car and go where you wanted to go?"

He invited me to stop by next time I come down I-24. He didn’t seem to know or care that today is the 25th anniversary of Aaron’s record-setting homer. He said he would be very proud if I were to publish his portrait of Aaron, and that I should let his son know how to find it on the Internet.

I’m very glad Hank has the record, and I’ll be sad when Ken Griffey Jr. takes away part of it. But he can’t take my part.

Royce Webb is the editor and publisher of SportsJones.