AJC > Sports > Columnists > Archives > 2007 > July > 24 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USScully’s call on Aaron’s 715th irksome
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
You know — a term frequently used as punctutation by athletes who didn’t major in grammar — I’d never heard this thing until the other day, all these years since it was spoken in 1974. And no reason I should have, for I was at the Braves game that night, not listening to a broadcast from Los Angeles.
The Dodgers were in town, and Vin Scully was doing the game on his West Coast network. Henry Aaron had just hit his 715th home run, and old Atlanta Stadium was in hysterics, when Scully, putting his touch on the event, spoke into his microphone, “A black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep South for breaking the home run record of an all-time baseball idol.”
Beg pardon? I don’t know what I’d have thought at the moment, for I’d have been too swept up in the event. Aaron had passed Babe Ruth. The most unbreakable record in baseball had been broken in our own precinct. Hank Aaron had broken it, and he was getting a standing ovation, and why not, I should ask? And why should it not happen in the South?
My god, this was 1974. Yes, this was the South, but there was something about the way Scully said it that made your hackles rise. We’d thought we had that pretty well worked out, and we’d had all winter to get ready for it. Aaron had hit No. 713 off Jerry Reuss the September before, and No. 714 off Jack Billingham on opening day in Cincinnati. No. 715 couldn’t be far removed.
So the human eruption came. People danced, cried out in delight, jumped and did wild things. A couple of young fellows leaped from the stands and joined up with Aaron around second base, then disappeared into the billowing crowd. (One of them is a lawyer in Atlanta today.) Neither of them had the color of Aaron’s skin on their mind, nor did any of us in that pit of glorious insanity.
Scully wasn’t sitting in a studio in Los Angeles. He was there in the middle of it in Atlanta Stadium, and it’s not as if he’d never been South before. His wife is a Southerner, from the county seat of my hometown. If this had been in the Bronx would he have announced, “A Harlemite is getting a standing ovation in New York City!”
Nah, they don’t pick cotton in New York, draw well water, milk the cow, or perform other such agricultural chores. I can tell you I have. I’ve done it all. It makes you sweat, but it doesn’t make you any different, no matter what your color. No doubt, Aaron had absorbed a ton of junk from the stands who had more than Ruth’s record on their mind.
I didn’t like seeing Ruth’s record go, but I liked the idea of it settling on Atlanta, and had taken on the project of collaborating with Aaron on his life story. Beyond that, times had been hard on Aaron. He had gone through divorce, split from his family, his ears burning with the bellowing of dissenters, and the frequent target of every kind of nut case on the planet.
“I’ll tell you this much,” he said once at the height of his pursuit, “this kind of abuse isn’t going to stop me. The more they push me, the more I want the record. All I want is to be treated like a human being.”
There’s a certain authenticity in Aaron’s home-run production not found in Bonds’. Aaron’s were evenly distributed over the years; eight times he hit 40 or more, 47 his highest. Bonds never reached the 40s until his eighth season in the majors, then it was eight seasons later that he erupted into the soaring number of 73. Never close before, never close since. Aaron led the league in a column more important to his team, runs batted in, four times, 2,297 the record for a career.
All these years have passed and Aaron finds himself firmly seated at a similar popularity level as Babe Ruth when his record was under assault, though for reasons of differing nature. It’s not the home runs as much as it is the genuine respect for the man. The Babe had his record in his own time. The Hammer has the record for all time, as most of us see it. Don’t know how Vin Scully will address it if and when it happens that Barry Bonds passes the record, no more than I can imagine whatever brought him to to say what he said when it happened in Atlanta in 1974.
I do know it’s keeping a lot of us up past our bedtime while the Braves carry the fight to the West Coast.
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