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.

In his whole life, Aaron never got the chance to play the game without having to overcome adversity or without dealing with racism. His father said that even when he first started playing, “When he came up, I heard fans yell, ‘Hit that n****r. Hit that n****r.’ Henry hit the ball up against the clock. The next time he came up, they said, ‘Walk him, walk him.’”

The letters he received during his professional career, his secretary would read first and were so violent that she didn’t even want to let Aaron see them. They consisted of postcards with drawings of guerrillas on the one side and a note on the other, reading, “You are not the man that Babe Ruth was and never will be, you faggot n****r bastard.”

“Dear Mr. N****r, I hope you don’t break the record. How am I supposed to tell my kids that a n****r did it.”

Another letter told him to retire or die, that its author knows where he’ll be throughout the months of June and July and August, and the author will be at one of those games with a rifle or a .45 and will shoot him dead by god unless he retires before then.

Aaron eventually read one of the letters out loud from behind a podium before a national broadcast. He read from the letter, “Hank, there’s three things you can’t give a n****r. A black eye, a puff lip or a job.”

Teammates said it didn’t seem to affect him, that if he didn’t have security guards around him at all times for safety, they themselves might not even know about the death threats. But they knew it eventually, and could tell in the clubhouse when he’d drop a letter on the floor and walk out onto the field that he hadn’t just read anything written by a fan.

They’d sit next to him in the dugout and he’d stand up and sit somewhere else away from them in case a shooter missed and the teammate was killed by way of sitting next to Aaron. When his teammates found out they admitted that they were scared to death, and admitted too that Aaron wasn’t afraid at all. He had been taught at a young age by his father to not show pain.

Not once at the plate did he ever appear nervous, beaten or had.

Never possessing fear in his soul, as though hinged upon his shoulder blades were great invisible feathered wings. 

Standing at the plate he manifested so greatly the character of a god among the earth. In a homerun derby in 1959, announcer Mark Scott and opposing slugger Al Kaline agreed his approach to hitting a baseball was a study in relaxation, with his wrists bobbing and the bat waving up-and-down behind his head as if casting a fishing rod, lifting his front foot from the earth for a moment before leaning into the flight of the ball, the barrel of the bat pointed at the dugout behind him, then it whips like the pull of a planet’s moon around his body, following the jabbing of his elbow and his striking hands and turned wrists and the movement conjures up the echoes of thunder and by the time the wood of the bat hammers the ball, one can feel the impact of lightning, electricity circuiting through the body.

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He grew up swinging the bat with a cross-handed grip and grew up in a house without electricity or windows or indoor plumbing and grew up playing a version of baseball with tin cans for a baseball or nylon wrapped around acorns or golf balls he’d find, and broom sticks or sticks from the woods for a bat, and wore for clothes his older sister’s hand-me-downs and grew up in a sundown town, where members of the Ku Klux Klan would gather at nightfall and march down the streets, cloaked in white and under white hoods, carrying among them bibles and waving in their hands the Confederate Flag, with many members on either side and holding an enormous American Flag to cover the width of the road in which they walked, and holding up burning crosses, driving cars slowly and honking the horns while other whites in the neighborhood waved and cheered from their porches and lawns, and the young whites had people to admire and hope to become, celebrating and honoring their heritage and white nationalism, marching through Aaron’s neighborhood, and planted countless crosses on fire in their yard, howling at the sight of the crosses, gathering in a circle in his yard over a hundred strong in numbers, walking up and down the roads in an organized manner and chanting hymns of Anglo Saxon, like a finely trained Nazi military division and many of them would have worked with Aaron’s father during the daytime.

A children’s book, Brave in Every Way, written by Peter Golenbock and illustrated by Paul Lee, was published as a biography for the youth to read of Aaron’s life.

The background of the pages is colored in a tinge of golden dust, and the human flesh is not drawn cartoonish or incredibly realistic either but almost styled and informed from the paintings of great mythology.

Each drawing appears next to a page of biographical prose, beginning with his birth in Alabama during the Great Depression and his mother and father standing face to face and raising up young Henry toward the heavens, with each of them smiling and him looking back down at them in nothing but a diaper and smiling too, to him as a boy and watching his father with a hammer and a nail framing the interior boards of their house, to him sitting in school wearing a pressed collar button-down with an Aristotle pose—his chin on his fist and sitting at a desk right next to the window where the world beyond glows and shines of an aureate sky containing the vapors of milk and honey, to him still young and playing baseball in a dirt lot with friends underneath a sky harnessing on its wall a mural of Jackie Robinson, as though he were an American god and the heavens were manifested by the mind of young Henry, to him standing next to his kneeling mother with a glove in one hand and his other arm held by her hands—about the time when he was fourteen and would have been offered ten dollars a game to play for a semipro baseball team, with their games being held on Sundays, a day which his mother honored devoutly as Holy and the day made to give glory to the Lord, not the day to play baseball—and she is looking up to him appearing to almost cry as though deep down in her soul she knew already that she had given birth to a man that will honor the Lord through this game, that he himself had the potential to serve a saintly calling for the South, country and for the world, to him walking up to the batter’s box tall and lean like an oak sculpture carved by Michelangelo, the bat hanging out in front of his body and carried in his hands in the image of a warrior’s club.

His rookie season for the Braves was in 1954 and the team stayed at the beautiful Dixie Grande Hotel on the Manatee River in Bradenton, Florida. The hotel was eight stories tall, surrounded by palm trees and royal poinciana, the smell of the ocean lifted by a gentle breeze. Great big suites for each room, a billiards hall, a private stone patio for its guests and balconies, a garden that grows orange trees and banana trees, a sun parlor with glass windows nearly as big as the walls in which they were framed, and a lounge area mezzanine where three- and five-course meals and fancy cocktail drinks would be ordered and served.

For their down time they could have fished for largemouth bass and bluegill or sat in the shade along the banks and watched snapping turtles and manatees and dolphins under the crystal blue waters. It was like some tropical and majestic paradise where one comes to once one’s made it in this world.

Hank Aaron did not stay there. Arrangements were made for him and teammates Charlie White and Bill Bruton and Jim Pendleton to stay at a crowded and tight-quartered guesthouse built upon stilts and owned by a local school principal beside a funeral parlor on 9th Avenue, a street in the part of town that was called the Negro section. It would take ten more years before he’d stay in the same facilities and be given the same accommodations as his white teammates. It was not new to Aaron, only he was fixing to be new to the world.

There’s a signed playing card from his rookie season that showcases his face in front of a fiery orange background. He’s smiling easy with his head tilted and turned up toward his right as though he’s staring down the gods and his own destiny, and is completely unshaken. A smaller scale of his entire body stands on his shoulders, fielding a ground ball. At the bottom is an unassuming signature that clearly reads his first and last name, and at an auction in 2012 this card sold for over $350,000.

He’d go on to win the World Series against the unbeatable New York Yankees, breaking records while restaurants across the country broke and threw away the plates and glasses that he ate off and drank from, and he’d hit at least twenty homeruns for twenty consecutive seasons, earn three Gold Glove Awards for league’s finest defender and win Most Valuable Player for league’s most incredible and dynamic and prolific ballplayer, make the All-Star team twenty-five times, touch a league all time best 6,865 bases, hit in more runs than anybody in league history with 2,997 and earn the most extra-base hits in league history with 1,447 and do it all with more Grace than anybody since his predecessor, Jackie Robinson.

By the 1970’s, he was finally beginning to be seen and considered by the world to be embarking upon the possibility of hammering his way into the realm of eternity, and due in large part to his historic chase of the homerun record, and in effort to help highlight his aura, the Braves changed their uniform and the uniforms would be the first worn of the Sand-Knit era, showcased at least seven years ahead of its time.

They were of the very first and very few designs to trash the traditional button-up style. An athletic V-shaped collar. Away jerseys were cloaked in a sky blue with white sleeves that depicted on the biceps a red and blue feather, and the team nickname slapped in freehand scribe in white lettering across the chest and outlined by a boiling red border. The material was breathable and light on the flesh, almost the same fabric of a t-shirt, in comparison to the heavy woolen cloth of the common and standard uniforms.

They are considered now, by many people, in comparison to other styles of uniform, as being trailer trash or ghetto, almost a grotesque celebration of non-privilege, and probably also recognized by the fans of other teams in the 1970’s as being pure ugliness. The style seems just as likely to have been designed for a beer or BBQ-joint sponsored softball league. When they were washed they shrunk horrendously, and so they had to be sent from the clubhouse after each game to a dry cleaners, and after the cleaners caught fire and burned, the jerseys in its possession were salvaged and still worn, and revealed in the base of the colors a golden and charred mark of fire and brimstone, similar to the outfit and origin of the outfit a superhero might wear.

Hank Aaron wore the home design the night he hammered out homerun number 715, pants and jersey in a matching shade of dull-white that seems to have been clayed among the heavens, with blue sleeves, and a hat and helmet on his head, painted half in that spoiled-milk white and half in a pearl-sea blue and revealing over the mind a blood-red lowercase “a” team logo.

The uniforms had a lack of class and sophistication the game of baseball had been so accustomed to. Seeing as how it tried so hard to omit the prospect of championing the success of a black ballplayer, these jerseys seem to represent a perfect ‘kiss my ass’ style and attitude, all the while being worn by one the most resilient and toughest and humble players to ever lace up cleats. When one conjures up the notion of triumph and glory in the Deep South, the image of this jersey, numbered 44 stitched across the back and stitched into the front left ribcage, must come to mind.

They aren’t made anymore. It is likely, these days to see somebody wearing the jersey to be over fifty years old, and one who makes a living working outdoors and working with their hands, carpenters and landscapers, mechanics and farmers, or worn by a young Braves fan as a hand-me-down gift. One imagines this would make Aaron smile, and the spirit of his father proud.

One wonders, too, if the Braves ought to wear these uniforms still, at least every other Sunday or even just one Sunday a month as a means of tribute, a way to honor the legacy of probably their most significant and storied and statuesque player.

To put it plain, the uniform is the cloth of the American South for the 1970s.

The seasons and highlights of Hank Aaron almost unfold for him in a way meant for his own superhero comic book. With each hammering of the bat that smacks against the seams of the baseball, a speech bubble drawn as a cloud from the skies and outlined by lightning, reading not the words Pop or Zap or Kazam, but instead the words from Exodus, Let My People Go.

Sending balls deep over the left field wall, the centerfield wall and hitting in the opposite direction over the right field wall, hitting his way toward and knocking down the doors of destiny.

These seasons ought to have been a celebration of triumph and a testament to the endurance of human will and the most exciting moment in his life, and it instead was the toughest and most dreadful, most agonizing and stressful time he’d ever undergo, ever endure, ever live through.

Deep down where the soul speaks the language of the heavens he was so furious at this point in his life, in paraphrasing his own words, and exhausted, physically and emotionally, and uncaring about a record, and so disgusted with the ways of how certain people could act in America that all he wanted to do was to quit and then leave this country and live some place where baseball and the name of Babe Ruth registered nothing in anybody’s minds.

He wanted to give it all up and be someplace where none of it mattered, where he could find peace, free of the hatred thrown upon him just because he was great, where he could be free from the expectation of greatness, from the fans and the country itself and the world too.

He wished more than anything at this point in his life to quit. He almost did. Ultimately, he stayed because of the Reverend King and because of his lifelong hero and borderline savior Jackie Robinson—he felt that he owed it to them, that he owed his family and himself and to everybody across the nation who ever looked up to him, who needed him. And so he stayed, and stayed hunting the record for the soul of every son of a bitch that ever called him the N-word.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was buried in Atlanta, Georgia in 1968, two days before Maundy Thursday. Tens of thousands came to see him at Morehouse College in the week leading up to his funeral, as he was when he died, under glass and laying in a coffin.

In silence the city wept. Tens of thousands of people unable to speak. The silence and depth of pain echoes to this day in Atlanta.

The day King died, he was working on a new sermon titled, Why America May Go to Hell. That night upon receiving the news of his death, Bobby Kennedy—two months before his own assassination—offered a eulogy in Indianapolis, where he was campaigning at the time for President, on the back of a flatbed pick-up truck. He quoted the poet Aeschylus, saying, “And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

And he went on to say that what is required now of Americans is not lawlessness or hatred, anger or violence, but the principles that the Reverend King was killed for, Love toward one another and compassion for those who suffer still, and the wisdom to understand what it was the Reverend King dedicated his life towards and ultimately sacrificed his body and flesh and life on earth for. That it won’t be the end of violence but the vast majority of Americans desire and seek justice and equality for all human beings that abide in our land. Then he finished by asking for all to say a prayer for our country and all of her people.

On the sixth anniversary of King’s death, Major League Baseball’s 1974 opening day, the Braves were in Cincinnati and the commissioner of the league was in attendance and asked Hank Aaron if there was anything baseball could do to honor the memory and legacy of King that day, and Aaron said they could hold a moment of silence before the game, only to have this request denied, being told that for scheduling reasons, there wouldn’t be permitted any time for it. Almost like they were just trying, even begging and desperate for him to lose his calm and composure.

Sportswriter Dave Kindred summarized the moment—that the commissioner of Major League Baseball was saying to Hank Aaron, and saying to Civil Rights too, that you’re important, but you’re not that important.

In the game’s first inning, Red’s pitcher Jack Billingham nearly lost his balance on the mound throwing a ball so hard over the plate, with Hank Aaron at-bat on a 3-1 count.

The pitch was a breaking ball that seemed to sink under the strike zone and appeared to be unhittable, and Aaron tagged it across the plate and the ball rocketed as it were headed and made for the constellations, giving him homerun 714 for his career, which tied Babe Ruth for the most by a player ever.

The fans in attendance cheered as he rounded the bases, and jumped in the air and held hands of praise above their heads, hugged each other and slapped each other’s palms, and probably a record was set for amount of beer splashed and spilled, and they screamed ecstatically as though they believed Aaron was playing for them, played on their team, as though he manifested in the flesh the dream of a new America for everyone.

One wonders about the spirit of Reverend King too, whether it was also in attendance that day, smiling and proud, and thinking to himself—as Aaron rounded the bases to opposing fans roaring for him and his glory—Why America may not go to Hell.

The Threemile Creek in Alabama is five miles west of Mobile and it streams into the Mobile River which is a tributary for the ocean that makes up the Gulf of Mexico, and is where Aaron learned to fish and where he fished often as a child. In the off seasons since becoming a Major Leaguer, he’d return home as often as possible to be with family and close friends, and come back to the creek for solace, for silence and peace of mind, to enjoy days fishing.

Just before the 1974 season, about one week before breaking the record, he went on a fishing trip with his brother Herbert, Jr. at a marshy spot likely somewhere along the creek and river and gulf. The waters would have been the habitat for speckled trout and redfish and sheepshead fish too.

Aaron wore blue jeans and a tank top undershirt. His brother was shirtless. They faced opposite sides of the water and stood on the platformed bow at the front of the boat so their feet were level with the steering wheel. The gothic fingernails of the Southern sun clawed out sweat from beneath their flesh and it was as though they did not notice.

Aaron had been at bat against the nature of this world for his entire life. As seemed typical throughout his career, Aaron appeared as a modern day and American biblical prophet with a fishing rod in his hand.

Their white boat looked about seven-feet-long and was steered and then engine turned off about twelve feet from where the salt grass and cordgrass grew knee high and where black oak trees lined and layered the forest beyond.

Aaron threw a spincast rod with his left arm toward the shade of water where the fish would have been to keep from the heat of the boiling sun.

A trickling halo expanded from the waters, silent and shimmering and reflecting his image like a stained-glass window against the surface of the water.

Throughout the day they might have shared a few jokes and a few memories from their life, “Remember when Mama this,” and, “How ’bout when Daddy that,” but likely they didn’t speak too much and by the day’s end they caught somewhere over sixty fish. The makings of a perfect day.

There was a picture of this moment captured by the photographer Ken Regan and depending on the dimensions, a copy of the photograph is worth between $900 and $3000. But its value ascends monetary. It represents where Aaron found, near his childhood home, in a time of loathing and dread and awful fear in his life, a moment of pure and uncompromising peace of mind and refuge from the wickedness of this world that he was experiencing.

He was very likely seven days away from his own death and he’d have known this. He and his brother were on the same waters where he had first learned to fish, somewhere around thirty-three years earlier.

On the eighth day of the fourth month in 1974, there were nearly fifty more police officers in Fulton County Stadium than what was standard, Atlanta sportswriter Lewis Grizzard—after receiving countless phone calls referring to him as a n****r lover for covering Aaron’s pursuit of the record, with each call reinforcing the death threats they had sent to Aaron—had decided without telling anybody to write down an obituary for Henry Lewis Aaron in case of the event Aaron was shot and killed at forty years old the moment he broke the record and Aaron’s father threw out the first pitch of the historic night.

It is not difficult to imagine what followed directly thereafter as he walked back to the dugout and his son stepped onto the edges of the field.

They’d had nodded and shook hands, with neither of them crying out of the sake of toughness, or maybe at this point in each of their lives they’d reckon toughness be damned, if only for just a moment, and then Aaron stepping onto the field from the dugout to take his position and as he becomes fully visible by those in attendance they rise from their blue painted wood chairs throughout the stadium’s entire circumference and all three levels and cheer enthusiastically for his sacrifice and efforts and chant his name, screaming in the vein of a Cherokee war cry and remain screaming at the top of their lungs from way down in their guts and on top of their feet for five straight minutes as Aaron turns in a full circle to witness them while they celebrate with wild and great tongue, his name, what it means to their team, the Braves, and what it means for their lives, while his teammates stand still waiting in the dugout for him to receive this prolonged and phenomenal and hard earned ovation which ends only after the umpire would have to shout at his teammates in the dugout multiple times to take their position on the field, trying to scream through the sea of elated spectators, shouting through cupped hands, Let’s Go, Play Ball, Play Ball, Let’s Play Ball damnit, with 53,000 sets of feet stomping the concrete in rallying waves, with Hank Aaron and Hank Aaron alone on the field, and the players finally—after Aaron takes a few steps to walk across the blades of grass, beyond the chalk, and then beginning his trot—come up behind him and they all jog to their positions under the lights, the fans still ecstatic, the stadium shaking and sounding as it were fixing to erupt.