Hank Aaron (part ten)

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.