Don’t Miss Aaron Documentary

We are a high-speed sports culture in need of reminders, in need of context. Game highlights flash by mindlessly. Any stat is available at the touch of a keyboard. Hot-stove chatter is about bargaining positions rather than batting stances. That’s why “Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream,” a documentary produced by Denzel Washington that airs at 5:05 p.m. PDT tonight on TBS, is a welcome retrospective.

The death threats, hate mail and racial invectives that hounded Aaron in his quest to break Babe Ruth’s homerun record are a lasting scar on America’s sports history.

But Aaron’s greatest achievement is not the virtually untouchable mark of 755 home runs, although a player would have to average almost 35 home runs a season for 22 years to top him. Instead, Aaron’s remarkable life and career was, as Harry Belafonte described it, “a litmus test on civil rights.” Aaron helped topple racial barriers from Jacksonville, Fla., to Atlanta, before it was proclaimed “The New South.”

Sidestepping the academic snare that tripped Ken Burns in the making of his “Baseball” epic - too many talking heads, too many still photos - Washington blends authentic footage, interviews with Aaron’s family and former players and some reenactments, to tell Aaron’s story.

Re-enactments can be awkward. But most of these re-enactments are as valid as the rarely seen clips of Aaron playing second base for the Braves. In this case, I’d rather watch a boy hit a thrown bottle cap with a broom handle at twilight or feel how immensely sad it was to overhear a chef at a diner in Washington, D.C., shout to a busboy to “break those plates the niggers ate off” instead of listening to some outsider recount it.

Until he saw a Ku Klux Klan march in his small hometown outside of Mobile, Ala., Aaron was blissfully unaware of racism. At age 13, the quick-wristed youngster fell under the spell of Jackie Robinson, who had just joined the Brooklkn Dodgers. In 1952, he was an 18-yearold shortstop for the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro League. When traveling with the team, white children would come up and rub black players’ arms “to see if the color would come off.”

In Milwaukee, where baseball fans were color-blind, Aaron became a star. He was given No. 5 when he broke in because he was “too skinny” to wear double digits. In 1957, Aaron and the Milwaukee Braves won the N.L. pennant and the World Series. Years later, Sandy Koufax would call him “the toughest hitter for me to get out.”

Later, in one of many TV clips interspersed throughout the program, Walter Cronkite announces that Aaron had just become the highest-paid player in baseball history in 1972, signing a three-year deal for $200,000 a year. In another old clip, Robin Williams, as Mork, says he would have to trade his whole planet for Aaron.

That media attention prompted Aaron to speak out against racial injustice, a platform he said he felt obliged to ascend after the retirement of Robinson and others in the first tier of black major-leaguers.

Aaron’s opinions came to the fore during the Ruth record chase, and the pressure on Aaron doubled. Bodyguards were hired to watch his children. He ran on the field in Cincinnati the night he hit No. 715 wondering if a sniper was in the stands.

At a screening in Atlanta, observers said Aaron, now a vice president at Turner Broadcasting, was visibly moved. That happens when you face some dark memories, a life put in context. It’s a reminder, and we all need them sometimes.