Everyone wants to know how Aaron feels

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Everyone wants to know how Hank Aaron feels. Every day now that the home-run chase approaches its inevitable conclusion another request reaches deep into Atlanta, five requests, 500 requests, all to speak to this proud and quiet man who more than 30 years ago dared to hit more homers than Babe Ruth.

Everyone wants to know how Hank Aaron feels. Is it really so hard to understand?

When Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run, the one that surpassed the Babe, his daughter Gaile watched on television with FBI agents. There had been threats – seriously worded threats – to kidnap her. As Aaron rounded the bases, he would say, he felt no joy, no glory, he felt only numb and lifeless, like everything had been emptied out of him. When he crossed home plate, he hugged his mother, Estella, for a long time – she would not let him go. She would say that she wanted to shield him from assassins.

And when Aaron was first asked that question, that silly and unanswerable question that would follow him for more than 30 years, when he was first asked, “How does it feel to be the home-run champ?” he said this:

“Thank God it’s over.”

Now, again, we ask him. We cannot help ourselves. How does it feel? Barry Bonds is three home runs away. He may hit those three home runs over the weekend; he may take a month or more to hit them. But it seems sure now that he will hit them, he will break the record, he will take his seat, rightful or not, on the home-run throne.

Hank Aaron will not be there when Bonds breaks the record. Some see this as his protest against Barry Bonds. Some see this as unspoken anger, leftover pain from his own home-run ordeal. Some see this as a simple admission that Aaron is now an old man, and he’s just so tired, too tired to go chasing the man who chases him.

Still, everyone wants to know how Hank Aaron feels.

Is it really so hard to understand?

Hank Aaron set his home-run record brick by brick, swing by swing; he never once hit 50 home runs in a season. He lasted. He pounded away at the Babe’s record game after game, year after year, like a fighter working the body, 44 homers one season, 30 homers the next, 39 homers, 40 homers, bang, bang, bang, merciless, tireless, and like that fighter who works the body, Aaron got his man in the later rounds.

Home runs hit by Ruth and Aaron in their later years:

Age 37: Aaron 47, Ruth 41.

Age 38: Aaron 34, Ruth 34.

Age 39: Aaron 40, Ruth 22.

Age 40: Aaron 20, Ruth 6.

Age 41: Aaron 12, Ruth 0.

Age 42: Aaron 10, Ruth 0.

“I wasn’t going to let anybody stop me,” Aaron would say. “I wasn’t going to let anybody tell me no.”

In those later years, the hate mail poured in – crude drawings of gorillas, insults so ghastly that he would never repeat them even to prove a point, death threats. Aaron endured. He kept hammering away at ghosts and hate and that unbreakable record, and he triumphed. He won. He hit his 715th homer on a high fastball thrown by Al Downing, and then he kept going, he hit 40 more home runs before he walked away. And as big and remarkable as the number 755 may have appeared to people outside – think of it as 38 home runs per season for 20 seasons in a row – those people outside could never know how big and remarkable it really was inside.

“Nobody understood what I was going through,” he would say.

What about now? What is he going through now as a 73-year-old man watching from afar? Barry Bonds is about to break the home-run record while his personal trainer, Greg Anderson, sits in a jail cell and refuses to say what he knows. Bonds’ own grand jury testimony, which was illegally leaked, suggests that his transformation from all-round star into a home-run superhero was not entirely natural. Meanwhile, boos follow Barry Bonds. Polls show that most Americans don’t want him to break the record. Polls show that most Americans believe that when Bonds breaks the record, it will be tainted.

And everything rushes back for Hank Aaron. He turns down all interview requests. He answers no questions. His closest friends say the pain of his own chase is too raw – he doesn’t want to look back. He doesn’t want to be misunderstood. Most of all, he doesn’t want to let America in. He’s a private man.

“My feelings,” Hank Aaron once said, “are my feelings.”

Still, the requests pour in. How does he feel about all this, about Bonds, about America, about steroids, about time passing by, about the record that he gave so much of his life to achieve? How does he feel? Is it really so hard to understand?

How would you feel?