Column: Aaron fought simply as fiercely for civil rights | Professional Sports activities

Jackie Robinson was a legend I read about in history books.

Hank Aaron was a man I actually saw play. When the news of his death flashed on my smartphone screen on Friday, I had an emotional reaction that I wasn’t really expecting.

He wasn’t my favorite baseball player. He didn’t play on my favorite team. Indeed, when he was staring at Tom Seaver inside the racket’s box, I made my way to the other.

But I loved Hank Aaron. Just as I loved Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Colin Kaepernick and every righteous black athlete who knows that struggles for freedom are a thousand times more important than a home run or a party dance in the end zone.

And Hank Aaron was a fighter.

Henry Louis Aaron, “Hammerin ‘Hank” for anyone who has ever played a ball game, was best known for a long ball record that stood for a generation.

But the home run crown – one of the most prestigious in any sport – came at an unbearable price for the Atlanta Braves star: constant ridicule and serious death threats from sick racists who couldn’t stand the thought of black people breaking Babe Ruth’s sacred record in 1974.

“In 1972, when people finally noticed I was climbing up Ruth’s back, the letters ‘Dear N —- r’ came up with alarming regularity,” wrote Aaron in his 1991 memoir: “I had a hammer.”

“They told me that no one had the right to go where I was going. There is no way to measure the impact of these letters on me, but I like to think that each of them added another home run to my total. “

Aaron, a Hall of Famer, had talked endlessly about the stress of chasing records on him and his family. But the remarks he once made about his earliest days in baseball moved me the most.

Aaron grew up in poverty in a house with no electricity or a bathroom in Mobile. As boys, he and his younger brother, Tommie, who also became an important leaguer, used broomsticks as bats and bottle caps as balls.

When he was 14 years old, a year after Robinson broke the baseball color line, Robinson attended Mobile and Aaron skipped school to meet his hero. Robinson advised the boy to concentrate on his education and later play baseball.

Aaron wasn’t listening. When he was 17, he signed with a team in the Negro Leagues, the Indianapolis Clowns. He was on a road trip with the team in Washington, DC when he received one of his first lessons on the ugliness of racism in a league where only the ball was white.

“We ate breakfast while we waited for the rain to stop and I can still imagine sitting with the clowns in a restaurant behind Griffith Stadium and listening to all the plates in the kitchen after dinner break, “said Aaron once.

“What a terrible noise. The irony struck me as a child: Here we were in the capital of the land of freedom and equality, and they had to destroy the plates that had touched the forks that had been in the mouths of black men. If dogs had eaten from these plates, they would have washed them. “

When his 23-year career as a player was over, Aaron became front office manager, a seat where he fought as hard for equality as he did for an extra base on the field.

As a boy growing up in Brooklyn, I wore two baseball caps. A Mets hat and one for the Indianapolis clowns.

I still wear a Mets hat. I wish I had my clown hat now.

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