Here’s What Hank Aaron Really Thought About Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds And Black Players In Baseball

Hank Aaron thought The Great Bambino was closer to The Great Bamboozler since George Herman “Babe” Ruth never played against African American players.

Speaking of Ruth, Aaron carried lifetime scars from the racism he faced during the early 1970s when he sprinted toward breaking the Babe’s all-time home run record of 714 along the way to 755.

Later, during the post-playing stretch of Aaron’s life, when he supposedly had become a beloved icon throughout society, he encountered haters outside and inside the same Atlanta Braves franchise that he served as either a player or a front office worker for nearly 70 years.

Barry Bonds? The African American slugger who later surpassed Aaron’s all-time record in August 2007?

Even with that steroids thing, Aaron could tolerate Bonds, the player. In contrast, he was so bothered by Bonds, the person, that he refused to do a 30-second commercial with Bonds for Charles Schwab worth $1.9 million (a massive figure back then) to run during the 2002 Super Bowl. Aaron eventually agreed, but he did so only after he was guaranteed he didn’t have to encounter Bonds during the filming.

This is the Aaron I got to know while writing my new book called “The Real Hank Aaron: An Intimate Look at the Life and Legacy of the Home Run King,” which comes out Tuesday. The book gives answers to these questions: What did George W. Bush whisper into Aaron’s ear at the White House in 2002 to cause the new Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient to cringe? Why did Aaron purge many of his friends in his 70s? Who could make you smile in a flash quicker than this frequently hilarious guy with his contagious laugh?

Then there is Aaron and The Myth.

Aaron preferred The Truth regarding the trigger behind the drop of African American players in Major League Baseball from its peak of around 25% in the mid-1970s to 7% these days for an industry that Forbes senior contributor Maury Brown said could surpass a record $11 billion this season in gross revenues.

“They’re trying to get all these people from all over the world to come here to play Major League Baseball. (Those who run MLB) don’t give a hoot, not one hill of beans, about (an African American) person. Not one thing whether we play baseball or not,” Aaron told me during a 2007 interview, revealed for the first time in the book. “This game of baseball, and you have to look at it, that this game was so, it was just folding until Jackie Robinson came in and lifted it to another playing level and trying to make it exciting for the fans — both Black and White.”

Robinson became Aaron’s hero after Jackie trotted onto Ebbets Field with the hometown Brooklyn Dodgers to break baseball’s color barrier on April 15, 1947.

Seven years later, Aaron began his sprint to the Baseball Hall of Fame — 25 All-Star Game selections, 2,297 RBIs and 1,477 extra base hits (all records) to join his 3,771 hits and 2,174 runs scored — by spending 21 seasons with the Braves of Milwaukee and Atlanta and his final two with the Milwaukee Brewers.

Aaron left Wisconsin for Georgia during that fall of 1976 to join his brother-in-law, Bill Lucas, as the first African American executives in MLB history after Braves owner Ted Turner hired Lucas as his general manager a few months before giving Aaron a front office job.

Nevertheless, from the height of Aaron’s playing career during the 1960s through the time of his last breath on January 22, 2021, he believed the game he cherished spent years systematically phasing African Americans out of the game.

He believed baseball had a quota system.

As I mention in the book, Aaron wasn’t alone with such thoughts among prominent African American players of his generation — along with other players, managers, coaches and officials (both Black and White) throughout Major League Baseball when I did a deep study of the game in 1982 for the San Francisco Examiner. I even discovered back then during my research that MLB had a slot for race on its computerized scouting reports (neither the NFL nor the NBA had such a thing), and baseball didn’t remove that distinction until I brought it to the attention of then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who first denied it was there.

That’s when I first met Aaron.

We became kindred souls, especially during my 25 years at the Atlanta Journal-Consitution through April 2009 as the first African American general sports columnist in the Deep South while becoming the Hank Aaron Whisperer.

Not only that, but I went from a 12-year-old baseball fan — who bought a Hank Aaron poster that I still have on a wall in my Atlanta home — to an honorary pallbearer at his funeral to author of The Real Hank Aaron.