'The Real Hank Aaron,' written by a longtime journalist with Milwaukee ties, covers every angle of Aaron's struggles and legacy
JR Radcliffe
Terence Moore's first impression of Hank Aaron was one of considerable disappointment.
Moore, who went on to a decades-long career in sports journalism and grew close with Aaron, moved to Milwaukee with his family in 1972, though his rooting allegiance remained with his old hometown team, the Cincinnati Reds.
Aaron returned in 1975 and 1976 to play for the Brewers in Milwaukee, the city where he first made his name as one of baseball's legends from 1954-65 with the Milwaukee Braves. But as Moore and his brothers found out, this wasn't that Aaron.
"I can remember that every time his name was mentioned, people went nuts," Moore said. "We were more sad than happy because we grew up knowing the other Hank Aaron. Many of the people in County Stadium obviously knew the other Hank Aaron, too, but it was always amazing to me how much Wisconsin, not just Milwaukee, loved that man.
"He was a sports god. It didn't take very long for me to discover the pecking order of athletic greatness in Wisconsin. Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr and Hank Aaron. ... I was just remembering the Hank I saw (as a younger boy), at Crosley Field, Riverfront Stadium, on television. Now here we are in the bleachers, and there's this overweight guy with a terrible Brewers uniform. It was almost unbearable."
But Moore's first impression, and many baseball fans' final impression, of Aaron was just the beginning. Moore believes his own connection to Milwaukee helped foster a relationship with the baseball icon, long after Milwaukee Journal sports editor Bill Dwyre spoke to Moore's sophomore class at James Madison High School, sparking an interest in Moore to pursue the profession.
Moore's new book, "The Real Hank Aaron," available for purchase May 17, attempts to paint a complete picture of the legend, who died in early 2021. It arrives as the Milwaukee Brewers and Atlanta Braves, Aaron's former teams that serendipitously also met in last year's playoffs, face off at American Family Field.
"Hank liked Atlanta, but he loved Milwaukee," Moore said. "When he would talk about his Milwaukee days and Wisconsin days, he'd almost have tears in his eyes and remark about how well he was treated by his fans. He loved the fans there, loved everything about it. Every time we'd talk about Milwaukee, it was almost like a little kid again.
"That was his city to the very end. To say he loved Milwaukee is to say Wisconsin loves beer."
Book an opportunity to cover every angle of Aaron's legacy
The book, enabled by Moore's near quarter-century as a sports columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and becoming the self-proclaimed "Hank Aaron Whisperer," doesn't dwell deeply on Aaron's days in Milwaukee, but it's filled with anecdotes and Aaron's own words about the many chapters of his baseball career.
That includes the much-publicized fraught circumstances around his chase of Babe Ruth's home run record, Aaron's relatively chilly relationship with Barry Bonds as Bonds was on his way to breaking Aaron's mark and the deep parallels between Aaron's story and that of Jackie Robinson.
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But it also goes further. Moore said he wanted to make it clear that Aaron was not one-dimensionally a man who quietly endured the racism of baseball and society at large, but instead continued to fiercely advocate for greater embrace of Black players in the sport after his retirement, and resistance to those ideas remained prevalent. That included when Aaron faced antagonism from inside and outside the Braves when he joined the organization's front office.
Moore doesn't want Aaron's struggle reduced to the 2½ year window when he was closing in on Ruth's mark of 714 career home runs.
"I call it the Muhammad Ali thing," Moore said. "There's a tendency when it comes to strong Black personalities, there's a metamorphosis. Once they become, in the minds of a lot of whites, harmless, then it's a revisionist history of how great they were, how nice they were. Ali went through that. He was hated in the 1960s, Black and white couldn't stand him. Once he couldn't talk and got Parkinson's, it was more like, 'Oh geez, he was so great, had such strong convictions.' Those same people weren't saying that back in the '60s.
"Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson and myself, we all have very similar experiences. One reason I could relate to Hank was that I understood what he'd gone through. ... Once he came to Atlanta and started facing the southern media, which was very racist, that's when he became the bad Black, so to speak. 'He's too big for his britches.' He didn't have trouble with the Milwaukee media, but Hank had always been outspoken. Time has made it seem like he was a guy that always kept his head down."
Moore's own pioneering trail began in Milwaukee
Moore graduated from Miami University in Ohio and became the first full-time Black sports reporter at the Cincinnati Enquirer, then again at the San Francisco Examiner, and then the first Black sports columnist at any paper in the deep south at the AJC. In the book, he frequently shares anecdotes from his own history, from an unsettling racist encounter with a coach on his football team at Madison High School to the time he often matched wits with those inside his own newsroom who were uncomfortable with his point of view.
His parents continued to live in Milwaukee for more than 30 years, and his brother, Darrell, played on the University of Wisconsin baseball team (and held the single-season stolen-base record for a program that went defunct in 1991).
During his time as a reporter, Moore spoke to a number of MLB officials in 1982 who believed MLB had silently endorsed a quota system to artificially depress the volume of African-American ballplayers, and he uncovered scouting reports that included race among the attributes for evaluation. When Moore asked MLB about his findings, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn denied Moore's allegations but also sent a memo to MLB teams telling them to remove race from scouting reports. It was around that time Moore first met Aaron and began relying on him as a resource.
Aaron's fight continued after his playing days as an executive
Aaron joined the Braves front office after his playing career concluded in 1976. Though his work in the player-development office helped equip Atlanta with a string of talented players who made the Braves one of the best franchises in all of pro sports in the 1990s, Moore said Aaron's role with the Braves was often seen as symbolic.
"Hank was regularly ripping baseball for being racist, which it was and which it is," Moore said. "He was getting the (hate) letters when he was a Braves executive. (The sentiment was), 'He needed to keep his damn mouth shut,' from outside in the public, from the media, from the paper I worked for, from inside the Braves, incoming from everywhere. He had the incidents about how the people at the Braves were insinuating, as all of us who are Black (have encountered), that he was lazy, didn't know what he was doing. That was an inspiration to me, to set the record straight and put it out there what this man went through and how he battled through this."
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Moore said when Robinson died, Aaron felt a responsibility to carry on his legacy of advocacy for Black ballplayers, a conviction that wasn't shared by many other Black Hall of Famers who preferred a less confrontational attitude at the time. Aaron fumed when anyone insinuated that he was speaking out only because local civil-rights leaders put him up to it.
"Particularly whites would say, 'I don't see any fire hoses and attack dogs; you're not getting lynched,' " Moore said of perceptions that racism has abated over time. "That's not the way it's done anymore. Little mind games are being played constantly, even when you're Hank Aaron. That's what I wanted to make clear in the book."
JR Radcliffe can be reached at (262) 361-9141 or jradcliffe@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JRRadcliffe.