The Price Of Admission

When Aaron rounded second on April 8, 1974, two young men came out of the stands toward him. In the seats, an off-duty Atlanta detective named Calvin Wardlaw put his hand on the .38 in his binocular case and made a decision he had about a second and a half to make.

They were fans. They wanted to shake his hand. Wardlaw had been shadowing Aaron for two years because the threats were credible enough that the FBI opened files on some of them, and because some of the letters included diagrams of how it might be done while Aaron stood in right field. Aaron got around 900,000 pieces of mail in 1973. The Braves hired a secretary just to open it. The Postal Service eventually sent him a plaque for receiving more mail than anyone in the country outside of politics, which is a strange thing to be honored for when you know what was inside most of it.

He hit 40 home runs that season anyway and finished one short of Ruth, then spent the entire winter wondering whether he would live to see Opening Day. He had an obituary prepared. His children were guarded against kidnapping threats.

What people saw was a man who never once complained in public. What he said later was this: it made him see clearly what this country was about, and the taste of it never left. Both things are true. The composure everyone admires was not calm. It was the price of admission, and he paid it in full.