Sports Talk – Hank Aaron

Sunday August 13th, @ 1 PM with Zack Klein & Jeff Schultz

HANK AARON: Portrait of the Player and the Man

Zach Klein, sports director for Channel 2 Action News, and Jeff Schultz, senior writer for The Athletic, discussed the amazing highs and sobering challenges that were never far apart in “The Hammer’s” world.

Hank Aaron reached the pinnacle of Major League Baseball when he broke Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974, but getting there was not easy for reasons that went well beyond the field of play. The estimated 900,000 letters the Atlanta Braves outfielder received in 1973 was reported to have contained many hundreds of racist attacks and death threats. It wasn’t the first time that Aaron had prevailed in the face of racism. He started his career in the segregated Negro American League as an 18-year-old in 1951, and when he made it to the Majors in 1954, he often slept in railcars in which the Milwaukee Braves traveled since most of the hotels where his teammates stayed were white only. Aaron radiated dignity in public, but the inequities and threats were a burden he carried into his successful post-playing career in Atlanta, the self-promoted “City Too Busy to Hate.”

In The Breman program “Hank Aaron: Portrait of the Player and the Man,” Zach Klein, sports director for Channel 2 Action News, and Jeff Schultz, senior writer for The Athletic, explored the amazing highs and sobering hardships that were never far apart in “The Hammer’s” world.

The program was another in a series focused on photographer Robert Weingarten’s biographical portraits, including one of Aaron, in The Breman’s current photography exhibition “ICONS: Selections from the Portrait Unbound.” “ICONS” curator Tony Casadonte was in the gallery to discuss Weingarten’s groundbreaking portraits before and after the talk.

• enablewpts: 0