Hearts and Homers

It was a different moment in a different era, a rainy spring night in Atlanta, April 8, 1974, when Henry Aaron, one of the last players to make it from the Negro Leagues into Major League Baseball, sent a ball arching into myth and the Southern darkness.

One in every four televisions in America -- from San Diego to Bangor, from Seattle to Key West, from the dark of the Nebraska plains to the single-bulb glare of walk-ups in Harlem -- was tuned to the game. President Richard Nixon, mired in Watergate, stopped to watch.

715.

Aaron's shot to left broke the most hallowed record in American sport, Babe Ruth's home run record of 714. It was a number known by every schoolboy, in every sandlot. Exceeding it was unthinkable. You couldn't break the record of a god.

Ruth, who had out-homered entire teams -- season after season. Ruth, the hard-knock kid from a Baltimore orphanage who had become a superstar known by his first name, often prefaced with "the." The Babe. He was the "patron saint of American possibility," in the phrase of one biographer. His last name became an adjective, Ruthian, deriving from Herculean, to denote an achievement worthy of the ancient Greeks.

And now, on the outer edge of the civil rights era, the patron saint of another sort of American possibility, Hank Aaron, was circling the bases. The nation, cheering, weeping, ecstatic, dumbfounded, watched a black man jog into the realm of folklore.

715.

It was like seeing John Henry drive steel.

In the coming days or weeks, Barry Bonds will almost certainly break Aaron's home run record of 755, and this time, it will matter very little. Most of the nation (outside of Bonds's home park in San Francisco) will watch with ambivalence, if not bellowed disdain.

This is primarily the fault of the allegedly steroid-enhanced Bonds, who is widely perceived to be a great player who cheated his way into the outer reaches of the record books, a mere mortal trying to fake his way to Mount Olympus. At every stadium but his home, he is booed. People chant, "Cheater! Cheater! Cheater!" Or just scream "SSTEEEROOOIIDS!"

Most damning: Aaron, an honorable man of 73, has said he will not attend the record-setting dinger.

Will the home run record cease to mean anything? Will we have lost something once cherished?