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I DIDN’T KNOW their names. I only knew I was jealous watching them, those two bold 17-year-olds in bell bottoms making an unsanctioned cameo on the field when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record.

If you were among the 55,773 other fans at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium on April 8, 1974, or, as I was, in one of the 14.7 million households with TV sets tuned to the game that night, chances are you remember the bushy-haired teens patting Aaron on the back after he crossed second base.

For me, what continues to resonate 50 years later was not just the astonishment that two dudes in street clothes were able to run onto the field during the most anticipated game in decades but also the envy felt that night by my 10-year-old self. 

Hank Aaron, my favorite player, had just connected for his record 715th career home run. If only that was me running the bases with him. 

At least I would get the pleasure many years later of talking to Britt Gaston and Cliff Courtenay about their rogue run on the basepaths alongside Hammerin’ Hank. They shared their stories with me for a Palm Beach Post column in 2006, after Barry Bonds entered that season with 708 home runs, on his way to breaking Aaron’s record in 2007.

But I certainly wasn’t the first or only reporter to get their story. The two bandit baserunners would share it plenty of times over the years, the price — or penance? —  of being rogue footnotes to perhaps the most famous home run ever hit.  

"Turned out to be pretty embarrassing," Courtenay told me. "It was just being caught up in the moment and thinking with a 17-year-old brain."

Whose bright idea was it to join Aaron on the basepaths?

"Cliff and I usually blame each other," Gaston said in my 2006 column. "I remember talking about it when we were walking into the stadium. It was one of those things. You start talking about it and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until you've talked yourself into it."

Gaston said he remembered hearing a pre-game announcement over the stadium public-address system. "They were going to throw any individual in jail who tried to run on the field," he said. "And we were fully prepared to go to jail."

They attended the game with two other friends, each pair sitting in different sections along the first-base line. “Before the game I went to their seats and told them we were going to do it. We didn't know how, only that we were going to do it,’’ Gaston told reporters in 1984.

The plan was to sneak down to the railing — the only separation point between the first row of seats and the field — each time Aaron came to bat. If he didn’t homer, they would return to their seats.  

In Aaron’s first at bat, leading off the second inning, he drew a walk. In his second at-bat, in the fourth inning, he took a ball on Downing’s first pitch then connected with the next. The ball arched high and deep toward the left field wall.  

"This is it," Gaston recalled telling Courtenay. "We jumped before it cleared the fence.’’

Legendary sportswriter Dick Young, in his story for the New York Daily News, described Aaron encountering the two teens on his home-run trot:

“When he reached second base, he was picked up by a young convoy, two boys in their late teens who had appeared as if from out of nowhere. They jogged behind him by a step then left him at third base and dashed for the stands, two fully clothed streakers, hoping to escape the arm of the law. They failed.’’ 

To the teens’ astonishment, the only person on the field to touch them was Aaron, when he threw a gentle elbow as they caught up to him.

"The security guards had their backs to us," Gaston said. "They were all watching the home run. We ran with him probably 10 yards. We didn't want to steal the show. We patted him on the back and peeled off and tried to get back into the stands.’’

They didn’t get very far.

"They caught Cliff as he was getting over the railing," Gaston told me. "I got up into the stands about 10 or 12 rows and tried to mingle in with everyone, but they had me zeroed in." 

What the pair didn’t know that night: They were nearly in the crosshairs of an Atlanta police officer’s pistol. 

As Aaron closed in on Ruth’s home run record the previous season, he received hate mail and death threats. When racists threatened to shoot him before he ever touched home plate, the FBI assigned undercover Atlanta police officer Calvin Wardlow to watch over the slugger on April 8, 1974. 

Wardlow sat with Aaron’s wife and friends. He kept a snub-nose .32 concealed in a binoculars case.

In his 2005 book Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America, author Tom Stanton described Wardlow’s reaction when he saw the two teens run on the field:

Wardlow grabbed his binoculars case and slid his hand inside and around the grip of the gun. A thousand questions flitted through his mind. Should he show his revolver? Should he charge onto the field? Did the young men present a danger? Should he risk spoiling the moment? What if he were to shoot and accidentally strike Aaron? Wardlow paused. The young men slapped Aaron’s back and congratulated him. Wardlow sighed. They meant Aaron no harm.

Aaron was asked after the game that night what the kids said to him.  “Were there two boys running behind me?’’ he replied. “I just wanted to touch all the bases.’’ 

In 2010, Aaron said he warned Wardlow before the game to be careful about pulling the pistol during the game, according to an excellent story published April 5 in Lagniappe Weekly, an online news site based in Mobile, Ala., where Aaron was born and raised. 

“I told him, ‘Now Calvin, you’ve got to be very careful when you pull that gun out on somebody. You know what to do, but so many times, these people are just having fun,’” Aaron recalled.  “And when these kids were running around the base path with me, he said he thought about what I’d said and he said he was so thankful that I did because it wasn’t nothing else but a bunch of kids having fun.”

The two teens spent a few hours in jail that night. 

“We got the whole treatment — fingerprinted, mug shots — then were put in a big holding cell with about 40 other guys,’’ Courtenay recalled in a 1994 press conference to promote a TBS documentary about Aaron. “One of them was kinda crazy and we gave him all the room he wanted. We were there three or four hours before they released us to our parents.’’ 

They received $100 fines. Their sentences were suspended after an assist from Aaron, who helped get the charges dropped.

"I told the judge they meant no harm," Aaron said in 1994.  

Gaston and Courtenay were close as teens, but they would go their separate ways in life. Gaston became a successful businessman, Courtenay an optometrist. They occasionally kept in touch and participated with Aaron in charity reunions.

After Gaston was diagnosed with cancer in 2010, a stronger connection was forged.

“Seeing him and his deterioration was sad and it makes me think, ‘We had this public moment and it will always be there.’ It’s hard to express,” Courtenay told CNN in 2012.

Gaston died in September 2011. His obituary mentioned his rogue run with Aaron.  

Earlier that year, he and Courtenay got together with Aaron at an event where they signed baseballs for charity. Courtenay and Aaron each put their signatures on a ball and gave it to Gaston.   

“Britt was a bold, charismatic, bright individual who was a little bit reckless and a bit stubborn but he was one of those people, whether you liked him or not, you couldn’t not like him,” Courtenay told CNN. “Some people just have a magnetism about them. He was that kind of guy.”

When Aaron died in 2021, Courtenay wrote a tribute to the slugger on his Facebook page. “He was always king and gracious to Britt and me. … RIP Hammer.’’

Fifty years later, we can watch grainy video of the teens briefly running with Aaron and we can see that famous photo of the three, captured by photographer Ron Sherman, who was on assignment that night for United Press International. 

“It was one of 544 images I made that night,’’ Sherman wrote in 2019 in a guest column for photofocus. “I didn’t know it was special until I saw it in the darkroom after the game.’’   

Today, security protocols at sports stadiums are more intense. It’s rare to see a fan run on the field. Even in 2006, Gaston mentioned how the security protocols at that time would make it nearly impossible for fans to get over the railing. 

I asked him what he would do in hindsight, if he could go back in time to April 8, 1974. He didn’t hesitate with his reply. 

"I'd do it again,’’ he said, “jail and all.’’

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For more entertaining Palm Beach Stories, visit ByJoeCapozzi.com.

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