The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (107 page)

Forester took a slight left and headed his golf cart along the two right-field bull pens. He drove slowly to give the 34,187 adoring fans, and Williams himself, plenty of time to soak up the moment. Then he took a hard right at Pesky’s Pole, went past the Red Sox dugout, behind home plate, and past the visitors’ dugout. The American League and National League All-Stars all applauded as they stood along the baselines, as did the All-Century players. Ted waved the unfamiliar white hat early and often to the delirious crowd—hat tipping, after all, was now routine for him since he’d shattered his own taboo against the practice back in 1991.

Then Forester took a right around third base and headed to the pitcher’s mound, where Ted was engulfed by players young and old in a memorable tableau of spontaneous joy and adulation. The younger players seemed especially eager to bask in Ted’s aura, and he happily greeted some of his favorites, including Tony Gwynn, of the San Diego Padres, and Nomar Garciaparra. Mark McGwire pressed in for a blessing and
Ted asked him if he had ever smelled burned wood when he fouled off a pitch. “All the time,” McGwire replied.

The players kept crowding around and wouldn’t leave, despite pleas from the public-address announcer to do so. “Everybody said no,” recalled Garciaparra. “Nobody wanted to leave.”

It was a magical moment, one of the greatest nights in Ted’s life. “I’m a rather emotional guy, and when I got up there, tears were coming out of Ted’s eyes,” said Larry Walker of the Colorado Rockies. “I kind of turned away. It almost brought tears to my eyes. The greatest player in the world is surrounded by more great players. It was outstanding to see.”

Finally Tony Gwynn helped Ted out of the golf cart and pointed him toward home plate so he could throw out the first ball. As Gwynn took firm hold of his left arm, Williams stood in front of the mound and tossed a ball in on the fly to Carlton Fisk, the former Red Sox catcher. A giddy Fisk then jogged out to hug Ted.
³⁴

After the ceremony, Al Forester drove Ted up to luxury box L-22, the Polaroid suite, overlooking left field, which had been rented by Gerry Rittenberg for four days during the All-Star festivities. Rittenberg was there with his father and two sons. John-Henry was there, thrilled, along with Anita. Actor Matt Damon came by with his father. The four pilots who had buzzed Fenway in their jets during the pregame flyover dropped by to pay their respects, and Ted quizzed them on what altitude they’d been cleared for. The pilots said twelve hundred feet.

“You weren’t at twelve hundred feet, you were at seven hundred feet, right?” Ted said.

“You’re right, sir,” the pilots replied sheepishly. Then they talked in detail about the specs of the jets: their engine thrust, how fast they could go, and how they compared to those Williams had flown in Korea.
³⁵

Predictably, John-Henry took a shellacking in the press for his Hitter.net play. Even some of his close friends and his sister Claudia questioned the move. But Claudia said her father himself later told her he’d been all in. “Dad said, ‘I wouldn’t go out on the goddamn field if I wasn’t wearing the hat.’ ”

However, at Williams’s next public appearance, that October—a cameo at the second World Series game in Atlanta, which John-Henry did not attend—Ted took the field in his Red Sox hat.

T
ed’s joy at the reception he received at the All-Star Game was short-lived, tempered by the death, that same month, of his longtime faithful dog, the Dalmatian named Slugger.

Williams had grown so attached to the dog that he had told many of his friends that he wanted to die before Slugger did. He’d even said so publicly. “I’ve got a dog I absolutely love,” Ted told the
Boston Globe
in 1998, just a year earlier. “I asked that guy in heaven to drop me dead before my dog. That’s how much I love my dog.”
¹

But Slugger had already been operated on for cancer, and now, at the age of thirteen, was struggling with kidney failure. And so the local vet, Charles Magill, who had been caring for Slugger for several years, was summoned. The dog was lying on his bed in the garage when Magill put him down.

Williams “was very stoic but quite verbal about his attachment to the dog,” Magill recalled. “ ‘Dogs are a lot more loyal than people and a lot nicer,’ he said.”

When talking with friends or his caretakers about his hope that he would die before his dog, Ted would usually go on to say that he and Slugger would both be cremated and their ashes tossed in the sea. That’s what he told his
My Turn at Bat
ghostwriter John Underwood five months after Slugger’s death, when Underwood visited with his wife just before Christmas. “Once, Ted paused in front of a picture of Slugger and said, ‘Yeah, he’s dead, and I’m going to have my ashes mixed with his and thrown out to sea,’ ” Underwood said. “We have a videotape of this.”
²

Three years later, after Ted died, Magill was shocked to read a quote
from John-Henry in the local paper in which the younger Williams said that he had buried Slugger’s ashes in Ted’s backyard. Actually, John-Henry had never picked up the dog’s ashes, and Magill still had them. “Ted loved Slugger so much,” Magill said. “I think John-Henry may have been a little jealous of the dog.”

Magill contacted Ted’s estranged daughter, Bobby-Jo, and gave the ashes to her.
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Since John-Henry’s arrival in Citrus Hills in 1994, he had narrowed Ted’s circle of friends to those he deemed necessary or would never dare exclude, such as old Red Sox pals Dominic DiMaggio and Bobby Doerr. John-Henry could monitor who was calling the house from his office in Hernando, and he decided that certain calls and messages for Ted would go undelivered and thus unanswered.

“Ted had a huge network of friends from all walks of life,” said Rich Eschen, who helped with the memorabilia business in Hernando. “Military friends, baseball friends, local schmucks, and he loved us all. I think John-Henry resented that. I think he wanted that attention. When John-Henry came down here, some of the people that Ted used to consider friends felt shut out. Friends of Ted’s for fifty years who would come visit and shoot it with him—that all stopped around ninety-four.”
⁴
Mail stacked up, and many Christmas cards and birthday wishes to Williams remained unopened or never given to him. As a result, Ted gradually felt more isolated. Buzz Hamon, a former director of Williams’s museum, said Ted would call him and complain that he felt like a prisoner.
⁵

Ted used the same word—
prisoner
—with two closer friends: Elden Auker, his former Red Sox teammate, and Tommy Lasorda. “John-Henry wouldn’t let anyone get near Ted,” Lasorda said. “Ted said to me, ‘I’m like a prisoner. I can’t get to see any of my friends.’ He was in that house, and he couldn’t get out. He couldn’t do anything about it. I think I was one of the few he let in at all times. Me and Elden Auker.”
⁶

In March of 2000, Lasorda arranged to spring Ted from his house and fly him over to Vero Beach in a private plane to watch a Dodgers spring training game. Williams met with the Dodgers players in the clubhouse before the game and seemed offended when only about a dozen of them said they had read his book
The Science of Hitting.
“There are, what, sixty of you in this room, and only twelve of you have read that book? That’s horseshit!” Ted said as the Dodgers laughed.
⁷

In the stadium, Williams was introduced to the crowd, and Lasorda, mindful of Ted’s failing vision, supplied a pitch-by-pitch account of the
game as Auker sat next to them and looked on. “Afterwards, Ted said to me, ‘Tommy, you made me the happiest guy in the world taking me down here today,’ ” Lasorda said.

Williams’s deteriorating vision was also making it more difficult for him to see the Red Sox games on his big-screen television. He told Dom DiMaggio about this, as well as about his feelings of isolation, and DiMaggio found a way to address both problems: “I said, ‘Teddy, how many guys do you see—you get a lot of guys coming?’ ” DiMaggio recalled. “He said, ‘Dommie, I don’t see anybody, and I have a hard time getting information on the game. I’ve got a big-screen TV, but I’m having trouble seeing it. People around here don’t understand the game. I know when they win or lose, but I don’t know the details.’ I said, ‘Teddy, this is what I’m going to do. I will call you every morning and give you the report in detail of the Sox game.’ He said, ‘Oh, that would be good.’ So I called him every game except for a day off. Sometimes I would forget, and I’d kick myself.”
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The press sensed Ted was nearing the end of the line, and Williams probably did, too, so he gave several valedictory interviews in which he offered some insights on his career and his persona.

Talking to Bob Greene for a
Life
magazine spread in February of 2000, he confessed, “My most disappointing things all my life were always related to baseball. I didn’t feel good because I did something successfully—I felt bad if I failed to do something that I was expected to do.” Williams said that while he always wanted people to think he was the greatest hitter who ever lived, he never believed it himself. “I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now,” he said. “Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, they were so good.”

And what made him happy these days? The sound of birds, Ted said. “I’ve got five clocks in my house, and they all sing different songs, on the hour. At 10 a.m., I might hear eight or ten birds sing at the same time. I’ve learned to love to hear those clocks sing. The beautiful songs.”
⁹

In July, Williams explained to Paul Reid of the
Palm Beach Post
that before he was a fisherman he’d been a hunter. “I think the most peaceful times of my life were spent at dawn, in a duck blind somewhere,” Ted said. “Manitoba. Minnesota. You wait for the flocks, it’s quiet, a breeze maybe. So quiet. So majestic. But then the great bird migrations got not so great. The birds disappeared. People did that, yes? Not hunters, but mankind. What a wacky bunch we humans are.”

Ted complained, quite forcefully, about getting old. “The so-called
golden years. What a lot of bull. I think you ought to get a pill when you turn 72, a pill to take if and when you think it’s time. I call it the Kevorkian pill.”

More than anything, Reid was struck by Williams’s curiosity. Ted asked the writer who he thought the most important American of the century was. Knowing Ted’s conservative politics, Reid thought he would tweak him by answering FDR. While Williams mustered a few kind words for Roosevelt, he said he had someone else in mind.

MacArthur? Reid guessed.

“That’s the ticket,” said Ted. “Douglas MacArthur. There’s a book about him, a book I read and then picked right up again and reread.
American Caesar
I think is the title. It’s written by… ah, written by…”

“William Manchester,” Reid said.

“Yes. What a writer.”

Reid told Williams that he and Manchester had a few things in common. Manchester had been a Marine, wounded in Okinawa, and he was a lifelong Red Sox fan. Then Reid asked Ted if he’d like the renowned biographer’s phone number. Reid was a good friend of Manchester’s and before long would be chosen by the ailing writer to finish the third volume of his trilogy on Winston Churchill. Manchester would die in 2004.

Williams, always sensitive about his lack of formal education, asked Reid if he thought Manchester would really want to talk to him. Reid said he was quite sure the answer would be yes.

So the phone call was arranged, and it turned out that Ted and Manchester had something else in common: they had both faced Vic Raschi, the late New York Yankees pitcher. Manchester told Williams that he and Raschi had grown up in Springfield, Massachusetts—Manchester a light-hitting second baseman for Springfield’s Classical High School and Raschi a flamethrower for Springfield Technical. Raschi made quick work of Manchester the one time he faced him, striking him out easily. “He threw so hard I couldn’t even see the ball,” said Manchester. “I feared for my life.”

Back in Ted’s kitchen, Reid watched as the Kid picked up a baseball in his right hand and gazed at it “with all the intensity of Hamlet with Yorick’s noggin.” Then he sighed, rolled the ball across the table, and said: “I was a ballplayer.”

“Like a Ferrari is a car, Ted,” Reid said.

Williams smiled at that. Reid thought Ted knew he was going to die soon.
¹⁰

As John-Henry had hoped, following Ted’s appearance at the All-Star Game, Hitter.net received a surge of interest, not only in the form of hits on its website but also in the form of some inquiries about buying the company. The most serious potential buyer was Duro Communications, a large Internet service provider near Orlando that had raised more than $100 million in equity and had quickly acquired dozens of smaller ISPs. But one issue soon emerged: Duro was only interested in the dial-up, ISP portion of Hitter, not its Web hosting component—that is, porn—and it concluded that the businesses were too intermingled.

Still, talks continued for almost a year through various fits and starts, but no deal would be had. “John-Henry was a sales and marketing guy with little regard for finances or understanding of finances, in my opinion,” said Ted Taylor, head of Duro’s investment bank. “The numbers didn’t prove out all the time. His accountant would have some problems trying to reconcile John-Henry’s numbers, and Duro was very thorough in their due diligence, and there were always things that came to light each time we would get close to a deal.”

At one point, Taylor, who participated in the negotiations, said the company offered John-Henry a figure that was “north of $5 million” for Hitter. Peter Sutton, Williams’s Boston-based lawyer, said that the figure was about $7 million, and that he and others advised John-Henry to “take it and run.”

But John-Henry chose to hold out for more, believing he could ride the dot-com boom higher. However, the Internet bubble peaked in March of 2000 and went downhill, bursting by 2001. At the same time, interest rates increased, and the economy slowed.

“At the end, it fell apart because the numbers just wouldn’t support the minimum price John-Henry wanted,” Taylor said. “We kept trying to make it work, and it didn’t. The fact of the matter was John-Henry was an excellent salesman, but he wasn’t focused enough on what he was trying to do. We told him Hitter would go under, but he was in denial. He had the forethought and vision to build that business at first, but he should have found a techie and a business partner who would manage it for him. He was a nice guy, he commanded a presence; he just didn’t know his own limitations.”
¹¹

Duro’s warning that Hitter would fail was prescient. Though his porn business was still healthy, John-Henry had acquired new and bigger computer equipment using leveraged money, and his bandwidth costs had increased substantially. He had postponed paying a growing list of
creditors, assuming that Hitter would be sold, but when Duro walked away, he felt he had no alternative but to protect his company and himself, so on July 21, 2000, Hitter filed for bankruptcy in Orlando, listing assets of $1,293,183.92 against liabilities of $5,518,608.71.

John-Henry delegated Anita Lovely to deliver the bankruptcy news to Ted. Williams was upset, naturally, and as it happened, Bob Breitbard, Ted’s boyhood pal from San Diego, was visiting at the time. Ted and Breitbard exchanged annual visits, with Williams usually going to San Diego in the winter and Breitbard coming to Florida in the summer, around Ted’s birthday. As pained as Williams was to learn that Hitter had gone bankrupt, Breitbard had another John-Henry issue to raise: young Williams had only repaid him $250,000 of the $500,000 Breitbard had loaned him in 1993. Frank Brothers, who was present for this discussion, recalled Breitbard saying, “Ted, I’m gonna be honest with you. Your son has never paid me a dime of the $250,000 he owes me. And the only reason I’m telling you this is I have children. As long as I’m alive, nothing’s going to happen. But if I die before you, my children are going to go after your son for that money. The only reason I’m telling you this is because I love you.”
¹²

Ted tried to absorb this second blow. John-Henry had assured Breitbard that he was going to repay him in full, but Williams was now frantic. Over the next few days he worked the phones, trying to determine what he might sell immediately to repay his friend. The likely choice was his place on the Miramichi River in Canada.