The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (27 page)

“The elevator door opens, and out pops Cunningham wearing a
porkpie hat, and it was obvious he had been drinking,” recalled pitcher Elden Auker. “He walks straight over to Ted and interrupts us, saying, ‘C’mon, kid, let’s get this over with. I have to interview you because the people in Boston want to know what this kid coming up from Minneapolis is like.’ Ted just looked at him and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Cunningham, I don’t talk to sportswriters after they’ve been drinking.’ Well, you could see the steam coming out of him as he walked away.”
⁴⁵
Despite that incident, Cunningham generally liked Williams and would often come to his defense when he was under attack over the years.

Lake, like Cunningham, had once starred in football—first as a halfback at Lafayette College, in Pennsylvania, and then in Buffalo and Philadelphia, where he played professionally. He served as a college football referee until shortly before his death.

Nicknamed the Duke, Lake worked with Egan in the Hearst building that housed the
Record
and the
American,
but the two were unfriendly rivals and sometimes feuded publicly. Although it was Lake to whom Ted gave his pivotal rant in August of 1940—the story that would permanently change the tenor of his tenure with the Red Sox—Lake, unlike Egan, was never obsessed with Williams and seemed more interested in the interplay between the star and his fans. He once wrote that the murmur of the crowd when Ted came to bat was “like the autumn wind moaning through an apple orchard.”
⁴⁶

Besides the Big Three, the longest-serving, most influential, and most colorful beat writers and columnists who covered Williams included Hy Hurwitz, Harold Kaese, Clif Keane, and Roger Birtwell—all of the
Globe
—Joe Cashman of the
Daily Record,
and Ed Rumill of the
Christian Science Monitor.
These men were characters and players in their own right, and they had a significant role both in shaping public perceptions of Williams and in framing Ted’s own view of the press and the world around him.

Few writers had as many ups and downs or jousts with Ted as Hurwitz, a former Marine who was just a shade over five feet tall. Hurwitz had joined the
Globe
as a copyboy in the late ’20s, when he was a senior at Boston’s English High School. He covered Ted throughout his career, and they served in World War II at the same time, from 1942 to 1946.

Hurwitz and Ted were thrown together in earnest in 1946, when the
Globe
announced that Williams, for the hefty sum of $1,500 per week, would write a column at the end of the Red Sox’s pennant season. The paper did not announce that Hurwitz, also the
Globe
’s Red Sox beat
reporter, would be the ghostwriter. Each dreaded the daily meeting, in which Ted would riff on some subject or other and then Hurwitz would produce the column, entitled
TED WILLIAMS SAYS.
According to Al Hirshberg, around the seventh inning of every game, Hurwitz would say to his colleagues in the press box: “In two more innings I’m going to have to go down to listen to that big sonofabitch.” Ted, for his part, would sit on the bench and complain to teammates: “In two more innings I’m going to have to talk to that no-good little bastard.”
⁴⁷

One of the most colorful characters among the writers of the day was the
Globe
’s Clif Keane, who was known as the Che Guevara of Boston’s sporting press. Short, paunchy, balding, and bespectacled, Keane constantly pushed the boundary between friendly ribbing and overly harsh needling. He carried out his often riotous repartee with the deft timing and delivery of a stand-up comedian, but he softened his blows if the targets were people he liked.

When Roger Maris was chasing Ruth’s record in 1961 and the Yankees were making their last visit of the season to Fenway Park, the New York writers told Keane that Maris was in the bunker and not talking to anyone. “Really?” said Keane. He walked over to the Yankees dugout, spotted his target, and called out, “Hey, Maris, you shoemaker! You busher! Who would want to talk to you?” Maris laughed and said, “Come on, Clif, I’ll give you a story.”
⁴⁸
And Keane got a scoop.

Baseball was Keane’s realm, but occasionally his editors gave him an assignment off the diamond. Once, he was dispatched to cover a dog show—unfamiliar turf, to say the least. He filed a routine story, then later learned that one of the leading dogs in the show had died of a heart attack. Keane called in a perfunctory paragraph to be added to the end of his story. The next day
Globe
editor Larry Winship called Keane in and chewed him out, telling him that the drama of the dog dying should have led the story, not ended it. Keane was unmoved. “Larry,” he explained, “the dog died and I buried it.”
⁴⁹

Keane grew up in the Dorchester section of Boston and was married to a
Globe
classified ad taker. He joined the paper’s sports staff in 1939. He always called Williams Bush, tossing Ted’s familiar greeting right back at him. Ted once threw a ball toward Keane in jest, but the ball hit a pebble and bounced up to shatter Keane’s eyeglasses. Williams apologized and offered to buy him a new pair of glasses. Keane declined and said, “I’ll get you, but I’ll get you between the eyes.”
⁵⁰

Roger Birtwell was a Boston Brahmin (Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, class of ’23) who spoke with the lockjawed, languid manner
characteristic of the city’s self-styled aristocracy. Before joining the
Globe
in 1942, Birtwell, who was known as the Rajah, had worked in New York for the
Daily News,
the
World-Telegram
, and the
Herald Tribune.
He wore blue suits, often with his slippers for extra comfort. Before tapping out a story, he would back a spool of copy paper up to his typewriter, roll it out to the desired length, then write his piece to order. He was infamous for showing up at Fenway Park around the sixth inning, sidling up to a colleague in the press box, and saying, “Yeeeeaaas, could you catch me up a bit?” After some requisite eye rolling, the fellow scribe would give Birtwell his fill, and the Rajah—partly out of enthusiastic gratitude and partly to rev himself up for the task at hand—would say, “Ye-e-es! Ye-es! Yes!” with increasing near-orgasmic intensity as he scribbled out his notes on what had transpired.

In February of 1955, when Ted was threatening to retire as part of a financial ploy to shield income from his first wife during tense divorce proceedings, he said he had signed contracts to take fishing trips in Peru and Nova Scotia that May and June—proof, he said, that he would not be playing ball in the summer. Birtwell found the concept of a fishing contract amusing, and wrote a tongue-in-cheek story saying that he, too, would not be working during those months because “I’ve signed a contract to go fishing for flounders in the Hampton River. By the way, with whom do I sign the contract—the flounders?”
⁵¹

Not all Ted’s relationships with the press corps were antagonistic. He was friendly with the
Record
’s Joe Cashman and would keep up with him in retirement. Mindful of Williams’s ambition to be the greatest hitter who ever lived, Cashman liked to say that he considered Ted only the second-greatest hitter—after Rogers Hornsby. Ted thought that was still pretty good company, and once when he called the writer’s house to make dinner plans, Ted said: “This is the second-greatest hitter who ever lived calling.”
⁵²
When Cashman died in 1993 at the age of ninety-two, Williams sent a telegram offering his condolences.
^*

Williams kept his soft, kind side well hidden, but Cashman saw it revealed on several occasions. Once, after a reporter died suddenly, Ted called his paper and inquired after his financial status, saying he was prepared to cover the funeral expenses if necessary. Williams was thanked and told that wouldn’t be necessary.
⁵³

The writer who was probably closest to Williams was someone who worked for the least influential paper in town. Ed Rumill of the
Christian Science Monitor
had covered the major leagues for forty-five years, and every World Series from 1930 to 1972, by the time he retired. Rumill was also a regular in the
Sporting News,
a forum he needed to enhance his visibility, since few ballplayers saw the
Monitor
—though the Red Sox did buy nine copies a day because it was the only paper in Boston that carried the minor-league standings and scores.

Rumill’s significance was that he was a confidant of Ted and Tom Yawkey and thus a reliable barometer of the thinking of the two most important figures on the Red Sox. Rumill often served as a middleman between Ted and the rest of the writers, passing on quotes from Williams whenever he refused to speak to other reporters, which was not infrequently. Rumill would also show up at the ballpark hours before game time and meet Tom and Jean Yawkey in the last row of the grandstand to talk and perhaps have a libation or two.

Rumill played baseball himself, in the amateur Boston Park League, and in the late ’30s Yawkey permitted him to throw batting practice for the Red Sox. This was a different kind of writer, one whom Ted thought he could trust. Rumill introduced his mother to Williams, and she would become a regular visitor to Fenway Park on Wednesday afternoons, when the Red Sox hosted their “Ladies Days.” Ted would always wave to her or stop by and chat.

Rumill was six foot three and looked so much like Ted that fans often approached him and asked for his autograph. Over the years, on the numerous occasions when Ted went into the bunker and refused to talk to the writers over some perceived slight or another, he never stopped talking to Rumill. So Rumill would agree to serve as a pool reporter for the frozen-out scribes, carrying their questions to the Great Man. Recalled Phil Elderkin, a columnist for the
Monitor
who was a friend of Rumill, “Ed talked him into this. He’d say, ‘Ted, you gotta do this. They have families and obligations. They’re trying to do a job.’ Ted went along with it. He pretended to be mad about a lot of things.”
⁵⁴

One night in Philadelphia in 1954, Williams hit one of his tape-measure home runs out of Connie Mack Stadium and onto the roof of a neighboring apartment building. It was career home run number 362, putting him one ahead of his archrival, Joe DiMaggio. Rumill knew the ball would be an important keepsake for his pal, so he bolted from the
press box and ran outside to the apartment building. He tracked down the fan who had come up with the ball and arranged for him to cough it up in exchange for another ball, autographed by Ted.

In the off-season, Rumill would visit Williams in the Florida Keys, where Ted would later take up residence, and the two would have long talks. Once, Ted confided to Rumill that he had paid the hospital bill for a Boston writer who had a medical problem but couldn’t cover the cost, Elderkin said. And when Rumill himself got in a financial jam, Ted insisted on giving him a loan, the writer later told a friend.

For the writers, their daily encounters with Williams were a tumultuous mixture of riveting theater, sheer excitement, and resentment at having to absorb a matinee idol’s torrent of bile and abuse. But their front-row seat also gave them a fascinating perspective on the development and evolution of Ted’s mercurial and fragile persona.

They learned his moods and eccentricities, what approach he might favor, how he would play them off against each other, how he could be extraordinarily kind to people, and how, for all his raging at the press, he devoured everything that was written about him. They also learned how he craved fame but not the inconvenience of celebrity—a naïveté that betrayed a basic misunderstanding of a writer’s role in ferreting out information about him, an outsize personality whom the public thirsted to know more about.

Bob Ajemian of the
American
was a young reporter thrown into the Williams fray in the late ’40s and early ’50s. He had grown up in suburban Boston as a great fan of Ted’s. “We were all just crazy about him.… But to be with him in the locker room was scary. He radiated so much energy and appeal, and he intimidated us. His voice was unique. He spoke with certitude. ‘What the fuck do you know?’ He was a transcendent figure. You didn’t want to be on the wrong side of him. The press was largely afraid of him. He would berate you publicly and loudly, as opposed to taking someone aside for a private beef.”

Ajemian thought Ted was not a team leader the way Joe DiMaggio was. “If you walked into the Yankee locker room, people skirted Joe differently than you’d skirt Ted. Joe took a loss very hard and radiated that. Williams radiated superb individual performance. Individuality was the dominant theme of his career. Yet his teammates regarded him with reverence. He had tremendous standing. He owned the town.”
⁵⁵

Bud Collins, the longtime television commentator and tennis writer for the
Boston Globe
, remembered well his first encounter with Williams.
It was 1955, and Collins was a cub reporter for the
Herald
. Eager to show what he could do, the young journalist burst into the clubhouse after the game, unaware that reporters were barred for fifteen minutes, a Williams-inspired team rule that Ted took delight in personally enforcing. “What’s that cocksucker doing in here!” thundered Ted from across the room as he spotted Collins.
⁵⁶
Jack Fadden, the trainer, quickly hustled Collins into an adjoining room, explaining the fifteen-minute rule and telling him not to worry: Ted treated everyone that way.
^*

Collins eventually got to know the Kid and engaged him a bit. One familiar postgame ritual with Williams was to ask him what kind of pitch he’d hit for a home run. “Fastball, cock high,” Ted would usually respond.
^*
(Recalled the
Herald
’s Tim Horgan, “If I could get a quote out of TW that was printable through all the four letter words, I was golden.”)

Collins said occasionally Ted would approach
him
to comment on something he had written. “Once, he came up and said, ‘You probably don’t think I read that piece of shit you wrote because we were on the road. Well, let me tell you something: when you rip somebody, someone always makes sure he sees it.’ ” Another time, Collins was assigned to interview a group of fans in the bleachers about what they thought of some of the moves Red Sox management had been making—sort of a Fenway man-in-the-street feature. The next day Williams complained to him that the hoi polloi had no authority to comment. “What the hell do you think a bunch of fuckin’ Armenians know about baseball?” Ted demanded.