The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (3 page)

Ted was an original; not a traditional, modest, self-effacing hero but brash, profane, outspoken, and guileless. Self-taught and inquiring, he excelled as a Marine fighter pilot and became one of the most accomplished fishermen in the world. For better
and
worse, he was always his own man, never a phony—characteristics that helped him outlast his critics and win widespread affection and admiration as he aged. He had three favorite songs, which he played in his mind to help him fall asleep: “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “The Marines’ Hymn,” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

On visits to Boston long after he retired, Williams was struck by how people fawned and fussed over him, puzzled that he seemed more popular in retirement than he was during his playing days. The best evidence of this was his reception at the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park. Ted, by then fragile and ailing, was driven out on the field in a golf cart to a thunderous ovation, and then, in a memorable scene, swarmed by a new generation of All-Star players who knew they were in the presence of baseball royalty. The players lingered, wanting to soak in the moment and bask in Williams’s glow.

Of course all the obituaries listed Ted’s key batting statistics, representing the spine of his twenty-two-year career: the .344 lifetime average, six batting titles (he led the league two more years, in 1954 and 1955, but injuries and walks prevented him from getting enough at bats to qualify for the batting titles in those years), two Most Valuable Player awards, two Triple Crowns, and 521 homers. He was selected an All-Star eighteen times.

Out of 7,706 at bats, Ted had nearly three times as many walks (2,021) as strikeouts (709), and he retired with a .482 on-base percentage—baseball’s best ever. That meant he reached base nearly every other time he came up. He was second in all-time slugging percentage at .634, behind Ruth’s .690. He led the league in homers four times and RBIs four times, in runs scored six times, walks eight times, slugging percentage eight times, and on-base percentage twelve times.

Ted’s .388 average in 1957, at age thirty-nine, was nearly as remarkable as his .406 year. Though injured, he won the batting title, then promptly did it again in 1958, at the age of forty. “If in the end I didn’t make it as the greatest hitter who ever lived—that long ago boyhood dream—I kind of enjoy thinking I might have become in those last
years the greatest old hitter who ever lived,” Ted wrote in his autobiography,
My Turn at Bat.

During each Williams at bat, something between a hush and a buzz suddenly filled the air as the crowd shifted from autopilot engagement to edge-of-the-seat anticipation. “I was looking around for a story one day, and someone said there was this blind guy on the first-base line,” remembered Tim Horgan, who covered the Red Sox for the
Boston Herald
and then the
Boston Evening Traveler
in the 1950s. “I went up to the man and said, ‘Pardon me for asking, but why do you come to the park? Why not listen to the game on the radio?’ He said, ‘I love the sounds of the game when Ted comes up.’ ”
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Red Sox fans and the rabid press corps that covered the team seemed as captivated by Ted’s personality as they were by his slugging. He was a prickly prima donna whose much-chronicled “rabbit ears” had an unerring ability to zero in on even a few scattered boos amid all the cheers. He seemed immune to receiving praise but generally couldn’t tolerate criticism. On the field, his moods ranged from sheer joy and exuberance during his rookie year in 1939 to rage and petulance later in his career.

Williams reasoned that he was an expert at what he did, was trying his best to do even better, and thus resented any criticism. From 1940 to his last game in 1960, he swore off the time-honored baseball convention of tipping his hat to the fans. Once, after a spring training game in Miami in 1947, Ted appeared to doff his cap as he crossed home plate after hitting a home run. So alert was the press to Williams’s every move that the
Boston Globe
’s beat writer at the time, Hy Hurwitz, rushed to the clubhouse after the game and asked Ted if he had, in fact, tipped his hat. He denied that he had and said he was merely mopping his brow. Whereupon Hurwitz famously wrote: “It was the heat, not the humility.”
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The self-made, intellectually curious Williams was ahead of his time in regarding hitting as a science worthy of study, experimentation, and technical analysis. He coddled the blunt instruments of his success: his bats. He boned them. He cleaned them with alcohol every night. He weighed them meticulously on small scales to make sure they hadn’t gotten slightly heavier through condensation. And, acting on the improbable suggestion of a teenage boy from Chelsea, Massachusetts, he even heated his bats to keep their moisture content low.

If anyone could get under Ted’s skin, it was reporters, a group he contemptuously called the Knights of the Keyboard. For most of Ted’s career, Boston had between seven and nine daily newspapers, plus
another half dozen or so from the surrounding communities, not to mention the New York and national press. It was the post–
Front Page
era, but Ted was still prime fodder for intense tabloid and circulation wars in Boston, his every move dissected, debated, analyzed, second-guessed, and, of course, photographed.

A voracious consumer of his own press, Ted ignored all the positive coverage and focused only on the negative. “There were 49 million newspapers in Boston, from the
Globe
to the Brookline Something-or-Other, all ready to jump us,” he whined in
My Turn at Bat.
⁹
He was particularly sensitive about any stories that he felt delved unnecessarily into his private life, accused him of failing to hit in the clutch, or suggested that he was more interested in his own performance than that of the team.

It was natural for writers to despise Williams and fear him, because he treated them like dirt. But they also knew Ted was great copy, and if they could get him to talk, he was usually a terrific interview because he spoke with unvarnished candor. He was not above stirring the pot with reporters to give him something to be mad at if he felt he was losing his edge. He often said he hit better if he was mad. “He nurtured his rage,” as the writer Roger Kahn once put it.

If Ted had been quiet for a while, and perhaps not hitting as well as he normally did, the writers would learn to expect that he’d pick a fight with one or several of them, pop off, then usually go on a tear at the plate.

If Ted’s rages on and off the field dominated his public persona, his dedicated charitable work underscored his innate kindness. Once, after the Red Sox finished playing a night game in Washington, Ted chartered a plane and flew down to Raleigh, North Carolina, to spend five hours visiting a sick child, then flew back to Washington in time for an afternoon game the next day.

Every time Williams made a charitable visit on behalf of the Jimmy Fund or another organization, he would insist that no press coverage be allowed. If he saw a reporter or photographer, he would turn around and leave. He had a genuine, generous spirit and feared that press coverage might make people think he had some ulterior motive, such as trying to improve his churlish image. “He did not want to be thought of as a phony, I think,” said Tim Horgan.

In retirement, the public Ted blossomed. He was quickly inducted into the Hall of Fame, and in his acceptance speech made a totally unexpected, bald political statement that called on the lords of Cooperstown
to lift their color ban and induct the old Negro League stars. The statement was courageous, earned Ted enormous goodwill among black players, and underlined his basic sense of fairness and decency. Later, he returned to baseball and did a turn as a manager for the Washington Senators, pursued big-time fishing and hunting around the world, made annual spring training forays to Florida on behalf of the Red Sox to work with young hitters, took bows at the White House, made his peace with the fans and press of Boston, dabbled in the memorabilia market, and was a goodwill ambassador for baseball. Unlike many old-timers who cling to their era while belittling and resenting modern players, Ted remained a fan of the game, heaped praise on current stars, and forged relationships with players such as Tony Gwynn and Nomar Garciaparra.

His private life, during and after baseball, was much more problematic. If, during his career, Ted was able to manipulate the rage that simmered inside him and turn it into an on-field positive, off the field his inability to control his anger hurt him immeasurably in maintaining relationships—especially with his wives and children.

If he failed to perform a given task up to his own high standard, or if a friend or loved one did something in what he felt was an inept or shoddy manner, Ted would ignite. He could also be set off if he wasn’t in control of a situation, or was not being accorded what he felt was proper deference. If the telephone rang at an inopportune or intrusive time, he might rip it from the wall and fling it across the room.

After seeing a lifetime’s worth of these explosions close-up, Bobby-Jo Williams Ferrell concluded that her father had some kind of mental illness: “My dad was sick. And it’s a damn shame that because he was Ted Williams, and because nobody wanted to tell him like it was, including myself, he suffered and progressively became more ill by the years. And I think even especially after he quit managing, he got worse and worse and worse.”
¹⁰

Gnashing of teeth was a telltale sign that Ted was getting ready to go off. “He would clench his teeth so hard it was like he was having a seizure,” said Jerry Romolt, a memorabilia dealer who became a friend to Williams. “A fulmination. Then it would pass.”
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That was the thing: the storms always passed, and usually quickly. But the price of being in Ted’s orbit was that you had to endure the foul weather. “Sometimes he’d get so ticked off at me that the damnedest things would come out of his mouth, and then he would feel bad about it, but he would never apologize,” said former Red Sox shortstop Johnny Pesky. “He was a proud guy. Every time you’d ask him a question, he’d
look at you and say, ‘Why are you so goddamn dumb?’ He said that about pitchers, too, and they didn’t like it.”
¹²
His language made even some other ballplayers blush. “He’d say things that I shudder to think about and would never repeat,” said Milt Bolling, a Red Sox shortstop from 1952 to 1957.
¹³
If you called him on his behavior, or decided that absorbing a steady diet of such outbursts was too much to take, then so be it, good-bye, you were out. But if you could accept that the eruptions were just
Ted being Ted,
that he really meant no harm, and that he could in fact be charming and engaging after the storm had blown over and act as though nothing had happened, then you were in, and Ted was your loyal friend for life.

Bobby Doerr, the old Red Sox second baseman and dear friend to Ted, felt Williams’s lash while fishing and on many other occasions, but accepted him unconditionally. “He’d be like a maniac,” Doerr said. “Ted fought embarrassment. Anytime he was embarrassed over anything—if it was baseball, he’d throw the bat in the air; fishing, he’d break a rod; golf, he’d throw the club. He fought embarrassment terribly because he was a perfectionist.”
¹⁴

Would Doerr ever tell him he was out of line? “No—you never said anything to Ted. It wasn’t going to do any good.” Doerr was far from alone. Johnny Pesky, also one of Ted’s closest friends on the team, thought most of his teammates were simply awestruck by Ted. “We were like a bunch of kids looking up to a schoolteacher,” Pesky said. “Some of the guys called him God. They’d say, ‘God has spoken.’ ”
¹⁵

Williams had few close friends, but would embrace and cultivate friendships with perfect strangers. He preferred the company of the “little people” to hanging around other celebrities or swells. “If I said this guy was a reporter and he could make you or break you, Ted would have nothing to do with the guy,” said Dave McCarthy, a former New Hampshire state trooper who became a confidant of Ted’s and a trustee of his estate. “But if I said, ‘I’d like you to meet a janitor who likes bone fishing,’ he’d talk all night. He was genuine about that. That’s what I loved about him.”
¹⁶

Ted realized his behavior was a burden to others. “He said, ‘The people that really love me have had to endure more than you can possibly imagine, because I can’t control my temper,’ ” recalled Steve Brown, a Florida filmmaker and fisherman who became a confidant of Ted’s toward the end of his life.
¹⁷

Some friends struggled with the notion that they were enabling Ted’s abusive conduct by not intervening. One was Elizabeth “Betty” Tamposi,
daughter of the late Sam Tamposi, a longtime pal of Williams’s who was a Red Sox limited partner and real estate developer in New Hampshire and Florida. After long being exposed to the kind and humanitarian side of Ted, Betty Tamposi was startled to witness his abusive conduct, sometimes exacerbated by drinking. Once, enraged by something, he furiously beat his dog in frustration. Another time, she watched as he humiliated the woman he lived with late in life, Louise Kaufman, in front of others at a restaurant. “I think there were a lot of people that enabled behavior of Ted’s that was unacceptable,” concluded Tamposi, who served as an assistant secretary of state under President George H. W. Bush.
¹⁸

The Red Sox themselves coddled and enabled Williams in several ways: moving the right-field fences in for him, letting him maintain rules that kept reporters out of the clubhouse for a period of time after games, tolerating his spitting and various other on-field flameouts, and looking the other way when he missed two months of one season just so he could get a better divorce deal.

And what was Ted Williams angry about, exactly? Most who knew him well thought the cause was rooted in resentment of his unhappy childhood in San Diego. His mother, May, was a well-known Salvation Army zealot, out all day and much of the night saving souls, leaving Ted and his younger brother, Danny, to fend mostly for themselves. His father, Sam, was a ne’er-do-well who ran a small photo shop, drank excessively, and showed little interest in either of his sons.