The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (96 page)

In the end, Bush won the primary going away, with 37.6 percent of the vote to Senator Dole’s 28.4 percent, gaining the momentum he needed to eventually capture the Republican nomination and the presidency. “That’s the greatest story of Ted’s life—greater than anything he did in baseball,” the younger Al Cassidy said. “Ted won that election for Bush.”
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Sununu, a more astute and dispassionate analyst of New Hampshire politics, would not go that far, but judged the “Ted effect” to be considerable.

Bush would always be grateful for Williams’s help. He would honor him twice at the White House in 1991, and in 1989, four months into his presidency, he invited Ted to join him in Baltimore for the Orioles’ opening day.
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Continuing his goodwill tour following the New Hampshire political interlude, Ted came to Boston to attend a ceremony in which a twenty-mile stretch of Route 9 running west of the city was renamed the Ted Williams Highway. “Over the past many years, I’ve had a lot of difficulty finding Route 9,” he told the assembled crowd, “but if I don’t know how to get there now, I won’t know what my own name is.”

That August, the Kid turned seventy, and in Massachusetts, Governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed it Ted Williams Day. Three months later,
Ted made one of the most meaningful stops on his Being Ted Williams tour: he came to Boston to be honored for the forty years of work he had put in for the Jimmy Fund. He had been visiting the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute regularly in retirement, sometimes bringing John-Henry and Claudia with him. “When Dad met the kids, it was heartbreaking,” Claudia remembered. “He was so careful and gentle with them. Dad was not normally delicate or careful. He would ask them if they liked baseball—even the girls. And if they said no, he’d ask, ‘Why not?’ in a goofy, sarcastic, smiling way. When we walked the hospital halls, Dad was pretty quiet. I only remember him asking, ‘Is he going to be all right? Is he going to make it? How is he feeling? Are they in a lot of pain? Do the parents have insurance to cover all this?’ ”

When he departed, Williams would glance at the heavens and rage at the injustice of it all. “When we left the hospital Dad was
so
mad,” Claudia added. “It was scary to be around him when he got like that. He ground his teeth down and clenched his teeth, and God forbid if anyone around him did anything wrong at that moment. Because then the anger would flow all over us, even for something stupid like dropping our fork at the dinner table.”
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The Jimmy Fund event on November 10, 1988, was called An Evening with Ted Williams, Number 9, and Friends, and 4,200 people turned out at an ornate old theater in Boston, the Wang Center, to see Williams feted by a slew of admirers ranging from his old pal John Glenn to the Red Sox–loving writer Stephen King.

“It took an awful, awful, awful, awful lot to get me here,” Ted told the press before the program began. “I just thought there were millions and millions of people who’ve done a lot more for this than I have.” But friends had leaned on him to accept the honor, not least because $250,000 would be raised for the Jimmy Fund, so there he was, even wearing a tie—though it was a bolo tie, sporting a silver oval clasp with a gold salmon embossed on it.

Besides Glenn and King, the friends of Ted who offered testimonials about him included his old teammates Dominic DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Johnny Pesky; rivals Joe DiMaggio and Bob Feller; fishing pal Bud Leavitt; former House Speaker Tip O’Neill of Boston; President Ronald Reagan and president-elect George H. W. Bush (both via video); and baseball ambassador-at-large Tommy Lasorda, the former Dodgers manager.

Perhaps the most memorable of the testimonials was Joe DiMaggio’s.

The Yankee Clipper, in contrast to some of the disparaging remarks
he’d made about Ted privately, gave Williams his due in public that night: “Absolutely, he was the best I ever saw,” Joe said. “I’ve never seen a better hitter. Not just hit, but power. He was feared.”
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John Glenn, who had become a US senator and Ted’s favorite Democrat, told the crowd about his fellow fighter pilot’s excellence in Korea and of surviving that crash landing. “Let me say just one thing,” Glenn said. “Ted only batted .406 for the Red Sox. He batted a thousand for the Marine Corps and for the United States.”

When the testimonials were finished, Ted’s son, John-Henry, then twenty, appeared onstage with a five-year-old boy named Joey Raymundo. Dressed in a tuxedo and acting on behalf of the Jimmy Fund, Joey, who had leukemia and was being treated at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, presented Williams with the fund’s gift of an oil painting depicting the Kid in baseball action.

At that, it was Ted’s turn to speak. He took out some notes and, to everyone’s surprise, a pair of reading glasses, his famed vision having dimmed a bit. “Not a lot of people have seen these,” he said of his specs.

Ted spoke of how lucky he had been, and when the emcee asked a question that Williams thought cut too deep, he replied: “You’re not gonna make this old guy cry.” Then he looked around at his friends who had come to praise him, then out at the audience, and said: “This has been an honor, and I’m thrilled and a little embarrassed.” Then he paused and added: “And I want to thank you.” There was a catch in his throat, and his eyes welled up a bit.
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Being Ted Williams had always meant signing autographs, but starting in the 1980s Ted began charging a fee for his signature as the memorabilia industry emerged to offer aging sports heroes an unexpected source of money.

In his retirement, Williams had constantly been asked if he begrudged modern ballplayers the multimillion-dollar contracts that even .250 hitters were getting. He always said he did not, and more power to them. Still, the windfalls that the red-hot, baby boomer–driven memorabilia market suddenly produced in the late ’80s and into the ’90s for icons like Ted and DiMaggio had the effect of leveling the playing field somewhat
and letting the storied old-timers catch up financially with the modern mediocrities.

There were card shows, personal appearances, and various other permutations of the market to be taken advantage of. By the early-to-mid ’90s, the Kid and the Clipper could make up to $250,000 for a weekend of signing. Ted couldn’t believe how easy the money was, yet unlike DiMaggio, he declined to game the system for all it could bring him.

Williams had started out in 1983 doing a few appearances—one in Connecticut, another in Kansas City—for $1,000 an hour. By 1989, he was making a minimum of $5,000 an hour and attending more shows, like one in Atlantic City that featured all the living players who had hit five hundred or more home runs. DiMaggio refused to sign bats or balls, but Ted would sign anything. Joe didn’t bother to look up when he signed to acknowledge his fans, while Ted was engaged, chatty, and willing to pose for pictures.

In February of 1989, for example, more than a thousand people, middle-aged or better, assembled outside Chicago to wait four hours for Williams to sign autographs at $20 each. People were ready with their autograph books, photos, bats, balls, and even an old sign bearing the legend
TED’S CREAMY ROOT BEER
. One man in a Red Sox uniform thrust a baby in Williams’s arms and started snapping off pictures, while a blonde posed with him and kept clinging to his arm well after their photo was taken.
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Sometimes, if the spirit moved him, Williams would do a signing show for free, as he did in October of 1989 for Eddie Walsh, a retired Boston cop who had gone into the memorabilia business. Ted wanted to help Walsh because the officer had been kind to John-Henry. “The guys in charge of security wouldn’t let John-Henry into the ballpark because they thought he was a pain in the ass,” Walsh recalled. “I told them his father built Fenway Park and they should let the kid in.” Williams’s complimentary signing went on for more than two hours.

“I made fifteen thousand dollars,” said Walsh. “Ted wouldn’t take any money. I gave the Jimmy Fund five thousand dollars. I gave John-Henry five thousand dollars—he was still in college—and the rest to one of my daughters. We had one thousand seven hundred and eighty-three people. Ted was talking to everyone. Sometimes they don’t let these guys talk at these shows.”
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In the early-to-mid 1990s, Ted would ratchet up the number of signing shows he did annually, because John-Henry had taken over his business affairs by then and wanted him to be more active. While Williams often grumbled about the escalating demands on his time, especially as
his health started to fail, he was generally a willing participant, motivated by a desire to leave a significant inheritance for his children.

The son’s entrée to a position of power and influence over his father was facilitated by the fact that Williams had fallen victim to a memorabilia swindle in 1988, a scam that would cost him dearly.

One day that year, Ted had gotten a call from a man named Vince Antonucci, who ran a baseball card shop in Crystal River, Florida, just down the road from the Kid’s new home in Citrus Hills. Though Williams didn’t know it at the time, Antonucci was a con man who had been convicted of various charges ranging from fraud to larceny. Antonucci lured Ted to his store, which was called Talkin’ Baseball, by saying there was a package there for him that he had to sign for.

After arriving, Williams quickly learned there was no package and that the purpose of the visit was to give Antonucci and his partner, Barry Finger, a chance to talk Williams into entering the memorabilia business with them. Ted was bored and looking for something else to do. He was also naive and credulous, and Antonucci had a clever line of patter. His pitch essentially was that Ted could get off the autograph-show grind and just sign bats, balls, and other items for Talkin’ Baseball, which Antonucci and Finger would then market and sell.

Ted agreed to take a one-third interest in the company. Soon Finger and Antonucci were arguing about the direction of the business, and Finger wanted out. Williams bought out his share, at which point he owned two-thirds of Talkin’ Baseball.

Ted gave Antonucci $38,700 to buy one hundred cases of baseball cards, but Antonucci promptly put the money into his own checking account and spent it. When Williams noticed that the cards never appeared and that other inventory they had assembled was also unaccounted for, he went to civil court to dissolve the partnership. Antonucci countersued, claiming Ted owed him money from various signings he had done.

Williams went all out and hired Washington superlawyer John Dowd, best known for representing Major League Baseball as chief investigator and author of a report that led to the banning of Pete Rose for betting on games. Dowd, who had grown up in Brockton, Massachusetts, and served in the Marine Corps, regarded Williams as a hero and was thrilled to meet him. But he tried to persuade him to drop the litigation. “I told him it would be very expensive,” Dowd said. “He ‘goddamned’ me a few times. He wanted to do it. I told him he shouldn’t. I didn’t take the case.” Williams called Dowd back a few weeks later. “I was getting this ‘Goddamn
it, I checked you out. You’re the man. You gotta do it.’ I said, ‘Ted, it’s crazy. You don’t need to relive this thing.’ I went through the costs. ‘I don’t give a good goddamn’ about the money.” Dowd tried again to distance himself. “Then he showed up in my office in Washington without an appointment. Down the hall there was all this noise. The place was going crazy. He was signing autographs. The word went through this place like lightning that Ted Williams was here. We’ve got Red Sox fans all over the place. He said he was not leaving until I took the case.”
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So Dowd signed on—and, as he predicted, the cost of the case quickly reached the point of diminishing returns for Williams. Ted’s legal fees for chasing Antonucci exploded to nearly $2 million, and in the end only a portion of the missing memorabilia was recovered.

In February of 1992, Antonucci was found guilty of grand theft for taking the $38,700 and sentenced to five and a half years in prison and ten and a half years of probation. He got out of prison early, in August of 1993, then violated his probation and began crisscrossing the country selling Williams’s forged signatures. He was finally captured in Washington State in 1995 after being featured on television’s
America’s Most Wanted
program.

After the Antonucci saga, John-Henry would successfully argue that in order to continue to play in a business filled with cheaters and sharks, Ted, a gullible sort anyway, would need to rely on someone he could trust totally. And who could he trust more than his own son?

The Antonucci affair and its attendant expensive misery represented an anomaly from the exalted star turns commonplace in Ted’s retirement routine. But the everyday acclaim intensified in 1991, the fiftieth anniversary of his .406 season, for which he would be honored by the Red Sox and by the Bush White House—twice. Harvard University had also hoped to use the anniversary as a peg upon which to hang an honorary degree they wanted to give Williams, but Ted declined the invitation, a decision that underscored his lingering insecurity about not having an education beyond high school.

Harvard and Williams had extensive talks that progressed to the point where the university sent him a detailed letter in February, spelling out the logistical arrangements for the day he would receive his honorary degree—he would have a limousine at his disposal while staying at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, the president of Harvard would host a dinner the night before for him and the other honorees, at which no press would be allowed, and at the commencement itself, Ted would stand while a
citation was read and bask in the applause without having to make a speech.

“This will be a unique occasion in your life,” Jack Reardon, associate vice president for university relations, wrote Williams in a February 26, 1991, letter. “Harvard has recognized unique achievement in all fields of endeavor; and you are as deserving of this special recognition as any other winner of a Harvard honorary degree.” But Ted ultimately said no.