The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (106 page)

In archconservative Citrus County, this decision was a closely guarded secret. Eric Abel registered Hitter’s porn subsidiary, which was called Strictly Hosting, Inc., in Nevada, along with a related corporate shell called Strictly, Inc. If Strictly Hosting were ever to be hauled into court on smut charges, the thinking went, the litigation should take place where the company was registered, in Nevada, where the denizens were presumably more sympathetic to matters of the flesh.

Two Citrus County men were recruited and paid handsomely to help run Strictly Hosting and to agree to put their names on the corporate papers in Nevada. The party line would be that Strictly, which Abel said never produced its own porn, was an independent business simply buying bandwidth from Hitter.

Secrecy was paramount. John-Henry, when he e-mailed about Strictly Hosting, used the pseudonym Eric Good. The town fathers of
Hernando certainly would have looked askance at a porn-trafficking business, and Hitter’s regular Internet customers likely would have frowned on the association, too. Then there was the risk of tarnishing the Ted Williams brand. And Ted himself could never know, of course, even though $570,000 of his funds had been used as collateral to help launch Hitter.

It wasn’t long before John-Henry’s bandwidth suppliers caught on. “I started noticing a tremendous amount of traffic coming out of Hernando, which was highly unusual for a place that isolated,” said a sales rep for one of the telecoms that dealt with John-Henry. “Then the Strictly Hosting people I met confirmed it, and John-Henry finally admitted it.” Strictly Hosting provided users with links to such websites as Filthy Teens and Hospital Fetishes as well as to other sites that carried numerous graphic images of men and women engaged in sex. Said the sales rep, “At the height of his business there he had almost every site that was on the Internet for porn. He had customers in California, Detroit, the Carolinas, Boston. Hernando is a notch in the Bible Belt, but it became the porn capital of the South.”

While the telecom industry might have been reluctant to deal directly with porn companies, they were sometimes quite happy to do so at arm’s length through an intermediary like Hitter. Soon the representative, who asked not to be identified, and John-Henry were flying first-class to Los Angeles to meet with leaders of the porn industry, solicit business, and sign contracts. Said the sales rep, “The porn people weren’t the most trusting guys, but John-Henry would always tell them, ‘You know who my father is? You should go ahead and trust me. Where am I going to go? There’s nowhere for me to hide. Look who my dad is.’ ”
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While the money was nice, not everyone in John-Henry’s circle was happy with his new endeavor, especially Anita Lovely, to whom John-Henry had become engaged. The wedding was set for September 9, 1999—or 9/9/99, a date chosen to show off Ted’s old Red Sox number to maximum effect. Anita, a devout Catholic, was troubled by the porn business, to say the least, but knew she couldn’t stop it.

“It’s funny, in retrospect this stuff looks naughty and bad, but at the time it was just pure business,” said Abel. “John-Henry was being a businessman.
He wanted what could be profitable, and didn’t have the same moral concerns that others might.”

On June 11, 1999, Ted made a trip to New York. New York Mets owner Nelson Doubleday had wanted to honor Williams while the Red Sox were in town to play the Mets, so a thin pretense was created: a celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of Ted’s rookie year. After paying tribute to New York baseball fans and saying the best team he ever played for was “the US Marines,” Ted prepared to throw out the first ball. Steadied by legendary pitcher Tom Seaver and another former Met, Rusty Staub, Williams then lobbed one in to Mets catcher Mike Piazza, who had received hitting tips from Ted as a teenager.
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Tommy Lasorda, the former Dodgers manager and Ted pal who was on hand for the ceremony, witnessed John-Henry take advantage of the moment by demanding that his father be compensated for the event. Recalled Lasorda, “Doubleday really got upset. He said, ‘Listen, you young squirt!’ I asked Doubleday later what that was about, and he said, ‘The guy wanted me to pay an appearance fee!’ They were honoring Ted, for Chrissakes. Doubleday said to me, ‘That young punk! That SOB!’ ”
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Years later, asked about the incident, Doubleday said he didn’t recall clashing with John-Henry. “I don’t have a memory of it, but I was prejudiced against the kid beforehand. I’d heard so many bad things and that he was ruining Ted’s life.”
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In any case, as far as John-Henry was concerned, the Shea Stadium appearance was a mere dress rehearsal for what he hoped would unfold in Boston the following month. On July 13, the All-Star Game was to be held at Fenway Park. To celebrate the end of the century, Major League Baseball was planning to announce an All-Century Team. The thirty-odd living players chosen for the hundred-man team would be flown to Boston and introduced by actor Kevin Costner in what was intended to be a re-creation of Costner’s
Field of Dreams
leitmotif. Old-timers like Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Bob Feller, and Yogi Berra would join the current All-Stars, including Nomar Garciaparra, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Derek Jeter. But to anchor the show, the Red Sox knew they had to have Ted throw out the first ball. So the team, and the league, assigned Dan Duquette to line the Kid up. “He wasn’t sure if he could come because of his health,” recalled Duquette. “I kept talking to him. I said we’d get him a private plane. All his friends would be there. The fans wanted to see him. He had to come.”

Part of the problem was that it now was getting increasingly hard to
persuade Ted to go anywhere. Claudia Williams said he would work himself into a tizzy before he was scheduled to appear somewhere. “Two or three weeks before an event, he’d be a bear. ‘This is the last fuckin’ event I’m ever gonna go to!’ But then after it was over he’d say, ‘Wasn’t that great, and wasn’t it great to see so-and-so?’ ” She said the buildup to an appearance became so fraught that John-Henry would only tell him about an event two or three days in advance to curb the Sturm und Drang.

Duquette wasn’t the only one having a hard time closing the sale. John-Henry wanted his father to go to Boston both to burnish the Williams legacy and to reap the attendant commercial benefits. John-Henry told Peter Sutton, a Boston lawyer who helped represent the family’s interests, that he had fielded offers from a few corporations to pay Ted six figures if he were willing to wear their corporate logos on the field. John-Henry and Duquette both asked Sutton to get involved in persuading Ted to come. “I called Ted, and when I mentioned that there were some corporations who wanted him to wear their logo, that didn’t interest him, but then he turned to John-Henry, who was in the room, and said, ‘If I went for you, would that help your company?’ John-Henry said yes. So Ted said, ‘I’ll go for my son.’ John-Henry and I laughed later and said, ‘Why didn’t we think of that before?’ ”
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Claudia said: “At key moments in Dad’s life, we got him to do things by making it a personal appeal. ‘Will you do this for us, Dad? Me and John-Henry.’ ” If the question was framed in personal terms, she said, Ted’s attitude was, “ ‘Well, if you put it that way, sure I will!’ To protect Dad in that context meant to make everyone think he was going to the All-Star Game to see all the old players and all that. Really he was doing it for John-Henry.”

It was unclear initially how Ted would demonstrate his support for Hitter.net, but John-Henry soon confided his plans to the telecom sales representative: Ted would be making a series of appearances in and around Boston leading up to the game. He would wear both a polo shirt and a baseball cap emblazoned with the Hitter.net logo at each event and, finally, at the game itself.

“I said to John-Henry, ‘There’s no way Ted will wear the hat at the game. The guy never tipped his hat to the fans when he played. What makes you think he’s gonna wear your baseball cap?’ ” the sales rep recalled. “And John-Henry said: ‘Oh, I’m going to get him to do it. Blood is thicker than baseball.’ ”

Ted arrived in Boston several days before the game and checked into a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel overlooking the Public Garden. Traveling with him were John-Henry, Anita, and a caretaker, Jack Gard.

The first event on the schedule was at the Jimmy Fund, where Ted was to meet Einar Gustafson, the sixty-three-year-old Maine truck driver who was the original “Jimmy,” the pseudonymous boy who had become the poster child of the charity back in 1948. Brian O’Connor, the Polaroid executive and Jimmy Fund board member, had arranged the event, which he knew would be a publicity bonanza for the charity: Williams, its chief benefactor, was meeting its original namesake.

But O’Connor had nearly failed to get John-Henry to agree to the visit. “He didn’t think it was practical,” O’Connor said. “He didn’t see the benefit of Ted going to the Jimmy Fund. He didn’t see what he would get out of it, so I laid the law down. I said there was more to this than monetary benefit. He just didn’t see that. He was a cold kid.”

As it turned out, John-Henry was delighted when a swarm of media turned up for the Ted and Jimmy show. “Where’s this guy, Jimmy?” Williams shouted on arriving at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, wearing a powder-blue Hitter.net shirt and a red Hitter.net baseball cap. Ted was taken to meet some dignitaries first, but eventually caught up with Gustafson. “How are you, Jimmy baby?” Ted fairly shouted. “This is the biggest thrill of my trip, right here! Geez, you look great! You’re an inspiration to everybody!” The two sat in rocking chairs and reminisced about the Jimmy Fund’s early days, and then Williams made the rounds to visit the sick kids as he used to do.

“Boy, oh, boy, what a good-looking kid you are!”

“How are you doing with school now?”

“I bet you’re not here too long.”
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The next day, Ted traveled to Loudon, New Hampshire, to serve as grand marshal for the Jiffy Lube 300, a stop on the NASCAR circuit at the New Hampshire International Speedway. Ted, dressed in his Hitter.net finery again, fit right in with the NASCAR drivers, all of whom looked like human billboards, hawking motor oil, soft drinks, car companies, and various tire brands.
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Williams was introduced to a loud ovation from a crowd that he was astonished to learn numbered fully ninety thousand. Then he was taken for a spin around the oval in a green Chevy. He shook hands with each of the forty-three drivers, did an interview with the television announcer,
and, when the time came, took the microphone and said the magic words of car racing: “Gentlemen, start your engines!” Then John-Henry brought his father up close to the rail for a taste of the energy as the cars roared past.

On the day of the All-Star Game, Ted and John-Henry went to Fenway Park to go over the logistics of Williams’s appearance that night. His limousine would get a police escort from the hotel to the park and enter in a holding area underneath the center-field bleachers, off Lansdowne Street. Then, after the other old-timers were introduced, Ted would make his grand entrance from center field in a golf cart driven by Al Forester, a member of the Red Sox grounds crew who had been working for the team since 1957. Williams knew Forester well and had often used his name as an alias over the years when checking into hotels.

During this walk-through, John-Henry asked Brian O’Connor what he thought about Ted wearing the Hitter.net hat. “I said I thought it was more appropriate that he wear the Red Sox hat, but if Ted wants to wear it, that’s his business. Ted had told me during those few days, ‘I’m up here to promote Hitter, period.’ So the hat, in that context, made sense.”

Jack Gard, the caretaker on the trip, was repulsed, but not surprised, by the decision. “It was disgusting. That really made a lot of Ted’s friends back away because they could see the kid was exploiting him.”
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Gard and John-Henry had a tense relationship. In 1998, Gard had filed a formal complaint with Florida’s Department of Children and Families alleging that Ted was being abused by his son. A department investigator responded by going to Ted’s house, accompanied by a sheriff’s detective. After questioning Williams, the official decided the complaint was unwarranted. Ted said he enjoyed working with his son and helping him out.
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Not long before the start of the game, Ted’s limo, escorted by a squad of policemen on motorcycles, eased down Lansdowne Street, behind the Green Monster, and pulled to a stop at an entrance behind center field. Spotting Williams, a crowd surged around him, chanting, “Ted! Ted! Ted!”

New Hampshire state trooper Dave McCarthy sprang into action with his two friends Eric Goodman and Dan Wheeler, each dressed in Hitter.net polo shirts. They formed a circle around Ted and got him out
of harm’s way into a garage area where Al Forester was waiting in his golf cart.

Williams climbed into the passenger seat and chatted with well-wishers, then Forester drove over behind a red curtain that was covering the open garage door. In a few minutes Ted would emerge from the curtain and make his entrance on the center-field warning track. The other members of the All-Century Team had already walked onto the field to be introduced.

As John-Henry waited, he took McCarthy aside. The son was having a last-minute twinge of doubt about putting his father in the Hitter.net hat. Someone from the Red Sox had brought a team hat for him to wear on the field. Ted was already wearing the company shirt. McCarthy thought the hat would be overkill. John-Henry said he still thought Ted should wear the Hitter hat, but was looking for reassurance.

McCarthy said this was the All-Star Game, a national showcase, and each player was expected to wear his team hat. If he put Ted in the Hitter.net hat, John-Henry should expect a heavy backlash. John-Henry noted that Carl Yastrzemski, Ted’s successor in left field for the Red Sox, had just been introduced as a member of the All-Century Team wearing no hat at all. Recalled McCarthy, “He said, ‘You know, millions of people are gonna be watching this on TV. It’s good for Dad and good for me and the company. Watch how many hits we’re gonna get on the website.’ ”
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So John-Henry put a sparkling white Hitter.net hat firmly on his father’s head and sent Ted out into the night, into the roaring crowd.