The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (137 page)

B
EN
B
RADLEE
, J
R.
, spent twenty-five years at the
Boston Globe
as a reporter and editor. As deputy managing editor, he oversaw many critically acclaimed stories, including the
Globe
’s Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in 2002. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Salvador Herrera said the Venzors were Mexican through and through. “They were almost Apaches, man,” he added, referring to the darkness of their skin. “There are a lot of Hispanics who don’t want to be Hispanics. I see that every day.” Teresa Cordero Contreras, May Williams’s niece, recalled that in 1936, she and her older sister Madeline Cordero were in San Diego to help May out around the house. The Corderos’ skin is dark, and after a disagreement one day, Ted angrily told Madeline to “go back to the reservation.”

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In another biographical error in
My Turn at Bat,
Ted wrote that the Samuel “was for my mother’s brother who was killed the last day of World War I.” Actually, that was Daniel Venzor; May had no brother named Samuel.

*
On Ted’s birth certificate, replying to the question “Number of children born to this mother, including present birth,” May had written “3.” And to the next question, “Number of children of this mother now living,” she wrote “1.”

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The files were in Ted’s papers, which were made available to me.

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Williams told
Sports Illustrated
for its August 1, 1955, issue: “There wasn’t anything about it that I was going to be a great baseball player or anything in the future. It was just something that I liked to do. I was a funny looking kid, a string bean, a terribly scrawny looking thing. I certainly had no muscles. My mother used to get notes from the health officer, ‘This kid is underweight; tonsils need checking.’ ”

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At the time, some of the best tennis in San Diego was being played on the courts on the south side of the North Park playground (the ball field was on the north side). Maureen Connolly, who in 1953 would become the first woman to win tennis’s grand slam, was just starting out and played at University Heights. Ted played with Connolly occasionally, as well as with Press and Joe Villarino, but he had to give up the game after he broke too many strings and May told him they couldn’t afford the thirty-five cents it cost to get the racket restrung each time. Press said Ted had talent. “He would’ve probably been just as good at tennis as he was at baseball. I always marveled because he did the same thing in tennis as he did in baseball: he hit it in the middle of the racket. He did it pretty much every time.”

*
Ted and his brother were not blameless when it came to mess. According to Mary Cordero’s son John, “We were called down to help because Ted and Danny wouldn’t do anything around the house. Danny one time bought a white rat and brought him in the house. May said to get rid of the rat. He put him in the garage, [and he] got out and multiplied. May told us to get rid of the rats. We went in there, they’d jump on us and bite us, so we just closed the garage off and said to hell with it.”

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Like many ballplayers, Ted was superstitious. He gave the batboy, Coach Caldwell’s son Bill, a special rabbit’s foot and insisted that Bill rub Ted’s bat with it each time before he hit.

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McDonald liked to debunk a story told about Ted from the Padres years—that he’d struck the world’s longest home run when a ball he hit out of Lane Field went into the railroad yards and landed directly on a Los Angeles–bound freight car. It was he, not Ted, who hit that ball, McDonald insisted to Bill Swank.

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In their early features on Williams, many reporters covering the Millers somehow settled on Francis, not Samuel, as Ted’s middle name and would stay with the error all season. “Theodore Francis” would become one of their favorite affectionate monikers for the Kid.

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Surprisingly, Ted was apparently tapped for babysitting duty occasionally by a family who lived near the Beans. Elizabeth Harris surfaced after Williams died and wrote the
San Diego Union
to brag that “not everyone can say, ‘Ted Williams was my baby-sitter.’ When he played in Minneapolis, Ted lived across the street from our home. My parents had him baby-sit on several occasions. They said he was a tease—he would hide my toys!”

*
LeFebvre would witness this kindness on a personal level several years later. He had a son with Down syndrome. At a Red Sox family event, Ted went out of his way to talk to the boy, bring him food, and spend time with him—without knowing he was Lefty’s son. “That meant so much to me, Ted waiting on him like that,” LeFebvre said.

*
One day that spring, some players were quizzing the learned Berg about the prospects for war in Europe. Ted piped up: “Germany and Russia will go in together if there’s any fighting.” Berg assured Ted that would never happen. Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact five months later, in August of 1939, and World War II began shortly thereafter. The pact remained in effect until 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

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Besides his players, Yawkey would invite friends to visit, such as chief Yankees scout Paul Krichell, who signed Lou Gehrig, and Ed Barrow, who managed the Red Sox from 1918 to 1920 before moving to the Yankees front office, where he was credited with building a dynasty in the era of Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio.

*
This was apparently a reference to the fact that his parents had separated. The separation had occurred in April, but it’s possible Ted did not learn of it until later.

*
This incident was one reason why the
Globe
became the first paper in Boston to stop having the teams pay the expenses of its writers on the road, according to notes by Harold Kaese, the former
Transcript
writer who by then had become a leading
Globe
columnist.

*
Another financial connection between the clubs and the writers was the job of official scorer at the games. Writers could earn an extra $50 or more for that assignment, which was coveted and rotated among the beat reporters.

*
Gowdy told me he’d noticed that Ted was much more receptive to radio (and, later, television) reporters than he was to the writers. “I said to him, ‘Look, why are you being so nice to these guys when you’re brutal with the press?’ And he says, ‘These radio guys boost baseball where the press tears it down.’ He was always good to the little radio announcers, guys from Bangor, Maine, or Rhode Island.”

*
Perhaps unbeknownst to Williams and his teammates, the old-school Cashman served as a legman for Dave Egan, feeding the columnist raw, behind-the-scenes stuff that Cashman himself would never write.

*
In retirement, Ted warmed up to Collins. In 1969, as manager of the Washington Senators, Ted, seeing Collins for the first time in years, called out cheerfully: “Are you still writing that shit?” And as he took up tennis later in life, Williams became a fan of Bud’s TV commentary.

*
Bob Ajemian thought that Williams went beyond the token, customary observation that such and such a pitcher had good stuff; that he was often expansive and enthusiastic in his comments about the pitchers he faced. “Ted would praise other pitchers, and the other pitchers of course loved that. I always thought he was praising pitchers to not be thrown at.” It was true that Williams was rarely drilled, but that may also have been because pitchers concluded that it was counterproductive, since whenever Ted was knocked down he would usually get up and hit a rope somewhere.

*
The
American
ripped off the title of its series from a
Look
magazine article the previous year that carried the same headline.

*
Washington pitcher Sid Hudson told me that he’d been trying to help Ted make history, having told him before the game that he’d throw “nothing but fastballs today unless I’m in a jam, then you’re on your own. I did it because I wanted to see if he could get up to .400.” Nevertheless, Hudson added, “every time I threw a fastball, I threw the best one I had.… I just did it, and that’s it. I didn’t think about it.”

*
The tour had been organized by Foxx, who needed the money after losing $45,000 in a golf-club venture in Florida. Williams had wanted to go fishing and skip the tour but agreed to go as a favor to Foxx, knowing of his financial problems. The trip didn’t generate as much money as Foxx had hoped, so when it was over, Ted returned the $2,500 he had been guaranteed to his teammate.

*
One possible obstacle had been narrowly cleared. The tallest a Naval aviator could be was six foot four, and Ted had been measured at six foot three.

*
The New York writers, perhaps trying to rectify what had been widely seen as an injustice when the Yankees’ Joe Gordon was voted the American League MVP over Williams in November, had selected Ted as their “Player of the Year.”

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The ball was stolen from his house in the late 1970s. Williams offered a $5,000 reward to anyone who could help him recover the ball, to no avail. Then, in 2006, four years after Ted’s death, someone tried to sell the ball on the memorabilia market, and Williams’s daughter Claudia was alerted. She filed a lawsuit against the Chicago-area auction house that planned to sell the ball and successfully negotiated for its recovery in return for agreeing not to prosecute the seller or the auction house.

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The Mitsubishi A6M, a Japanese fighter aircraft.

*
To editors at the
American,
that story was no laughing matter. When Finnegan wrote about this in the third installment of his series, the piece carried the headline
WILLIAMS NEAR DEATH ON TAKE-OFF MISTAKE
, as if the incident had just happened and he was on life support in the hospital.

*
While Finnegan was still visiting, Ted was assessed his first demerit—not one but five, just for failing to make his bed one morning. This had him in a funk. Ted explained that his formation had been called twenty minutes earlier than usual and he hadn’t had time to tend to his bed.

*
The breakdown was: Intelligence, 3.7; Judgment, 3.4; Initiative, 3.6; Force, 3.5; Moral Courage, 3.6; Cooperation, 3.6; Loyalty, 3.5; Perseverance, 3.4; Reactions in Emergencies, 3.4; Endurance, 3.5; Industry, 3.6; and Military Bearing and Neatness of Person and Dress, 3.6.

*
When it was reported in the spring of 1944 that 280 professional ballplayers were still assigned to domestic Army bases, some never having even finished basic training, the Army deflected the heat by simply transferring the players overseas—mostly to Hawaii. The Army Air Forces’ Seventh Air Force club, based in Honolulu, boasted the likes of DiMaggio and Ruffing, their Yankees teammate Joe Gordon, and Johnny Beazley of the Cardinals. The Navy waited another year, until the war was almost over, before pronouncing the “deliberate concentration of professional or publicly known athletes within the continental United States for the purpose of exploiting their specialties… detrimental to general morale.” But months earlier—in the summer of 1944—Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, had moved to counter the growing Army baseball presence in Hawaii by transferring some of the better Navy players there, including Virgil Trucks, Schoolboy Rowe, Johnny Vander Meer, Pee Wee Reese, and Dom DiMaggio. By September, Nimitz had challenged the Army to an Army-Navy “World Series.”

*
Though lackadaisical in his play, there were brief moments when Williams offered those in attendance a glimpse of what he could do if he tried. In one game, he hit a ball so far that it landed among a group of alligators in a marsh near the base.

*
JFK apparently considered Fenway Park fertile campaign ground. He returned on June 8 for another game against the Tigers and was pictured in the next day’s
Herald
posing with Ted, Joe Cronin, and Army sergeant Charles A. MacGillivary, a Boston native and Congressional Medal of Honor winner for his heroism at the Battle of the Bulge. Ten days later, Kennedy easily won the Democratic nomination in a ten-man field, then coasted to victory in the November general election.

*
The ball was initially estimated to have gone 450 feet, but in the mid-’80s, the Red Sox decided to scientifically measure the clout and concluded that it had traveled 502 feet. They marked the spot by painting the seat where it had landed red, to make it stand out in the green bleachers, and pronounced it the longest ball ever hit at Fenway Park. Latter-day Sox sluggers such as Mo Vaughn and David Ortiz have called the distant red seat impossible to reach, even in the steroids era, and dismissed it as management propaganda designed to enhance the Williams mythos.

*
During spring training in 1947, a Dallas minor-league team playing an exhibition game against the Red Sox put seven of its nine players in the right-field bleachers when Ted came to bat, leaving only its pitcher and catcher in play.

*
Williams took Dunne’s advice seriously, and before
Swing King
was released in early 1947, he told Arthur Daley for the February 16 edition of the
Times:
“Bert Dunne knows more about hitting than any man in the country—including myself.” Coming from the Kid, this was high praise indeed—especially the afterthought.

*
Doerr loved that story and told it often. “Can you imagine what that letter would be worth today in the memorabilia business?” he asked the writer David Halberstam, chuckling. “Ty Cobb writing to Ted Williams on how to beat the shift? One million? Two million?”

*
Yawkey had given credence to the latter charge just the day before, when Bob Feller revealed that he had offered to pay Williams $10,000 to be the headliner for an off-season barnstorming tour of prominent American Leaguers that the pitcher was organizing, only to have Yawkey sabotage the plans by agreeing to pay Ted $10,000 not to participate. The Sox owner didn’t want to take a chance that his star would get hurt, but he didn’t object to his other players signing up if they wished. They wanted to, but Feller, irked by Yawkey’s stance on Williams, refused to invite any of the other Red Sox.

*
“Ted Williams bunted yesterday and it was the biggest thing around here since Bunker Hill,” wrote Red Smith in his syndicated column on October 10. “The Kid’s bunt was bigger than York’s home run. Thirty-four thousand, five hundred witnesses gave off the same quaint animal cries that must have been heard at the bonfires in Salem when Williams, whose mission in life is to hit baseballs across Suffolk County, pushed a small, safe roller past third base.”