The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (138 page)

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Ted had agreed to appear on one of Feller’s radio shows, and in return, as Feller told the writer Michael Seidel years later, he agreed to pitch to Williams in future games—not pitch around him—unless first base was open or there were runners in scoring position.

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Chandler had kept the original report and later released it along with his other personal papers, which are stored at the University of Kentucky.

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Three writers from each of the eight American League cities picked ten players in descending order of importance. A first-place vote was worth ten points; tenth place counted for one. Ted had been named on twenty-three of the ballots, meaning that one writer had left him off his ballot entirely. In his book, Williams wrongly named a Boston writer, Mel Webb of the
Globe,
as the culprit who had blanked him, but as it turned out, Webb didn’t even have a vote. The three Boston writers who did vote—Joe Cashman of the
Record,
Burt Whitman of the
Herald,
and Jack Malaney of the
Post
—all listed Ted in first place. It had been a midwestern reporter who hadn’t listed him at all, as the writer Glenn Stout noted in his book
Red Sox Century,
cowritten with Richard Johnson. And the vote was not only unfair but scandalous, it emerged. The
Sporting News
later revealed that the election results had been available to the writers a week before they were announced, and that some of them had used the inside information to wager hundreds of thousands of dollars on who the winner would be. Voting procedures were later changed, but too late to help Williams in 1947.

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That summer of 1949, when Pressman was at Fenway for a game against the Yankees as a guest of Ted’s, Williams brought Joe DiMaggio over and introduced him. Said Pressman, “I was in the stands. Ted said, ‘I want you to tell Joe about this whole baking thing.’ So I did. Joe thought the whole thing was foolish and he had a deer-in-the-headlights look in his face as I told him this stuff. Then he just walked away. Ted said to him, ‘The kid told you something. You should thank him in some way.’ ” So DiMaggio sent Pressman a Yankees hat. “Years later I met DiMaggio at Cooperstown,” Pressman recalled, “and he said he remembered that and he signed the hat for me. Ted seemed annoyed by Joe’s reaction at the time. Later, Ted told me, ‘I want to tell you something about Joe D. He asked me a question about hitting at an All-Star Game, and I knew from the question he didn’t know shit about hitting.’ ”

*
Later in spring training, Williams proved he wasn’t exclusively obsessed with hitting, suggesting that outfielders warm up before each inning by throwing balls to each other, the way infielders did. It was a logical idea—innovative then but seemingly obvious in hindsight—that would later be adopted.

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Other players, such as Joe DiMaggio, were heavy smokers, even in the dugout during games.

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The latter remark was made in August of 1949, after a Red Sox–Yankees game in which Ted, criticized for not stretching a double into a triple at Fenway Park, replied defensively that no one had criticized Joe when he didn’t stretch a single off the wall into a double in the same game. That evening, DiMaggio summoned Dan Daniel, the
World-Telegram
syndicated columnist, and handed off the crybaby quote. The writers raced back to Ted the next day and prodded him for a response, but Williams only smiled and said he had nothing to say.

*
DiMaggio’s frigidity and greed extended to his own family. Joe’s image was on the cover of his brother Dom’s memoir of the 1941 season,
Real Grass, Real Heroes,
but Dom never asked his brother’s permission, Joe said, because he knew Joe would have said no. Engelberg wrote in his book that Joe and Dom didn’t speak to each other for five years before Joe’s death.

*
Reporters, ever alert to any Williams gesture, would later ask him if he had not violated his own ban on hat tipping. Ted of course said he had not. It had been merely a wave of thanks and farewell, hat held aloft, not the traditional baseball hat tip—hand to brim with cap on head—given to acknowledge a home run or other applause. For Williams, this was not an insignificant parsing of differences.

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Marty Keough, a Red Sox utility outfielder from 1956 to 1960, recalled that one of his favorite memories of Ted concerns the time when a plane carrying the team was struck by lightning in the late ’50s. “They had a cracked window and the priest was up saving everyone,” Keough said in an interview. “We were supposed to land in Florida at eleven at night and didn’t get in until three or four in the morning. Ted was the calmest out of anyone. He didn’t say a word, just sat there. Everyone else was freaking out, especially the ones who didn’t like to fly in the first place. He was probably thinking, ‘Shit, this is nothing. Just imagine doing this every day in Korea.’ ”

*
Dave Egan pounced on the crash news to reprise his argument that Williams had only been recalled for PR purposes, and now that those aims had been achieved in spades he should be released.

*
When Williams returned to his home outside Miami, he found a mob of reporters waiting for him. So he made a U-turn and headed straight back to Islamorada, to Albright’s house. Could he lie low there for a while? Sure he could. Albright’s wife, Frankie, prepared a meal, and just as they were sitting down to Key lime pie for dessert, two reporters knocked on the door, looking for Williams. Ted jumped up and hid in a closet. Albright, rather than shoo the scribes away, invited them in for pie and coffee and made Ted sweat it out in the closet for a bit.

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Years later, when Bobby-Jo met Ted’s son, John-Henry, for the first time, they compared notes on this practice: “We went alone into a room to talk. The first thing he said—we closed the door, this was 1991—he said, ‘Did you ever have to say…’ and he started to say it, and we both picked up the phrase at the same time, and I said, ‘Holy shit!’ ”

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Curley died the following year, at the age of eighty-three.

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In 1954 they went to see a horror movie called
Creature from the Black Lagoon
, starring Richard Carlson and Julie Adams. Ted emerged from the theater a bit too enthused about Adams for Nelva’s liking. “What a body!” he said. “How pretty!” Ted promptly asked Fred Corcoran to arrange a meeting with Adams, the sort of request from Williams that Corcoran was accustomed to receiving. Ted and the actress went out, and the news hit the gossip columns. “Ted Williams is the kind of man that makes you glad you’re a woman!” Julie told the
New York Daily News
on July 12, 1954. “I’ve really only had one date with him, but it was one date I’ll never forget if I live to be a million.”

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White had hit .245 in 1956, with 5 homers and 44 RBIs.

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Toward the end of the season, Boudreau began hitting Ted second in the order to get him more at bats, but he still fell fourteen short with 386, and Cleveland’s Bobby Avila won the batting title with a .341 average. Casey Stengel, always a Ted booster, spoke out against the four-hundred-at-bats rule, saying it was “never meant for a guy like Williams. It’s for Humpty Dumpties trying to steal a batting championship on half a season’s work.”

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In 1958, United Press had been renamed United Press International (UPI) after taking over the International News Service (INS).

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The Boston writers were annoyed they had to follow the Lebovitz scoop, but they contained their grievances in light of the five hundred milestone.

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Reflecting on Williams’s emotional outbursts, Farber compared Ted to General George Patton, also known for a raging temper—a “man of greatness under strain” whom people didn’t take the time to fully understand.

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While Ted kept his distance from his mother’s side of the family, one of his endorsement deals, with Wheaties, meant that hundreds of boxes of cereal were regularly delivered to 1008 Chino Street in Santa Barbara. The extended family was effectively raised on the cereal. “I remember I ate Wheaties until I was blue in the face, and I can’t stand them now,” said Ted’s cousin Rosalie Larson, Paul Venzor’s daughter.

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Though it was hard to imagine Hillary not having the first say on how to make the best sleeping bag, one early ad presented Williams as the idea generator: “Most sleeping bags seem to be made for midgets. Let’s make them longer and a whole lot wider—so that people can really stretch out. Who wants a sleeping bag that fits like a straitjacket?”

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Besides the column, the radio spot, and the cartoon panels, George Struthers, the Sears executive who had first reached out to Williams, also thought the company should produce a television documentary on Ted’s life. To that end, Struthers paid $10,000 to hire four researchers who combed through newspaper archives and put together two huge three-ring notebooks filled with clippings and notes chronicling Williams’s career. A script was written, and Ramin even wrote a song for the film. Then Struthers died suddenly of a heart attack. His replacement was less of a Ted booster, so the documentary project was dropped.

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The Veterans Committee is a voting arm of the Hall of Fame empowered to induct managers, umpires, baseball executives, and players retired at least twenty-three years who have not been admitted by the writers.

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Ironically, the
Herald
’s editorial page that day differed from McKenna’s assessment. In a short editorial entitled “The Honest Man,” the paper decided that the Williams remark was a refreshing example of his candor.

*
Hall of Fame president Jeff Idelson later told the
Boston Herald
that the first casting was not destroyed, as it should have been. It was tossed in a Dumpster, then pilfered and sold on the memorabilia market to an unknown buyer.

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Dolores’s use of the plural was indicative of a broader trail she’d noticed, just as Ted’s previous wives had.

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Burgin mentioned that he’d served in the Army for three years, and Williams teased him by saying, “A scribe in the fuckin’ Army? Jesus Christ, so much for military secrets.”

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In 1970, Nixon arranged for his son-in-law, David Eisenhower, to be the statistician for the Senators. According to Shelby Whitfield, Eisenhower was a diligent worker who would report for duty in the press box wearing a dark pin-striped suit. In a tell-all memoir of his two years with the Senators, Whitfield wrote that during the seventh-inning stretch, Eisenhower would ask a press-box attendant to get him a bowl of ice cream, as the writers sent out for beer. On road trips, some Senators players took Eisenhower out on the prowl, determined to test the strength of his relationship with Julie Nixon, but without success.

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Claudia knew from experience how to hang in there, too, having been on the receiving end of coarse insults from Ted. “Yeah, it hurt the first time I heard my father say to me: ‘As long as I have a hair in my ass, you’ll be a pain in it,’ ” she said. “And I’d be like, ‘Oh, my God!’ Just devastated. I’d go off to my room, bawl, pout, do whatever I had to do, come back out to the kitchen: He loved me! He loved me! But I don’t think I ever heard my dad say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Never.”

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The headline in the
New York Times
the next day was
TED WILLIAMS: GOOD FIELD, NO HIT
.

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Manuel said Ted eventually sent him $1,500 as reimbursement.

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When Claudia came back from Paris, Ted would always ask her to speak French to him, and when friends came over, he would demand that she give them a command performance. “Until the day Daddy died, he’d ask me to talk French.”

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The Gold Cup Invitational Tarpon Fly Tournament, as it is officially known, continues to be held every year in June and is known as the Wimbledon of tarpon competitions.

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In the early ’60s, while shooting a film for Sears, Ted had expertly maneuvered a tarpon directly into his boat for the benefit of a photographer stationed in an adjacent boat, only to find that the photographer hadn’t been ready and had missed the shot. Enraged, Ted paid the man on the spot and sped off, telling him to find his own way home.

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In appreciation of his conservation efforts, the Canadian government later gave Williams a fishing license, enabling him to avoid the requirement that foreigners hire local guides, but Ted continued to use Roy Curtis. After Roy died, Ted employed his son Clarence.

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The new president’s other guest that day made for an unlikely companion for Williams: Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

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When Dominic was asked his opinion, he gave his standard diplomatic reply, all the more so because his big brother was watching and listening carefully: “Well,” he said as the audience laughed sympathetically, “the best
right-handed
hitter was Joe. But the best left-handed hitter by far was Ted Williams.”

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Many concluded that John-Henry’s effort was merely a ploy to eliminate some Ted signatures from the market in order to enhance the value of the autographs he was generating, but the son denied that. “It’s the furthest thing from the truth,” he told
Sports Illustrated
for its November 25, 1996, issue. “It doesn’t matter what type of forgeries are out there. It’s not going to affect the amount of money I make. But when I see people devaluing his autograph, that’s not fair.”

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Once when Ted was in town and staying with his son, John-Henry borrowed a window air conditioner from the Helmans so his father would be more comfortable. Helman didn’t get the unit back until he asked for it two years later.

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John-Henry also challenged some of McWalter’s moves, such as his decision to settle a minor dispute that arose after Williams bought out Barry Finger, Vince Antonucci’s original partner. “John-Henry said, ‘That isn’t the way the Ted Williams family does business. When someone crosses us, we get him! We don’t settle with him, we get him. You’re not our kind of person.’ ”