The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (25 page)

Reporters with no college education were one thing, but that could be a liability in an editor, George Frazier, the late columnist for the
Globe,
once suggested cheekily. “When I went to the
Record-American
as a columnist,” Frazier wrote in reference to the paper that grew out of the 1961 merger of the
Record
and the
American,
“I was aware that its devotees moved their lips while they read. What I didn’t realize was that the editors did too.”

In the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, Major League Baseball was by far the dominant sport in the country. It would often take up a third of the front page of newspapers in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
¹⁹

Before television, writers such as Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon,
Grantland Rice, Westbrook Pegler, Paul Gallico, and, later, Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon were key cogs in the machine that fashioned baseball legend and lore. What they wrote shaped glorious public perceptions of the players, who remained at a certain distance and remove that the arrival of TV would forever change. And to be a baseball writer assigned to cover one of the big-league teams was a highly prized position. “The sportswriters loved the game, their jobs, and the prestige it gave them on the paper,” wrote David Halberstam in
Summer of ’49,
his book about the 1949 pennant race between the Red Sox and the Yankees.
²⁰
“Trying to get a position as a beat baseball writer was like waiting for a Supreme Court justice to retire. It was a position held for life.”

The writers wore suits. When covering road games, they’d play poker on the trains with the players and among themselves. Some great yarns came out of those trips, but in the fraternal milieu, it was understood that the stories would stay in-house, never to turn up in print.

On average, the writers were a generation or more older than the players they covered. Before World War II, the vast majority of them had not gone to college, and in the ’40s, their salaries ranged between $5,000 and $7,000 per year. But you couldn’t beat the perks. In what seems a quaint anachronism today, it was common practice at least into the ’60s for the ball clubs to pay all the expenses of the writers when the teams traveled. The reporters would stay at the best hotels, order from room service, and eat at fine restaurants. Moreover, they spent six weeks in Florida for spring training on the teams’ tab. In return for such largesse, the clubs of course expected—even demanded—favorable coverage, and they received it. On the rare occasions when they did not, the teams would not hesitate to assert their economic leverage over the papers.

In 1947, Boston Braves manager Billy Southworth was arrested for drunk driving. To try to keep the news out of the papers, the Braves, or Southworth himself, supplied the police with a false name. When the
Globe
’s Hy Hurwitz, in a then-rare burst of enterprising zeal, got wind of the story and began poking around, Braves PR man Billy Sullivan, who later became the founder of the Boston Patriots pro football team, protested vehemently to the
Globe.
He argued that no writer whose expenses the Braves covered should even be contemplating stories like that.
^*
Tim Horgan, who covered Williams and the Red Sox in the 1950s for the
Boston Herald
and
Evening Traveler,
said the Red Sox once got a
colleague of his at the
Traveler
fired for writing a story the team deemed too critical of catcher Birdie Tebbetts.
²¹

Before Tom Yawkey bought the Red Sox in 1933, the Boston press had been inclined to favor the National League Braves because Braves president Emil Fuchs showered the writers with food and drink and gave them Christmas presents. This changed under Yawkey, who had plenty of money to throw around, and by the time Ted arrived on the scene in 1939, the Red Sox were firmly established as the leading team in town. But manager Eddie Collins tried to economize on Yawkey’s behalf and ordered that writers’ expenses be curbed, while the Braves increased the team’s publicity budget to the point where it later even included gambling money for writers on the road. The result was divided loyalties among the writers as to which team treated them better, and thus which was more deserving of their favorable notices.
²²

The accepted reporting convention of the day was to write spare, runs-hits-and-errors stories that focused only on what happened in the game.
^*
Criticizing management, flawed strategy, or inept play, or otherwise rocking the boat, was considered off-limits. Scoops were discouraged—and often shared—because they made those who didn’t get them look bad. In addition, there was collaboration in the writing of stories and sharing of quotations.

Another conspirator in the collaborative process was the Western Union telegraph operator who wired the reporters’ stories to the papers. “We had telegraph operators who would write half the stories,” Horgan said. “He’d be sending your story, and if he saw you didn’t have something that another guy had, he’d just stick that in your piece.… It was like a big club. Everyone was in it, and no one was going to get hurt.”

Some stories were wildly embellished or altogether untrue. Russ Kemmerer, who pitched for the Red Sox in the mid-’50s, thought this was the natural by-product of so many newspapers competing with one other and looking for their own angles. “Each paper had to find a way to deal with the same game, make it interesting enough to sell papers and at the same time mention the score,” wrote Kemmerer in a memoir of his time in the big leagues. “One paper had this heartwarming story of how my sick three-year-old son had seen me pitching on television and crawled out to the kitchen to get his mother to watch the game. Another told a story of how General Manager Joe Cronin ripped up my contract
and doubled my salary. One related that Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey had given me a bonus check for $1,000. They all sounded great! Sadly enough, none of them was true.”
²³

Yawkey assumed the press was basically corrupt, interested in little more than hospitality, and in return for that would remain compliant. Indeed, the willingness of the Red Sox and other teams to pay the writers’ expenses, and the newspapers’ ready acceptance of the arrangement, established a corrupt foundation for the player-reporter relationship. In addition, some reporters were personally corrupt—part of a culture that was built on sloth and collaborating with one another, not competing.

Writers who were on the take had nonbaseball “accounts,” as they were called—clients who paid them to write stories, usually short items. The sponsors included racetracks, boxing promoters, wrestling promoters, dog tracks, or anyone else who wanted publicity. The papers, which knew of the practice and encouraged it, could thus pay their writers less, knowing they would supplement their salaries through such after-hours pursuits.
²⁴

With Williams’s arrival in 1939, Yawkey had made a token effort to improve ties with the writers by hiring a public relations man, Ed Doherty. But Doherty was so hostile to reporters that he effectively served as the anti–press agent. Doherty “considered the writers parasites and made no attempt to conceal his contempt for them,” wrote Al Hirshberg, who covered the Red Sox of that era for the
Post
and the
Herald.
“His standard reply to anything but routine questions was, ‘How the hell do I know?’ ”
²⁵

Partly as a result of Doherty’s antagonism, loyalties and affinities fluctuated. By the mid-’40s, relations between the writers and the team ranged from congenial to extremely tense. In late 1946, when the Red Sox clinched the pennant in Cleveland, a long-running feud between manager Joe Cronin and the
Evening American
’s Herb “Huck” Finnegan boiled over. There had been bad blood between the two for a while, and Cronin felt the hard-drinking and irascible Finnegan had been insufficiently appreciative of his leadership.

“Well, what do you say now, you fuckin’ bastard?” Cronin asked Finnegan when they chanced to run into each other in the elevator back at the hotel.

“You’ll never win another one!” replied Finnegan defiantly.
²⁶

That night the Red Sox refused to include the writers in the team celebration. Though Yawkey paid for a separate press party, the moment was a watershed in Red Sox–press relations, and they got steadily worse.
“The Red Sox just didn’t know how to make the press work for them, and the result was a multitude of unnecessary problems,” Hirshberg recalled.
²⁷
Later, in choosing a successor to Doherty, the team underscored its disregard, or contempt, for the press by selecting aging bull-pen coach Larry Woodall, who also couldn’t stand reporters. Woodall made it his business at spring training to circulate among rookies and instruct them not to talk to the Boston writers because they couldn’t be trusted.
²⁸

At first, the writers had thoroughly enjoyed their repartee with Williams. He was new, immensely talented, raw, spirited, amusing, clever, and, of course, he talked nonstop. He’d received a charmed press his rookie year, but in 1940, as he brooded and sulked, he began to lash out at the writers with increasing frequency. One of Williams’s favorite maneuvers was to give a scoop to an out-of-town writer—the better to antagonize his real or perceived enemies in the local press corps. Like the fans, reporters found Williams easy to provoke, and then his public rages would become fair game to report. “I remember one time I asked him how he could talk to the writers the way he did,” said Don Buddin, who played shortstop for the Red Sox from 1956 to 1961. “He said, ‘Son, if you hit .350, you can do a lot of things.’ ”
²⁹

This new adversarial dynamic would be further fueled, especially after World War II, by the arrival of younger and better-educated writers who were not interested in writing one-dimensional stories about the game only. Readers were beginning to demand a more personal, behind-the-scenes treatment of their heroes, an approach Ted thought an unacceptable invasion of his privacy. In addition, while the number of major dailies in Boston began to decrease, each paper was starting to assign two or three writers to the Red Sox beat, and sheer repetition was no longer an option. Moreover, the number of suburban dailies that covered the team proliferated. Soon the Boston chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America was the largest in the country, after New York’s.

By far the leading Boston sports journalist of the day—the most widely read, the most outrageous, and the most brilliant, even in the nonsports realm—was Dave Egan, a columnist for the
Record
whose nom de plume (chosen for reasons unknown) was the Colonel. And this leading light had a vendetta against Ted, to whom he referred as “T. Williams Esquire.”

Egan was about five foot seven, 150 pounds, and dapper. He always
wore a suit and tie topped off with a stylish fedora. An elegant writer, he was a provocateur, a contrarian who delighted in cutting against the grain seven days a week. If Ted was the darling of Boston, Egan decided he had to knock him down. He was a populist rabble-rouser who targeted the haves on behalf of—he liked to think—the have-nots. And in addition to all that, he was a drunk. (When the Colonel was hors de combat, writers at the other papers would hear about it, and press-box parlor games ensued to guess who the ghostwriter of the column would be that day.)

Egan was far more educated than his brethren on the sports pages. Born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1901, the son of a milkman who fathered sixteen other children, Egan won a scholarship to Harvard, sailed through in three years, cum laude, and went on to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1925. He practiced law for a year and then went to work as a sportswriter for the
Globe,
where he had been a night office boy and had done some writing while in college.

Egan ranged widely and colorfully. When a dog wandered onto the floor of the Boston Garden once during a Celtics game, the Colonel linked the moment to his antagonism toward referees, writing that the refs had “whistled him in off the street.” He referred to New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia as “the Little Flower with the Big Pot.” In 1943, when a cabdriver struck Boston Braves manager Casey Stengel one rainy night in Kenmore Square and broke his leg, Egan suggested that the cabbie should be hailed as Man of the Year.
³⁰
Yet Egan was far from without moral compass and dignity. His concern for racial justice and equality placed him well ahead of his time. In 1942, five years before Jackie Robinson broke the color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Egan called on Major League Baseball to integrate, and he continued to pressure the Red Sox until his death in 1958. The following year, Boston became the last team in baseball to have a black player. For his efforts, Egan was honored by the Boston chapter of the NAACP in 1948.

The core of the Egan indictment against Ted was that he was the consummate greedy individualist, “just not suited for a bicycle built for nine,” a man whose boorish on-field behavior set a poor example for young people. But his harshest charge, the one that frosted Williams the most, was that he failed in the clutch. The ultimate evidence for this, the Colonel would later claim, was that in the ten most important games of Ted’s career—the seven World Series games of 1946, the playoff game for the pennant against the Cleveland Indians in 1948, and the final two games of the 1949 season against the New York Yankees, in which the
flag was on the line—he hit just .205. Williams’s defense, of course, was that it was unfair to cherry-pick ten games and ignore the countless other times when he
did
come through. Egan couldn’t have cared less.

A chronic beef of Ted’s, and of other players who were the target of Egan’s slashing prose, was that the Colonel rarely showed up in the clubhouse to allow the players he had ripped to confront him—unlike the beat writers, who were there every day. Still, Ted always read Egan carefully. At Fenway, it would be one of the jobs of Larry Corea, a clubhouse boy who worked under Johnny Orlando, to make sure Williams got his daily
Record.
“Ted used to send me out to get the
Record
at about 5:00 p.m. to see what the Colonel wrote,” said Corea.
³¹
When the team was on the road, Williams would have his pals at home call and read him what the Colonel had written. If it was bad, Ted’s anger would usually help him go on a tear. Then he’d want to know if Egan had mentioned any of the good things he’d done. Invariably, there would be nothing, reinforcing Ted’s theory that the Colonel was simply out to get him.