The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (70 page)

“He died tough,” Ted later wrote. “I got his little pistol. I always thought he would shoot himself because he suffered so much.… There wasn’t the closeness between us there should have been. I regret that. After I left for pro ball, I never saw much of him.”
³⁸

Funeral services were held at a mortuary in San Diego, and Ted flew
out from Scottsdale to attend. Williams spent tens of thousands of dollars on Danny’s medical care toward the end of his life, including flying him on charter flights and private jets to the Mayo Clinic and even to Mexico for treatments.

“When my father was sick and couldn’t work, Ted supported my whole family,” said Danny’s son Ted, whose college education would later be paid for by his famous uncle. “And May, too. Ted comes across as being hard-assed and arrogant and aloof. But he helped a lot of family members. Certainly with money. He knew he had a special place in the world and had the opportunity to help people less fortunate than he. The whole family besides him were just ordinary people who never accomplished much. The rest of the family really saw him as a hero. I don’t think he ever forgot his family. That’s probably missed.”

The Red Sox opened the season in Washington on April 18 before 28,327 fans and assorted dignitaries, including President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. When Williams first came to bat in the second inning, Nixon was heard to tell Eisenhower: “This is probably his last season. Let’s root for him,” according to the Associated Press. “That’s a good idea,” Ike responded.
³⁹

Williams worked the count to three and two off Senators ace Camilo Pascual, then crushed a fastball to dead center. The ball took off on a rising line and in just a few seconds cleared the thirty-one-foot fence, landing at least 420 feet away. The president and vice president were delighted, and they rose to give the Kid an ovation as he rounded the bases. Ted’s 493rd homer tied him for fourth on the all-time list with Lou Gehrig. They were trailing only Mel Ott, Jimmie Foxx, and Ruth. Another looming milestone that season, the press noted, was Williams’s two thousandth walk. He would reach that mark after he gained fifty-seven more bases on balls. Ruth again had that record with 2,056.

The next day in Boston, in the home opener against the Yankees, Ted blasted another pitch into the right-field grandstand in the eighth inning off Jim Coates. Williams proved how creaky he really was, pulling a leg muscle as he rounded the bases in his home-run trot. Then he caught a virus, to boot, and didn’t return to the lineup until late May.

As Ted rode the bench, there was managerial and front-office intrigue aplenty. With the Red Sox floundering, a pro–Mike Higgins faction among the writers had been reporting that there was dissension among some players over how Billy Jurges was handling the team. Alarmed by
the reports, Jurges called a team meeting in New York on April 26 to clear the air, asking any player who had a beef with him to speak out. No one did.

Williams scoffed at the dissension stories and strongly backed Jurges. “It’s a lot of horseshit!” Ted told his pal Joe Reichler of the Associated Press. “It’s those damn Boston writers again. They’re always starting trouble.”
⁴⁰

But a cloud remained over Jurges. At the end of May, UPI reported that Tom Yawkey was on the verge of replacing the manager with Williams, but both Yawkey and Ted denied the story.
^*
Then the owner, along with Joe Cronin’s replacement as general manager, Bucky Harris (Harris had been the Red Sox field manager in 1934, when he was replaced by Cronin), issued a strong statement saying that “Billy Jurges is our manager and no changes are contemplated.” After its release, a furious Yawkey walked over to a group of writers at Fenway Park and said that while he believed in freedom of the press, “sometimes it goes beyond the bounds of human dignity and reason. I don’t put up with it. I don’t have to. How many of you guys think you’re qualified to manage a ball club?” No one spoke up. Yawkey picked out one reporter and looked him in the eye. “Do you?”

“No, I don’t think I’m qualified,” the reporter said.

“You’re damn right you’re not.”
⁴¹

But the anonymous sniping persisted, and the skittish Jurges called another clubhouse meeting, this time inviting the writers to attend as well. Most of the players looked at the floor nervously. Williams glared at the reporters, still protective of Jurges. The manager asked that the player whom the wire story had quoted off the record as saying that Jurges had lost control of the team step forward and identify himself. Of course no one said a word. Then, astonishingly, Jurges turned to the writers and asked
them
to identify the culprit. “We’re all in this together,” he told the reporters. “We’re all working for the City of Boston and the Boston Red Sox.”
⁴²

After another long silence, the
Globe
’s Roger Birtwell piped up and, in his best Brahmin-Harvard accent, proceeded to give Jurges his lecture on the journalistic ethics of the day, such as they were. The writers covered the team; they were not
part
of the team, he said, and the manager was exceeding his authority by even asking them to come to this meeting.
Most of the players giggled through Birtwell’s separation-of-church-and-state discourse. Ted slowly boiled.

On June 14, two weeks after Yawkey’s nearly Shermanesque statement that Jurges was his man, the manager was fired and replaced by old standby Mike Higgins.

Williams returned to the lineup rejuvenated, with the pain in his neck mostly gone. On June 17, he belted his five hundredth home run in Cleveland. With that, after the game he told a Cleveland writer, Hal Lebovitz, that this was definitely his last year.
^*

Ted proceeded to hit for average and power, and by July 4, Harold Kaese declared Williams the hottest hitter in the league, with fourteen home runs on the season and twelve in his last eighty at bats, the most potent power streak of his career.
⁴³
Three days later his average stood at a sparkling .345, though it was clear he would yet again not have enough at bats to contend for another batting title.

On August 10, in Cleveland, Ted hit his 512th career home run to surpass Mel Ott’s 511 for third in the all-time rankings, behind Foxx at 534 and Ruth at the seemingly unattainable 714. Later the same game, Ted swatted number 513.

“I’m happy and delighted over these two homers,” Williams told the writers in the clubhouse. “I wasn’t going for the long hit either time.… I got to know Mel Ott when he was traveling as a broadcaster with the Tigers. We used to talk hitting a lot. I can hardly believe that I have finally hit more homers than he did.”
⁴⁴

On the flight to Baltimore, Boston’s next stop on that road trip, Williams shocked the writers by sending them champagne. “So scientists think getting to the moon is an accomplishment?” wrote the
Globe
the following day in noting Ted’s gesture. “Know what happened to the baseball writers yesterday on the flight here from Cleveland?”
⁴⁵

Soon he collected his two thousandth walk on the way to what would be a final total of 2,021—forty-one less than Ruth’s record. Ted’s walk-is-as-good-as-a-hit credo was still not yet firmly established, but the stats mavens who would later emerge as a force in the game blessed his base on balls numbers as a key cog in the vital on-base percentage statistic. Williams’s .482 on-base percentage (OBP) remains a major-league record.

With each milestone reached, with each record tied or broken, there
was inevitable press speculation about what might have been had Ted not lost nearly five years of his prime to World War II and Korea. The
Globe
’s Jerry Nason calculated that his service in both wars cost Williams 2,534 times at bat, or 169 home runs, based on his lifetime average of one home run every 14.9 times up. At that rate, his five hundredth home run would actually have been his 669th had he kept playing straight through, Nason wrote. But Ted brushed off the might-have-been talk. Others who went off to war had their numbers affected, too, after all. “Nobody is more grateful than I am to have played as long as I have,” he said. “I’ve been lucky.”
⁴⁶

The
Sporting News
announced that it had named Williams baseball’s “Player of the Decade” by acclamation in a vote of veteran players and writers in major-league cities around the country. This was effectively a lifetime achievement award, an acknowledgment that Ted had set historic records and fully redeemed himself in his valedictory season. Williams told
Sporting News
publisher J. G. Taylor Spink that to be recognized ahead of the likes of Mantle, Mays, Musial, and Aaron was meaningful to him, and it helped alleviate the sting of various MVP snubs.

The Red Sox mailed in the rest of their season and finished in seventh place with a record of 65–89, thirty-two games behind the pennant-winning Yankees. It didn’t matter—the story, as ever, was Ted. He resisted offers from other AL teams to hold days in his honor as he took his final trip around the league. Instead, Ted underscored his longevity by homering off the Senators’ Don Lee, prompting old-timers to recall that twenty-one years earlier, he had also homered off Lee’s father, Thornton.

Williams tried to keep his mind on baseball—even though he’d had to deal with the news that his home in Islamorada had been destroyed by Hurricane Donna on September 11, along with many of his trophies and a set of custom-made four-foot-by-five-foot scrapbooks containing personal photographs and clippings. His final numbers—a .316 average in 113 games with 29 home runs and 72 RBIs—validated the story line he had hoped for entering his final season: that even at forty-two years old he could put together a season worthy of his excellent career and prove that 1959 was an aberration resulting solely from injury.

On September 25, the Red Sox made official what Ted had already announced—that he was retiring. The announcement, which was made after the Yankees clinched another pennant, also said that Williams would serve as a batting instructor at spring training in 1961, and after that, he would assume “other duties best suited to his talents.” Four days
earlier, Yawkey had offered Ted the general manager’s job for the following season, but Williams had turned it down and suggested the hitting coach role instead.
⁴⁷

His final game at Fenway Park as an active player would be against the Baltimore Orioles on September 28, a Wednesday afternoon.

T
he Red Sox didn’t play on September 26, and Ted used the free time to make a half-hour instructional film to be released in 1961 entitled
How I Hit, by Ted Williams
. He smashed balls off an elevated tee, then faced live pitching from Jerry Casale, a third-year right-hander. Rookie Jim Pagliaroni, who idolized Williams, served as the catcher, while another rookie, Don Gile, shagged out in right field.

Ted bantered with some hovering writers, and said with a smile that this was “some private business. The boys are just taking pictures of my swing. They got an idea that it might make a film.” One writer asked him if he was sorry to be retiring as a player. “Yes, I am,” Williams replied. “Baseball has been very good to me over the years, and I’ll be forever grateful. Sure, I’ll miss it as a player. That’s only natural after all these years, but it had to come.”
¹
Such innocuous stuff provided adequate fodder for a press corps hungry for any off-day morsels about Ted. The news, such as it was, was featured in all the papers the following day, alongside accounts of the historic first televised Kennedy-Nixon presidential debate the previous night in Chicago as well as a report that Nixon would be boldly campaigning in JFK’s home state of Massachusetts later that week.

Ted’s penultimate home game, on September 27, was a forgettable 17–3 shellacking at the hands of the Orioles in which he grounded out, popped up, and walked. On the twenty-eighth, the weather was overcast, chilly, damp, and bleak, with little wind. Ineptly, the Red Sox chose this very day to step on the Williams valedictory story line by announcing the firing of general manager Bucky Harris and the return the following season of slugging outfielder Jackie Jensen, who had quit
the team in 1959 because of a fear of flying. The news meant that before the game most of the writers were preoccupied in the executive suites. That left more running room for Ed Linn, who had been assigned by
Sport
magazine to cover Ted’s last stand.

Linn had grown up in the Dorchester section of Boston as an ardent Williams fan who had watched with delight from the Fenway bleachers in 1939 as the rookie made his debut in right field and captivated the crowd with his youthful exuberance. After serving in the Army during World War II and attending Boston University on the GI Bill, Linn began a career as a freelance writer that was anchored by his association with
Sport
and his status at the magazine as a Williams aficionado. He had first been assigned a piece on Ted in 1954, following the spring training mishap in which the Kid broke his collarbone. Linn showed up at the clubhouse and heard Williams’s response inside the training room when he was asked if he would receive a man from
Sport.

“Send the son of a bitch in,” said Ted.

Linn entered and introduced himself, whereupon Williams immediately said he would not talk to him. But he would tell him why. He had been nursing a grudge against
Sport
since 1948, when he had failed to show up for a luncheon the magazine had invited him to following the World Series and
Sport
had retaliated by dispatching a reporter to do a hatchet job on him. He couldn’t remember the writer’s name, but it would come to him, Ted said.

Linn mumbled something about the magazine having new ownership now and a new editor.

Who was the editor? Ted asked.

Ed Fitzgerald, Linn replied.

“Ed Fitzgerald!
That’s
the son of a bitch” who had maligned him, Williams roared.

Having given up on getting his interview, Linn asked if he could at least ask one question. Williams, now feeling some empathy for the inexperienced young writer, who after all had had nothing to do with the 1948 retribution, answered at length. Linn ended up staying on to interview Ted and his teammates over a period of three days. When his teammates asked if it was okay if they spoke to Linn, Ted would respond, “Yeah, yeah. Talk to the son of a bitch.” Linn modestly concluded that neither his technique nor his interviewing skills had had anything to do with Williams changing his mind: “Ted could see that he had someone there who had not the slightest idea what he was doing. And Ted has always had a thing about lending a helping hand to the disadvantaged.”
²

Every year after that for the rest of the decade,
Sport
called on Linn to write an article on Williams, and now here he was for the ending.

On his last day, Ted arrived at the park at 10:50 a.m., nearly four hours before game time. He was wearing dark brown slacks, a yellow sport shirt, and a tan pullover sweater. When Williams saw Linn, who had finagled his way into the Red Sox clubhouse in violation of the team rule that barred reporters for two hours before the game, he snapped: “You’re not supposed to be in here, you know.”

“It’s your last day,” replied Linn. “Why don’t you live a little?”

Williams started to the trainer’s room, but then wheeled around. “You’ve got a nerve coming here to interview me after the last one you wrote about me.”

What was the matter with the last piece? Linn asked.

“You called me unbearable, that’s what’s the matter.”

Linn noted that the full quote was actually that he “was sometimes unbearable but never dull,” which had a different connotation.

Williams then reverted to bashing
Sport
for its original sin—the 1948 piece, now twelve years old. What he objected to in that article, it turned out, was the mere fact that the reporter had deigned to interview his mother to elicit a complimentary quote about him. As far as Williams was concerned, his family was off-limits, even if they said nice things about him.

“Why don’t you just write your story without me?” Williams suggested to Linn. “What do you have to talk to me for? What can I tell you now that I haven’t told you before?”

“Why don’t you let me tell you what the story is supposed to be? Then you can say yes or no,” Linn said before realizing this phrasing invited only one reply.

“I can tell you before you tell me!” Ted shouted. “No! No, no, no.”

Linn retreated, hoping Williams would largely forget he was there and just let him observe. He proceeded to spend the entire time before the first inning with Ted, and later walked him out of the park when all was done. His lead piece, published in February of 1961, entitled “The Kid’s Last Game,” would be the definitive behind-the-scenes account of Williams’s finale.

As his teammates dressed and went out on the field, Ted remained in the clubhouse and read his mail. Then he took his spikes into the trainer’s room and began shining them. A photographer came by and asked him to sign a ball. “Are you crazy?” Ted sneered before demanding that the clubhouse boy throw the offending photographer out.

Williams did not leave the clubhouse for the dugout until 12:55 p.m., just thirty-five minutes before the game was scheduled to begin. He’d decided to skip batting practice—the better to make a dramatic entrance, Linn thought. As he climbed the stairs to the dugout, he bumped into his fishing pal Bud Leavitt, sports editor of the
Bangor Daily News.
Spotting Williams, a group of photographers closed in and began firing away. Ted leveled a few choice obscenities at them and guided Leavitt to the far end of the dugout. “Let’s sit down so we don’t get bothered by all these blasted cameramen,” he said.

Leavitt let Ted know that he had brought Cornelius Russell III and a bunch of his friends to the game. Russell was a friend of Leavitt’s, a young man from Bangor who had broken his neck in a sports mishap and was now confined to a wheelchair. Several years earlier, while Ted was in Bangor, Leavitt had taken him to meet Russell, an avid Red Sox and Ted fan known as Connie. Ted and Connie became friends, and Williams would visit him whenever he came to Bangor to hunt or fish, and he would call him on holidays to offer good wishes. Connie had never seen a major-league game, so now Leavitt had invited him and several of his friends to Fenway for Ted’s finale. They were all sitting behind the Red Sox dugout. Ted told Leavitt to bring Connie and his friends around to his suite at the Somerset Hotel after the game.
³

As Leavitt walked away, a young, attractive redhead peered into the dugout from her box seat and asked Ted if he would sign her scorecard.

“I can’t sign it, dear, league rules. Where are you going to be after the game?”

“You told me that once before,” the woman said.

“Well, where are you going to be?” Williams shouted.

“Right here.”

“All right.”

Joe Cronin, Ted’s first manager and now the president of the American League, came into the dugout to greet his old charge. They talked quietly for a while, and as Cronin left he said to Ted, “Behave yourself.”
⁴
Then Williams came onto the field to do a television interview with a local anchorman, Jack Chase of WBZ-TV, and his colleague Betty Adams. By this time, most of the surprisingly small crowd of 10,454 in attendance that day were in their seats, and they let out a lusty cheer at the sight of Ted. It was foggy and dark with a threat of rain.

Chase asked Ted how he felt. “You can’t get blood out of a turnip,” Williams replied. “I know I’ve gone as far as I can go as a player. I wouldn’t try to go any further.” Betty Adams followed up with a question about his
future plans. “Sweetheart,” Ted said, “all I know is I’m going to spring training. After that, I don’t know what I’ll be doing.”
⁵

Williams pushed his way through a gaggle of photographers who had been taking pictures of him doing the interview and headed back to the dugout. Someone asked him to pose with Cronin, and he did. Then Ted grabbed his glove and went out to play catch with Pumpsie Green, as he generally did during pregame warm-ups. At this the photographers closed in again. “Why don’t you cockroaches get off my back?” Ted sneered at them. “Let me breathe.”

A bell rang to signal the end of warm-ups before Ted could make more than a few dozen throws to Green. Most of his teammates went back into the clubhouse, but Williams stayed in the dugout and put on a jacket to ward off the chill. An older photographer asked him to pose, but Ted would have none of it. “Get lost,” he said. “I’ve seen enough of you, you old goat.”

Curt Gowdy, the Red Sox broadcaster who would preside over a pregame ceremony honoring Williams, stopped by to go over the script. Then an old woman leaned in from the box seats with a plaintive wail: “Don’t leave us, Ted! Don’t leave us!” Williams was unmoved. “Oh, hell,” he said, turning his back on her with disdain. When the young redhead saw this, she said to him: “Why don’t you act nice?” Ted ambled over to her, smiling broadly, and said teasingly: “Come on, dear, with that High Street accent you got there.”

Williams noticed Ed Linn soaking in the scene from a seat in the dugout. “You getting it all?” he asked him sarcastically. “You getting what you came for?”

In watching Williams’s serial displays of rudeness and bad manners since his arrival that morning, Linn had concluded that Ted was determined to go out with his hardness on full display, without betraying even a hint of sentimentality.

Gowdy called the proceedings to order at home plate. “As we all know,” he said, “this is the final home game for—in my opinion and most of yours—the greatest hitter who ever lived, Ted Williams.” There was loud applause. After some more preliminary remarks from the broadcaster, the chairman of the Boston Chamber of Commerce presented Williams with a silver bowl “on behalf of the business community of Boston.” Another chamber representative offered a plaque in appreciation for Ted’s visits “to kids and veterans’ hospitals.” Boston mayor John Collins then proclaimed it Ted Williams Day and handed Ted a $4,000 check for the Jimmy Fund.

As this was going on, the Orioles starting pitcher, Steve Barber, a twenty-two-year-old rookie left-hander, limbered up on the sidelines, trying to stay warm. Pitching coach Harry “the Cat” Brecheen, the former Cardinals ace who had owned Ted in the 1946 World Series, supervised Barber. Williams fidgeted nervously—head mostly down, with one foot pawing the ground—waiting for the ceremony to wrap up.

Gowdy said, “Pride is what made him great. He’s a champion, a thoroughbred, a champion of sports.… I don’t think we’ll ever see another like him.” He then asked for another round of applause “for number nine on his last game in Boston.” At that, Williams gave Gowdy a hug and whispered in his ear that he’d like to get a copy of his remarks.
⁶
Gowdy told him he’d ad-libbed it. “Aw, shit!” Ted said, then he grabbed the microphone and addressed the crowd.

“Despite the fact of the disagreeable things that have been said about me by the Knights of the Keyboard—and I can’t help thinking about them—despite these things, my stay in Boston has been the most wonderful thing in my life. If I were asked where I would like to have played, I would have to say Boston, with the greatest owner in baseball and the greatest fans in America. Thank you.”

The crowd roared and applauded. Williams walked back to the dugout, where his teammates were standing and waiting for him, also applauding. He smiled and winked at them, bounded down the steps, and took a seat on the bench.