The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (71 page)

Of course the writers were not thrilled at Ted’s “Knights of the Keyboard” dig, but they had grown accustomed to his scorn over the years and well knew that his retirement also meant the passing of a reporter’s dream. No one, after all, was better copy than Williams. In fact, John Gillooly of the
Record
had announced his own mock retirement that morning. “Dear Boss,” he wrote. “This is it. Deal me out. I am through. Get another boy and give him a new ribbon and let him take over the keyboard. This is my official resignation. Williams has retired.… The loss of Williams to a Boston sports columnist is like a bad case of athlete’s fingers to Van Cliburn. You just can’t pound the keys any more. The song has ended.” Gillooly said Ted was “our Hemingway. Oh, the stories he has written for us.”
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Besides Ed Linn, there was another keen follower and admirer of Williams in attendance that day, a different kind of writer who had already established his bona fides as an ascendant man of letters: John Updike. Updike—who died in 2009 after producing a vast collection of fiction,
poetry, essays, and criticism that established him among the leading lights of American literature—was then twenty-eight, just six years removed from Harvard, where he had graduated summa cum laude. He was firmly ensconced at
The New Yorker
magazine, for which he had already written more than one hundred articles, essays, short stories, and poems. In addition, he’d already published three books: a collection of poems, a collection of short stories, and a novel—
The Poorhouse Fair.

The married Updike was at Fenway Park that day only by chance, he later admitted. He had come up from New York to rendezvous with another woman, but when he went to her apartment on Beacon Hill he learned that he had been stood up. So knowing this was Williams’s last appearance in Boston, he went to the ballpark instead and ended up writing a piece for
The New Yorker
entitled “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which is considered by many to be the best sports essay ever.

Growing up in Shillington, Pennsylvania, near Reading, Updike loved baseball but was uninterested in either Philadelphia team—the Phillies or Athletics—but he latched onto the Red Sox. In a 1986 article for the
Boston Globe
entitled “Loving the Sox,” Updike wrote that he had become aware of the great Williams before World War II, though it was the 1946 World Series that turned him into an enthusiastic Boston fan. He had a vivid memory of sitting in his father’s Chevrolet at the age of fourteen and listening to the seventh game.

Working for
The New Yorker
after college, he would take the subway to Yankee Stadium to watch the aging Williams duel with Mantle. Then in 1957, Updike and his family moved to Ipswich, on Massachusetts’s North Shore, where he would listen to Sox games on the radio. He loved Curt Gowdy’s voice, “with its guileless hint of Wyoming twang,” and became such a devotee of the team that he once got stranded in the Vermont wilderness after pulling over to listen to a game and draining the car battery.

In a 2008 interview, Updike told
Globe
sports columnist Bob Ryan, “No other sports figure has moved me as much as Ted Williams.”
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He was drawn to Ted’s fragile persona, his constant warfare with the fans and the writers, and the sense of drama that seemed to always surround him. “The fact that he had these detractors in the stands and in the press just made Williams all the more appealing,” Updike said. “It made you like him more and root for him harder. It gave him a heroic ethos.… He never had a smooth season where he just played ball and everything just fell into place. There was always something going wrong.”
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For Ted’s last game, Updike arrived early and bought a good seat,
near the Orioles dugout, behind third base. For his
New Yorker
audience, he immediately set the scene: “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark,” he wrote, a description that would be quoted ad nauseam in the ensuing years and etch its way firmly into Red Sox lore.
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Batting third as usual, Ted came to the plate in the bottom of the first inning. There was one out and a runner on first. Willie Tasby—the center fielder acquired from the Orioles that June in a trade for Gene Stephens, Ted’s caddy—had walked. Barber started Ted off with a curve that was inside; then a fastball was low. The crowd began to boo, wanting to see Williams hit. But the next two pitches were balls, too, and Ted trotted to first with a base on balls. After a hit batsman and a wild pitch, Williams found himself on third. Lou Clinton then lined out deep to center fielder Jackie Brandt. Ted tagged up and slid into home past catcher Gus Triandos as Brandt’s throw hit him in the back. The crowd, which was cheering Ted’s every move, was delighted by the uncharacteristic sliding hustle play.

When Ted returned for his second at bat in the third inning, Barber had been replaced by Jack Fisher, a twenty-one-year-old right-hander in his second year. Williams drove a one-and-one pitch to deep center, but Brandt drifted back and made the catch easily.

It was then announced over the public-address system that Ted’s number, 9, would be retired by the Red Sox “after today’s game.” That meant that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to its final three games of the year at Yankee Stadium. So this would not just be his final home game but his final game, period.

In the fifth inning, with two out and nobody on and the Sox trailing 3–2, Ted came to bat for the third time. By then a fog was coming in, and an east wind had kicked up. He lashed a ball hard and deep to right-center. Off the bat it looked gone, but the right fielder, Al Pilarcik, raced back as far as he could, and with his back against the bull-pen wall, out from the 380-foot sign, caught the ball chest high. “I didn’t think I could hit one harder than that,” Williams said after the game. “The conditions weren’t good.”
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In the sixth inning, the lights were turned on to counter the advancing darkness and gloom. Jack Fisher was having few problems with the Red Sox and appeared in command as he took a 4–2 lead into the bottom of the eighth. Williams was due up second for what figured to be his last major-league at bat.

Willie Tasby, the first batter, came out of the dugout, followed quickly by Ted, whereupon the crowd roared. Tasby, rather than do the customary
dawdling by the on-deck circle to swing a bat or two, proceeded directly to home plate, as if he couldn’t wait to cede the spotlight to Ted. He hit the first pitch on the ground to shortstop for a routine out.

Williams had barely settled into the on-deck circle on one knee, swinging the lead bat to limber up, when it was his time. As he strode to the dish, everyone in the ballpark stood, but the cheers heard all afternoon now stopped in favor of more respectful sustained applause. Home plate umpire Ed Hurley—who, like all the umpires, admired Williams and who would stop by the clubhouse after the game to pay his respects—called time as the applause swelled and continued with no sign of dying down. Ted stood in the box, swishing his bat back and forth and staring at Fisher, all business, ready to hit. He seemed oblivious to the fans’ acclaim and did nothing to acknowledge it. After about two minutes, Hurley signaled for Fisher to pitch, and he did so, even as the applause continued. Only after he threw his pitch—a ball, low—did the ovation stop.

The second pitch was a fastball, neck high. Williams swung mightily—and missed. The fans oohed, but they seemed to take some satisfaction in seeing that he was obviously going for the downs—neither he nor they would be cheated. Ted said later he couldn’t believe he missed it. After the first pitch, he’d thought Fisher “humped up, as if he were going to try and fire the ball by me. I
knew
he was going to try and pump it right past. And gee, here comes a ball I should have hit a mile, and I
missed
the son of a gun. I don’t miss,
completely
miss, very often and I don’t know yet how I missed that ball.”

He’d swung a tad late, so he told himself to be quicker on the next pitch: “Fisher couldn’t wait to throw the next one,” Ted remembered. “He must have thought he threw the last one by me, and maybe he did, but all my professional life I had been a fastball hitter, and whenever I had an inkling one was coming it was that much better for me.”
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But even guessing fastball and getting it, there was still the matter of delivering: he had hit the ball in the fifth inning on the screws, and it had not gone out. Then there was the singular pressure of this moment, the last at bat of his career, and the keen strain to satisfy his own yearning—and those of legions of others—to go out in style.

Fisher was confident. “I had just thrown a fastball right by him,” he remembered. “So I came right back with another one. He hit it real good.”
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Yes, he did.

The pitch came in waist high—on the outside corner, but still too fat. Williams turned on it and sent the ball screaming on a grand trajectory out to deep right-center. Jackie Brandt, who’d denied him in the fifth, couldn’t reach this one. The ball sailed into the Red Sox bull pen and struck an aluminum canopy that covered the bench where the relief pitchers sat, making a loud racket.

“It was in the books while it was still in the sky,” as Updike put it.

Deafening cheers, tinged with pure joy, rejoined the applause now as the Kid rounded the bases quickly, head down, expressionless. As he passed second, he thought of tipping his cap, he said later. If he were ever going to do it, this would be the time, his last chance. But he didn’t.

As he approached home plate, Gus Triandos, the Orioles catcher, greeted him with a big smile, and Ted smiled back. The on-deck hitter, catcher Jim Pagliaroni, had dropped his bat and started to cry. “This was my idol,” he recalled, “and no one will understand how special this was to me.” Beside himself with excitement, he reached out his hand to congratulate Williams, a routine Ted never liked, even then. So Williams didn’t extend his hand in return, but Pagliaroni reached out and grabbed it anyway.
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Said Pagliaroni of the moment, “It was my biggest thrill. I caught Catfish Hunter’s perfect game and Bill Monbouquette’s no-hitter. When Ted did that it was overwhelming.”
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Williams entered the dugout and was swarmed by his teammates, who hooted and hollered and thumped his back. Ted took a seat on the bench and put on a jacket, assuming he wouldn’t reenter the game. The fans were on their feet, delirious, and the park shook with cheers, which later turned to chants of “We want Ted! We want Ted! We want Ted!” Williams let all the adulation wash over him, and a satisfied smile came over his face. His teammates and Mike Higgins urged him to pop out to the field for a curtain call. Even the first-base umpire, Johnny Rice, motioned for him to come out, but Ted never budged. “Gods do not answer letters,” Updike famously wrote, in what became the most quoted line of his seminal piece.

But Higgins wanted to give Williams one more chance to acknowledge the crowd. So at the end of the inning, he ordered Ted to take the field for the top of the ninth. Williams scowled at the manager, ripped off his jacket, grabbed his glove, and ran out to left. As soon as he arrived, he noticed Carroll Hardy running out to take his place and recognized Higgins’s ploy, his nod to theater.

The crowd screamed anew, but Ted ran right through the cheers, still unwilling to bow to convention. As he passed shortstop, he said to Pumpsie Green, “Isn’t this a crock of shit?” Green laughed.
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Nearing the dugout, he still was not showing a trace of emotion. First baseman Don Gile challenged him to show
something,
even to show off. “Put it on, you big shit!” Gile said.
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But Ted just smiled as he passed by.

The ninth inning continued without Williams, and the Red Sox went on to score two runs to win the game, 5–4. As his teammates finished out the formalities on the field, the first thing Williams did when he reached the clubhouse was to go to a phone and share the news of his heroics with one Lee Howard, a fetching blond model from Chicago whom he had been seeing.

Howard had been born Lee Houda and raised in the affluent Chicago suburb of Riverside. Her father ran a cookie and cracker business in the city. Lee—tall and slim, with blue eyes—became a fashion model for Marshall Field’s and various high-end ladies’ clothing stores along Michigan Avenue. In the early ’40s, she did a brief stint in Hollywood as an MGM starlet, during which time it was suggested she change her surname to the more mellifluous Howard. She appeared in small roles in a few films, at one point as a Ziegfeld girl. In 1945 she married William Charley, a wholesale food distributor, who enlisted Ronald Reagan to serve as his best man at their wedding. The couple had two children, but the marriage ended in divorce after three years. Lee resumed her modeling career, and in 1955 was named one of the dozen most beautiful models in the country.

Ted’s pal John Blake, the state trooper based outside Boston, had introduced Lee to Williams in February of 1959, in Florida. Blake and some trooper friends had been lounging around the hotel pool and chanced to meet the divorced Lee, who was there with her young daughter and parents. By and by, Blake, who enjoyed being something of a talent scout for Ted, insisted that Lee meet his good friend Ted Williams.

“I had heard of him but did not know about baseball,” Lee said. “I wasn’t a fan. Anyways, I said to Blake, ‘Is he a nice person?’ He assured me he was. I think it was love at first sight on both sides. He called me every day after that, and he couldn’t have been nicer for the next year or so that we were going together.” Ted flew her out to spring training in Arizona, and she would see him play when the Red Sox came to Chicago, or nearby Detroit, and occasionally when she came to Boston.
“These were the first professional games I had seen. It’s funny I think of it now, how great he was at the game.”

Lee was delighted to get his call in Chicago from the Fenway Park clubhouse on the day of that final game. “He said, ‘Well, I did it! I hit a home run the last time I was up!’ I said, ‘Well, isn’t that great!’ And he said—he volunteered it—‘I didn’t tip my cap to the sons of bitches, either.’ And I said, ‘Oh, Ted, you should have.’ And he said, ‘Oh, no!’ ”
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