The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (72 page)

Williams showered, then told a batboy to bring the bat he had just hit the homer with upstairs and present it to Tom Yawkey as a gift. Some of Williams’s teammates were awestruck by what they had just seen. Pete Runnels wandered around the clubhouse, repeating: “How about that? How about that? How about that?” By the time the writers were allowed in, after the obligatory fifteen minutes had passed, Ted was waiting for them with a towel around his waist. The old-timers, those with the best relationship with Williams, approached first. Among them was George Carens of the
Traveler,
the only reporter he had invited to attend his periodic dinners with close friends. Ted threw his arm around Carens and said, “This guy has always been in my corner.”
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Williams was gracious to this first group. Had he been trying to hit a home run? “I was gunning for the big one,” he said, smiling. “I let everything I had go. I really wanted that one.”

Was he sure it was gone right away? “I knew I had really given it a ride.”

Asked about his immediate plans, Ted said he would take care of some business in Boston, cover the World Series for
Life,
then return to the Keys to assess how much damage the hurricane had inflicted on his house.

Ed Linn, now reporting the end of his story from the clubhouse, thought Ted seemed a bit dazed. After the first group of writers left, he kept walking back and forth to the trainer’s room from his locker. Once, departing from his usual postgame fare of two quarts of milk, Williams grabbed a bottle of beer and downed the whole thing with relish.

He answered more questions from other reporters, those whom he did not consider friends. Some did not venture over to interview him at all, perhaps wary of a final clash or a public dressing-down for some perceived past slight. Finally, when all the other writers had drifted away and Ted was getting dressed, Linn approached him.

“Ted, you must have known that when Higgins sent you back out that he was giving you a final chance to think about tipping the hat or making some gesture of farewell,” Linn said. “While you were running
back, didn’t you have any feeling that it might be nice to go out with a show of good feeling?”

“I felt nothing,” Williams said.

“No sentimentality? No gratitude? No sadness?”

“I said
nothing.
Nothing, nothing, nothing!”

As Linn was totaling up the number of nothings, Williams again berated him about the alleged unfairness of that
Sport
article of a dozen years earlier. It was clear that he’d slipped back into his hard, mean veneer. A photographer from one of the papers asked him to pose for one last shot, but Ted would have none of it. “I’ve been here for twenty-two years,” he snorted. “Plenty of time for you to get your shot.”

“This is the last time,” the photographer pleaded. “Cooperate just this one last time.”

“I’ve cooperated with you,” Ted snapped back. “I’ve cooperated too much.”

Don Fitzpatrick, the clubhouse man who had replaced Johnny Orlando, escorted Williams to the bleacher entrance and ordered the door opened, whereupon a driver pulled up in Ted’s powder-blue Cadillac. Fitzpatrick scurried around to the passenger door and opened it for Williams. Just then, three young women who happened to be walking by noticed who had just hopped into the Caddy. “It’s him!” one of them exclaimed. Another simply screamed, while the third went weak at the knees and fell mute. Hearing the noise, a group of men and boys ran down the street and pursued the car as it pulled away. The car turned the corner, but it was forced to stop behind a bus at a red light. As the group closed in, the driver pulled around the bus and sped away.
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Back at Ted’s suite at the Somerset, Bud Leavitt was waiting with Connie Russell and his pals from Bangor, and the group settled in for the evening. Said Leavitt: “The way he celebrated his departure from major league baseball was opening up a couple of bottles of wine back at the old Somerset Hotel, while the police protected him from crowds trying to get a last look, and spending it with this kid in a wheelchair.”
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In the papers the next day, some of the writers speculated that Fisher may have grooved the last pitch to Ted to give him a nice send-off. But Fisher strongly denied this. “No way, Jose, that I grooved that pitch,” he said. “I was going to go after Ted, and I wasn’t about to walk him. Nobody had to tell me that. You never want to face the tying run. You’ve got to make ’em hit their way on. It’s common sense.” Still, Fisher was moved by what had happened, even if it came at his expense. “I called
Ted that night at the Somerset Hotel, and we talked for about five minutes. I told him that I was happy for him, but not so happy that I had lost the game. He said he appreciated the fact that I had tried to challenge him, not mince corners or walk him.”
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Updike was delighted by the reaction he received to his story and always remained proud of it. He continued to follow Ted with interest later in life, and wrote about him for various publications. Williams, of course, loved “Hub Fans,” and when it came time for him to publish his autobiography, in the late ’60s, he had an intermediary ask Updike if he would write the book. But Updike—no ghostwriter, he—politely declined. Still, Ted wanted to meet the man of letters and in 1982 wrote him a note asking if he would like to go fishing. Updike again begged off but expressed in his typed reply that he loved getting a letter from the Kid, particularly as it came just after he had listened on the radio as Williams returned to Fenway for his first Old-Timers’ Game. “For a lot of people that piece on you is the best thing I ever wrote—even the only good thing I ever wrote,” Updike told Ted in his letter. He explained that Williams’s invitation was wasted on him since he was not a fisherman, but his letter was not, and concluded by thanking Ted for enhancing his life and all he had done to give him “some notion of excellence to shoot for.”
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W
hen Williams finished his playing career, his excellence as a hitter was firmly established. But he had also established another legacy, which he would nurture and develop for the rest of his life—his work for the Jimmy Fund to help children with cancer.

His innate kindness to sick kids and to others who were having a hard time in life was Ted’s most redeeming quality—the quiet counterbalance to all those moments when he boiled with rage and became unhinged.

The outbursts—like the spitting, the gesturing at fans, the rants at writers—tended to linger longer in the public memory, in part because much less was known about Williams’s good deeds, which he did, after all, go to great lengths to conceal. It was harder to grasp Williams’s softer side, but that part of him provided an equally compelling window into his character and helped him forge a lasting bond with fans in Boston and around the country.

While the Jimmy Fund was the main vehicle through which Ted performed his acts of kindness, he quietly showed his charity in other ways, including offering generous financial support to his mother, father, brother, and other family members; using a trusted courier to dispense hundreds of dollars in cash to people he knew were in need, with explicit instructions not to reveal where the money came from; soliciting a small check for the Jimmy Fund from friends he knew were struggling financially, then using the account number on the check to wire the people substantial sums of money anonymously; and spending hundreds of dollars annually to buy Red Sox tickets, then giving the tickets out to bellhops, cops, cabdrivers, and others of modest means.

But children were Williams’s principal focus, and not all the kids he cheered up were seriously ill. In the spring of 1947, for example, nine-year-old Thomas Sessel of Chattanooga, Tennessee, a huge Ted fan, had been promised by his father that they would see the Red Sox when the team came through town on its way to Boston following spring training. But when the day came, Tommy had the flu and his parents ordered him to bed. He would have to miss the game.

“My father happened to see Ted Williams on the street that very day, before the game,” Sessel said. “Now my father was a salesman. He stopped, approached Ted, and told him the story. He could sell anything, so he sold Ted Williams on getting into a car in a strange city, with a strange man, going God knows where. All of a sudden, into my room walks Ted Williams!… What made it interesting was that he was regarded by some as a misanthrope who would hardly give anybody the time of day. His actions really belied that reputation. He sat down and we talked for a little while. I forget how it came up, whether he offered or whether I asked for him to hit a home run for me that day. But he did.”
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Promising home runs, then delivering, became one of the trademarks of Ted’s visits to kids. Besides Sessel, there was double amputee Glenny Brann of Massachusetts. After visiting Glenny at a hospital outside Boston in May of 1947, Williams promised the boy a homer in his next game, then hit not one but two—the first balls he hit over the left-field wall at Fenway. And in 1949, his first homer of the season was dedicated to a fourteen-year-old polio victim.

These were Ruthean, outsize feats, and in his dealings with kids, Williams was following the Babe’s tradition of being a source of comfort for needy children. Like Williams’s parents, Ruth’s mother and father had made little time for him when he was a boy and had actually abandoned him when he was seven years old, awarding custody to a Jesuit missionary order. Both men’s experiences as neglected children colored their decisions as adults to get involved in the lives of kids in need.

While Williams nursed great resentment of his mother, the Salvation Army zealot, he admired her dedication and selflessness. Those qualities must have shaped Ted’s own charitable impulse.

Williams grappled with a range of emotions throughout his life, including a taut discipline and drive to succeed, rage, shame, and tenderness—all amplified by a kind of narcissism, which drove his need to be admired and in control so as to further avoid the shame and hurt he carried with him from childhood.

He had a soft side but also a wish to fight or lash out, which hitting thousands of baseballs helped to sublimate. The Jimmy Fund work was a good counterweight to a life spent smacking a ball, dropping bombs as a fighter pilot, and struggling to contain a burning anger. Helping kids with cancer was an acceptable way to show that softer side.

Growing up, Williams had been an emotionally deprived, almost feral child. As an adult, the Jimmy Fund kids who worshipped him served as a soothing balm. If you wanted to be Ted’s friend you gave him a refuge, and the Jimmy Fund served as a refuge for him, a place where he could relate to kids on his own terms.
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Williams’s traumatic, neglectful upbringing left part of him longing for the love and attention he should have gotten early on but never did. Later, the praise he received for being a great hitter never made sense to him. He did not like sycophants. But he liked underlings who could be willingly subservient to him, idealize him, and idolize him. He needed the hero worship and connected with people through what he did rather than who he was.

Ted had lifelong friends. But most were fond of him, at least initially, because he was the great Ted Williams. And he gravitated toward people who were not his social equal, people like the TV repairman, the liquor salesman, and the clubhouse attendant—those whom he wasn’t threatened by and felt safe with.

Williams felt uncomfortable if he was not in control of a situation. The rage attacks came on like a fever, usually triggered by loss of control—such as when he was booed by fans or ripped by writers for reasons he felt were unfair. One reason he connected with the Jimmy Fund kids and some of his trusted friends was because he was always in control. The charity work was compelling to him altruistically, but it also made him feel powerful. He was tall, athletic, and famous, but he didn’t always feel powerful—he felt vulnerable. And the Jimmy Fund kids were helpless and dying. These were uneven relationships, but Ted could relate. After all, he had been a disenfranchised, neglected kid himself. And if on some deep, emotional level he didn’t feel good about himself, maybe being in the company of people who were really suffering made him feel better. The Jimmy Fund kids could bring out Ted’s tenderness, and he—at least the part of him that needed his mother, who was out on the streets—craved such an outlet. And if he knew that someone was dying, maybe he could give even more freely: no future obligation would be due. The kids couldn’t hurt him. He had few situations like that. Not with the fans, the press, or even his own children.

But Ted had a good heart. Even as a schoolboy, he had often donated his thirty-cent daily allowance to kids less fortunate than he. High school teammates recalled Williams befriending outcasts, including handicapped people and a boy who stuttered.
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In the minors at Minneapolis, he would visit sick and impaired kids in hospitals, and this carried over to his arrival in Boston in 1939.

Don Nicoll was in the hospital that year with a ruptured appendix, in the days before penicillin. He’d had surgery and was in serious condition. “My father, who was an avid baseball fan, somehow got to Ted Williams and asked him to see his boy in the hospital,” Nicoll remembered. “Ted, who was then in his rookie year with the Red Sox, said yes, so he came to see me, and after I got out of the hospital, he came and visited us at our home on a number of occasions. I think he found… [our] home a place where he could be where he wasn’t under the gun, he was not being badgered, nothing was expected of him except that he’d enjoy himself.”
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On his own initiative, Williams would often call on other children like Nicoll until 1947, when the Jimmy Fund launch gave him an organized way to focus his efforts. The Variety Club of New England, an association of people in show business, decided that year to adopt Boston Children’s Hospital as its favored charity so that they could spotlight the problem of cancer in children, not just in adults. They raised $47,000 through a raffle and established the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation, headed by Dr. Sidney Farber, a renowned pediatric pathologist at Children’s Hospital, who is credited with being the father of chemotherapy.

Farber’s early work attracted wide attention, and to build on that success, the Variety Club arranged for Ralph Edwards to feature the Boston effort on his nationally syndicated
Truth or Consequences
radio program in 1948. On the air, Edwards telephoned the Children’s Hospital room of a young cancer patient. The child chosen by Farber to talk with Edwards was twelve-year-old Einar Gustafson, who was from a small town in northern Maine, near the Canadian border. His identity was not revealed on the broadcast, which assigned him the pseudonym Jimmy.

Since Einar was a Boston Braves fan, it was arranged that Edwards would steer the discussion to baseball, and that some of the Braves players would be standing by to make a surprise appearance in the boy’s hospital room.

The players—including Johnny Sain, Warren Spahn, Eddie Stanky, and Earl Torgeson, as well as the manager, Billy Southworth—assembled
around Einar’s bed and presented him with a raft of baseball loot, including a uniform, bats, and balls. A piano was then brought into the room, and the boy led everyone in a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in an animated, off-key voice. Edwards concluded the broadcast with a fund-raising appeal, and when he bluntly suggested to Farber that the clunky Children’s Cancer Research Foundation was too long a name for people to remember, Farber quickly came up with a handier two-word alternative: the Jimmy Fund.

The radio show struck a chord. People in Boston walked in off the street to give cash, while letters containing checks arrived from various parts of the country. Jimmy Fund collection canisters began popping up throughout New England and became fixtures at Little League games, movie theaters, bake sales, and wherever large numbers of people gathered. By the fall, more than $231,000 had been raised, and the following year, ground was broken on a five-story Jimmy Fund headquarters building in Boston, which replaced the tiny lab Farber had been working out of.
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The Red Sox’s first major event was the fund-raiser starring Williams in the summer of ’53, following his return from Korea, and Ted was effectively the spokesman for the charity from that point on.

After Einar Gustafson went into remission and left the hospital, Jimmy Fund officials lost track of him over the years, and many assumed he had died. But Gustafson would later reemerge dramatically and identify himself as the original “Jimmy” more than fifty years later, as the charity prepared to celebrate its golden anniversary.

Williams remained closely linked to the Jimmy Fund from 1947 until his death—a span of fifty-five years. That marked one of the longest associations of any public figure with a charity—rivaling or surpassing Jerry Lewis’s work for muscular dystrophy and Bob Hope’s for the USO. During Ted’s involvement, the Jimmy Fund became a New England phenomenon, raising more than $200 million for the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation, which later became known as the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Williams was the impetus behind a significant portion of that total.
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He was the public face of the Jimmy Fund, personally attending fund-raisers at American Legion halls, drive-in theaters, local police stations, Little League games, temples and churches, department stores, fish fries, bake sales, and cookouts. He would also lend his name to major pledge drives and endorse any checks sent to the Jimmy Fund—a creative way for fans to get his autograph. At speaking engagements, in lieu of a fee,
Ted would ask whoever had invited him to send a check to the Jimmy Fund. He also made movie trailers for the charity, along with stars such as Bing Crosby, Spencer Tracy, and Joan Crawford.

But his most important work was unheralded—the quiet visits Williams made to the bedsides of dying children, which he insisted could not be publicized. Ted came to call because he cared, that was all. He feared that if the papers wrote about the visits, the authentic would look inauthentic; that his compassion would appear to be a calculated attempt to soften his bad-boy persona. Reporters knew about the visits, but whenever one broached the subject, Williams warned him not to write about it or he would never talk to the writer again.

Michael Cioffi was one of the many children Ted came to see. Although Cioffi later died, Ted’s visits lingered as a loving comfort to Michael’s family, which included seven brothers and sisters. Michael was four years old and had leukemia when Williams first saw him at Children’s Hospital in 1954.

Michael’s brother, Ernest Cioffi, remembered: “I was there with my mother, and Michael said to me, ‘Know who that guy is over there?’ He had his back toward me, so I said, ‘No; who is that?’ So my brother yelled up to him, ‘Hey, Ted!’ and the guy turned around, and my jaw dropped to the floor. Ted Williams came over and talked to Michael and me, and he spoke to my mother, and my mother asked if he’d like to come over to the house for an Italian dinner.” A week later, Williams appeared at the Cioffi house, in the Charlestown section of Boston. Michael, by then blinded from a tumor in his eye, had gone home to die. Ted stayed for two to three hours. “There’s eight of us, so that’s why he was there all that time. It was an honor, a day I’ll never forget. Michael would always say, ‘Ted Williams says I’m gonna get better, to keep fighting.’ Things like that. Ted was a modest person, very nice, and he was really down and hurt when he came to the house, because looking at my brother, he had a tumor in his eye and in his brain, and his head was almost twice the size of a normal head.”
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