The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (73 page)

Mike Andrews, the former Red Sox second baseman who went on to become the Jimmy Fund chairman, told of a time when a little boy wouldn’t let go of Williams’s hand, so Ted had someone pull up a cot, and he slept next to the boy.
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Saul Wisnia, publications editor at Dana-Farber and the author of a book on the history of the Jimmy Fund, told a similar story of Williams spending the night on a bed next to another boy. Then when the boy’s family went to check him out of the hospital and pay the bill, they were told Williams had taken care of it.
⁹

Even four days before his final game, Williams had gone to Rhode Island to make four appearances for the Jimmy Fund. Before he left, he stopped at Children’s Hospital in Boston to visit a dying boy. The boy, who presented Williams with a belt he had made for him and buckled it around Ted’s waist, died a few days later.
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While reporters respected the news blackout Williams imposed on live coverage of his Jimmy Fund visits, fans generally became aware of what Ted was doing because people such as Farber and Richard Cardinal Cushing, of the Archdiocese of Boston, would talk about Ted’s kindness publicly. And sometimes the grateful parents of a child Ted had helped would call the papers and sing his praises as well.

Assessing Williams’s impact on his cancer patients, Farber said in 1958: “I’ve seen Ted with them and he’s better with the children than a collie-dog. He comes in quietly to visit them. He comes without publicity. And I have to respect the man for it. This is his contribution to society. When you put together the whole case for Ted Williams, it’s then you find a wonderful human being who has done a great deal of good.”
^11
*

One mother said that in the late ’40s, Williams helped her young son pull through a delicate operation in which a metal plate was inserted in his skull. “You can’t imagine the tender sincerity with which Ted talked to the lad,” she told
American
columnist Austen Lake. “It was amazing how he could put himself on childhood’s level, the direct simplicities of which my boy understood and which smoothed away his fears. You know children are quick to detect adult artificiality or a false note, like in a cracked bell. Here was a spiritual therapy beyond medical science. It gave my little one courage to face his ordeal, which restored him to health with a silver plate in his head.… So in the impressionistic mind of a boy, there is a little bit of God about Ted.”
¹²

In 1957, Williams visited a fifteen-year-old boy at Children’s Hospital who died shortly afterward. Nevertheless, the boy’s father was so touched by Ted’s visit that he wrote the
Boston Globe
to suggest that a ward at the hospital be named after Williams. “If he could prolong even for a day the life of a child, he would give up all his baseball trophies, honors and records,” the man said of Williams. “It hurts me to hear him condemned, knowing all the good he has done. I don’t care whether he throws his bat, expectorates, wears a necktie or not. Let us not forget the good
things about this gracious man.… I know what he has done to try and keep my child and others alive.”
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Once, in the ’40s, when another admiring father sent Ted a letter saying he had named his son after him, Williams sent out a silver cup to the young boy engraved:
FROM TED WILLIAMS TO TED WILLIAMS
.
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On at least three occasions, Williams responded to appeals to boost the spirits of seriously ill or dying children who lived out of state by quickly chartering a plane and flying to visit them.

In the late 1940s, when the Red Sox were in Washington to play the Senators, Williams received a telegram from a doctor in North Carolina who was attending a dying boy. The doctor said the boy talked about Ted constantly and wondered if Williams could send him an autographed ball to give him a lift. Ted flew down to deliver the ball in person and returned to Washington that night.
¹⁵
On another occasion in the capital, before the Red Sox were to start the season, a Richmond, Virginia, man reached Williams by phone and told him his son was seriously ill in a hospital there. “Can I see him this afternoon?” Ted asked. He hired a plane and returned in time for opening day.
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Then in the early ’50s, broadcaster Bud Blattner, in Boston to televise a Game of the Week for ABC, told Williams he’d visited a ten-year-old boy with leukemia in a Midwest hospital. Ted was the boy’s hero—would he sign a ball for him? Williams said he’d do better than that—he’d charter a plane and go see the boy, on two conditions: Blattner could say nothing of the visit on television, nor could any local press in the boy’s hometown be alerted. Ted made the trip, and the boy died later that year.
¹⁷

Throughout the rest of his career, Williams kept up a schedule of frequent visits to Jimmy Fund patients and public appearances on the charity’s behalf. In 1957, in Baltimore, when the Orioles wanted to honor Ted on his birthday with gifts, he refused and asked for contributions to the Jimmy Fund instead. In 1958, following a Sunday afternoon game at Fenway, Williams made a dramatic entrance by helicopter at the Suffolk Downs racetrack in East Boston to preside over what was billed as the “world’s largest spaghetti dinner,” at which fifteen thousand people turned out to donate money for the cause.

Until Ted died, he would stay in touch with, and be a mentor to, some of the children who had survived. He always considered most of his Jimmy Fund work—certainly the visits to sick kids—to be private expressions of cheer and goodwill, and he disliked anyone suggesting that he was some sort of saintly benefactor.

“Look, it embarrasses me to be praised for something like this,” Ted said years later. “The embarrassing thing is that I don’t feel I’ve done anything compared to the people at the hospital who are doing the really important work. It makes me happy to think I’ve done a little good. I suppose that’s what I get out of it. Anyway, it’s only a freak of fate, isn’t it, that one of these kids isn’t going to grow up to be an athlete, and I wasn’t the one who had the cancer?”
¹⁸

Williams also thought of his younger brother, Danny, with that same there-but-for-the-grace-of-God tinge to his voice: “My brother had cancer of the bone marrow or some damn thing. He threw a ball or an orange at somebody and broke his arm. Aw, shit. Could have been me, you know?”
¹⁹

W
ith his final home run, Ted’s lifetime average stood at .344407—a sliver higher than Tris Speaker’s .344338. That put him fourth on the all-time list, behind Shoeless Joe Jackson at .356, Hornsby at .358, and Cobb at .367. He was then third on the home-run list at 521, behind Foxx’s 534 and Ruth’s 714. He was first in all-time on-base percentage at .482, ahead of Ruth’s .474, and second in slugging percentage, with .634 to the Babe’s .690.
Globe
stat guru Harold Kaese calculated that Williams had won a remarkable ninety-eight games with home runs for the Red Sox over the course of his career—a higher percentage than Ruth. He had made the dramatic seem almost routine, and his team came to depend on him so much that his failures—in the 1946 Series, the 1948 playoff game, and the last two games of 1949 against the Yankees—stood out all the more.

Obviously, losing nearly five years in his prime to two wars affected Ted’s numbers dramatically, and now the “what if” games began in earnest. Kaese, adding his projections to those of others, wrote that if Williams had played the 727 games he missed during World War II and Korea, he would have finished with 165 more home runs at 686, 403 more RBIs at 2,242, and 842 more hits for 3,496.

Beyond the numbers, Updike’s essay reverberated and served to put a sheen on Ted. Having one’s heroics celebrated—even with dollops of clubhouse cruelty and vulgarity—in
Sport
magazine was one thing, but having them exalted in the pages of
The New Yorker
was quite another. Now Williams had transcended the sports pages and mass-circulation monthlies and entered the realm of
literature,
a development that only helped propel him on his way to Cooperstown and formal designation as an immortal.
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On a practical level, however, Ted now had to come to terms with just what he would do next, and his heroic departure from baseball helped elicit a spate of offers. The Yankees—presumably trying at least in part to embarrass their rivals in Boston—asked Ted to pinch-hit for them in 1961 at a salary of $125,000. He said no. The Tigers inquired as to whether he’d have any interest in managing their team. Ted said no. If he were going to stay in baseball, he wanted it to be with the Red Sox, and though he’d agreed to a part-time job helping out the hitters at spring training, he was ambivalent about a continued association with Boston. He didn’t think he was suited to be a manager, but felt that if they’d wanted to, the Red Sox could have fashioned a full-time job for him, combining being a hitting coach with scouting, perhaps. “I thought for a long time the Red Sox wanted to keep me in some capacity, but as I look back I have to think there was a faction that didn’t want me around, that kind of undercut me a little bit,” Ted later wrote. “I never felt I was really wanted, so the hell with it.”
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Of course, it wasn’t imperative that Williams take any job. Ted Williams Enterprises, created by Fred Corcoran in 1946, had been generating well over $100,000 annually for years. There was a clothing and product line: Ted Williams hats, shirts, belts, and hunting boots. There was baseball card income, and there were various endorsement deals. Williams, who didn’t smoke and couldn’t abide the habit, had hypocritically done advertising campaigns for Lucky Strike and Chesterfield in the ’40s. One Lucky ad showed Ted with a cigarette dangling from the left side of his mouth, and he was quoted as saying: “Luckies are really a great smoke. They give me what I’m looking for in a cigarette.” Williams later regretted doing the ads. “I always said I was going to give that money back to cancer research,” he said. “I always said I was going to, but I never did.”
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There was a contract with the Wilson Sporting Goods company that produced a five-figure annual fee, and a similar deal with the Horton Manufacturing Company of Bristol, Connecticut, which made fishing tackle. The annual fly-casting exhibition at the sportsmen’s show, which he would continue, was lucrative. Publishers were clamoring for his autobiography whenever he wanted to clear enough time to talk into a
tape recorder and let a ghostwriter weave it all together. And Hollywood had a standing offer with Corcoran to produce a feature film,
The Ted Williams Story
.
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Now television also beckoned. Would he do color commentary on the Game of the Week? Ted said no. ABC took an option on Ted’s services to host one or more shows on either baseball or fishing.
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Fishing remained Williams’s great passion outside baseball. In late 1952, he’d invested in a Miami-based fishing-tackle business, then several years later, Ted and the golfer Sam Snead had started their own tackle firm, Ted Williams, Inc. In November of 1960, Ted wrote a rather presumptuous letter to L.L.Bean, the venerable Maine-based outdoor clothing and equipment store, asking if it would consider merging, or being acquired by, Ted Williams, Inc. The overture got nowhere.

Ted Williams, Inc., made a good rod and reel, Ted felt, but it couldn’t generate any sales volume. Earlier in 1960, while fishing with Karl Smith—his roommate at Pensacola during World War II, whom he’d stayed friends with and who had a sales background—Ted asked Smith how he could expand his fishing business.

“Have you heard of Sears?” Smith asked.

“You think they can sell fishing tackle?” Ted said.

“They’ve got ten thousand stores. Next time you go to Chicago and have some time off, go to the Sears building and tell ’em who you are and that you want to see a person that sells fishing tackle.”

So Williams did and made a contact, George Struthers, a vice president in charge of merchandising. Then the day after Ted’s final game, Struthers sent Williams a telegram saying he wanted to talk with him about his future. Several days later, Struthers and a colleague were in Ted’s suite at the Somerset in Boston to finalize a contract for Williams to develop and test a range of baseball, fishing, hunting, camping, and boating equipment for the company as well as to do some marketing and promotion. Ted would become chairman of Sears’s “Ted Williams Sports Advisory Staff.”

Ted flew to Chicago for the announcement, two days after Christmas. The deal was for five years at $125,000 a year, but that was just a base figure; Williams also got a percentage of anything sold with his name on it, according to Ted Rogowski, a lawyer who represented him on the Sears deal. And while Ted would be required to drop his association with Wilson, a competitor, he could keep his fishing-tackle business.

A few weeks after the deal was announced, Williams called Karl Smith to thank him for giving him the Sears idea.

“It’s the biggest robbery since Brink’s,” crowed Smith. “It means you’re gonna go hunting and fishing anywhere you want to and Sears will pick up the tab for it.”

Ted laughed and said, “You’ve always been a wise son of a bitch.”
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The deal was a coup for Williams. It paid well and linked him to a major company and the recreational sports that he so enjoyed. Moreover, he wouldn’t have to work that hard: all told, the time required of him would not be more than two months a year.

Ted enjoyed the interaction with members of his “sports advisory staff,” all of whom were leading lights in their fields. Sears was then at the forefront of an effort by the merchandise sector to recruit celebrities as endorsers of its products, and Williams was the company’s celebrity in chief. Under him were about a dozen active or former “sportsmen,” including Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who in 1953 had become the first to scale Mount Everest; Bob Mathias, the Olympic decathlon winner in 1948 and 1952; basketball’s Jack Twyman, then captain of the Cincinnati Royals; and, later, pro tennis star Butch Buchholz.

Sears quickly became the biggest buyer of Ted Williams, Inc., gear and launched an aggressive advertising campaign that was the first of its kind. It featured two-page layouts in
Life, Look,
and other magazines that showed the Kid, dressed in a white jacket, dark tie, and dark slacks, standing in front of Sir Edmund and the others. The ad copy said that Sears had signed Ted as a “playing manager” who would “add a cold, professional viewpoint on the quality of every piece of Sears sports equipment
before
it gets into the Sears catalog or any one of the… Sears department stores.”
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Williams and his advisory group gathered at least twice a year; they met with manufacturers to discuss equipment (Ted might recommend putting stronger wheels on a camp trailer, lighter soles on hunting boots, or softer leather on baseball gloves to improve their feel) and visited new Sears stores when they opened. On those occasions, Ted would put on fly-casting demonstrations, setting up garbage cans in a parking lot and dropping a line into them from two hundred feet away.

“We were not just endorsees; we had to test and be satisfied and proud of the products, and Ted was very much the leader of that philosophy,”
said Buchholz, who joined the group in the early ’70s. “Ted was a very strong individual. He led by example, and if he didn’t like something, boy, he made sure the manufacturer would fix it. I saw him break fishing poles over his knee if they weren’t good enough.”
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The advisory group was filled with type A personalities who liked to hold forth on the intricacies of their sports, and they each commanded attention. Jack Twyman and Williams hit it off particularly well. Williams nicknamed the six-foot-six-inch basketball star the Glandular Case, and Twyman called Ted the Swollen Splinter. Besides Williams, Twyman was struck by Hillary. “Sir Edmund Hillary: he was a tiger.… Just imagine climbing Everest like he did! He was the toughest man I have ever seen; I wouldn’t tangle with him.” Twyman recalled that Williams would grab a fork during dinner, simulate a bat, and talk for hours about the art of hitting. “There was no one that studied it like him or could articulate it like him,” and he would brook no challenges. “ ‘You don’t know anything about it,’ he’d say.”
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Ted was just as expert at fishing. He would analyze the butt of the rod for strength, the middle for flex, and the tip for feel. His boss at Sears, Carl Lind, recalled that at a sporting goods show in Houston, a buyer introduced Ted to a group from Daiwa Seiko, the Japanese fishing-tackle manufacturer. “Ted became the center of attention when he began to dissect their reels down to the last screw, showing them how to reconfigure the parts to improve their function,” Lind said. “It was a sight to see three Japanese engineers furiously taking notes. They got a free fishing lesson that day from the master.” When Lind introduced his boss to Ted, the man excitedly volunteered that he had just bought a new fishing pole. “We only deal with rods in this business,” Williams informed the executive curtly. “Poles are for catfishing.”

Ted was also involved with a Sears division that made fishing boats, motors, and marine safety equipment. One key corporate goal, Lind said, was to produce an unsinkable boat. Their designers used plastic to shape the hull and deck and poured expandable foam in between. Williams was chosen to be the centerpiece of a TV ad campaign for the boat and was shown drilling a hole through the bottom, but the boat sailed on. Then, in the climax, he sawed the boat in half, and still half of it kept planing along. “This was a merchandising utopia,” Lind wrote in a short reflection on his time with Ted.

To promote the boat and its other products, Sears invited a group of writers from various outdoor magazines, like
Field & Stream, Outdoor Life,
and
Sports Afield,
to come to its test base at Fort Myers Beach, Florida.
One of the writers asked Williams: “Did you really saw that boat in half in the TV commercial and still ride in it without sinking?”

“Hell, yes!” said Ted. Then he pointed to the manager of the test base. “Get me the half boat we used in the commercial. I’ll show them.” The manager retrieved it from storage, attached a motor, and took it to the dock. Ted hopped in, fired up the engine, sat well back in the stern to ensure the craft would plane, and off he went—just as he did in the commercial. But as he made his way out into the Gulf, Ted inched forward, curious to find the tipping point where the boat would no longer plane. He went an inch too far, and suddenly the boat capsized, and Williams was hurled into the ocean. Fearing his star attraction might drown in full view of the outdoor press, Lind dispatched a motorboat to the rescue, and Ted was fished out. When he docked, he emerged laughing, as if he’d thoroughly enjoyed the entire spectacle.

Williams also made his presence felt in hunting. Once, on a trip to Arkansas to visit the factory that manufactured Daisy BB guns, carried by Sears, Ted watched a demonstration of point shooting, in which a rifle is fired from the hip as opposed to the shoulder. He then tried firing at a series of objects such as coins, keys, and buttons that were dangling from a line tied between two trees. “From about 20 feet away, it was remarkable, after a few trials, how many of those objects Ted was able to hit,” Lind wrote.
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On another outing in Illinois, a skeet-shooting competition was arranged between Williams and decathloner Mathias. Each shot a perfect twenty-five for twenty-five.