The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (76 page)

Besides Al Cassidy and his brothers, Williams surrounded himself with a staff he liked and was comfortable with. In addition to Al Palmieri, the baseball director was Joe Camacho, an elementary school principal in neighboring New Bedford who had played minor-league ball. Ted also brought in Wos Caldwell, his Hoover High coach, and Roy Engle, who’d been the catcher and captain of the team while Ted was at Hoover.

Camacho thought one of the reasons he got along well with Williams was that he stood up to him. “I think the first day I met Ted, I got into an argument and wouldn’t give in to him, something about baseball. I don’t remember what it was specifically. I wouldn’t kowtow to him, I wouldn’t be a yes guy, and he liked that.”

On the early-morning golf outings, Williams’s temper would usually be on full display as he’d fling various clubs around the course in disgust after a missed shot. Camacho remembered, “One day he threw his club up into the tree, and he says to me, ‘Go get it.’ And I told him, ‘You go get the goddamn club.’… Al Palmieri and I, we used to tell him, ‘You don’t behave, Ted, we’re leaving.”
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“Ted was happiest as an adult at that camp,” Camacho’s son, Jimmy, said. “He was really in an element kind to his personality. He enjoyed the company of children, the structured atmosphere. It was structured like school or a military academy, with uniforms, and everybody was organized by team and always going everywhere together. There was a logic and predictability to it. Observing him, he looked enormously happy, comfortable.”
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The oldest and best players at the camp would play American Legion teams in the area, and Ted would show up at these games and of course root for his team. Kevin Flanagan remembered what happened the day he was pitching for his New Hampshire Legion team against the camp club: “We were actually beating Ted’s camp team, 7–2, in the fifth inning when a sedan pulled up to the field and out pops Teddy Ballgame. He took a look at the scoreboard and started cursing up a blue streak. ‘How the fuck can my guys be losing to a little New Hampshire team?’ He was loud and kept muttering to himself as he made his way to his team’s side of the field. For three innings, Ted actually sat and watched us play and beat his boys.”
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Williams was out and about as much as possible, preferring to spend as little time as he could in the camp office fielding phone calls. He hated the phone and wouldn’t even get on the line for most people. One person who called him regularly in those early years at the camp, and whom Ted would always talk to, was young Carl Yastrzemski, who had succeeded him as the Red Sox left fielder. Yaz was still insecure as a hitter, and whenever he got into a slump, he would call Williams for advice. “Ted was quite loud, and you could hear him all over camp, yelling,” said Al Palmieri. “He would give Yaz hints about standing forward or back more, the usual thing about picking out a good pitch to hit, and he
would yell this at him.” If Williams felt Yaz wasn’t taking his advice, or comprehending it fully, he would call him a dumb Polack—not unaffectionately. At midyear, Yaz was hitting only .220 and called Williams in a panic, saying he wasn’t sure he could make it in the big leagues. Ted, who was in New Brunswick fishing at the time, flew to Boston immediately and worked with the rookie for three days, restoring his confidence. Yaz hit .300 for the rest of the season.

As for returning phone calls after messages were left for him at his camp, Ted was hopeless. He would get a stack of messages every day, come in the office, look at the first three or four, and take all of them and throw them away. One summer day in 1961, Al Cassidy took a phone call from the White House: John F. Kennedy, the new president, would be in nearby Hyannis Port soon and wanted to invite Williams to come down and see him. Cassidy took the message and put it on Ted’s desk. Williams threw it away. After not hearing back, the White House called again to see if Ted got the message, and Cassidy said he’d try again. This went on for three or four days, with Williams still not calling back. Cassidy was embarrassed—the president of the United States wanted to see Ted—so he wrote the message on a big piece of paper and put it on his desk on top of everything. Ted came in, looked at it, and threw it away.

Cassidy decided he had to speak up. “You know, I usually wouldn’t want to be nosy, but did you see that message from Kennedy?”

“Yeah,” said Ted.

“He wants you to come and meet him. You have to call him back.”

“I don’t have to.”

“You have to let him know. I have to tell them something next time they call. I’m not going to tell them you just don’t want to talk to them.”

“Well, just tell them I’m not coming.”

“Ted, I’ve got to tell them something more than that.”

“Well, tell them I’m a Nixon fan.”
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So Cassidy did.

Williams had admired Richard Nixon for years. A mutual friend introduced them in Miami in the mid-’50s, when Nixon was vice president, and the two hit it off immediately. When the Red Sox came to Washington to play the Senators, Nixon and Ted would often have lunch together in a private dining room at the Statler Hotel.
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Kennedy, meanwhile, had been courting Williams politically since 1946, when he ran for Congress and arranged to have his picture taken with Ted twice. And along with his aide Dave Powers, JFK was a great
fan of the Kid’s. On September 29, 1960, the day after Ted homered on his final at bat, Kennedy, then in the homestretch of his run for the presidency against Nixon, used Williams as a foil to knock down the Republican argument that he lacked the necessary experience to be president. “I read in this morning’s newspaper that a great hero of my hometown, Ted Williams, was retiring,” the candidate said at a speech in Syracuse, New York. “And I was also interested to read that he was too old at forty-two. Maybe experience isn’t enough.”

Less than three weeks later, on October 18, Kennedy and Nixon each flew into Miami to address the American Legion convention. As Kennedy’s plane was taxiing to the gate, he looked out the window and saw Williams getting out of a private jet. Nixon had asked that Williams appear with him at the Legion convention, and Ted had gotten a fishing buddy who was a pilot, Stu Apte, to fly him up from the Keys for the occasion.
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Kennedy called out to Dave Powers with excitement, “Dave, look, there’s Ted!” As their plane drew closer, however, JFK, who apparently didn’t know of Ted’s history with Nixon, was crestfallen. “Look,” he said. “The son of a bitch is wearing a Nixon button.”

According to David Pressman, the Chelsea, Massachusetts, doctor on whose advice Ted had heated his bats over the second half of his career, the Catholic Church, through Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston, made a late effort through Pressman’s father to convince Williams not to endorse Nixon. Pressman said he relayed the request, to no avail.

After Kennedy won the election, Williams groused that JFK’s father had bought him the presidency. Ted nursed a personal grudge against Joe Kennedy for having once given him a bum stock tip, and he also considered the old man a glorified bootlegger who had acquired much of his wealth through ill-gotten gains.

Executives at Sears were happy with how their contract with Williams was working out, but they decided they should look for ways to maintain his visibility now that he had retired from baseball. The company’s press agent, Bill Doll, suggested a syndicated newspaper column, periodic short radio spots, and a sports cartoon strip for smaller weekly papers in rural parts of the country, where Sears had a presence. Williams was agreeable to each idea. He made it clear that he’d need a ghostwriter, but he insisted on choosing him and on approving each column in advance. He would record the radio spots, which would be lighter in tone than the column, from an approved script, and he wanted to sign off on the cartoon panels as well.

For the column, Doll approached a dozen sportswriters and asked them to submit a sample from which Williams would then select his favorite, without being shown the name of the writer. Given Ted’s tense history with the Boston press, Doll ruled out anyone from that city and focused instead on a group of New York and Chicago reporters. As a lark, Doll asked one of his assistants, Jordan Ramin, to submit a column, knowing that Ramin had grown up in Boston and was a huge Williams fan. Ted ended up choosing Ramin’s entry, telling Doll: “This guy writes like I think.”

The columns ran from June of 1962 to March of 1967 and were syndicated in ninety daily papers, including the
Boston Globe,
which Ramin considered the flagship paper and which carried Ted’s first piece on the front page. The columns were sent out weekly under the heading
SWINGING WITH TED WILLIAMS
, though each paper was free to use any headline it wished. A paper was also free to run the piece immediately, every two weeks, or even once a month if it wanted. Ramin would think of an idea and get Ted’s approval by phone. Then he’d write a draft of a column and mail it to Williams in Islamorada. “Ted would either approve or disapprove,” said Ramin. “He even corrected the grammar sometimes. Jesus, he was smart! He knew a lot about a lot of things. I never knew about his interest in music, for example. He loved Stan Getz and Erroll Garner for jazz, and Streisand for pop music.” The topics centered on baseball, but they would dabble in other sports, such as basketball and boxing. There would also be softer fare, like Ted’s New Year’s resolutions and his enjoyment of cooking, as well as excursions into politics—some of which were surprising for those who thought they knew Williams.

“He had a thing about the American Indians,” remembered Ramin. “He thought they really got shafted.” In one column, Williams cited the disparities in Indian education levels and life expectancy compared to other citizens and called this situation “un-American.… It’s about time we start making amends to our own people.… If you’re a real American, you should be angry, insulted that this kind of treatment has been allowed for so many years.”

In September of 1963, Ramin received a letter from President Kennedy’s aide Dave Powers, the über–Williams fan, asking to be put on a mailing list for a copy of Ted’s column. Two months later, JFK was dead. Ramin suggested to Williams that he write a column on the assassination, and Ted agreed. In a piece headlined
THE WOUND
, distributed four days after the slaying, Williams issued what amounted to a kumbaya
call, saying that not just the assassin but also everyone in the country was to blame because there was too much hate in the land. “It will take more than just time to heal our nation’s deepest and most tragic wound,” the column began. “In this case, time can only be a scab and not a healer. The wound is still open and sore and it hurts, it hurts so much.… We must stop this terrible hating that has been going on in our country during the last few years. We’re supposed to live in a civilized society, we’re supposed to live in the greatest country in the world. Well, let’s start acting like human beings.… If, through this horrible tragedy, we can act toward our fellow human being with more understanding, then President Kennedy’s death will not have been in vain.”

The blunt political commentary expressed in these columns was unusual terrain for a professional athlete. Williams’s ringing support for the downtrodden Indians, and the can’t-we-all-get-along ethos he expressed in the Kennedy column, belied the archconservative Republican views he was generally thought to hold. “He may have been a Republican, but not like they are today,” said Ramin. “He was what they call a Rockefeller Republican. He would have ridiculed the Christian right, for example.” The columns also revealed the Williams who was obscured by his own angry outbursts: yes, he hated the Boston press; yes, he had serious issues with women and his family—but when it came to the broader culture and his sense of protecting the underdog, he could be generous and courageous.

But his temper still flared. The radio spots were aired as part of the NBC national program
Monitor.
Ted might record several in one sitting in New York, and Ramin remembered going to the baseball camp in Lakeville to tape some of the spots. “He was very impatient about things, almost like a kid wanting instant gratification,” said Ramin. “When he rehearsed the scripts, he sometimes would have difficulty pronouncing a name, like the ballplayer Ted Kluszewski. Then he’d say, ‘Who wrote this shit?’ and slam the script down. We’d try to placate him. Bill Doll was good at that. He was from West Virginia and had a drawl like Red Barber. Whenever Ted got upset, Doll would say, ‘Ted, ain’t that the truth.’ Then Ted would calm down.”
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The cartoons—given free to 2,200 weekly papers and marketed separately from the column, under the heading
TED WILLIAMS SAYS…—
consisted of one panel containing a drawing below an innocuous quote from Ted. In one sample from 1964, he said: “I knew it was time to hang up the spikes when I hit a home run off Don Lee and someone reminded
me I had hit a homer off Don’s father, Thornton Lee, many, many years ago.”
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On April 3, 1964, Lee Howard filed for divorce in a Miami court. She charged in her lawsuit that Williams had routinely cussed her out in temper tantrums so frequent that she couldn’t stand living with him anymore. She said such explosions “violated her sensibility” and that his behavior was “erratic, irresponsible and wholly unpredictable.”

“I was with him two and a half years, and it took me another two and a half years to get a divorce,” Lee said. “The reason was that he was never available. He told me later he never wanted the divorce, and the reason it took so long was that he wouldn’t ever answer the phone. He knew that it was going to be a lawyer.”

A few months earlier, in late February of 1964, several weeks after Lee left him, Ted had invited her to join him on a trip to New Zealand. The New Zealand trip was yet another Sears initiative to promote Williams, this time in collaboration with the New Zealand government, which wanted a famous figure like Ted to help showcase the country as a fishing and hunting destination for tourists. Lee knew he hoped to use the exotic locale to rekindle their romance, so she refused to go.