The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (82 page)

Williams prided himself on his ability to tie intricate flies, and he’d
spend hours in his workshop at the Miramichi. Dolores told him the lacquer on his flies had an odor, and if she were a fish, she’d never bite it because of the smell. She tied her own flies au naturel, using chicken feathers. Once, a big salmon he had spotted upstream eluded him and came downstream, where Dolores caught it, though it got away. Ted groused, “You’ll never be that lucky again.” And she thought some of their happiest moments as a couple were when he’d take her out on the flats in Islamorada to fish for tarpon. “He liked my casting. I got a lot of respect, peace, and calm from him, which meant a lot. He said, ‘You’re not a dumb dame.’ ”

Dolores loved Vermont and considered it home. She had a sixty-acre farm near her parents’ home, but Ted didn’t like it there. Whenever he got annoyed with her, he’d call her “Cow Hampshire.” The state was wrong, but the point was clear: she was a hick. He kept complaining he was freezing his ass off and there wasn’t enough to do. Dolores didn’t even have a television. (She hated TV and considered it decadent. Every time Ted bought a TV when they were in Vermont, Dolores would move it out when he left town.)

“Ted much preferred to be down in the Keys, where it was warm and there was fishing,” Dolores said. “Vermont also cramped his style. There were no girlfriends up there. He couldn’t take other girlfriends out.” But for Dolores it was home, and she spent as much time there as she could. At one point, she built a stone wall on her property and called it her “Ted frustration wall. If I had Ted on my mind, I’d get extra energy to push a heavy rock up a little bit further.” And she took shooting lessons. Ted kept shotguns and an automatic pistol at the house. She wasn’t worried about intruders, because she had two German shepherds, one of them trained to attack on German commands.

Dolores went to extreme measures to try to get her husband to like Vermont. Once, when he was away, she hired someone to put her house up on wheels and tow it up the hill to provide a more sweeping view. The next time Ted was there, he was confused and called Dolores. “Where the fuck is the house?” he asked.
¹²

“I’m
in
the house,” she responded from up the hill. It didn’t do any good. Ted still didn’t like being there, but he got a kick out of telling friends what Dolores had done: “Not only does she move the furniture, she moves the whole goddamn fucking house!” he said.

Dolores didn’t mind Williams’s swearing. In fact, she found it rather endearing. “I thought his way of swearing was very colorful. I didn’t mind it at all. I thought it was the most acceptable way for a gentleman
to be cursing. You know, it was okay to hear him saying, ‘As long as I have a hair on my ass, so help me…’ That’s nice, instead of using those four-letter derogatory terms that people can use. He didn’t insult people personally to their face.”

She also found a silver lining in her husband’s crass view of women. His favorite line was, “They’re a pain in the ass, and if you couldn’t fuck ’em, they wouldn’t be worth anything.”

Said Dolores: “That was Ted. But he had a clever way of being abusive that was forgiving. He really didn’t point-blank debase the person. He didn’t attack the individual per se. It was all women. ‘Christ, you couldn’t please them if you were Jesus Christ himself.’ And it just made it okay.”

Yet it was certainly a form of abuse, and, like her predecessor, Lee Howard, Dolores soon learned that Ted had far more anger than she’d known before she married him.

“He was a tornado,” she said. “You never knew what he was going to be like. He was volatile. He had easy, nice, calm sessions, and then, boom! A storm would blow up. You either walked out or—you certainly didn’t try to talk him out of it. You played all your psychiatric training you ever had in nursing. You never go running into the beehive if somebody’s upset. He knew how to hurt. He was rough about it. The timbre of his voice was rough. Growly.”

To cope, she tried to be optimistic: he was explosive, but he had sensitive enough antennae to tell when he’d pushed too far, and then he’d say he didn’t mean it and that he loved her, after all. She noted, too, that Ted could channel his anger in constructive ways. “It was his best friend, because it gave him power to do things which saved him, which was important. If he had to swing the bat, and he was angry, that ball would fly. If he was fishing, and he was angry, that fly would just fly, and the fish didn’t stand a chance.”

But the difficulty came in social situations, when his loved ones and his friends felt the lash. Dolores and Ted might be playing chess, for instance, and if he lost, he’d gather up the pieces and send them flying into the venetian blinds. Ultimately, Dolores felt the source of Ted’s rage was his inability to satisfy the perfectionist ambitions that he set for himself. When he failed to meet his own expectations, no matter how innocuous the activity, he could snap.

I
t was the winter of 1969, and Bob Short had a problem.

Short, a wealthy Minneapolis businessman who loved sports and politics, had recently bought the lowly Washington Senators for $9.4 million, beating out the comedian Bob Hope. It was Short’s second stint as the owner of a professional sports franchise. In 1957, he and more than one hundred other businessmen had put up a mere $100,000 to acquire the floundering Minneapolis Lakers of the National Basketball Association. Then, as the Lakers continued to lose money, Short gradually bought out his other partners, assumed sole control, and moved the team to Los Angeles. He sold the club for $5 million in 1965.

The sale netted Short about $3 million, but it was in the trucking and hotel industries that he had made his fortune. He’d hoped to make his mark in Minnesota politics as well, but he lost runs for Congress in 1946 and lieutenant governor in 1966. His friend and fellow Minnesotan, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, had installed him as treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, and Short had also been one of Humphrey’s most prodigious fund-raisers during the latter’s failed presidential campaign of 1968.

In early 1969, Short immersed himself in running the sad-sack Senators, who the previous year had finished tenth—dead last—in the American League with a record of 65–96. Short’s challenge—to rekindle excitement in the Senators among Washingtonians, traditionally far more interested in their Redskins and pro football than in baseball—was magnified by the coup that the Redskins had just pulled off. They had lured Vince Lombardi, the legendary Green Bay Packers coach, out of retirement and installed him as the Redskins head coach.

To counter the buzz that the hiring of the fabled Lombardi had generated, Short, who had given himself the general manager portfolio and fired the previous manager, Jim Lemon, determined that the Senators needed a “storybook manager, the kind people dream about.”
¹
There were only two people Short could think of who met that criterion: Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio.

Short quickly gravitated to Williams, whom he had revered ever since watching the Kid slug for the Minneapolis Millers at Nicollet Park in 1938, when Williams had torn up the American Association and won its Triple Crown before moving on to Boston.

“Washington was not only last in terms of the American League, the sport was practically dying in the town,” Short would say later in explaining why he went after Williams. “You don’t go after anything less than the divine when you’re trying to raise the dead.”
²

At first blush, the notion of Williams as a manager did not compute. After all, he had turned down the Red Sox when they offered him the job in 1954 and again in 1959, when he was still a player. Then he had said no to the Detroit Tigers in 1960, after he retired. “All managers are losers; they are the most expendable pieces of furniture on earth,” he had written in his autobiography, which was to be published later, in 1969. And temperamentally, the job seemed a bad fit. How could a perfectionist like Williams tolerate as much imperfection as he would see in the Senators? He was a loner and a brooder who could be volatile and combustible. How would those traits play out in a job that required patience and tact? Also, Williams had never been a leader on the Red Sox. He had been the practiced individualist who, if he led at all, did so only implicitly, through the brilliance of his hitting, rather than by exerting his influence on behalf of the team. Then there was the press. Ted had spent his career feuding with the writers. Could he change his stripes for a job that would require daily press conferences and interviews, public relations skills, and the need to forge amicable relationships with reporters covering his team?

Moreover, there were the Senators themselves to consider. The team was an expansion club that had started in 1961 after Calvin Griffith had moved the old Senators from Washington to Minnesota and renamed them the Twins. The new Senators were known to be one of the worst organizations in baseball, with a weak farm system and a weak scouting operation. Washington had never supported baseball adequately, and the stadium—which had been renamed for Robert F. Kennedy, to honor the recently assassinated senator—was located in the ghetto.

Williams was surprised when Short called him in Islamorada. The owner said he could name his terms. Ted replied that he knew nothing about managing and hardly even knew who played for the Senators, other than the huge slugger Frank Howard and a few others.

Short plowed ahead, conceding that Williams would be inheriting the worst team in baseball but arguing that if the players got no better, people would say they were just lousy and he would not be blamed.
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If the team improved, however, he’d get the credit. Then Short appealed to Williams’s love of the game and his desire to see the sport prosper: it was vital that there be a viable, successful franchise in the capital. Given his stature as a baseball icon, he had a responsibility to help. Short even turned his pitch to patriotism and politics: Williams returning to baseball would be good for the country and for Richard Nixon, the new president, whom Ted held in such high esteem. Nixon, after all, loved baseball and was on record as wanting to see the Senators thrive.

Ted was flattered but unmoved. He politely declined the offer.

Then Short called Joe Cronin, by then president of the American League, and asked him for help. Cronin, drawing on his long history with Williams, called Ted and leaned hard on him. He said it was especially important that baseball have a healthy team in Washington, where Cronin himself had been named player-manager in 1933. After Mickey Mantle’s retirement at the end of the 1968 season, the American League could use a shot of Ted’s glamour and sizzle, even as a manager. The league needed him, Cronin said. So did baseball.

Short called Williams again, proposing to fly to Florida and drive down to Islamorada so that they could meet face-to-face. Ted, now weakening, said that wouldn’t be necessary: they could meet in Atlanta, as Williams had to stop there en route to South Carolina on a trip for Sears. His answer was still no, but he agreed to make a list for Short of people he thought would be best for the job.

Ted’s list had his own name on top.
⁴

Williams called his bosses at Sears to ask if they would support his taking the Washington job, and they immediately said yes. His $100,000-a-year Sears contract ended in 1970. Becoming a manager would get him back in the limelight, something Sears had already thought was important. That’s why they were having him do his syndicated column, radio spots, and the cartoon strip. Williams realized that managing would bring him far more attention than any of those activities and would position him well when it came time for Sears to decide whether to extend its contract.

Talking with John Underwood, his ghostwriter, the night before he was to fly to Atlanta to meet Short, Williams was still leaning against taking the job, but he said that “the one thing, the only thing, that could make me change my mind is m-o-n-e-y.”
⁵
Ted had played his last six years with the Sox on a deferred salary, so his last deferred payment had been made, a factor that caused him to be more concerned about his finances.

Short and Ted met at the Marriott hotel in Atlanta. Williams thought Short was bright, dynamic, and an ardent salesman. As they talked late into the night, the Minnesotan further endeared himself to Ted by telling the story of watching as a young man when Williams was starring for the Millers. Short laid it on thick, and then, rather than have Williams fly commercial for his meeting with Sears in Columbia, South Carolina, Short flew him there in his own plane and used the extra time to lobby some more.

Williams had changed his mind-set. Instead of thinking of why he should
not
take the job, he began thinking of why he
should.
First, he had to admit he was bored. It had been great to indulge his love of fishing, for which he had traveled to many exotic locales, but he’d had his fill. At fifty years old, he was too young to do that for the rest of his life. Second, baseball remained his first love; it was what he knew best, and he could still make a significant contribution. Maybe Short and Cronin were right: the game did need him. And truth be told, Ted missed the action and the limelight.

He would be a good teacher, he thought. As a player, he had been constantly giving his teammates and his opponents tips on how to hit. He’d been doing the same thing for young kids at his baseball camp for more than a decade, as well as for Red Sox minor leaguers in spring training throughout the ’60s.

Then there was the lucre. Short was offering a five-year contract at $65,000 a year, plus an option to buy 10 percent of the team for $900,000.
⁶
He would get ten years to exercise the option. He also would be given the title of vice president, an unlimited expense account, and a free apartment at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel. He could quit, but not be fired, and would be free to assume a front-office position at any time.

This was a generous package worth a bit less than $1.5 million. Williams had about $400,000 invested in the stock market and owned some Florida real estate, but this deal could go a long way toward making him financially secure for life, he thought.
⁷

Williams consulted several friends and associates, most of whom
advised him to accept the offer. One notable whom Ted called was Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, a man he had worked for in one capacity or another for thirty-one years. Williams was still on the team payroll as an executive/celebrity responsible for showing the flag at spring training, and this and that. Technically, Yawkey had to release Ted so he could pursue the Washington job, though that was just a formality. Yawkey was an important figure in Ted’s life, and Williams wanted his blessing. He also wanted the owner’s candid view on whether he thought Ted could actually be a manager. Yawkey told him he thought he could do a good job.
⁸

In fact, privately, Williams was disappointed that once he retired, the Red Sox had never asked him to be their manager. When he turned down the job before, the main reason was he felt he could still be productive as a player and didn’t want the distraction of being a manager at the same time. After he retired, Ted felt the team never showed him the proper respect, and toward the end of his life, he confided to friends that he had wanted to return to Boston as manager. But if Yawkey had ever seriously considered Williams to lead the Red Sox after he retired, the year 1969 was certainly not the time. After all, Boston had won its first pennant in twenty-one years in 1967 under Dick Williams, who still was firmly established in the dugout with the club.

Ted finally signed his contract with the Senators on February 21, in Short’s suite at the Washington Hilton, after a battery of lawyers on both sides took more than a week to hash out the stock-option details.

When everything was just so, Williams and Short emerged to face more than one hundred writers, radio and TV people, and photographers for what was said to have been the largest sports press conference in the city’s history. “This is Ted’s night, and Washington’s night, and the Senators’ night, and America’s night,” Short said in his grandiose introduction.
⁹
“I have a world of confidence in Ted as the manager of our ball club. I know it’s traditional in baseball that great players never make great managers, but if anyone can, I believe he has the ability to become the exception.”
¹⁰
Williams said he regarded his former manager Joe McCarthy as his role model. He said he believed in discipline and would institute a curfew for his players. He ruled out pinch-hitting at age fifty. He promised to try and get along with the writers and said his troubles in that regard had only been with a handful of antagonists. He suggested he was wiser and humbler now than he had been in his playing days. “I hope I’ve matured a little, that my thinking’s better,” Ted said. “I did not feel I was qualified when I could have managed the Red Sox,
and I feel the same now to a degree, but I am ten years older. I took the job, I think, because of Bob Short, and because it happened to come along at the right time.”

Williams fielded nearly seventy-five questions deftly and with humor. At one point he was asked, “Will manager Ted Williams be able to tolerate a player like Ted Williams?” The new manager replied, “If he can hit like Ted Williams, you’re damn right.”
¹¹

Harold Kaese, the
Boston Globe
’s veteran Williams watcher, came down for the press conference and wrote that Ted’s return as a manager was the most exciting off-the-field development in baseball since Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947.
¹²
That level of interest was evident four days later, when Ted took the field for the first time as manager at the Senators’ spring training facility in Pompano Beach, Florida. A throng of reporters and photographers surrounded him as he settled into the dugout and prepared to hold court. He was wearing his familiar number 9, having usurped it from Frank Howard, the team’s six-foot-seven-inch, 255-pound slugger, but the numeral was invisible beneath the baggy blue Senators warm-up jacket Williams wore to disguise the forty extra pounds or so he had packed on since his playing days, mostly in the gut.