The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (92 page)

John-Henry headed to Santa Barbara to stay with Ted’s second cousin, Manuel Herrera. Manuel was a Vietnam veteran who then worked construction, running a bulldozer. He’d been orphaned as a boy when his mother, Ted’s first cousin Annie Cordero, was murdered by Manuel’s father, Salvador Herrera, who then killed himself.

Manuel’s grandmother, Mary Venzor, had been the sister of May Williams, Ted’s mother. And Manuel had been one of the points of contact for Ted when it came to his dealings with the Venzors. He got John-Henry a tryout with a local sandlot team. “He batted ninth for the team, but kept trying to tell everyone what to do,” Manuel said. “I saw him play. He was slow, had a pretty nice swing, but was an average ballplayer. He had no confidence.” Next, Manuel got John-Henry a job at the local Radio Shack, which he quit after two weeks without informing his supervisor. He stayed at home watching TV and making long-distance phone calls. “John-Henry, when he stayed with me, was calling everybody. His phone bill was three to four hundred dollars a month. I couldn’t afford that.”
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Added Manuel, “I got tired of him. He was always trying to manipulate people. Money was always his focus. He told me he was waiting for his dad to die so he could be a millionaire.” Manuel was particularly struck by how entitled John-Henry felt. “He said, ‘I can have anything. My dad will pay for it.’ He had dreams of being a NASCAR driver. He thought his dad could buy the car for him, and he could step right in. He wasn’t ready to work his way up.” After a few months, Manuel got fed up with John-Henry and threw him out. “I was probably the only one who ever did,” he said. “Because he was Ted Williams’s kid, no one had ever stood up to him that way.”
²⁷

That June, Manuel wrote Ted and Louise a letter, reflecting on John-Henry. “He tries to be Ted Williams when he should be J. H. Williams,” Manuel wrote. “Ted, sir, your son needs help. I am sorry.”
²⁸

Then Manuel’s older brother, Salvador Herrera Jr., took John-Henry in. Sal and his wife, Edna, a retired Los Angeles police officer, lived in Porterville, California, north of Bakersfield in the San Joaquin Valley.
Sal, then fifty-four, was a rough-and-tumble ironworker with a hair-trigger temper who had played minor-league ball in the Milwaukee Braves organization. He had his own batting cage and moonlighted as a hitting instructor. He took one look at John-Henry in action inside the cage and thought he was pathetic. Sal’s style was confrontational and in-your-face. He told John-Henry that if he wanted to get serious about baseball, he was starting far too late. “I said, ‘You’re twenty-three years old or something. You’re a mama’s boy and you’re a daddy’s boy. You don’t know how to do anything.’ ”

But after a while, John-Henry began to respond to Sal’s drill-sergeant persona, and his hitting started to improve. Sal kept Ted apprised of his son’s progress. The pair liked each other and talked on the phone every month or so. They needled one another, spoke candidly, swore up a storm, and one would often hang up abruptly in a snit if he felt the conversation was not going his way. The aggrieved party would then promptly call back and say, “Don’t you
ever
hang up on me again”—and then hang up.

“I told Ted, ‘You don’t know how to teach guys to hit. You’d rather tell them how
you
hit,’ ” Sal said. “We used to argue about that shit. I told him, ‘I taught your kid something. I make it simple: you throw it and you hit it.’ ”

John-Henry stayed with the Herreras for three months. He greatly admired the way Sal could still turn on a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball and back up the abuse he dished out. John-Henry was further enamored of Sal because he had arranged a token tryout for him with the Toronto Blue Jays in Los Angeles by calling in a favor with a Blue Jays scout he knew. (On the way home, Sal said to John-Henry, “You might be a doctor or a lawyer, but you’re not going to be a professional baseball player.”
²⁹
) John-Henry respected Edna, too, and soon found himself confiding in them in a manner that surprised the couple. They couldn’t believe what they were learning about the young man.

The first thing they learned came from Dolores, who called to inform them that her son had stolen several paintings from her house before leaving for California. “His mom called me up, and told me he got in her house and stole all her paintings and sold them,” Sal said. “He was a thief. The people he sold the paintings to told her. He admitted it to his mother. He told me, too. I said, ‘Hey, man, your old lady told me’—he laughed. That kid was the most money-hungry piece of trash I’ve ever seen.”

Next, John-Henry mocked the Herreras’ religious beliefs. Sal and
Edna displayed a cross in their house. “He saw that and said, ‘Hiss-hiss,’ ” Sal remembered. “He said, ‘I don’t believe in God. It’s all bullshit. There is no God.’ ” Added Edna, “The part that surprised me about him was his utter lack of standards. I try to run the center of my home on a somewhat spiritual basis. He had none. He had no direction at all. He had no moral standards at all.”

One day, Sal said, John-Henry bragged to him that he was selling Ted Williams–autographed balls and bats at a healthy profit. But Ted hadn’t signed the merchandise—John-Henry had forged his father’s name. “He told me he’d forged a bunch of bats and balls and he could prove it to me, and that’s when he started to write Ted’s name on a pad of paper. John-Henry was sitting at my table showing my wife and I how he could duplicate his dad’s signature so good. He was showing off. He said, ‘I can write my dad’s name to a tee. I’ve practiced this.’ He used to sign baseballs and bats and have the trunk of his car loaded and sell them. He spent hours and days doing it. He did it right in front of my wife and me. I said to him, ‘You’re crazy. You’re just like your uncle Danny’ ”—Ted’s brother. Concluded Edna, “He had no idea of things you do and things you don’t do. I don’t think he ever got any guidance. John-Henry’s focus was on money. I said, ‘That’s not all there is to life.’ ”
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When one of Edna’s coworkers at a local hospital asked for a Ted Williams–autographed ball, she said John-Henry simply signed it in his father’s name.

John-Henry also fretted to the Herreras that his inheritance would be severely diminished now that Louise Kaufman had reentered Ted’s life. “He was afraid Ted was going to leave all the money to Louise,” Sal said. “He said, ‘Louise has got my dad wrapped around her finger. He’s going to leave her everything.’ So he was actually trying to find out how to have her killed. He talked to my wife about that. He said, ‘How can I kill her and get away with it?’ She was retired LAPD, and he figured she’d know. He was serious about that shit.”

Edna was shocked. “John-Henry did tell me that he was convinced Louise was after Ted’s money, and if he could think of a way to get rid of her, he would. I said, ‘That’s evil thinking, pal.’ I said that to him. He was waiting for Ted to die. He was counting early on what he was going to be getting. He was so concerned he was not going to get his share. He said that. He was very open.”

If John-Henry followed a traditional path from a prep school near home to college, albeit with detours, Claudia decided to do something
different. After spending the ninth grade at Northfield Mount Hermon, a private school in western Massachusetts just over the Vermont line from Brattleboro, she set out for Paris. She would finish high school at École Active Bilingue, a prestigious bilingual studies program that attracts students from around the world.

“I think I was struggling very hard to find out who I was,” Claudia said. “Where I was at home didn’t seem big enough for John-Henry and I. We so badly wanted our father’s approval and recognition that we strived hard to do something exceptional. For me, because John-Henry had right from the start such a tight, tight relationship with Dad, I had to go a different direction to get Daddy to notice me.” In addition, Claudia felt that Dolores was smothering her. “It got to a point where Mom and I just started bashing heads. And I couldn’t get far enough away.”

Her maternal grandfather was Swiss-German, and Claudia had taken a school trip to Switzerland and Germany when she was thirteen. She had grown enamored of Europe, and loved the idea of becoming fluent in at least one foreign language. Dolores came around to the idea and asked a friend in Switzerland to go to Paris once a month to keep an eye on Claudia. Ted was fine with her plan, which required little effort on his part.

Claudia moved in with a Parisian family near the school as a
fille au pair,
and that took care of her room and board. She would come home twice a year, usually once at Christmas and once over the summer. She traveled widely in Europe, including in England and Austria. She had gotten interested in bicycle racing at home and now trained with a group of French cyclists, even aspiring to be the next Jeannie Longo, the French women’s cycling champion.

While cycling was a bit too exotic for Ted to relate to, he was alarmed when he learned of another of Claudia’s offbeat interests: parachuting. Once, she showed up at his house fresh from a jump. Williams thought her outfit was strange.

“What the fuck kind of shorts are those?” he asked her.

“Parachute shorts.”

“Jesus Christ! I hope you never do that.”

She then pulled out a photo of herself skydiving. Ted soon forgot his admonition and turned proud, introducing his daughter to friends as someone who “jumps out of airplanes.”

Being in Paris was a formative experience for Claudia. At home she’d always wondered, “Are they liking me for me or for who my dad is? In Europe, nobody knew who Ted Williams was. So every kind of
compliment or accomplishment or recognition that I got over there, I earned it one hundred percent. And that was so character-building for me, especially at that age, because I was so desperately trying to figure out, ‘Who am I? Am I ever going to be able to even get close to who my father was or what he accomplished?’ That’s a pretty big shadow to grow up in. And I liked the people in Europe, the realness of it. When you make a friend there, they stay a friend. I find America fake and caught up in celebrity.”
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If she had had her druthers, Claudia would have stayed in Europe for a while after graduating from her Parisian school rather than go to college right away. She wanted to pursue cycling to see if she might be able to make it as a professional, but Ted wouldn’t hear of it. “He was constantly on us about the need to go to college, to get our education,” Claudia said. “There were two reasons for this. One of them was because he didn’t do it. He always used to say, ‘I’m just a dumb ballplayer.’ He wanted to have that certificate for his kids that said, ‘No, my kids have had their higher education.’ And I also think he wanted us to be different than Bobby-Jo. If his first child was a failure, then he didn’t want his next children to make the same mistakes.”

Claudia had hoped to go to Middlebury College in Vermont to pursue her love of languages, but was rejected, so she went to Springfield College in Massachusetts. After her first semester, she kept trying to apply to Middlebury, this time as a transfer student, but to no avail, despite her fluency in French and strong grades. One day she told Ted of her frustration. “So for the first time, Daddy said, ‘What’s with this Middlebury?’ ” Unbeknownst to Claudia, Williams called John Sununu, the former governor of neighboring New Hampshire, and asked if he might help his daughter at Middlebury.

“A week later I got a call from the admissions office saying they’d apparently overlooked my application. I said, ‘I’m so disappointed in Middlebury. You get a call from a governor and only then do you check out my application? I had great grades and speak fluent French, and only after a politician calls do you want me?’ ” She turned them down and stayed at Springfield, graduating in three years. Claudia called her father and chewed him out for calling Sununu. Ted said, “Well, Jesus Christ, all I wanted to do was help you, goddamn it!” and hung up the phone.
But in the meantime, Ted told all his pals how proud he was of Claudia going her own way.

“He told fifty people, ‘My daughter, I’m so damn proud of her. She did this. She did that. I called up Sununu, got her into Middlebury. She turned the fuckers down! She’s gonna do it her way.’ He loved that.”

But Ted never told Claudia how proud he was. “If there was one thing that I wish my dad had done when I was growing up, I wish he could have been able to tell me how proud he was that I was so independent. How proud he was that despite having him open a door for me, I said, ‘No, Dad, I’m gonna show you I can do it this way.’ I always felt like I was constantly waving flags, going, ‘Notice me!’ He would tell other people. And these people would even come to me and they would tell me these stories, and I’d be like, ‘Why doesn’t he just tell me?’ ”

At Springfield, no one knew she was the daughter of Ted Williams until graduation day, when he showed up. When she spotted him in the crowd, Claudia bolted from the line of students awaiting their diplomas and raced over to give Ted a big hug, causing a stir as people recognized the Kid. Delighted, Williams told her with a smile, “Well, Jesus Christ! Get back in the line!”

“When I graduated from Springfield, there wasn’t a brighter face in the audience than my dad,” Claudia said. “It was so awesome to see how happy my father was sitting in the audience.” She graduated cum laude, with a major in psychology. When the president of the college handed Claudia her diploma, he quietly asked if he could meet Ted after the ceremony.

Claudia returned to Europe after college for another five years, this time to Germany, where she worked for a publishing house and gained fluency in German to go with her French. She fell in love with a German named Roman, whom she brought home to meet her father.

Ted took a break from his fishing and received Roman. Of course the Kid was rough on the young man, and later, when Claudia told Ted that Roman had dumped her, Williams said: “That fuckin’ Kraut! Just be glad there’s no kids involved. Where is he, back in the Fatherland?”

D
uring and after his baseball career, Williams’s other great passion was fishing.

Ever since he was a kid starting out with a split bamboo pole—first going for bass in a lake outside San Diego, then surf casting for corbina at Coronado, then snagging a raft of barracuda on a deep-sea outing off Point Loma in 1934—Ted had simply been captivated by fishing. “I was just carried away with the whole damn thing,” as he later put it.
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His desire to fish only grew as he prospered in baseball. Playing for the Minneapolis Millers in 1938, he loaded up on walleyes and northern pike throughout Minnesota. By the time he got to Boston the following year, Williams made sure to carve out time for fishing around his baseball commitments. In his rookie season, he went fly-fishing for the first time on Lake Cochituate in suburban Natick, and a girl he had with him lay prone in the boat to avoid being hit as he cast, prompting an inquiry from another curious fisherman who wanted to make sure everything was okay.
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Well into the late 1940s, whenever the Red Sox were playing at home, Williams would often get up early in the morning and go fishing at various local hot spots before coming to Fenway Park. On off days, he might make a run to Cape Cod, or head north of Boston near Cape Ann, where he made headlines in 1949 by catching a 394-pound tuna. At night, he’d unwind after a game by tying flies in his room at the Somerset Hotel for hours. Over the five-year period after he returned to baseball following World War II, he claimed that he tied twenty-five hundred flies.
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Ted’s love of fishing was well noted in the press during his playing days, and some fans took an interest in his interest. One day during a game, a harmless drunk came out of the stands, ambled out to Williams
in left field, and announced: “I just wanted to tell you that the fish are really biting at Cape Cod Canal.”
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What was it about fishing that enthralled Williams? For one thing, it gave him solace and a refuge from the celebrity glare. But it was much more than that. He loved the beauty and authenticity of the outdoor life: “No stuffy characters. No formal dinners. No tight ties around your neck. Just good, clean, fresh air and the gamest opponents in the world,” as he put it in 1952.
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That was a sharp contrast to how he felt about people. Williams liked to call himself “a Will Rogers fisherman: I’ve never met a fish I didn’t like.”
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He bathed in the beauty of isolated streams, rivers, ponds, and the sea. He loved “just being there, away from the telephones, away from people. I can’t think of anyone who had more fun out of life than Zane Grey. He had that big three-masted schooner, and he just traveled the world, hunting and fishing.”
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Until he died, Ted would harbor his version of the Zane Grey fantasy: to buy a seventy-five-foot shrimp trawler, equip it with a crew and a small skiff or two for excursions away from the mother ship, and then cruise around the world at his leisure, looking for fish he hadn’t caught before.

Like the novels that Grey wrote, the trawler would remain a romantic fiction. As it was, however, Williams did live out a fisherman’s fantasy, catching a 1,235-pound black marlin off Peru, a five-hundred-pound thresher shark off New Zealand, salmon in Russia, and tigerfish in Zambia. (Other foreign destinations included Iceland, Panama, Costa Rica, Belize, Mexico, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and the Fiji Islands.) He’d fished all over the United States—catching albacore off San Diego, muskie in the Midwest, trout in Montana, bluegill in the Arkansas River, bass in Maine’s Pocomoonshine Lake, and snook in the Everglades. But mostly he favored the Florida Keys and his adopted Islamorada, where he helped put saltwater fly-fishing on the map in the late ’40s and early ’50s while trolling endlessly for tarpon and bonefish. Those two, plus his beloved Atlantic salmon, which he caught for years on the Miramichi, were Ted’s favorites.

He exalted those three fish in
Ted Williams: Fishing the Big Three,
his 1982 book with John Underwood. It had been Underwood’s 1967
Sports Illustrated
piece, “Going Fishing with the Kid,” which pleased Williams so much that he picked the writer to do
My Turn at Bat.
In 1981, Underwood wrote a
Sports Illustrated
sequel about Williams going for Atlantic salmon on the Miramichi, which, along with the 1967 piece, formed the basis for
Fishing the Big Three.

Just as he had approached hitting as a science, Ted brought to fishing the same spirit of inquiry, energy, and intensity, as well as a thirst for knowledge of whatever fish he was after and its habitat. And just as he had studied the habits and tendencies of pitchers, he studied the ways of fish and strove to develop the most refined technique for catching them, adding his own skill, endurance, and patience to the mix. As it turned out, the drive for excellence that made him want to be known as the greatest hitter who ever lived evolved after he retired from baseball into another goal: not literally to be known as the greatest angler, but to master the art of fishing totally—fueled by his love of the outdoors, an insatiable curiosity about fish, and his innate competitive drive. Ultimately, Williams became so esteemed in the fishing world that he was inducted into both the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame and the International Game Fish Association Hall of Fame. He was delighted by these honors, almost as proud of being designated an angling immortal as he was of his enshrinement in Cooperstown.

Long before leaving baseball, Williams had been able to turn his love of fishing into a paying avocation. In 1952 he’d bought an interest in a Miami fishing-tackle firm. In 1953 he launched a TV show that aired weekly in Miami on outdoor life. In 1955 he made a thirty-minute fishing film for General Electric, which brought him to the Miramichi in Canada for the first time. Then, over several years, he filmed thirty-nine 15-minute TV spots on fishing in which he served as the narrator and sometimes appeared with guests, such as Bing Crosby and Sam Snead. The films were syndicated by Beacon Television of Boston, which Ted and his business manager, Fred Corcoran, held stock in.

In January of 1960, before starting his final year with the Red Sox, Ted unveiled a line of fishing gear for the Bigelow & Dowse Company of Boston, a hardware retailer that dealt in fishing tackle. The line included a spinning reel that was praised for its effectiveness and ease of use, combining the best aspects of the manual and full-bail pickup reels. When he went to work for Sears after finishing his baseball career, Ted had a broad platform from which to develop effective fishing tackle. He could test his ideas and help build the sort of equipment he wanted, and he played a role in the technological advances of rods, reels, lures, and lines. He watched rods evolve from bamboo to fiberglass to graphite-boron and other synthetic composites; he saw lines go from braided linen to the finest monofilament.

For years, Williams showcased his fishing skills by serving as the headliner for the annual sportsmen’s show at Mechanics Hall in Boston.
Tens of thousands packed the hall to watch Williams put on fly-casting demonstrations, sometimes with the former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Sharkey as his friendly foil. There was a carnival atmosphere at the shows, which ran over the course of nine days in February and which featured logrolling, archery, performing dogs, hooded falcons, canoe-handling exhibitions, a “catch ’em and keep ’em” trout pool, and Williams casting to a spot about twenty-five yards away while Sharkey heckled him from the sidelines.

After the 1946 baseball season ended with the Red Sox losing the World Series in seven games, Williams was dying to go fishing. He called a guide in the Florida Keys: Jimmie Albright. Through word of mouth, Ted had heard that earlier that year Albright and his client Joe Brooks had become the first to catch a bonefish using a fly rod. Bonefish cruise in shallow water and are relatively small, weighing seven to twelve pounds and extending close to three feet in length. But they are a widely prized game fish and considered, pound for pound, the strongest and fastest of saltwater fish. Catching bonefish on a fly was unheard of at the time, and it caused a stir in the fishing world. Albright, who lived in Islamorada, soon made his mark as a saltwater fly-fishing pioneer. He took Williams out, the two formed a lasting friendship, and Ted quickly became smitten by Islamorada.

Albright, who was two years older than Williams, had already established himself as a fabled guide, fishing with the likes of Zane Grey, Ernest Hemingway, former president Herbert Hoover, the actor Jimmy Stewart, and the actress Myrna Loy.
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A native of Indiana, Jimmie had come to Miami in 1935 and caught on as a mate for an offshore charter boat. After a stint in the Navy during World War II, Albright settled in Islamorada with his new wife, Frankie Laidlaw, who was an accomplished fisherwoman in her own right.

Jimmie and Frankie built a house and guest cottage on the water. There was no electricity or running water in the village, and the population numbered about seventy-five people—mostly so-called Conchs, descendants of the white Bahamians who fled the American Revolution as Crown loyalists. Jimmie had a charter boat,
The Rebel,
and a handful of fifteen-foot skiffs that were powered by 7½-horsepower Mercury engines. In the big boat, he fished the Gulf Stream for marlin, dolphin, sailfish, wahoo, and kingfish. He’d use the skiffs to pole the flats for bonefish and permit.

Besides his nose for fish, Albright was also a knot-tying savant credited with developing two knots considered indispensable to anglers: the
nail knot and the Albright Special. The nail knot used a nail or tube to tie two lines together, while the Albright Special linked two lines of different diameters.

But it was Ted who became Albright’s longest-lasting and most notable client. They would fish together perhaps fifty times a year, and while other guides were more than willing to fish with Williams free of charge for the cachet it could bring them, Ted always paid Jimmie aboveboard. It had been Albright who introduced Ted to Louise Kaufman, and it was at Jimmie’s house where Ted hid from reporters in 1952, when he was called back for service in Korea. Albright would protect Williams from interlopers who wanted to gawk at him or otherwise invade his privacy—unless it was someone Jimmie thought Ted might like to meet, like Jack Nicklaus, whom he once brought around.

Albright was the guru of guides, but it was Williams’s heralded fishing presence on the Keys that provided a significant jolt to the local economy, and Islamorada soon took to billing itself as the “sport fishing capital of the world.” It certainly was for Ted: by the mid-1960s, Williams had caught more than one thousand bonefish, the species that had first brought him to the Keys. For his next challenge he began to focus on the tarpon, one of the great saltwater game fish. The “silver kings,” as they are known, range from five to eight feet in length and usually weigh anywhere from twenty to 150 pounds. They are best known for their leaping ability and fighting spirit. To boost tarpon fishing, Williams persuaded the Islamorada guides to stage an elite, invitation-only tournament called the Gold Cup. At the first tournament, in 1964, Williams caught the biggest tarpon, but the fish broke free after Ted insisted on using a spinning rod—against the advice of his guide, Clifford Ambrose, who urged him to use a fly rod.
⁹
Williams used Albright as his guide the following year and won the tournament with a fly rod. Ted couldn’t make it in 1966 because he was being inducted at Cooperstown, but he won his second Gold Cup in 1967, again with Albright. “After Ted won the Gold Cup a couple of times he quit fishing it, because everyone was groaning that he’d won it twice,” said Islamorada guide Buddy Grace. “He said he was too damn good for it, that’s all.”
^10
*

Though Ted got the glory, as far as Albright and the other guides were concerned, they were the ones who did the heavy lifting and deserved the credit. Of course Williams would have none of that.

After a day on the boat, Ted and Jimmie would retire to a round table at the Islamorada Yacht Basin, which later became the Lorelei restaurant, and hold court. This central perch became known as “City Hall,” and by the mid-to-late ’50s, it was further enlivened by the addition of Jack Brothers, who would become the second most important guide in Islamorada after Albright. Brothers was a Brooklyn transplant who had arrived in 1953, married a Conch, and after a stint at a local marine park set up shop as a guide.

Like Ted and Jimmie, Jack could be rather crotchety and cantankerous. Business was good by now, and the guides could fish with whomever they wanted to whenever they wished. One day, approached by two oversize men who wanted to go out bonefishing, Brothers told them: “If you think I’m gonna pole your fat asses around all day you’re crazy.”
¹¹
Williams got a kick out of that and quickly cottoned to Brothers. Ted took Jack’s son, Frank, under his wing, too. When Frank got to be about sixteen, Williams would take him out on Saturdays and pay him $5 an hour to pole him around after bonefish. Frank was overweight and, unsurprisingly, Ted felt no need for sensitivity. Criticizing the young man’s poling technique, he blurted out, “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Porky!”
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