The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (94 page)

Another early Williams faux pas on the Miramichi came when he had a run-in with W. W. Doak, owner of one of the leading tackle shops in the area. Recalled W.W.’s son, Jerry Doak, “The altercation occurred because Ted had quite a mouth on him; he was brash and profane, so my dad drew his attention to it a couple of times when he was in the store and told him, ‘If you can’t control your mouth you’ll have to leave.’… Ted was used to doing whatever he wanted whenever he wanted and wherever he wanted, and it didn’t work like that up here. That was pretty much the river’s approach to Ted—it was not impressed by his celebrity. Had he been a hockey player maybe it would have been different.”
²⁴

Williams belatedly picked up on criticism that he was putting off some of the locals and made some adjustments to become more welcoming. He got to know his neighbors along the river and stopped shooing away people who fished in his pools. But the main reason that Ted grew to become a highly respected figure along the Miramichi was that he turned into an ardent, if not militant, conservationist on behalf of the Atlantic salmon.

Williams had become involved in fishing conservation early on. As far back as 1961, he was calling for limits on saltwater game fishing and was using his platform at the annual sportsmen’s show in Boston to urge outdoor writers to crusade against pollution in rivers, streams, and oceans. Then in 1971, Williams and Bing Crosby headlined a gala at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to focus attention on the fact that Danish commercial fishermen were killing huge numbers of salmon in their North Atlantic feeding grounds.

“I’m here because I want to try and help save the greatest fish that ever swam,” Williams said. “The problem is simply this. A small number of Danish commercial fishermen operating off the Davis Strait near Greenland are taking huge quantities of young salmon in their North Atlantic feeding grounds. If something isn’t done to stop it, there will be no more salmon for the sports fishermen in North America and Europe.”
²⁵

The Danes eventually agreed to phase out the fishery off Greenland,
but Williams kept up his advocacy on behalf of the Atlantic salmon, making speeches to business groups from his platform at Sears and assuming a leadership role in the Miramichi Salmon Association. The association held its annual meetings in a Boston suburb, and Ted helped generate extensive news coverage of the many threats to the Atlantic salmon: abuse by Indians of their traditional fishing rights, poaching, and excessive incidental catching by commercial fishermen off Newfoundland of salmon bound for their home streams. Williams would also talk with local game wardens regarding the need to educate people about the importance of Atlantic salmon to the economy of New Brunswick. To raise the chances that a released fish will survive, he told
Popular Mechanics
in 1989 that he had recently started to file the barbs off his hooks, and he advocated mandatory saltwater licenses for all sport and commercial anglers with a fee that would cover “hard-nosed law enforcement and restoration work.” Though he said he was “basically conservative” and “against government meddling whenever possible,” he felt these steps were needed to save American sportfishing.
²⁶

In the fall of 1993, Williams told the
Telegraph-Journal
of Saint John, New Brunswick, that he was “going to cut my throat right here” if the Canadian fisheries department and law enforcement did not do a better job of enforcing existing laws. Canada required fishermen to release adult salmon to bolster the breeding stock, but Ted said too many anglers were keeping the fish. “All they’re thinking of is getting the big fish now,” he said. “Screw the river, get the fish.”
²⁷

This over-the-top outburst caused a flap throughout New Brunswick and beyond, leaving Jack Fenety of the Miramichi Salmon Association to put out the fire. “Ted made these wild statements to the press, and they were all over me,” said Fenety. “So I said to them, ‘He’s a John Wayne type. No matter what he says, it’s good publicity for conservation and good for the salmon.’ ” But Williams was who he was, and toning things down was not always his style. When a local judge let off a salmon poacher with a slap on the wrist, Williams railed against the judge and said he should be “hanged,” and that caused another fuss. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation did a program on the endangered state of the salmon, Ted gave the network an earful on abuses by commercial fishermen.
^*

In the winter, Williams would give Roy Curtis $10,000 to keep an eye on the camp and shovel snow off the roof. In season, besides serving as Ted’s fishing guide, Roy would do chores around the house. In the mornings, Ted would usually be up by five o’clock and head to his workbench in the basement to start tying flies. The Williams-preferred fly for the Miramichi was the double-hook Conrad, size 8. Another of Ted’s favorites he called the Stoplight, which was a variation on the multicolored fly he made in Islamorada for the tarpon, and then there was the Whore, though his journal entries didn’t explain why he called it that.

Roy and his wife, Edna, lived two or three miles down the road and would appear by 7:00 a.m. or so, and Edna would fix a huge breakfast. If he had guests, Ted would emerge from his basement and rouse them for the meal by playing reveille—without a bugle—which would often morph into “The Marines’ Hymn.” Edna, who also did the housekeeping, cooked three meals a day for Williams, and they would all eat breakfast and dinner together. For lunch, she would fix Ted and Roy salmon-salad sandwiches that they took out on the river with them. For breakfast, Williams liked Red River oatmeal, or eggs, or French toast, and lots of bacon, no matter what the main dish was. For dinner, Edna would make meat loaf, pork chops, steak, roast beef, chicken, or liver. Ted loved liver. They would eat early, around 4:00 p.m., because Williams liked to go back out and fish until dark. Then, returning home, Ted would plop down on a king-size couch facing a Franklin stove and listen to the Red Sox game on the radio. The reception in eastern Canada was usually poor, and sometimes he’d have to strain to pick up the voices of the broadcasters.

Of the various pools along the river that Williams owned or leased, his favorite was called Swinging Bridge, named after a working footbridge that had spanned the river at that point but was destroyed by an ice storm in 1970.

Ted and Roy would take the pickup truck to reach Swinging Bridge, about fifteen minutes away, and Williams made sure to load the necessary equipment: waders, angling vests, rods and reels, rain gear, and an extra rod. You never knew when a tip might break, and an entire day of fishing could be ruined without a spare.
²⁸
He was a stickler about his fishing tackle. Before going out, he would take reels apart to make sure all the bearings were free, leaving nothing to chance.

In 1972, Ted told a crew that was making a film of him for Sears that he usually fished eight hours a day and made a thousand casts. He cast right-handed—the way he threw, not the way he hit—with power and ease.
He said his normal cast was sixty-eight to seventy feet, but occasionally he would go to ninety if he needed to, depending on the conditions. He used an eight-and-a-half-foot rod, and usually cast at a forty-five-degree angle from the direction of the river, or the direction of the wind.

On August 30, 1978, his sixtieth birthday, Williams reported in his log that he had caught his one thousandth Atlantic salmon a few days earlier. Red Smith, the
New York Times
sports columnist, had been a guest of Ted’s a month earlier and wrote three columns from the Miramichi, using as one of his pegs the Kid’s approaching Triple Crown of fishing. Smith concluded that Williams’s “fly rod is a deadlier weapon than his bat used to be.”
²⁹

Williams’s camp sat in a grove of white birch trees on a hill overlooking the fast-moving river about 150 feet below. There was a main lodge and a small guesthouse. In the main cabin, over the front door leading out to the porch, was a wooden sign that read:
GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY SALMON
.

Guests were a fixture at Ted’s place, and they all had to be mindful of the house rules: this was his camp, his river, and things had to be done his way. One had to totally submit to the Williams treatment. Typical was the experience of Sammy Lee in 1993. Lee is a bass fisherman from Alabama who hosted a syndicated radio show on fishing called
Tight Lines with Sammy Lee.
He’d gone to Ted’s house in Florida to interview him for his program. What Lee expected to be a thirty-minute interview lasted eight hours, then Williams invited him up to the Miramichi.

Lee was an expert bass fisherman, but he had never fly-fished, so he consulted some friends in the know and bought some brand-new fly rods and related gear for his trip to New Brunswick. When he arrived, Ted said to him: “Let me see what kind of junk you brought. Hell, you can’t catch a fish with that. It’s not worth a damn.”

After breakfast the first day, at which Lee said Ted ate five eggs and a dozen pieces of bacon, it was time to go fishing. Lee gathered up his gear and headed toward the river when Williams stopped him short.

“Where you going?” Ted said. “You ain’t getting in my river today. You haven’t earned the right to get in my river.”

“I just flew halfway around the world to get here,” Lee protested mildly.

“Sit on the bank and see what you learn by watching,” Williams said.

So Sammy grabbed his camera and spent his first day wading out into the river to take pictures of Ted fishing. Williams, also an accomplished photographer, proceeded to question Lee about his camera technique.
The second morning, Sammy finally got his chance to fish, but Williams refused to let him use the new gear he had bought. “You’re not gonna use that crap,” Ted said. “You’re gonna use my rod and reel.” Williams then kept up a running commentary and critique lasting the next two hours. No matter how good the cast, no matter how long the distance, there was always something deficient. Finally, Williams evicted Lee from his position: “Kid, fish down to the bend of the river.”

“So I’m making casts,” Sammy recalled, “stripping line, and I come to a rock in the river, and not thinking, instead of backing up I try to step over it, and just as soon as I raised my left leg the undercurrent caught me and flipped me upside down. My head was straight down and my feet were straight up, and my only thought was, ‘Even if you drown, do not let go of this rod and reel,’ because it was Ted’s, and I was not about to lose Ted Williams’s personal rod and reel. I lost my sunglasses, my hat, my waders were full of water, and I get up finally, and I look over at the beach.” Williams was looking on, bemused, along with his guide, Roy’s son Clarence.

“Get your ass up here,” Ted called out to him. “That was good for you. Teach you some respect for the river.” When they took their lunch break, Lee asked Clarence why he hadn’t come out to help him. “Clarence said, ‘I jumped up to help you, but Ted said, “Let the son of a bitch drown—as long as he doesn’t lose my rod and reel. If he loses it, I’m gonna kill him, and he’d better hope he drowns.” ’ ”
³⁰

At the end of fishing season on the Miramichi, it was always difficult for Ted to leave. The river closed on October 16—always too early for Williams.

“Every fall going home, he’d leave crying, almost,” said Edna Curtis. “He’d just have to leave, get out the door, and go. There’d be tears in our eyes, too. He’d give me and Roy a big hug. I worked with him for thirty years. He really thought a lot of us—we a lot of him, too. He’d be awful lonesome, leaving. He really loved to fish.”
³¹

I
f fishing was the act of a loner, much of Ted’s life in retirement had a decidedly public dimension in which he happily starred in the iconography of being Ted Williams.

He did not recede, out of sight and out of mind. On the contrary, after baseball, Williams had a vibrant second act. While most star athletes, or the stars of any endeavor, fade into obscurity in retirement, Williams, paradoxically, saw his fame grow after his playing days were over.

Visiting Boston later in life, he was always surprised but gratified by the affection with which he was received. The tide of public opinion had shifted in his favor abruptly in the late ’50s, toward the end of his time with the Red Sox, after he had ridden out the uproars caused by his rages—the gesturing, the spitting, the popping off. And then his popularity surged again as he took his leave.

Williams “succeeded in bending life to his own prodigious will,” as the writer Michael Gee put it in a prescient 1983 piece for the
Boston Phoenix.
“The spectacle of someone forcing his own terms on the world around him is rarer by far than the sight of a home run. The most famous baseball heroes have often come to sad ends. Ruth and Gehrig died prematurely and in horrid pain. Ty Cobb died alone, a clinical psychotic. In their 50s Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, while hardly sick or broke, are less than imposing figures as casino shills in Atlantic City. But in 1983, Ted Williams flowers. His public recognition of his status as a revered elder statesman isn’t the act of a man coming to terms with age, but rather a kind of gracious acceptance of the world’s inevitable surrender to Ted Williams.”
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Ted remained an active fan of baseball and became one of the game’s leading goodwill ambassadors. He returned to the Red Sox as a hitting professor emeritus after a decade’s absence, during which he managed the Washington Senators and Texas Rangers, then awaited an invitation home to the club he had spent his career with. He came back to Cooperstown as an involved immortal, and to Fenway Park to be reembraced by Boston again and again. He returned to San Diego to reconnect with his roots and with childhood friends. He dabbled in, but was not consumed by, the memorabilia business. He continued, and finally was acclaimed for, his mostly anonymous good deeds on behalf of the Jimmy Fund and kids stricken by cancer. And in 1991, the fiftieth anniversary of his sublime .406 season was celebrated at the White House and beyond, kicking off a decadelong spate of honors for Williams in which he was hailed as a national monument and “Father Baseball.” In the process, he learned how to receive and return love.

It was the exalted .406 milestone, of course, for which Ted was most acclaimed. After posting the number in 1941, he had never thought he might be the last major leaguer to hit .400. Yet years went by, then decades, and no one else had done it. In some ways, this was unsurprising. The rise of relief pitching as a specialty has meant that fewer pitchers go a full nine innings and that hitters have to face fresher arms. Hitters have also had to contend with new pitches, such as the slider and the cut fastball, and they face each pitcher fewer times, thereby getting less of an opportunity to learn their tendencies. Other factors in the demise of the .400 hitter include the fact that hitting for a high average has lost some of its luster as players see that more prestige, money, and glamour flow toward the home-run hitter and as other measurements, such as slugging percentage and on-base percentage, have come to be considered better indicators of hitting ability. More night games and more demanding travel have also probably militated against higher batting averages. Finally, today’s season runs 162 games—eight more than Williams and his .400 predecessors played. But Ted would constantly be asked if he thought some player or another was up to the challenge, and Williams would say yes, he thought so.

In the summer of 1977, when Rod Carew, the Minnesota Twins first baseman, was making a serious run at the .400 mark, Williams indulged
Sports Illustrated
and his pal John Underwood by doing a feature for the magazine (which Underwood ghostwrote) headlined
I HOPE ROD CAREW HITS
.400. Ted said there were three reasons he felt this way: First, he
wouldn’t have to answer any more questions about whether he thought it could be done, and he could fish in peace. Second, he’d been saying for more than thirty-six years now that someone would hit .400, and he’d like to finally be proven right. And third, he said, “Carew’s a damn good hitter and a deserving one, and if he does it, it has to be a great stimulus for baseball. I have a feeling he might.”

Ted critiqued Carew, calling him the best hitter for average in the majors but one who flew under the radar because he was a prototypical singles hitter. Yet he had good form, good plate coverage, and a quick bat, and was a classic straightaway hitter—the kind of player who traditionally attains the highest average. Hitting ran in cycles, Ted pointed out, rising or falling with the quality of the pitching. In 1941, he had benefited because a lot of the name pitchers in the American League were past their prime. By 1977, major-league expansion and a decline in minor-league quality had diluted pitching. In addition, the ball seemed livelier, and they had lowered the pitching mound and reduced the size of the strike zone in an effort to boost hitting. All these factors augured well for Carew.

But in general, Williams was less hopeful about his record being easily broken, claiming (as he had for many years) that the current crop of ballplayers had numerous distractions, too much time on their hands, and made so much money they could be complacent. “In my case, nothing else mattered but the hitting,” Ted said. “I lived to hit. I was willing to practice until the blisters bled. And then I practiced some more. A trip to the plate was an adventure—and a time to store up information too. I’m as dumb as a lamppost about a lot of things, but I think I learned a lot about hitting.”

As it turned out, Carew, who was then thirty-one, fell short and finished the year with an average of .388, the same figure Ted hit in 1957, when he was thirty-nine. Williams’s sentiments and good wishes toward Carew were nonetheless gracious, especially since comparing the two men was an apples-and-oranges exercise. After all, Ted had 429 more career home runs than Carew, a slugging percentage more than two hundred points higher, and an on-base percentage nearly one hundred points higher. But Ted’s cheerleading for Carew and his willingness to participate in the magazine feature revealed a beguiling selflessness, his love of the game, and a desire to stay involved in it—especially when measured against Joe DiMaggio, who never did anything comparable when anyone hit safely in thirty-odd games and had designs on his streak.

In the winter of 1978, Williams was attending the annual New Hampshire writers’ dinner in Manchester and gave a radio interview in which he said he’d like to get involved in baseball again as a coach working with young hitters. Al Rosen, the Yankees president, was on hand and heard Ted’s remarks. He approached Williams after the interview, and the two had an animated discussion.

Rosen took down Ted’s contact information. Three days later, New York owner George Steinbrenner was in Boston proclaiming a great scoop: the pride of the Red Sox was going to work for the Yankees. Boston general manager Haywood Sullivan, racing to avert a public relations fiasco, quickly called Ted and said he thought his place was with the Red Sox. Williams, who hadn’t signed anything with New York yet, agreed. He’d just been waiting for his old team to ask.
²

When Ted showed up in Florida for the first day of spring training at the Red Sox camp in Winter Haven, it was like the old days. Scores of writers were on hand to see and photograph the Kid put on a Red Sox uniform again for the first time in eighteen years. At 245 pounds, he was more than fifty pounds north of his playing weight, so equipment man Vince Orlando fit him into a pair of pants with an elastic waistband to accommodate his girth. The players and Sox manager Don Zimmer were totally upstaged as a smiling Williams held a full-dress press conference in which he said it felt “pretty damn good” to be back in a Boston uniform, “the only uniform I’ll ever want to wear.”

Elaborating on his return to the Sox, Williams told Thomas Boswell of the
Washington Post
that he’d missed baseball since quitting as a manager in 1972, and he’d especially missed the Red Sox. “This is the uniform I should never have taken off,” he said. “You’re always a fan of this game after you played it. You enjoy being around it, listening to the young guys in the clubhouse. This is my chance to be up close to the game for a few weeks. I’ll leave when the rookies are shipped out. But it’s enough to give me an interest in the game again.”

Getting down to business with Red Sox hitters, Williams focused his attention on first baseman George Scott, who was known as the Boomer. Sporting a necklace that he said contained “second basemen’s teeth,” Scott demonstrated his stance for Ted and insisted that he, George Scott, was “one of the greatest hitters that ever lived.”

Smiling, Ted said: “Well, you’d be a hell of a lot greater if you’d open up your front foot so you can clear your hips and get that big rear of yours into the ball.”

“Right on, Number Nine,” said the Boomer.
³

Williams had taken up tennis, and when he checked into camp, he’d asked Vince Orlando who the best player around was. Carl Yastrzemski, came the answer, whereupon Ted challenged his successor in left field to a match. This contest attracted plenty of interest—about fifty spectators, some of them reporters—and George Scott volunteered to be the ball boy. There was considerable betting, and most of the money was on Yaz, who, at thirty-eight, was twenty-one years younger than Ted. Though both men had hit left-handed, they played tennis right-handed.

Williams, who took the court wearing a blue warm-up suit and a light blue visor, quickly fell behind, 5–0. But Ted, using chops and spins, came back to make it 5–5. Yaz tried talking some trash.

“You hit [.344] lifetime?” he shouted. “You had a [.634] slugging percentage? You play like a broad.”

“Just keep playing,” Williams said.

Yaz took the first set 8–6, the second 6–1, and the third 7–5. The match took an hour and a half. Yaz had done the most running and afterward seemed to need toweling off and liquid refreshment more urgently than Williams did.

“The only reason I won was age,” he said. “If he wasn’t… older than me, I don’t think I would have handled him.”

“He runs pretty good,” Williams remarked. “Better than I thought. But you know what? I play him again, I gotta bet on me. And this time we’re going to play for something. No more playing for nothing.”
⁴

In the summer of 1980, Williams returned to Cooperstown for the first time since his induction into the Hall of Fame fourteen years earlier. This time, he was appearing on behalf of Tom Yawkey, the longtime Red Sox owner who had died of leukemia four years earlier, at the age of seventy-three. Yawkey had been voted in to the Hall posthumously by the Veterans Committee, and his widow, Jean Yawkey, asked Ted if he would accept the award on her husband’s behalf.

Williams didn’t hesitate. The two men had had a convivial, though not especially close, relationship over the course of Ted’s playing days and into his retirement. Yawkey had thrilled to his star’s heroics, and Williams had been grateful for the owner’s generosity and kindness. They enjoyed talking about baseball, politics (serious Republicans both), fishing, and hunting. Ted had always had a standing invitation to come up to Yawkey’s private bar, under the roof along the third-base line, after games. There was a ticker-tape machine there on which the out-of-town
scores came through, and these smoke-filled boozefests—where Yawkey, Joe Cronin, their minions, and assorted guests held court and talked baseball—would last until the wee hours of the morning.

Williams liked Yawkey’s zest for the game and the fact that he didn’t hesitate to avail himself of the boyish perks of ownership. Every morning, for example, Yawkey would get dressed in a baseball uniform (number 44, for the year in which he married Jean) and play pepper with the clubhouse boys. After that he would take batting practice—he was a right-handed batter who could occasionally reach the left-field wall but never clear it. Then he would shower, and if his team was away he and Jean would take a blanket down to the field, spread it in the outfield, and have a picnic lunch while listening to the game on the radio. Fenway Park was their backyard.

Commissioner Bowie Kuhn began the ceremony in Cooperstown by calling Yawkey “one of the most storied executives in the history of our game.” Not mentioned, of course, was the owner’s most shameful legacy—the fact that, during his tenure, the Red Sox became the last team in Major League Baseball to integrate, in 1959.

Instead, Kuhn and Ted stressed Yawkey’s charitable efforts on behalf of children with cancer at the Jimmy Fund as well as his contributions to a hospital and a home for wayward boys in Georgetown, South Carolina, where he had had his twenty-thousand-acre estate.