The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  His private life, during and after baseball, was much more problematic. If, during his career, Ted was able to manipulate the rage that simmered inside him and turn it into an on-field positive, off the field his inability to control his anger hurt him immeasurably in maintaining relationships—especially with his wives and children.

  If he failed to perform a given task up to his own high standard, or if a friend or loved one did something in what he felt was an inept or shoddy manner, Ted would ignite. He could also be set off if he wasn’t in control of a situation, or was not being accorded what he felt was proper deference. If the telephone rang at an inopportune or intrusive time, he might rip it from the wall and fling it across the room.

  After seeing a lifetime’s worth of these explosions close-up, Bobby-Jo Williams Ferrell concluded that her father had some kind of mental illness: “My dad was sick. And it’s a damn shame that because he was Ted Williams, and because nobody wanted to tell him like it was, including myself, he suffered and progressively became more ill by the years. And I think even especially after he quit managing, he got worse and worse and worse.”10

  Gnashing of teeth was a telltale sign that Ted was getting ready to go off. “He would clench his teeth so hard it was like he was having a seizure,” said Jerry Romolt, a memorabilia dealer who became a friend to Williams. “A fulmination. Then it would pass.”11

  That was the thing: the storms always passed, and usually quickly. But the price of being in Ted’s orbit was that you had to endure the foul weather. “Sometimes he’d get so ticked off at me that the damnedest things would come out of his mouth, and then he would feel bad about it, but he would never apologize,” said former Red Sox shortstop Johnny Pesky. “He was a proud guy. Every time you’d ask him a question, he’d look at you and say, ‘Why are you so goddamn dumb?’ He said that about pitchers, too, and they didn’t like it.”12 His language made even some other ballplayers blush. “He’d say things that I shudder to think about and would never repeat,” said Milt Bolling, a Red Sox shortstop from 1952 to 1957.13 If you called him on his behavior, or decided that absorbing a steady diet of such outbursts was too much to take, then so be it, good-bye, you were out. But if you could accept that the eruptions were just Ted being Ted, that he really meant no harm, and that he could in fact be charming and engaging after the storm had blown over and act as though nothing had happened, then you were in, and Ted was your loyal friend for life.

  Bobby Doerr, the old Red Sox second baseman and dear friend to Ted, felt Williams’s lash while fishing and on many other occasions, but accepted him unconditionally. “He’d be like a maniac,” Doerr said. “Ted fought embarrassment. Anytime he was embarrassed over anything—if it was baseball, he’d throw the bat in the air; fishing, he’d break a rod; golf, he’d throw the club. He fought embarrassment terribly because he was a perfectionist.”14

  Would Doerr ever tell him he was out of line? “No—you never said anything to Ted. It wasn’t going to do any good.” Doerr was far from alone. Johnny Pesky, also one of Ted’s closest friends on the team, thought most of his teammates were simply awestruck by Ted. “We were like a bunch of kids looking up to a schoolteacher,” Pesky said. “Some of the guys called him God. They’d say, ‘God has spoken.’ ”15

  Williams had few close friends, but would embrace and cultivate friendships with perfect strangers. He preferred the company of the “little people” to hanging around other celebrities or swells. “If I said this guy was a reporter and he could make you or break you, Ted would have nothing to do with the guy,” said Dave McCarthy, a former New Hampshire state trooper who became a confidant of Ted’s and a trustee of his estate. “But if I said, ‘I’d like you to meet a janitor who likes bone fishing,’ he’d talk all night. He was genuine about that. That’s what I loved about him.”16

  Ted realized his behavior was a burden to others. “He said, ‘The people that really love me have had to endure more than you can possibly imagine, because I can’t control my temper,’ ” recalled Steve Brown, a Florida filmmaker and fisherman who became a confidant of Ted’s toward the end of his life.17

  Some friends struggled with the notion that they were enabling Ted’s abusive conduct by not intervening. One was Elizabeth “Betty” Tamposi, daughter of the late Sam Tamposi, a longtime pal of Williams’s who was a Red Sox limited partner and real estate developer in New Hampshire and Florida. After long being exposed to the kind and humanitarian side of Ted, Betty Tamposi was startled to witness his abusive conduct, sometimes exacerbated by drinking. Once, enraged by something, he furiously beat his dog in frustration. Another time, she watched as he humiliated the woman he lived with late in life, Louise Kaufman, in front of others at a restaurant. “I think there were a lot of people that enabled behavior of Ted’s that was unacceptable,” concluded Tamposi, who served as an assistant secretary of state under President George H. W. Bush.18

  The Red Sox themselves coddled and enabled Williams in several ways: moving the right-field fences in for him, letting him maintain rules that kept reporters out of the clubhouse for a period of time after games, tolerating his spitting and various other on-field flameouts, and looking the other way when he missed two months of one season just so he could get a better divorce deal.

  And what was Ted Williams angry about, exactly? Most who knew him well thought the cause was rooted in resentment of his unhappy childhood in San Diego. His mother, May, was a well-known Salvation Army zealot, out all day and much of the night saving souls, leaving Ted and his younger brother, Danny, to fend mostly for themselves. His father, Sam, was a ne’er-do-well who ran a small photo shop, drank excessively, and showed little interest in either of his sons.

  And unlike many professional ballplayers—most of them, probably—Ted was embarrassed that he never went to college and had no formal education beyond high school. In 1991, on the fiftieth anniversary of his .406 year, Harvard University wanted to give him an honorary degree, but he turned it down, feeling that he would have been out of place among the intelligentsia in Harvard Yard.

  “It’s too bad he didn’t get to go to college,” said Dave Sisler, a Red Sox pitcher in the late ’50s and the son of Hall of Famer George Sisler. “He was very, very smart. I went to Princeton, and was around some guys with big IQs. I bet if he took the test, he would have done very well.”19

  Ted certainly was inquisitive. He bought a set of encyclopedias in middle age and couldn’t wait to delve into them. He liked verbal jousting and a good argument, which he would often start on a given subject—after marshaling his facts in advance, the better to sandbag his opponent.

  But facts were only part of it.

  Bob Costas, the television broadcaster, interviewed Ted several times and found him “curious about excellence. ‘How do you do what you do? Whatever it is you do, how do you do it?’ Curt Gowdy [the longtime Red Sox announcer] said he was the most capable man he ever knew. My [own] impression was if Ted was walking down the street and you said to him, ‘Over there is the best carpenter who ever lived,’ he’d have gone over and talked to the guy.”20

  Williams would end up repeating some of his parents’ mistakes. He was repeatedly unfaithful and an absentee father himself. When Ted was introspective, he’d talk about his failures, according to Steve Brown. “He never talked about his accomplishments. He was humble. He looked at his failures very heavy. His biggest was as a father. He felt he’d never been a good father. He felt he had many areas to make up for.”

  Added Manuel Herrera, one of Ted’s cousins: “Ted’s exact words to me were: ‘As a father, I struck out. I was for shit as a father. I was never there. I was always gone. I had my commitments. I just didn’t do the job.’ It was obscure to him. He didn’t know how to do it. I think Ted tried to compensate for being a lousy father by trying to help other kids.”21

  Gino Lucero, a cousin on May Williams’s side of the family, said, “Ted was a great hero, and he was dysfunctional. When he was pissed, he was lethal. You
had this anger thing that he courted, that he embraced. No matter how distasteful it was, he embraced it.

  “He was a kid who wanted to fit in, and here’s his mom banging tambourines on a street corner and spreading the Gospel. Ted always gravitated to his friends’ fathers. Think about it. His dad had a photo business. His dad was never home. His dad was a drinker who showed no interest in Ted. How many men are screwed up because they were never validated by their fathers?”22

  Manuel Herrera thought Ted hid his fears with anger: “We were driving back from LA once. I said, ‘Why were you so hard on the people in Boston?’ He says, ‘You know, I was afraid.’ ‘What were you afraid of?’ ‘I really don’t know what I was afraid of, but I didn’t want them to know I was poor, didn’t have a good home, didn’t have the intangibles. I didn’t want them to know my private life, so I backed them away with my anger. But despite all that they loved me.’ ”

  The news of Williams’s passing hit hardest in Boston, where city flags were ordered flown at half-staff and talk radio began to give voice to a sense of communal grieving and remembering. At the Ted Williams Tunnel, which runs under Boston Harbor and had been dedicated in 1995, condolences were posted on electronic message boards. Newspapers ran updated obituaries of Williams that had been filed years ago; some papers ran special commemorative sections. Wondrous archival footage of the Kid in his prime aired on cable channels and on newscasts across America.

  President George W. Bush, the über–baseball fan who had once owned the Texas Rangers and whose father, President George H. W. Bush, revered Ted, said of Williams’s nearly five-year-long military service as a Marine Corps pilot in both World War II and Korea: “Ted gave baseball some of its best seasons—and he gave his own best seasons to his country.”

  Bob Feller, who once had said that trying to get his blazing fastball by Williams was “like trying to get a sunbeam by a rooster,” called Ted “the greatest hitter I ever faced.” And Yogi Berra, the old Yankees catcher, who used to enjoy needling Williams and trying to distract him as he stood in the batter’s box waiting to hit, echoed Feller and scores of others in concluding that Ted “sacrificed his life and career for his country. But he became what he always wanted to be: the greatest hitter ever.”

  At the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, events scheduled for the day Ted died were canceled. Officials placed a wreath under Ted’s plaque and flowers under his life-size statue, which stands next to Babe Ruth’s in the entrance to the museum. Around Major League Baseball, stadiums held moments of silence and lowered their flags. At Fenway Park in Boston that night, where the Red Sox were playing the Detroit Tigers, the grounds crew carved Ted’s number, 9, into the left-field grass. A lone bugler played taps at the base of the 9 as a Marine honor guard carried the flag. Both teams stood along the baselines in tribute, the Red Sox with black armbands on their right sleeves. A long-stemmed red rose was placed in the right-field bleachers on seat 21, row 37, section 42, where Ted had hit a massive 502-foot home run in 1946, crushing the straw hat of the man sitting in the seat.

  Ty Cobb may have hit for a higher average, and Babe Ruth with more power, but nobody combined power and average the way Williams did. He was a pure hitter—not a fielder or a complete player—and never pretended or aspired to be anything else. “They don’t pay off on fielding,” as he once explained it.

  Williams pioneered the use of a lighter bat—once considered heresy for sluggers—arguing that bat speed, not heft, was the key to power. Over the course of his entire career, Ted studied pitchers intently for their tendencies and quizzed hitters about what a pitcher threw to them in what situation. “Ted always said: ‘I don’t guess what they throw. I figure what they’re going to throw,’ ” said Tom Wright, a backup outfielder and pinch hitter for the Sox from 1948 to 1951.23

  And his hitting credo was simple: get a good pitch to hit. Critics said he followed this rule to the extreme by refusing to chase a pitch that was even an inch off the strike zone, thereby hurting his team by having its best hitter often pass up an opportunity to drive a runner home. But Ted made the slippery-slope counterargument: that if he chased a pitch an inch from the plate, it would only encourage pitchers to throw two inches outside the zone, then three inches, and so on. History has vindicated Ted’s approach, and there is now broad acceptance of the value of reaching base, or having a high on-base percentage—a statistic that was not appreciated and barely even kept in Williams’s day.

  His eyesight was exceptional, and his command of the strike zone so renowned that opponents often complained that the umpires effectively gave him four strikes. The umps loved Ted because he never showed them up by arguing a call. One oft-told story, perhaps apocryphal, has it that when a catcher beefed about a pitch that had been called a ball, the umpire told him: “Mr. Williams will let you know when your pitcher throws a strike.”

  A small minority of Ted’s teammates was less charitable, and resented his aloof, individualist persona and his temper tantrums, but most liked and admired him enormously, even worshipped him. “You’re not going to like everybody or be liked by everybody,” said Ted Lepcio, a Red Sox infielder from 1952 to 1959. “Geniuses have their own intricacies, and maybe that best describes Ted. He had a hard time understanding why guys like me couldn’t hit better. I think he had a hard time relating to nonperfectionists.”24

  Of Ted’s many nicknames, the Kid was his favorite, followed closely by Teddy Ballgame. Johnny Orlando, the longtime Sox clubhouse attendant, had first called Williams the Kid after he arrived at his first spring training in 1938. Never lacking in self-confidence when discussing his hitting prowess, Ted wouldn’t hesitate to use either nickname or to refer to himself in the third person.

  “He was really in love with himself,” said Jimmy Piersall, the splendid Red Sox outfielder who played from 1952 to 1958. “He’d be in that mirror talking, saying ‘Teddy Ballgame’; I think he kissed the mirror right in the clubhouse.”25

  Asked by the writer Cleveland Amory following his .406 year in 1941 what he could possibly do for an encore, Ted was ready with his answer: “I wanna be an immortal,” he said.26

  1

  Shame

  Ted was always ashamed of his upbringing.

  Ashamed of his mother, the Salvation Army devotee and fixture of Depression-era San Diego who seemed far more committed to her street mission than she was to raising her two sons.

  Ashamed of his largely absent and indifferent father, who ran a cheesy downtown photo studio that catered to San Diego’s sailors and their floozies, and who had a fondness for the bottle.

  Ashamed of his younger brother—a gun-toting petty miscreant always one step ahead of the law—who bitterly resented Ted’s fame and success.

  This sense of shame manifested itself in a reluctance to talk about his family with friends, outsiders, and especially reporters—at least until he was much older and out of baseball.

  But there was one aspect of his family life that Ted for many years decided to conceal outright. It was one of the most interesting parts of his background, an important element that did not emerge publicly until near the end of his life: the fact that he was half Mexican—on his mother’s side.

  Based on Ted’s All-American appearance and his white-bread last name, this was an improbable revelation, but that did not stop Hispanic activists from claiming him as one of their own. Not long before he died, Williams became the first inductee into the fledgling Hispanic Heritage Baseball Museum Hall of Fame.

  May Williams was the second of eight children born to Pablo Venzor and the former Natalia Hernandez, a native of Chihuahua, Mexico. Pablo, a mason, married Natalia in 1888. Natalia had a brother who worked in the Mexican government, and the family, feeling vulnerable to Pancho Villa and the coming revolution, emigrated from Chihuahua to Santa Barbara, California, in 1907.

  As immigrants often do in their effort to assimilate in a new country, some of the Venzors sought to play down their r
oots south of the border and claimed a Basque, or “Basco,” heritage with a strain variously said to have been French or Spanish. May’s younger sister Sarah Venzor Diaz, who died in 1999 at the age of ninety-four, went so far as to tell writer Bill Nowlin: “We have no Mexican heritage in our family. We are Basque.” And she suggested that attempts by writers to delve into Ted’s Mexican background were a slur against him.1

  Yet genealogical research reveals that May’s Mexican roots extended back at least three generations—as far as records could be traced. No records on Pablo’s side could be found, but interviews with surviving Venzor family members reveal nothing to indicate that his lineage is not cemented in Mexico as well. The Venzors’ sensitivity probably reflected the fact that in Mexico, those with European or Anglo roots are often more socially esteemed than those with “indio,” or indigenous, roots. This tension was also evident in the next generation of Venzors—Ted’s cousins and May’s nieces and nephews.

  “We were fruit pickers,” said Frank Venzor, son of May’s younger brother Paul, speaking of the extended family.

  “My dad was no fruit picker,” replied Frank’s sister Carolyn Ortiz.

  “The hell he wasn’t,” said Frank, who, in a private interview later, sarcastically offered the Venzor family line on their Mexican roots: “We’re not fruit pickers per se. We’re Basques. We don’t come from Mexico. We just happened to be passing through. My uncle Bruno would say, ‘I ain’t no Mexican! I’m a French Canadian!’ ”2