In February of 1955, when Ted was threatening to retire as part of a financial ploy to shield income from his first wife during tense divorce proceedings, he said he had signed contracts to take fishing trips in Peru and Nova Scotia that May and June—proof, he said, that he would not be playing ball in the summer. Birtwell found the concept of a fishing contract amusing, and wrote a tongue-in-cheek story saying that he, too, would not be working during those months because “I’ve signed a contract to go fishing for flounders in the Hampton River. By the way, with whom do I sign the contract—the flounders?”51
Not all Ted’s relationships with the press corps were antagonistic. He was friendly with the Record’s Joe Cashman and would keep up with him in retirement. Mindful of Williams’s ambition to be the greatest hitter who ever lived, Cashman liked to say that he considered Ted only the second-greatest hitter—after Rogers Hornsby. Ted thought that was still pretty good company, and once when he called the writer’s house to make dinner plans, Ted said: “This is the second-greatest hitter who ever lived calling.”52 When Cashman died in 1993 at the age of ninety-two, Williams sent a telegram offering his condolences.*
Williams kept his soft, kind side well hidden, but Cashman saw it revealed on several occasions. Once, after a reporter died suddenly, Ted called his paper and inquired after his financial status, saying he was prepared to cover the funeral expenses if necessary. Williams was thanked and told that wouldn’t be necessary.53
The writer who was probably closest to Williams was someone who worked for the least influential paper in town. Ed Rumill of the Christian Science Monitor had covered the major leagues for forty-five years, and every World Series from 1930 to 1972, by the time he retired. Rumill was also a regular in the Sporting News, a forum he needed to enhance his visibility, since few ballplayers saw the Monitor—though the Red Sox did buy nine copies a day because it was the only paper in Boston that carried the minor-league standings and scores.
Rumill’s significance was that he was a confidant of Ted and Tom Yawkey and thus a reliable barometer of the thinking of the two most important figures on the Red Sox. Rumill often served as a middleman between Ted and the rest of the writers, passing on quotes from Williams whenever he refused to speak to other reporters, which was not infrequently. Rumill would also show up at the ballpark hours before game time and meet Tom and Jean Yawkey in the last row of the grandstand to talk and perhaps have a libation or two.
Rumill played baseball himself, in the amateur Boston Park League, and in the late ’30s Yawkey permitted him to throw batting practice for the Red Sox. This was a different kind of writer, one whom Ted thought he could trust. Rumill introduced his mother to Williams, and she would become a regular visitor to Fenway Park on Wednesday afternoons, when the Red Sox hosted their “Ladies Days.” Ted would always wave to her or stop by and chat.
Rumill was six foot three and looked so much like Ted that fans often approached him and asked for his autograph. Over the years, on the numerous occasions when Ted went into the bunker and refused to talk to the writers over some perceived slight or another, he never stopped talking to Rumill. So Rumill would agree to serve as a pool reporter for the frozen-out scribes, carrying their questions to the Great Man. Recalled Phil Elderkin, a columnist for the Monitor who was a friend of Rumill, “Ed talked him into this. He’d say, ‘Ted, you gotta do this. They have families and obligations. They’re trying to do a job.’ Ted went along with it. He pretended to be mad about a lot of things.”54
One night in Philadelphia in 1954, Williams hit one of his tape-measure home runs out of Connie Mack Stadium and onto the roof of a neighboring apartment building. It was career home run number 362, putting him one ahead of his archrival, Joe DiMaggio. Rumill knew the ball would be an important keepsake for his pal, so he bolted from the press box and ran outside to the apartment building. He tracked down the fan who had come up with the ball and arranged for him to cough it up in exchange for another ball, autographed by Ted.
In the off-season, Rumill would visit Williams in the Florida Keys, where Ted would later take up residence, and the two would have long talks. Once, Ted confided to Rumill that he had paid the hospital bill for a Boston writer who had a medical problem but couldn’t cover the cost, Elderkin said. And when Rumill himself got in a financial jam, Ted insisted on giving him a loan, the writer later told a friend.
For the writers, their daily encounters with Williams were a tumultuous mixture of riveting theater, sheer excitement, and resentment at having to absorb a matinee idol’s torrent of bile and abuse. But their front-row seat also gave them a fascinating perspective on the development and evolution of Ted’s mercurial and fragile persona.
They learned his moods and eccentricities, what approach he might favor, how he would play them off against each other, how he could be extraordinarily kind to people, and how, for all his raging at the press, he devoured everything that was written about him. They also learned how he craved fame but not the inconvenience of celebrity—a naïveté that betrayed a basic misunderstanding of a writer’s role in ferreting out information about him, an outsize personality whom the public thirsted to know more about.
Bob Ajemian of the American was a young reporter thrown into the Williams fray in the late ’40s and early ’50s. He had grown up in suburban Boston as a great fan of Ted’s. “We were all just crazy about him.… But to be with him in the locker room was scary. He radiated so much energy and appeal, and he intimidated us. His voice was unique. He spoke with certitude. ‘What the fuck do you know?’ He was a transcendent figure. You didn’t want to be on the wrong side of him. The press was largely afraid of him. He would berate you publicly and loudly, as opposed to taking someone aside for a private beef.”
Ajemian thought Ted was not a team leader the way Joe DiMaggio was. “If you walked into the Yankee locker room, people skirted Joe differently than you’d skirt Ted. Joe took a loss very hard and radiated that. Williams radiated superb individual performance. Individuality was the dominant theme of his career. Yet his teammates regarded him with reverence. He had tremendous standing. He owned the town.”55
Bud Collins, the longtime television commentator and tennis writer for the Boston Globe, remembered well his first encounter with Williams. It was 1955, and Collins was a cub reporter for the Herald. Eager to show what he could do, the young journalist burst into the clubhouse after the game, unaware that reporters were barred for fifteen minutes, a Williams-inspired team rule that Ted took delight in personally enforcing. “What’s that cocksucker doing in here!” thundered Ted from across the room as he spotted Collins.56 Jack Fadden, the trainer, quickly hustled Collins into an adjoining room, explaining the fifteen-minute rule and telling him not to worry: Ted treated everyone that way.*
Collins eventually got to know the Kid and engaged him a bit. One familiar postgame ritual with Williams was to ask him what kind of pitch he’d hit for a home run. “Fastball, cock high,” Ted would usually respond.* (Recalled the Herald’s Tim Horgan, “If I could get a quote out of TW that was printable through all the four letter words, I was golden.”)
Collins said occasionally Ted would approach him to comment on something he had written. “Once, he came up and said, ‘You probably don’t think I read that piece of shit you wrote because we were on the road. Well, let me tell you something: when you rip somebody, someone always makes sure he sees it.’ ” Another time, Collins was assigned to interview a group of fans in the bleachers about what they thought of some of the moves Red Sox management had been making—sort of a Fenway man-in-the-street feature. The next day Williams complained to him that the hoi polloi had no authority to comment. “What the hell do you think a bunch of fuckin’ Armenians know about baseball?” Ted demanded.
Collins witnessed several Ted meltdowns. After one, Jimmy Piersall, the Red Sox outfielder who had been hospitalized with a nervous breakdown in 1952, whispered in Collins’s ear: “They’d put me away for acting like that guy.”
“How can you be so sure?” asked Collins.
“Because this woman happens to be my housekeeper, and she loves Ted Williams,” Cronin replied.
Perhaps no sportswriter has the perspective on Williams that George Sullivan—formerly of the Traveler and later the Record—does. That’s because Sullivan first got to know Ted when he was a Red Sox batboy in 1949, before he went on to college and made what Williams viewed as the heretical decision to become a dreaded writer.
One day he was in the Sox dugout when Ted was up. “Williams hit one about fourteen rows into the bleachers over the visiting team bull pen,” Sullivan said. “The bench went wild. The first words from the other players were, ‘What kind of a pitch was it?’ He was cussing. He’s very unhappy. ‘Son of a bitch, I never should have swung at that.’ He said it was off the plate. I thought, ‘Whoa, wait a minute. The guy’s won a ball game and he’s bitching about it?’ It jarred me. I was only fifteen. Jesus, this is not the way you play the game. Frankly, I wondered if he was so self-centered that he wasn’t a team player. I hated to even think of it, because the guy was my idol.”
But Sullivan wasn’t jarred enough to stop being enthralled with Ted, and the two got to know each other. Sometimes, on days when Williams had to go to the WBZ studios for an interview show he had committed to, he would offer to take George to his house in nearby Cambridge. “He’d say, ‘Let’s go!’ He had a Cadillac. He drove me home to my corner, Putnam Square, on Mass Ave and Trowbridge Street. Kerry Corner. I wanted to make sure my pals saw who was driving me home.”
One of Sullivan’s strangest encounters with Ted came at Fenway. As he approached the ballpark one day, he heard an alarming sound. “Near the service entrance there was a corrugated door. The door was open. I hear an explosion. I thought it was a car backfiring. I hear it again. Then it sounded like it was coming from inside the ballpark. I walked onto the field, and I saw the damnedest thing I ever saw. There were dead pigeons all over the field. I heard a shot again, and I saw Ted in old clothes with a rifle out in the visitors’ bull pen. I’m a city kid. I’d never seen anyone shoot a weapon. I watched him for a couple minutes. I was mesmerized. Finally I had to go do my chores. Then I hear the clump, clump of cleats coming down the runway. It’s Ted. With his arms around my shoulders, I thought, ‘Look out, he has a favor to ask.’ He said, ‘Hey, old buddy, when you have a chance, grab a few barrels and go out and get those pigeons.’ I filled a bunch of barrels, and that’s how I learned to swear. Every one I picked up I used one of the cuss words Ted taught me.”
In the summer of 1954, between his junior and senior years at Boston University, Sullivan was working full-time for the Traveler sports section. One day, the regular Red Sox beat writer called in sick. “Arthur Siegel, the sports editor, looked at the ceiling and said, ‘What’s this business coming to? I’m going to have to send you to cover the Red Sox today.’
“So I went to Fenway. I had never been in the clubhouse since I was a batboy, and now I had my ticket in. I went in before the game, and Mel Parnell spotted me. Mel’s a wonderful guy and he gave me a hug. Ted was in the trainer’s room.
“Parnell yelled at Ted, ‘Look who’s here!’
“Ted said, ‘Well, Jesus Christ! Son of a bitch! What are you doing now?’
“ ‘Ted, I’m a sportswriter.’
“He dropped my hand like it had a disease. He said, ‘You used to be a good kid! Where did you go wrong?’ That was the beginning of phase two of my relationship with Ted.”
Sullivan took his first road trip with the Sox in 1956—first to Washington for a series against the Senators, then up to New York, where they would play the Yankees. In Washington, he had breakfast with Jimmy Piersall, and Piersall mentioned that he and Ted weren’t speaking. The two had a rocky relationship, and it wasn’t the first time they’d feuded. Sullivan thought he had a good scoop, but he had to get Ted’s side of the story first. He waited until the team arrived in New York and Williams was picking up the key to his room in the hotel lobby.
“I went up to him and said, ‘Tell me about you and Piersall,’ ” Sullivan said. “He hit the roof. We were good friends, but he starts using the four-letter words right in the lobby. I learned as a batboy he did not respect you unless you returned the insults in kind. So I filed that away, and whatever he was saying to me now I was giving back to him in spades. I wanted him to respect me. We went toe-to-toe on Piersall. We were turning the room blue, and a little old lady turned heel right in the lobby and beat it out of there. It was like a class B western movie. Finally, Ted stormed off, and I wrote my story. I had a scoop.”
Sullivan and his hero clashed again later that summer of ’56, after Ted hit his four hundredth career home run in the second game of a twi-night doubleheader against Kansas City at Fenway.
Williams had been stuck at 399 for eight days, and the fans were on him a bit.
“So he finally hits the home run, and as he rounded the bases, the boos became cheers,” Sullivan remembered. “The press box was hanging over the field back then. As he crossed the plate he cocked his head up at us and pursed his lips as if to spit, but I don’t think he did spit. Then it looked like he said, ‘Fuck you.’ After the game I went down. I waited to grab him until the writers had left and he was alone. I went over and congratulated him. Then I said, ‘Did you say something to the press box when he you crossed the plate?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I spit at you bastards.’ He boomed it out. Everything in the locker room stopped. I said, ‘No, Ted, you did not spit, you said something.’ He turned beet red. He said, ‘You’re right, I didn’t spit. I meant to spit at you bastards, but I was afraid I’d hit the on-deck guy coming up.’ As soon as Ted stomped off all the writers came running over. ‘What happened? What happened?’ I told them.”
Sullivan was still young, only twenty-two, learning the ways of the press and angry at Williams for apparently forgetting that they had once been friends. Now Ted was just lumping him in with the other writers and abusing him. “I waited outside the locker room for Ted. I didn’t want any witnesses this time. I was taking this personally. Ted sees me, and it’s like nothing had ever happened. He was all smiles. I said, ‘Tell me, what was that crap that just went on? Were you talking about me, too, or just the other guys?’ He put his arms around my shoulders, and he said he wasn’t talking about me specifically. It was just sportswriters. He said, ‘Don’t take it personally.’ ”
For all Williams’s rage and bluster, Sullivan remained forever impressed by his quiet acts of kindness, especially toward children sick with cancer. This was widely known among the writers, but it was rarely written about because Ted demanded that it not be. “Williams would be getting dressed and a writer would have been tipped off that Ted had been to a hospital at three in the morning to visit some kid,” Sullivan said. “Williams had circulated his private number to some hospitals so they could call him if a kid was in serious trouble, and he’d told them if he can get there he will. So the writer would say, ‘Ted, I heard you were at Children’s at three in the morning.’ Ted’s neck would get red and he’d start sputtering and he’d say, ‘Yeah, I was there, but if you write one word about it it’s your ass, because I’ll never do it again.’ So he put the writer in a box, and of course it was never written.”
Why did he insist on anonymity? “He didn’t want to grandstand.… He had a thing for privacy like no one I’ve ever seen.”
Following the upheavals of 1940, there would be many more outbursts, fulminations, obscene gestures, and spitting episodes as Williams’s career unfolded, but in the end, he was able to gradually turn public opinion in his favor. The crowd could lash out at him if he made an error or behav
ed churlishly, and the boos would grow even louder after fans saw they could provoke the thin-skinned Kid into some outrageous response. So it was in 1950, after he gave them the finger, and in 1956, after he spat at them.
But in each case, after Ted took his medicine with a fine or a half-baked apology that the team forced him to issue, the fans would welcome him back and bathe him in their cheers and applause. The 1950 reception was especially meaningful to Williams. “I got an ovation that I’ll never forget,” he said years later. “It was one of my biggest thrills in baseball. I learned that night that New England fans really were for me and cared about me.”
Ted’s central claim that it was the malevolent writers who prompted the harsh treatment from the crowd was spurious at best, but gradually fans seemed to conclude that Williams was right. They came to accept Ted’s fragile psyche and his insistence that he was being persecuted. They admired his independence, his individuality, and his determination to buck convention, stick to his guns, and do things his own way—even if that stubbornness hurt him in the short term.
When the fans again welcomed Ted back after he spit at them in 1956, even some in the press began to take note of the shift in public opinion and questioned whether they had overstepped their bounds.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 22