The Navy Pre-Flight School had nothing to do with flight. If the physical regimen at Amherst—calisthenics, swimming, and the commando course—had been rigorous, the drill at Chapel Hill was akin to an all-sports marathon designed to build physical and mental stamina. “They really ran us through the wringer there—up by the light of the moon, double time all day, and to bed with the owls,” Pesky told columnist Austen Lake in 1952.11 “Drill till your tongue bulged.… Sports, hikes, inspections, fatigue. We played all games to test us for versatility—boxing, football, wrestling, swimming, soccer and baseball. The object was to find if we had a nerve cracking point. Some did! A lot of guys, knowing Ted’s reputation as a pop-off, waited for him to explode. But he never blew any fuses or got a single bad behavior demerit. If anything, he took a little stiffer discipline than the others, sort of stuff like, ‘Oh, you’re the great Ted Williams, huh? OK, Mister.’ Ted took it all.”
Williams enjoyed the novelty of trying different sports, especially boxing. He’d always been a fight buff and admired the toughness and courage of boxers. Now he tried his hand in the ring himself, and the instructor, Lieutenant Al Wolff, thought him skilled and polished. Along with Pesky and the other major leaguers from Amherst, Ted of course joined the Chapel Hill baseball team, the Cloudbusters. Later that summer, the mayor of Boston, Maurice Tobin, prevailed upon the Navy to spring Ted from Chapel Hill for a few days so that he could join a group of service All-Stars on July 12 for an exhibition game against the Boston Braves at Fenway Park. The game would support Tobin’s annual charity drive benefiting impoverished children. And a featured attraction, generating more interest than the game itself, was to be a hitting contest between Ted and Babe Ruth. It was the first time the Kid and the Babe had ever met or appeared together. Ruth had a soft spot for Boston because he’d broken in with the Red Sox in 1914 and retired with the Braves in 1935.
Ruth, managing the service team, flew up from New York the day before and stopped in at a doubleheader at Braves Field. Renewing acquaintances with his old pals in the press box, the Bambino tried to boost the gate for the following day. “I’ll be out there swinging, you can tell the fans!” he boomed to the writers, though perhaps in deference to Ruth’s rustiness and age (he was forty-eight), the writers were calling the match with Ted not a home-run contest but a “distance hitting contest.”12 Some eighteen thousand fans turned out early to watch the festivities, which included appearances by the Army and Coast Guard bands, a drill by a group of WACs, a softball game between city and state officials, and the introduction of thirty retired major leaguers.13
Williams, in his Navy dress blues, arrived in the clubhouse before Ruth. Mayor Tobin and a thicket of lesser Boston pols swarmed around the Kid, asking for his autograph on baseballs. Ted cheerfully obliged, signing his name on remote areas of the balls. “I’ll leave the honor space for the Babe,” he said, referring to the narrow spot between the seams.
Johnny Orlando presented him with two new bats from the factory in Louisville. Told they weighed thirty-five ounces, Williams asked the clubhouse boy to shave them down to thirty-three. He fielded a few calls from the front office and bantered excitedly with the writers about Ruth. “All I’ve got to say is, if the Babe, at 50 years, without a bat in his hand for a year, can hit one into the right field stands, he’s a wonder,” said Ted.
Then the other guest of honor strolled into the room. “Hiya, Kid!” boomed the Babe, a black cigar smoldering in his mouth.
“A very great pleasure indeed,” replied Williams, both awestruck and tongue-tied.
“You remind me a lot of myself,” Ruth continued. “You love to hit. You’re one of the most natural ballplayers I’ve ever seen. And if ever my record is broken, I hope you’re the one to do it.”
The Babe repaired to Bobby Doerr’s locker and stripped to his shorts. He chatted happily with the writers, old-timers, and assorted hangers-on while signing a batch of balls in the sweet spot left for him by Williams. He claimed his weight was down to 231 pounds from the 247 he’d last played at with the Yankees in 1934. Then Johnny Orlando brought him his pin-striped uniform, which bore the number 3, and gave Ted his road-gray flannels. After they finished dressing, they posed for pictures grabbing a bat hand over hand, choosing up sides to see who would hit first.
Williams emerged on the field first to a loud cheer, but it paled next to the sustained ovation given the Babe when he waddled out of the dugout. As the preliminary ceremonies played out, Ted sat in the dugout and told John Drohan of the Traveler that he wasn’t thinking much about baseball now. “I rarely look at a box score these days,” he said. “I couldn’t even tell you how much the Yankees are leading by. And you know, when I was playing ball, I had all those things figured out to the Nth degree. But I figure I’m in a bigger game now, one that requires my full and complete attention.”
Before the hitting contest began, Ruth stepped to the microphone and proved he’d lost none of his showman’s flair. “Boston’s my starting town,” he told the adoring crowd. “I was mighty sorry to leave for New York. Of course, I got lots more dough when I went there.” He paused for laughter, then concluded, “But here’s the town I love.”
Ruth would bat after Williams. “I ain’t had a bat in my hand since last September at Yankee Stadium,” the Babe told Ted, lowering expectations.
“You’ve got nothing on me, Babe!” replied Ted, who’d taken a few licks for the Cloudbusters.
Williams stood in against right-hander Red Barrett of the Braves and launched the third pitch fifteen rows up into the right-field bleachers, bringing the crowd to its feet. Ted looked “very natural and loose as ever at the dish,” wrote Fred Barry of the Globe. “He still has the knack.” Of the next fifteen pitches, Ted delivered two more homers into the same vicinity.
Then it was Ruth’s turn. On his second swing, he took a mighty cut—and fouled the ball off his ankle. He hobbled around in pain, and the ankle swelled up on him. After a few more futile hacks, he was forced to quit and limped back to the dugout. It was a dismal anticlimax to what had been the promoters’ unfair construct: the Home Run King, after all, was way over the hill at forty-eight, and Ted, the would-be successor entering his prime, was only half Ruth’s age.
Ruth gamely managed his service All-Star team from the first-base coaching box and had a bird’s-eye view when Williams, coming up in the seventh inning of a tie game, crushed a three-run homer into the center-field bleachers, leading the service team to a 9–8 win over the Braves. This time, as he crossed the plate, Williams abandoned his usual pose of studied indifference to the cheering crowd. He looked up into the stands, smiled, and tipped his cap.
In the clubhouse afterward, Ruth was ashamed of his hitting performance. “See that uniform down there on the floor?” he said to the Globe’s Mel Webb. “It was the last I ever shall put on. I started right here in Boston… and I finished right here today.” But by that evening, the Babe was out of the dumps and in a gregarious mood at Boston’s Hotel Kenmore. He entertained patrons in the bar with a boisterous rendition of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and lavished praise on Ted, who had already returned to Chapel Hill.14
Ruth and Williams would have another encounter just two weeks later. Babe reneged on his pledge to Mel Webb and agreed to put on the uniform for what this time really would be his final appearance in a ball game. Following a game between the Yankees and Indians at Yankee Stadium on July 28, Ruth agreed to manage a combined Yankees-Indians team called the Yanklands in an exhibition game against Ted’s Chapel Hill Cloudbusters to benefit the Baseball War Relief and Service Fund.
Though they were now on opposing sides, Williams and Ruth again met in the clubhouse before the game. Wearing his khaki Navy uniform this time, Williams asked his hero to sign a ball for him—the first and only time in his life that he would ask someone for an autograph. A photo was taken of Ted lighting Ruth’s cigar as the Babe gave Williams the signed ball. It was inscribed “To my pal Ted Williams from Babe Ruth
” and would become one of Ted’s most prized possessions.*
There were 27,281 fans at Yankee Stadium to watch the Yanklands play the Cloudbusters, featuring Williams in left field, Johnny Pesky at short, and Johnny Sain pitching. The Cloudbusters won 11–5, the highlight of the game being when Ruth inserted himself as a pinch hitter in the sixth. As the Bambino strode to the plate, umpire Ed Rommel suggested sotto voce to Cloudbusters catcher Alex Sabo, who had played two seasons for the Washington Senators, that after flashing the signs to Sain he let Ruth know what pitch was coming. Sabo did, without telling Sain. The information no doubt helped the Babe turn on one pitch and hit a long, loud foul, but in the end he took a walk.15
Among those in attendance that day was American League president Will Harridge. Harridge was sitting next to the commanding officer of Chapel Hill, who had accompanied the Cloudbusters to New York. When Williams was introduced to loud cheers, the commander was prompted to give Harridge a glowing endorsement of the young cadet. As Harridge related the remarks the following day to Jack Malaney of the Boston Post, the commander said of Williams: “You are going to be surprised at the boy we will turn back to you when activities are over. He is one of the finest young men we have in the entire school. He is liked equally well by the officers and the men. In fact, he is idolized by the men for what he has proven to be.… I understand he had ideas of his own in baseball which he insisted on carrying out. There hasn’t been any of that since we’ve had him.… Ted Williams has different ideas on life now, and I am sure his Naval training has added greatly to a remarkable personality.”16
Ted finished Chapel Hill in mid-September, at which point he was given a choice of resuming his flight training in Chicago or in rural Indiana.
“The line for Chicago was from here to the end of the block,” remembered Pesky. “The line for Indiana was much shorter. Ted grabbed me and said, ‘We don’t want to go to Chicago. The goddamn writers will be all over us.’ I didn’t give a shit where I went, so I went with him to Indiana. If Ted would have asked me to jump off the Mystic River Bridge, I think I would have.”17
The Bunker Hill Naval Air Station consisted of eighteen hundred acres south of the town of Peru, in north-central Indiana. This would be where Ted got down to flying in earnest—practicing takeoffs and landings on four five-thousand-foot runways and one twenty-five-hundred-square-foot concrete mat. He was still a relative novice in the air, with thirty-five hours to his credit at Amherst, just fifteen of those solo, and none at Chapel Hill, much of which had effectively been a sports camp. At Bunker Hill, he would get ninety-nine hours of flying, including sixty solo.
Arriving at the base, Williams was struck by the sheer number of planes he saw in the air. “The day we got there it looked like a flying circus,” he remembered in his book. “The air was black with planes. We’d been told, ‘Always stay 1,000 feet away from any other airplane and 1,000 feet above the terrain, and make nice, easy 45 degree turns.’ But here we see about 150 planes in the air, all flying around each other, maybe 200 feet apart.… I said to Johnny Pesky, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ They were all coming in at the end of their flying period. They’d gone out separately, but they were coming in together. Awful.”18
The routine at Bunker Hill was similar to the one at Amherst, only with more flying. And now, Williams was made commander of his seventy-man company at cadet barracks 30-A, responsible for rousing his men at 5:30 a.m. and getting them down to the mess hall on time. “The Williams Company is one of the most ship-shape on the station,” an Associated Press dispatch in December reported.19
The flying was now more technical and challenging: there were precision landings, aerobatics, formation and night flying, inverted spins, snap rolls, and slow rolls. Williams was a quick learner and continued to show himself to be a skilled pilot, though he did have another close call. During his first time in a Navy SNV, a variable-pitch prop, Ted, flying with an instructor, nearly put the plane in a ditch. Taking off once, he had the prop in too high a pitch and the flaps up when they should have been down. “We would never have made it off the mat,” he wrote in his book. “We’d have gone right into the boondocks, no doubt about it. But the instructor was in the back seat and he broke his watch scrambling to get the flaps down and the prop back in low pitch.”20
Despite that setback, Williams was given good marks and finished his flight instruction more than two weeks ahead of schedule. Pesky, on the other hand, continued to struggle. Ted tried to help, in his own impatient way. “He said, ‘Come on, Johnny, why can’t you get this, you’ve got a high school diploma,’ ” Pesky recalled, chuckling. “I said, ‘Ted, I’m not you. I don’t have your get-up-and-go, your mind is quicker, and I didn’t hit .400, either.’ That kind of shut him up. But he said, ‘Yeah, but after you get it, you’ll retain it. I may forget it, but you remember everything.’ I said, ‘You pig’s ass, you never forget anything.’ ”21
The powers that be decided it would be best if Pesky was eased out of the cockpit and redirected into another Navy specialty. “In an airplane he was a menace to himself and everybody else, but he was certainly officer material, so they moved him into O.C.S. and he actually got his rank before I did,” Williams said.22
After a year and three tours together through Amherst, Chapel Hill, and Bunker Hill, the two friends parted. Ted moved on to intermediate flight training in Pensacola, Florida. He told Pesky he was determined to get his wings. “If it takes ten years, I’ll qualify,” Williams proclaimed.23
Williams arrived at his new post on December 7, 1943.
Naval Air Station Pensacola, known as the cradle of Naval aviation, is located on the Gulf of Mexico at the western tip of the Florida Panhandle near the Alabama state line, about an hour east of Mobile. Established as a Navy yard in 1826, NAS Pensacola was selected as the country’s first Naval Air Station in 1914, and during World Wars I and II it served as the central training facility for Naval air operations. After Pearl Harbor, Pensacola vastly expanded its mission, and by mid-1943 it had produced nearly twenty thousand pilots—including many from Allied countries such as Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In 1944, twelve thousand more would be turned out.
Bunker Hill, which had looked like a “flying circus” to Ted, was tame compared to tumultuous Pensacola, where the air was thick and loud with all manner of training aircraft, from single-engine monoplanes to flying boats and floatplanes, humming day and night. The air station consisted of a central training base, known as Main Side, where arriving cadets received their basic orientation, and six outlying fields, all within a forty-mile radius, where the aspiring pilots received specialized training in various aspects of flying. Main Side oozed tradition: its history dated back to the nineteenth century, when its primary mission was to suppress the slave trade and curb piracy in the Gulf and the Caribbean. The airfield consisted of a large circular landing mat with four runways, each four thousand feet long. Tall oak trees draped with Spanish moss formed the backdrop for decorous old houses, where the senior officers lived. The arriving cadets shared a barracks known as Transient Quarters with those about to get their wings as commissioned officers. The new arrivals were thus able to instantly take the measure of men who had reached the goal they were still striving for. The graduating cadets had successfully endured months of formation flying, night flying, free and fixed gunnery, aerobatics, dive-bombing, and more to become newly minted Naval aviators.
A year into Ted’s service, there was still considerable interest, especially in Boston, as to how he was faring in the Navy. So four days before Christmas, Huck Finnegan of the American arrived in Pensacola to begin work on what would turn into no less than a thirteen-part series starting in early January. Though Finnegan would later become a harsh Williams critic, he was then a reliable supporter to whom the Kid felt comfortable unburdening himself.
It had snowed in Pensacola that December for the first time in forty-four years, and there was still a chill in the air when Finnegan ar
rived at Saufley Field, twelve miles from Main Side, where Ted was now working on formation flying. At one point, three young men in advanced flight training with Ted were killed in a landing mishap. “They tried some sort of hotshot landing,” Williams recalled years later. “They went in and they were all killed. They were great guys. Young guys.”24 Ted was also being exposed to “pressure chamber” tests. That involved going up to eighteen thousand feet without oxygen and forty thousand feet with it to see if he experienced sinus trouble or “the bends.” Williams later confided to Johnny Pesky that on one test run, he’d blacked out at seventeen thousand feet, and his plane had gone into a dive for fifteen thousand feet before he regained consciousness and pulled it back up at treetop level. The incident didn’t make the papers until Pesky casually mentioned it to a writer years later.25
Williams was friendly and outgoing to Finnegan. Though still wary of calling attention to himself, he seemed eager to have a visitor and was hungry for news about Boston and the Red Sox, so it wasn’t difficult for Finnegan to get his subject in a talkative mood.
“Gee, I miss baseball,” Ted began, his earlier professed flirtation with a career in flying now formally withdrawn. “You know, I get the feeling sometimes that I’ll never get the chance to play it again. When I look at my roomies, I realize I’m no kid. They’re all 20 and 21. I’m 25. And this war won’t be over in a hurry.” Then he veered away from any self-indulgent wistfulness and returned to the importance of the war. “You know something? I won’t be satisfied with this life until I get myself a Zero,”* he said. “I’m not fooling. Boy, I thought I got the thrill of a lifetime when I hit that three-run homer in the ’41 All Star game. Downing a Zero would cap that a hundred times. Lousy Japs—attacking Pearl Harbor and spoiling everything.” That priceless quote, delivered with exuberant guilelessness, gave Finnegan the title of his series—“Ted Williams Wants a Zero”—and would soon cause the Kid some annoyance.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 30