The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  Many major leaguers found safe sinecures in the Army as well, including Tex Hughson of the Red Sox, Harry “the Hat” Walker of the Cardinals, Pete Reiser of the Dodgers, Red Ruffing of the Yankees, and, most notably, the Yankee Clipper himself, Joe DiMaggio. It was Hughson who, reflecting later on his wartime experience, famously said: “I tell them I fought World War II with a baseball bat and glove.”*

  Ted was always uninterested in service baseball and, to his credit, never exploited it in an effort to stay out of harm’s way.38 “I didn’t have my heart in it at all, and I played lousy,” Williams recalled. “By this time I was more interested in flying. It was going to be my job for the duration, and I was also enjoying the pleasures of Florida fishing for the first time.”*

  He’d read an article in Field & Stream magazine about the fight that Florida snook put up when they’re caught. Intrigued, one day Ted and a friend saved their gas ration stamps and drove down to Everglades City to fish the canals there. On his second or third cast, he caught a fifteen-pound snook that took off harder and faster than any fish he’d ever encountered in fresh water. By the next day, Ted and his pal had caught 110 pounds of snook and sold them off at a fish market along the Tamiami Trail for eleven cents a pound.

  “It was the first and only time I ever sold a fish. I made up my mind right there that after the war I was going to come down a week early before spring training just to fish the Florida waters. As it turned out, a week wasn’t enough. I stretched it to two weeks, then a month, and before I knew it, I was a Florida resident.”39

  Once, when a Bronson Bombers game was rained out, Bob Kennedy and Ted hired a flat-bottomed boat and went out fishing in the Gulf. “We came up on this alligator in shallow water,” Kennedy remembered. “Ted said, ‘Let’s get the son of a bitch!’ I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ Next thing I know, Ted jumps into the water, and he’s got the head, I got the tail. We throw him into the boat, get him back on shore, and then throw him in the trunk of the car. He was close to six feet. We drove back to Ted’s place that night. He had a little house off base. We put the alligator in a fenced backyard. He didn’t tell Doris. They had a little police-dog pup named Slugger. The next day Doris let the dog out and sees the damn alligator. Luckily she got the dog back in, then she called Ted at the base, screaming.”40

  Williams and Kennedy began spending more time together. Once, after Kennedy got married, he and his wife, Claire, went out to dinner with the Williamses. “At dinner Ted said to Claire, ‘Are you and Bob going to have kids?’ ” Kennedy said. “She said she hoped so. Then Ted said, ‘By God, if my wife ever gets pregnant, I’m gonna kick her right in the belly!’ That sounds terrible, but it was an offhand remark. He didn’t mean anything by it.… Doris just looked at him.” Williams also liked to debate religion with Kennedy, who was a strong believer. Once, Ted asked Bob if he believed in God. “Certainly,” replied Kennedy. “Oh, bullshit!” said Ted. “No one will ever prove to me there’s a God.”

  Williams generally played center field for the Bronson Bombers. Len Poth, a Navy carrier pilot, was a pitcher on the team. One thing that drew the two men together was their exceptional eyesight. On road trips they would see who could be the first to read the letters on the license plates of cars approaching from the opposite direction. “We played for ten cents a shot. The other guys didn’t have the same kind of eyes we did, and they’d say, ‘Damn it, you’re making it up.’ ”41

  As an instructor, Williams would fly seven days straight and get the eighth day off. He got high marks from those he taught. Recalled Frank Maznicki, who had been to Boston College and would go on to play pro football with the Chicago Bears, “He explained everything very well. He explained it so well that it was pretty easy to do. The other cadets I was with thought he was good, too.”42

  Williams also earned a reputation for standing up for his students. As a surplus of pilots built up later in the war, he resisted pressure to thin the ranks by giving failing grades to an assigned number of them. Recalled Johnny Pesky, “Ted refused to wash them out, even though he was hauled on the carpet.… He said, ‘If I think a kid’ll make a competentflier, I won’t wash him,’ and he didn’t. I never met a Marine pilot who trained under Ted who didn’t say, ‘There’s a right Joe.’ ”43

  Williams didn’t mingle with his fellow officers much and wasn’t always sensitive to protocol when he did. According to Bob Kennedy, when a group of baseball-crazed senior commanders asked to socialize with Ted once at the Main Side officers’ club, he had one drink with them and excused himself. “Good night, boys,” he said. “It’s past my bedtime.”44

  In May of 1945, after more than a year of instructor duty at Bronson Field, Williams suddenly received orders to report the following month to Naval Air Station Jacksonville for combat training before being shipped out to the Pacific to join the fleet. The timing of the transfer seemed curious. The war against Japan was nearing an end, with the decisive Battle of Okinawa, the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific, then in progress and tipping in the Allies’ favor.

  Seven years later, in 1952, the Boston Globe would report that Williams’s transfer to Jacksonville was punitive, a reaction to Pensacola’s commanders exploiting him for baseball. Citing an unnamed Marine general as her source, reporter Ruth Montgomery wrote that while most of his peers were being sent off to combat, Williams had been assigned to be a flight instructor because his commanding officer “couldn’t bear to part with such a terrific ballplayer.”

  She said the situation only came to the attention of Marine Headquarters in Washington when House majority leader John McCormack asked permission for Williams to leave Pensacola to attend “a special Irish celebration” in McCormack’s home city of Boston. When a general saw the request and then called for Ted’s service record, he hit the roof. “We’re not running a war to provide any pink teas for congressmen!” Montgomery quoted the general as saying.45 “Why wasn’t this fighter pilot sent into combat long ago?” Shortly afterward, Williams was shipped off to Jacksonville.

  In Jacksonville, Williams continued to hone his skills, learning how to fly the F4U Corsair and setting a base gunnery record for student pilots.46 Williams also had a serious scare in Jacksonville when he crashed his plane while practicing a carrier landing in an incident that wasn’t publicized at the time. It was his fifth near miss since he began flight training at Amherst. After the accident, an unhurt Ted was hauled out of his plane by a Navy fireman from Boston, Jim Dunn. Recalled Dunn’s son Jimmy, “When he took his helmet and goggles off, my dad saw that it was Ted Williams. He said, ‘Hey, I’ve seen you play ball up in Boston.’ Ted said, ‘Yeah, I’ve played there.’ ”47

  Despite the flap over his Pensacola ball playing, Ted was virtually forced onto the Jacksonville base’s team. The Fliers, as they were known, also had Charlie Gehringer, the famed Tigers second baseman, on their roster. (Gehringer, who had played his last season in 1942, wanted only to coach, but said he was made to play by the base commanding officer, an ardent sports fan, who otherwise threatened to “send you so far they won’t know where to find you.”)

  One day Karl Smith, Ted’s pal from Pensacola, appeared. “I came back after my first tour of combat,” Smith said, “and I was at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, and the first day on the base I saw him, and he said, ‘Hey, Bush, where the hell you been?’ I says, ‘Out trying to win this war while you been playing ball here,’ and he died laughing.… I got shot down over Tokyo, and he wanted to hear every damn word of it.… He felt he really didn’t get to do what he set out to do: that was to be a fighter pilot.”

  On August 3, Williams received his orders for the Pacific and was given a month’s leave before he had to report to his departure point—San Francisco. On August 6, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and, three days later, on Nagasaki. On September 2, when Williams was in San Francisco, Japan surrendered, and the war was officially over.

  But once orders were in the pipelin
e, the ship of state turned slowly. Ted was obligated to continue on to Hawaii, arriving on September 4 for what would be a final four months of duty marked by anticlimactic boredom, sporadic ball playing, and mounting impatience to be released. The war, after all, was finished: he would see no action, and he had no desire to be kept on as a mere baseball prop, even in paradise.

  Which seemed to be mostly what the Navy had in mind when it ordered Williams and the other major leaguers in its Hawaii employ to stage another “World Series,” this time with those attached to American League teams on one side and those attached to National League teams on the other. Though Ted was indifferent to the series and was plagued by a bad cold, Johnny Pesky, who was in Honolulu and suited up for the Americans, felt certain that his pal would rise to the occasion during a key moment in one game. The AL was trailing 5–4 in the ninth when Ted came up with one out and runners on first and second.

  Pesky said, “There were about 30,000 servicemen packed into the stands at Furlong Field, and you can imagine how they were rooting and yelling. This was their spot. In the better seats, there was enough gold braid to start a mint, admirals galore, with four-stripers—captains, and such lesser lights as commanders, draped in the back.

  “I’ve seen Ted enough times up at the platter in the clutch to know his thoughts. I watched him. He was gripping that bat so hard that I expected to see sawdust falling around his feet. He was wiggling around and setting his stance. It was that old determination I had seen so many times.”

  Pesky still wasn’t worried when Braves lefty Lou Tost got two strikes on Ted. But then Tost jammed him, and Williams popped up weakly to the catcher, the ball rising no more than thirty feet in the air.

  “Ted didn’t wait for the catch,” Pesky continued. “The second he saw what he had done, he tossed that bat into the air, and I mean into the air, as high as he could throw it. There was a Navy photographer kneeling down who didn’t see the bat go up. Detroit’s Dick Wakefield was the next hitter, and when he saw what was coming down near the photographer, he yelled and then stuck out his own bat to prevent the photographer from getting hit.

  “The crowd booed and shouted at Williams. As he headed toward the bench, Ted gave some of the photographer equipment a kick that sent it airborne. Silently, Williams continued to the bench.

  “Ted Williams hasn’t changed a bit!” Pesky concluded.48

  On November 25, 1945, Ted and some sixteen hundred other servicemen gathered in Pearl Harbor, where it all had begun. They climbed aboard the USS Texas—a 573-foot battleship that had seen duty in World War I and had shelled Axis-held beaches in the North African campaign of World War II before being sent to the Pacific for the battles at Iwo Jima and Okinawa—then set sail for home.

  Nine days later, on December 4, they arrived in San Diego, a port of call no longer home to Williams but part of his emotional fabric nonetheless. Waiting on the docks, amid the cheering throng, were two people who represented the past and future of Ted’s life: his aging mother, “Salvation May” Williams, and his new wife, Doris Williams.

  On January 12, 1946, Ted was officially relieved of active duty after three years and two months of service.

  9

  1946

  As 1946 began, postwar America was exultant, euphoric, and eager for the return of a prosperous normalcy. Much of this giddy optimism was channeled into the resumption of Major League Baseball, which was eager to replace the cast of also-rans that had stocked its rosters in the war years and reinstall its varsities. Led by Ted, who was now twenty-seven, and Joe DiMaggio, more than three hundred players who had been off with the Armed Forces were now back home, preparing to reclaim their former positions with the start of spring training.

  Attendance would soar in the coming season as fans (a good number of them back from overseas themselves) flocked to see their favorite returning stars. Twelve of the sixteen teams, including the Red Sox, would set attendance records, and overall, 18.5 million fans came out to watch big-league baseball, a new high.

  Boston’s prospects looked brighter than they had in years. The Red Sox had finished seventh among the eight American League teams in 1943, fourth in 1944, and seventh again in 1945. Now the Sox’s nucleus of Ted, Dom DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr was back, as were pitchers Tex Hughson, Joe Dobson, and Mickey Harris. The pitchers would be joined by Dave “Boo” Ferriss, who in his rookie season in 1945 had gone 21–10. There were other changes: Jimmie Foxx had retired, Jim Tabor had been sold to the Phillies, Joe Cronin was now the manager only, and Rudy York, the powerful, right-handed-hitting first baseman, had been obtained in an off-season trade with the Tigers and was expected to tattoo the wall at Fenway.

  News of Ted trickled back to Boston from San Diego, where he had stayed since arriving from Hawaii. Lacking a home base after being away for three years, he and Doris had moved in with May Williams and stayed at the family homestead for a few months. It was Ted’s first extended stay in San Diego since he’d joined the Red Sox, a chance to reconnect with his divorced mother and to have May get to know Doris.

  Joe Cronin came to San Diego to visit Ted and reported back to the team’s beat writers that he had found his star enthusiastic about the upcoming season, hoping to play in 150 games and confidently predicting that the Red Sox would win the pennant. Then the Globe’s Hy Hurwitz flew out for his own assessment after Ted signed a $40,000 contract for the ’46 season—a $10,000 raise from 1942. Hurwitz found Ted chipper, cryptically noting without elaboration that after three years of military life Williams “appeared to have a far greater respect for his fellow humans.”

  Ted told Hurwitz that he now weighed 195, seventeen pounds more than what he played at in 1942, but he promised to be down to 185 by the end of spring training. “I’ve been living an easy life, sitting on my big fat duff,” he said. “I’ve got fat and bumpy. I haven’t any wind. But I’m not worried. I’ll get into physical condition easily. I’m not an old man, you know. The main thing is to get back my swing and the old eye on the ball.… I can hardly wait to start swinging again.”1

  In early February, Ted and Doris set out from San Diego by car for the long drive across country to Florida. They wanted to arrive early and do some fishing before Williams joined his teammates in Sarasota. Joining them for the trip was another San Diegan, Earle Brucker, a former catcher, now coach for the Philadelphia Athletics, and his wife. To a Sporting News reporter, Brucker dished that it had been quite a ride with the Kid, then held forth about Ted’s eccentricities, calling him “the most nervous man in the world… like a humming bird on a hot griddle.”2 In the mornings, they would get up early and drive. Ted would be at the wheel, of course, driving fast but skillfully and safely. They would go maybe fifty or a hundred miles before stopping for breakfast. Ted would jump out of the car, hurry into the restaurant, and place his order of orange juice, eggs over, and coffee before Doris, Brucker, and his wife had even set foot in the establishment. Then Williams would go over to the magazine rack and flip through anything dealing with hunting or fishing. When his orange juice arrived, he’d return to the table, gulp it down, and go back to the magazines until his eggs were served. Then he’d inhale the eggs, toast, and coffee, and as soon as he was finished, he would stand up and say, “Let’s go!” even though his traveling companions usually hadn’t even been served yet. Back on the road, Williams would demand that the others join him in contests to see who could first read the letters and numbers of license plates on approaching cars, and he would incessantly question Brucker about the new pitchers who had come into the league during the war.

  After fishing for ten days, Ted made his usual dramatic and tardy entrance in Sarasota on February 25. He and Doris pulled in to Payne Park at 1:00 p.m., a few hours after the first morning workout. The writers and photographers swarmed them. Before long, Ted had dispatched Doris off to Boston in their car to apartment-hunt. Then, trailed all the while by the press, he launched into a four-hour star turn of constant motion, chatter,
wisecracking, complaining about the chigger bites all over his legs from fishing, posing for pictures, ordering new bats, talking up the Sox’s chances this year—and, of course, hitting.

  Since Williams had not played nearly as much baseball in the service as most other major leaguers, he regarded the 1946 spring training season as essential to getting his batting eye and rhythm back. His hands were soft from not swinging a bat ad nauseam, so he would have to develop blisters and then a layer of calluses (batting gloves would not come into regular use until the 1960s, after Ted retired). He would use a thirty-seven-ounce bat to help build his strength and hone his reflexes so that his customary thirty-three ounces would feel like a feather by opening day. He’d continue to sweat off the extra pounds he’d put on during the war, and he told the writers he’d started the process by playing handball with some old pals in San Diego.

  Ted was friendly to the writers but still wary of them. When a Time magazine reporter told him he seemed more approachable now, Williams had a curt reply: “I’m always nice enough in the spring, until I read what those shitheads write about me.”3

  Before long, Ted let it be known that he had his groove back. “I really think I’m hitting the ball farther than I ever did,” he told Huck Finnegan of the American after smashing a few bombs over the right-field wall in Sarasota. “I haven’t got that old wrist snap yet, but I’ll have it by opening day.… The ball looks big to me. My eyes seem sharp as ever. On the whole I’m well satisfied with my stay here.”

  So was Joe Cronin. “You’re looking at the greatest hitter who ever lived,” the manager told Finnegan. “Yes, I’ve seen Ruth and all the rest, but Williams is number 1.”4

  The more Ted played, and the more success he had, the more confidence he developed and the more he felt entitled to tell the world how good he was. There would be his garden-variety batting-cage braggadocio, which he would display by demanding that Pesky or Doerr or Dom DiMaggio tell him whether he was not the greatest hitter who ever lived. And before they could even robotically answer, “Sure, Ted,” Williams would say, “Damn right.”5 But he went a step further in an early April interview, telling Grantland Rice that, yes, he did in fact think he was the greatest hitter who ever lived.