The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  Ted went off to Maine to fish, a tune-up for his trip to Peru in December, when he was to fish for marlin in the waters of Cabo Blanco, then considered one of the most prolific big-game fisheries in the world. Cabo Blanco was five miles off the coast, where the cold-water Humboldt Current merged with the warm-water Equatorial Current in a stretch known as Black Marlin Boulevard.

  Williams would fish for six days. On the first day, he hooked a big marlin, but it got away. (“I never felt so low in my life,” he said later.) On the sixth day, though, December 10, Ted caught a bigger one. For thirty minutes he dueled with the fish, strapped to a chair with a harness and wearing gloves, while several Inca guides looked on. The marlin jumped some thirty feet in the air several times in an effort to escape as Ted furiously reeled it in. When the fish was finally gaffed and hauled alongside the boat, Williams popped his harness and danced for joy. It was a fourteen-foot, 1,235-pound behemoth, then the eighth-largest black marlin ever caught in the world. “I always thought that 1941 All Star homer was my biggest single sports thrill,” Ted said, “until I caught that marlin.”23

  The catch was documented, it later emerged, by a film crew doing a public service announcement for the General Electric housewares division. The 16mm color film was acquired by the International Game Fish Association and later digitized and released as a fifty-four-minute DVD in 2005. “This is the story of the biggest fish I ever caught,” the Kid said in the introduction, proudly.24

  As 1955 began, Williams had decided—if there was ever any doubt—that he was, in fact, returning to baseball, despite his statements to the contrary the previous season. The problem was that he couldn’t announce his intentions because he was still locked in negotiations with Doris and her lawyer over how large her divorce settlement would be. Once spring training began and opening day approached, Doris hoped that Ted would get antsy, report for duty, and sign a new contract, which she could then take a healthy percentage of. But Williams was determined not to let that happen: either he would reach an agreement with Doris before he signed his new contract or he would sit out the entire year, if necessary.

  Doris’s lawyer, Earl Curry, took to the press to try to pressure Williams. “Ted shows no eagerness to reach a settlement,” Curry told Austen Lake of the American in early April. “He’s in no hurry. So we’ll wait too, at least until after the baseball season starts. Then we’ll consider the next move.… He’s the sort who will chop off two inches of his own nose to cut off an inch of ours.” Curry added that in the couple’s last two negotiating sessions, Williams had stated emphatically that he did not intend to play baseball again. Furthermore, his attitude during the conferences was one of “total indifference. He sat slumped on the end of his spine and just snorted. He is completely uncooperative.… We hope that when the ball season opens, he’ll have a change of mind.”

  Ted’s lawyers—Daisy Bisz of Miami and Cornelius Hurley of the white-shoe Boston firm Hale and Dorr—were under strict instructions from their client to say nothing to reporters. Bisz was among the first women to practice law in Florida and would be a friend to Williams for fifty years. (She was also the attorney Ted had recommended to Louise Kaufman several years earlier.)

  Hurley, a Holy Cross graduate and prominent Catholic in Boston, received criticism from some of the Jesuits at his alma mater and from others in the Archdiocese of Boston for taking on such a prominent divorce case. But he brushed off the carping and defended his faith during long, animated discussions with Williams, who was skeptical of any religion. During lulls in the divorce case, and later in life, Ted would pepper Hurley with questions about what it was like to be Catholic, why he believed what he did, and what it was like to have gone to Holy Cross and later to Georgetown for law school. “My dad thought Ted was the most intelligent person he’d ever met,” said Hurley’s son, Cornelius Hurley Jr.25 “Not from reading books or getting a formal education. But because of the penetrating questions he asked of people.” (Hurley would end up an equity partner in Ted’s fishing business, and the two would later make an unsuccessful investment together in a magnetized pin-setting mechanism for bowling.)

  In the end it was Doris who blinked first. On May 9, Miami circuit court judge George E. Holt granted the couple a divorce and two days later announced the financial terms: Ted would pay Doris $50,000 within two years and $125 per week until the lump sum was paid; she would receive the couple’s $42,000 home in South Miami and the Cadillac; Ted would pay $12,000 in court costs and $100 per month in child support for Bobby-Jo.

  According to the Miami Herald, the Red Sox agreed to pay the $50,000 to Doris as an added inducement to lure Williams back, but Joe Cronin denied this. In any case, the terms were widely seen as a strategic victory for Ted, an assessment Judge Holt himself seemed to encourage when he remarked of his ruling: “That ought to get him back in baseball.” And it did—immediately after the judge announced the financial specifics, Ted called Joe Cronin and said he would join the team in two days. He told reporters from Islamorada, where he was fishing with Bobby-Jo, that “altered circumstances have cleared the way for my return.”26

  The Red Sox, who had lost sixteen of their last nineteen games, were thrilled at the prospect of Williams’s return—both for the offensive punch he would bring to the lineup and for his impact at the gate. Attendance was off seventy thousand so far that year. Harold Kaese guessed that Ted would boost the team two rungs higher in the standings and about $200,000 higher in ticket revenue.27

  Around the American League, reaction to the Williams news was just as enthusiastic. “It’s the best possible thing that could have happened to our league,” said Yankees manager Casey Stengel.28 White Sox general manager Frank Lane went further, saying he would have been willing to pay part of Williams’s salary, since his presence at a Red Sox series at Comiskey Park would mean five thousand more fans per game.29

  Ted arrived in Boston and met with Joe Cronin to sign what was widely reported to have been an $80,000 prorated contract for the balance of the 1955 season. In fact, the contract was for $60,000, according to official Major League Baseball records.30 But Williams wrote in his book that he signed for $98,000 that year. The discrepancy resulted from the fact that, starting in 1955 and continuing into his retirement, Williams would opt to defer a portion of his salary in order to conceal income from Doris.

  “I was going into a divorce proceeding with my wife, and since the alimony was going to be determined by my income, it just seemed like common sense to limit my income as much as possible,” Williams admitted to a friend years later.31 Ted may have been the first professional athlete to sign a deferred payment contract; Hale and Dorr worked out details with the Red Sox after consulting the Internal Revenue Service, which approved the plan as long as Ted agreed to provide certain unspecified services to the team after he retired.

  His contract signed, Williams took the field and in short order swatted three home runs in batting practice—the first time he’d hit in more than seven months. His clubhouse confidant, Johnny Orlando, crowed to the writers that he’d known all along that Ted would be back, then casually predicted Williams would play in one hundred games and hit .350. New manager Mike Higgins, the former Red Sox third baseman who had been promoted after a successful run at Boston’s top farm team in Louisville, knew enough not to rock the boat, saying Williams would set his own timetable on returning to the lineup.

  Ten days later, Ted made his debut in an exhibition game against the New York Giants at Fenway, and he belted a home run into the bleachers. His first official start came on May 28 at home against the Senators, and he singled to center off Camilo Pascual in his first at bat. With that—the Red Sox twelve games out—Williams settled into another regular-season grind.

  One pleasant respite came on July 28, when Bobby-Jo Williams, then seven, came to Fenway Park to watch her father play for the first time. She sat in Jean Yawkey’s box with John Buckley, his wife, Vivian, and Mrs. Yawkey herself. Buckley was the local movie-t
heater manager who had been a Williams chum for years. He and his wife would play an increasingly important role as surrogate parents for Bobby-Jo when she visited Ted in Boston after the divorce. Ted couldn’t muster any heroics for his daughter, managing only a single in the eighth inning, after which he was lifted for a pinch runner.32

  Bobby-Jo said her parents’ divorce had little impact on her other than causing friends in school to make fun of her. After the split, Ted and Doris got along much better than they had before, making an effort for her benefit. Bobby-Jo would see as much of Ted as she ever had, perhaps more. She’d visit him on weekends, during school vacations, and for the entire summer in Boston, except for three weeks at the end, when she’d go to Albany, New York, to see her grandmother—Doris’s mother, Ruby Soule.

  Being with her father was always unpredictable. He loved her, she thought, but she never knew how he was going to treat her. “I was like a dog,” she recalled. “You know, if a dog doesn’t know if you’re gonna screech at it or if you’re gonna come over and give it a good ol’ scratchin’ and make it happy—I was just kind of, ‘Whoa, where we gonna go this time?’ He was a perfectionist, and he wanted me to be that way, too. Only that’s not how I was geared. Like he wanted me to play tennis, but I wanted to swim. The better I got in swimming the more he bitched about it: ‘Aw, shit, you oughta be playin’ tennis.’ You know, that’s the way it was. I was good at art. ‘Yeah, but what the hell do you know about math?’ ”

  Sometimes, they would drive up to Boston from Florida together, and Bobby-Jo would dread those trips. “It was like two and a half, three days of school in that car. And he’d pack the same stuff that we used to pack to go fishing. It was very strange. Two pieces of bread with peanut butter on it, no jelly, no butter, and we’d have a little-bitty old Thermos of water—we’d share it—and an apple. He’d pack three or four sandwiches each, twelve apples, and we’d go. Boom.” They’d pull over at a motel for the night, but Ted would insist on getting up at four in the morning and hitting the road again. He would have her read whatever she was reading in school to him, then quiz her on it. Nancy Drew was her favorite, and Ted seemed to like those stories, too.

  In Boston, her base was the Somerset Hotel: Williams had a twin bed brought into his suite, and Bobby-Jo moved right in. “As I grew older I realized that was really a lot for him to do. He was a good dad.” She recognized that she was putting a crimp in his social life, so after a while she would get farmed out to stay with the Buckleys for two or three days at a time, and they would bring her to Fenway for the games. Bobby-Jo preferred to sit down near the field, but Ted thought she could get clipped by a line drive, so he always arranged for her and the Buckleys to sit upstairs in the Yawkey box or in one of the other front-office boxes. Bobby-Jo had the run of the place, running out to chase foul balls or going to get a hot dog or a Coke. Thirty-nine years later, when Ted opened his hitters museum in Florida, he would invite some of those concessionaires, and they greeted Bobby-Jo as though she were a celebrity. “I watched you when you were a little girl,” they’d say. “I watched you grow up.” And then they asked for her autograph.

  During the games, Ted would keep an eye on his daughter, both from the field and from the dugout, and flash signals to her. When he pulled his cap down low over his eyes, that meant she was being too rambunctious and had to sit down. “I liked the games,” she said. “I still try and figure out if I would have if I hadn’t been thrown into this situation—born into this situation. But I loved ball.”

  Growing up in Florida, though, she loved fishing more. Ted took her to the Everglades when she was two, and she grew to be so skilled that her father was delighted. But fishing with Ted was intense—especially going for tarpon or bonefish, where he would stand and pole the boat and insist on absolute silence. If she made one false move, he could go off. But she proved herself: on her ninth birthday, Bobby-Jo caught a nine-pound bonefish. Ted took a picture of her holding the fish, had it framed, and hung it on the wall.

  The next year, when Ted asked her what she wanted for her tenth birthday, Bobby-Jo asked him to take her fishing for snapper. They’d go farther out in a bigger boat, and he’d be much more relaxed and much less guarded than he was going for bonefish or tarpon. When they’d snagged enough fish, Ted and Bobby-Jo would pull up to an island, build a fire, and fry up their catch, along with some hush puppies. “We did this every year after that—just he and I,” she recalled. “It was really good. That’s what I loved. I loved it.”

  The Red Sox won forty-four of sixty games after Ted returned, and in early September were only three games out of first place, part of a four-team race. But the pitching collapsed, and the team finished fourth at 84–70, twelve games behind the Yankees.

  As for Ted’s numbers, Johnny Orlando’s prediction was just about right. He played in 98 games, not 100, and hit .356, not .350, along with 28 home runs and 83 RBIs. Ted’s .356 average was the highest in the American League, but because of another shortened season, he was well short of the necessary 400 official at bats—he had just 320, with 91 walks—so Al Kaline of the Tigers won the championship at .340.

  But Williams could have no beef. After all, he had missed almost all of the first two months of the season—not because of injury but because of a conscious decision to protect his finances—and in so doing, he put his own interests ahead of those of his team.

  Perhaps only Ted could have gotten away with this. Neither Yawkey nor management ever complained. Neither did his teammates. The writers gave him a pass, too—even Dave Egan concluded that Williams had played the best baseball of his career in 1955, not because of his hitting but because of his fielding, hustling baserunning, and his presence: “He was a team player and a mighty inspirational force for the first time in his long career,” the Colonel wrote. The team succeeded as long as he did, and swooned after Labor Day only because Ted tired in September. So Egan suggested he should skip spring training altogether, because he’d proven he didn’t need it, and pace himself for the long haul.

  But Williams did not skip spring training in 1956—he reported, upbeat and frisky, anxious to get in shape and lay the foundation for a healthy and complete year that would contrast with his previous two abbreviated seasons. Ted actually enjoyed the Sarasota ritual as long as he was allowed to set his own pace and not play every exhibition game. That was fine with Mike Higgins, whose laissez-faire style fit well with his star’s wishes and whims.

  Yet the year would not go as Williams hoped. A freak injury in late spring would significantly cut into his playing time. The Yankees’ Mickey Mantle burst into superstar status by making a concerted run at Babe Ruth’s single-season home-run record on the way to a Triple Crown year, a year that far eclipsed Ted’s. And Williams’s combustible personality would trigger a spate of humiliating pop-offs and meltdowns that generated far more attention than his performance on the field.

  Ted’s warm-up in the controversy department came in mid-March. He was asked by a group of visiting San Francisco writers to comment on the case of Johnny Podres, who after pitching the Brooklyn Dodgers to two wins in the 1955 World Series had seen his draft status reclassified from 4F to 1A. The case reminded Ted of his own adventures with the Selective Service System in World War II and Korea, so he ripped politicians, draft boards, and the writers for exploiting Podres’s sudden fame. “Podres is paying the penalty for being a star,” he said. The Boston writers struck back with critical commentary, annoyed at being tarred by Ted’s broad brush and perhaps even more peeved that he had again seen fit to use out-of-town reporters to deliver his blast.

  In April, Ted slipped off one of the clogs he wore in the shower and hurt the arch in his foot, an inglorious injury that sidelined him for five weeks. “As the 1950’s wore on, I was just plain wearing out,” he said later.33 “I kept hitting, but I suffered one damn injury after another.”

  He didn’t return until May 29, and then he started slowly. Mantle, meanwhile, was on fire, and by mid-Jun
e he had hit his twenty-fifth home run. Clif Keane of the Globe suggested that the torch had been passed. “When the ballplayers start to talk about another player like the Sox were talking about Mantle tonight, you know he’s great. They’re talking about him the way they used to talk about Williams years ago.”34

  Ted started to hit, but erratically, and he began to hear a smattering of boos, which he always blamed the writers for, feeling that his critics in the stands were unduly influenced by what they read in the papers. But the boos turned to cheers on July 17 at Fenway, when Williams hit the four hundredth home run of his career in a game against Kansas City. As he crossed home plate, Williams snapped his head suddenly toward the press box and pursed his lips as if he were preparing to spit. The on-deck hitter, Mickey Vernon, approached and extended his hand to congratulate his teammate on the milestone.

  “Now, Ted didn’t go for shaking hands after a big play,” Vernon remembered.35 “If you stuck out your hand he would just slap it. But when he hit his four hundredth I figured I would shake his hand. It was appropriate. So I stick out my hand as he crosses the plate and he leans over and just spits on the ground, like he was disgusted.”

  Williams was lucky the story ended as it did. According to the Kansas City players, before he crossed home plate and cocked his head at the press box, Williams had spit at the fans in the left-field grandstand as he approached third base, but this was overlooked in the papers.36 As is, the Associated Press captured Ted craning his neck toward the press box, poised to spit, in a marvelous photograph that ran on the front page of the Boston Herald the next day, but the writers were slow to pick up on the story. Only the Traveler’s George Sullivan, the former batboy turned sports reporter, asked Williams about it in the clubhouse. Ted angrily said he had intended to spit at “you bastards” but stopped short because he was afraid he’d hit Vernon, the on-deck batter. The other writers heard a commotion and asked Sullivan what the Kid had said, and he told them.