The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  At that moment, Frank Howard raised his hand from the back of the room to interrupt. “Uh, Skip,” he said, “would you mind taking that a little slower?” Everyone laughed, and the tension was broken.40

  But tension remained. Williams was consistently annoyed because his hitters often couldn’t remember what kind of pitch they’d faced against a given pitcher—either when they struck out or got a hit. (Williams claimed to recall the key details of all of his 521 home runs.) He was not always shy about making his bewilderment known.41

  Still, by July 1, Williams had the Senators just over .500 at 40–39. In Washington, accustomed to decades of losing badly, this was enough to have the writers give Ted rave reviews in their midyear assessments of the club. “Stop the clock, right now, and baseball’s manager of the year, no dispute permitted, is Theodore S. Williams,” wrote Shirley Povich, lead sports columnist for the Washington Post.42 Povich noted that Williams had improved virtually all the players’ batting averages, commanded their respect, had them hustling, and was making strategic moves with the self-assurance of a polished veteran manager rather than the rookie he was.

  Forgotten now, it seemed, were the preseason concerns about Ted’s churlish, mercurial personality and his reputation as an impatient loner. Even with the fifteen-minute rule, he had won the writers over with his witty charm. He was proving to be a hands-on leader who didn’t hesitate to trot onto the field and argue a call with an umpire, something he hardly ever did as a player. Once, he even had an assistant call the press box to lobby for a scoring change on behalf of one of his starters. He said he was finding that the hardest part of managing was knowing when to take a pitcher out: if anything, he was tending toward an early hook rather than leaving someone in until he was gassed and prone to being shelled. But otherwise, he seemed confident and expert. Asked at midseason how he was enjoying managing, Ted replied, “Well, a lot of it’s fun. A lot of it’s horseshit. When it gets to be more than fifty percent horseshit, I’ll quit.” Ted said the percentage was currently about fifty-fifty.43

  Ted got another burst of publicity at midseason with the publication of his autobiography, My Turn at Bat. He promoted and signed the book for fans zealously, both at home and on the road. By now, Williams was even getting more attention than that other new coach in town: Vince Lombardi. Life was good.

  In his relationships with the players, Ted was helped significantly during his first season by his iconic status. He leveraged the awe he received from virtually all his charges to maximum effect. The players relished merely being in his orbit, so they strove to learn from the Great Man and please him.

  “I remember the pedestal that Ted was put on,” said Dick Billings, an infielder on the 1969 team who was later converted to a catcher. “It was an unbelievable feeling to be around him, not just for me but for everyone. He was so dynamic and animated about everything. It didn’t matter if he was talking about hitting, fishing, cameras, or whatever. That first year, when he walked in a room, everything just stopped.”44

  Billings and the others had never heard the sorts of stories about hitting that they heard from Ted. Recalled Billings, “He’d say that when he was playing, in the early innings, he’d try to hit the top half of the baseball for singles and doubles. Then from the seventh inning on, he tried to hit the bottom of the ball for home runs. We’re all looking around at each other like, ‘Yeah, right.’ But he was adamant about it.”

  If that was a bit of esoterica, another was Ted’s continued infatuation with Bernoulli’s principle, so whenever he was bored, Ted delighted in gathering a group of players, especially the pitchers, since this was their department, and asking them if anyone could tell him what made a curveball curve. “They’d answer, ‘Well, it has to do with the spin and the grip,’ ” Billings recalled, chuckling. “Ted would scream, ‘I’m not talking about that blankety-blank crap. I’m talking about the physics of it.’ No one knew.”

  Bernoulli’s principle was also central to a friendship Williams forged that first year with a most unlikely species: a sportswriter. Dave Burgin, then thirty, wrote a column and was sports editor of the Washington Daily News, a now-defunct, Scripps-owned afternoon tabloid.

  Burgin had been sitting in the dugout at Pompano Beach during spring training with about thirty other writers, talking with Ted. Williams was saying that he’d asked one of his pitchers, Notre Dame graduate Jim Hannan, what made a curveball curve. He said, “Even the fuckin’ college boy didn’t know the answer.” Ted wondered if any of the writers did.

  Burgin had been raised in Dayton, Ohio, home of the Wright brothers, and if you grew up there, chances were you might know something about aerodynamics. “It’s differential pressure,” Burgin piped up meekly.

  “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, I don’t believe it!” Ted bellowed. “A sportswriter knows that?”

  Then one night at the bar in the hotel where the players and writers were staying, Ted had spotted Burgin sitting with his wife, a dark-haired beauty, and had come over to introduce himself, teasing the writer about how he could have landed such a girl. Not long afterward, Ted was driving back to Pompano from Palm Beach after an exhibition game, going about ninety miles an hour in his Cadillac, when Burgin screamed by him in his Porsche Targa, going well over a hundred. Williams tried to catch him, to no avail, and when Burgin arrived first at the hotel, Ted came over to him and said, “Goddamn! What is that thing?”

  Burgin’s car, his wife, and his knowledge of Bernoulli’s principle had marked him as an intriguing character in Williams’s eyes. During the Senators’ first homestand, Burgin got a phone call. “This is Teddy Ballgame,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “What are you doing for dinner tonight?” Of course, Burgin could have had a dozen different plans and would have canceled them all immediately. “It was like that all summer long,” Burgin said. “He’d always call me. We must have had dinner twenty times.”

  Williams never specified if any of the sessions were off the record, though Burgin considered them so and never burned his new friend. He only told his wife and a few others about the dinners he was having with Ted and the friendship they were developing—never his staff at the Daily News. He took no notes at each session they had, nor did he ever write about the experience. “I kept it private. First of all, I did not think anyone would believe it. I kind of thought he wanted something, but that wasn’t the case at all. He just liked me, and here’s a guy that’s supposed to hate sportswriters.” Ted was not reticent in the least, either. “He loved to argue. He was right-wing, but he didn’t know right-wing. If you said he was a right-winger, he didn’t know what you were talking about. It was just, ‘America’s great, dammit.’ He was an optimist.” Burgin was especially interested in hearing about Ted’s service in Korea, but they also talked about newspapers, managing, and women. Recalled Burgin, “I wanted to know all about being a pilot in Korea. He told me a hundred stories about what it was like doing that. I really enjoyed it. He did it with gesticulations and sound effects. He’d grab the stick and rat-a-tat-tat the machine guns. He was in the jet and they were supposed to cross the Yalu River. He’s saying, ‘I’m going across and I see a convoy of trucks crossing a bridge. I see it’s gooks. They don’t see me till the last second. I put five trucks on fire.’ He said, ‘I betcha I killed a hundred gooks. Worthless commie cocksuckers.’ ”*

  As they met over the course of the season, Burgin got the impression that Williams felt managing the Senators was becoming a chore. He was frustrated with the level of talent but liked what he’d done with it. He took pleasure in teaching people how to hit, but he made it clear he wasn’t going to last too long. And after initially being enamored with Bob Short, Ted was souring on him.

  They discussed the concept of team chemistry, and Williams said he thought it was “bullshit,” Burgin recalled. “He thought team chemistry was playing your heart out. Didn’t mean you had to love the guy playing first base. Team chemistry was winning.”

  A fundamental
psychological point about Williams, Burgin thought, was that he always seemed angry. “He reminded me of the grandfather or father who tells his kids, ‘You don’t know how tough life can be. I had to walk to school three miles in the snow.’ Something was bugging him. It ran deep, and I have no idea what it was, and I never asked him.”

  Burgin—who later would become editor of the Orlando Sentinel, the San Francisco Examiner, the Dallas Times Herald, and the Houston Post—said he remained dazzled by what seemed in hindsight like the fleeting moments he had with Williams that summer of 1969. “Other than the Babe himself, is there another ballplayer more likely to tongue-tie a kid from my generation?”45

  Dolores had thought Ted becoming a manager was a good idea. She knew her husband was basically bored with the Sears job and that helping the Red Sox with spring training and assorted other chores, along with going fishing, wasn’t challenging enough. Baseball was what he knew best, and as a manager, he could make a contribution and have a real impact. “I said he should take the job,” she remembered. “He wasn’t going to take it.”

  Of course, Dolores didn’t have a clue about baseball and had never even attended a game before. She liked the idea of learning about it, but soon found that Ted had no interest in teaching her any of the fine points. And while part of Williams’s motive for taking the job was surely to get back in the limelight, Dolores, already uncomfortable in the role of celebrity wife, soon became even more distressed by the concomitant effects of fame as she watched the spotlight shine brighter and brighter on her husband.

  Once, she went to a game only to find a beautiful girl sitting in one of her seats. “I wondered, ‘Who is she? How come she’s in my seat?’ But I didn’t introduce myself to her and ask her to leave. Maybe that could have been Lee Howard or someone. I don’t know. I let it go. I didn’t want to look for a confrontation. If someone didn’t want me, that’s fine. Let me go my way.”

  And of course, people were more curious about her now. The press wanted to talk with the wife of the new Senators manager. Her first encounter with a major newspaper, her first interview as Mrs. Ted Williams, did not go well. She spoke with Myra MacPherson of the Washington Post at Ted’s house in Islamorada. It was a soft setting—at home with Mrs. Williams—but Dolores misread the situation. She turned up dressed to kill, offered champagne to the reporter at lunch, swore occasionally, and then stirred the pot by suggesting that Ted was not easy to live with and that he had a hard time getting along with people.

  MacPherson wrote that Dolores, clad in low-slung, hip-hugger jeans and a shirt tied at the midriff, “looked about as much like a housewife as Zsa Zsa Gabor looks like a nursemaid.” When she opened a bottle of French champagne for lunch, she remarked, “It’s not too early for wine. Some people have it for breakfast.” And about Ted’s new managing job, Dolores said: “It’s about time he learned to get along with people. He’s up and down like the weather. I go from being extremely happy to extremely unhappy. Just when I’m ready to give up, he’ll say, ‘I love you and I didn’t mean it.’ ”46

  Ted was mortified by the Post story and barred her from giving any more interviews. But in late September, at the end of his first season as manager, Dolores, without telling her husband, decided to open up to someone else. Don Newbery was the antithesis of a Washington Post reporter. He was not even a reporter per se but a high school teacher and coach in Silver Spring, Maryland, who did some freelance radio work on the side. He’d go to Senators games and Washington Redskins games and practices, then hustle interviews with players and coaches and try to sell his pieces to area radio stations. Newbery had interviewed Ted and met Dolores at the ballpark. He asked her for an interview. At first she ignored him, but at the end of the season, she told him to call her and arrange a time to come by and talk. They met where she and Ted lived in Washington, at the Shoreham Hotel. When he arrived, she suggested they do the interview on the roof.

  As they spoke, it was obvious that Dolores was dying to unburden herself of various pent-up frustrations about life with Ted: how he wouldn’t deign to discuss his Senators job with her, how insecure he was, how jealous she was of the other women who flocked around him, how much of the romance had left their relationship since they got married.

  “It’s the toughest relationship going when you live with someone as famous as he is and with someone as volatile as he is and someone who is as expressive and can work under these pressures. He’s very insecure. He wants badly to be able to do something right the first time. Nothing can get in his way. If I even ask a question it turn[s] into an argument. They say you always hurt the ones you love, but when he would come home and just take everything out on me, it was tough, and of course, I don’t know baseball, and for someone like me to show some interest it was more irritating than anything. Like you don’t have time for the greenhorn. This now became the most important thing in his life, and that was difficult.

  “I think in the beginning I was kept out of everything. I was told I couldn’t go to the training, I wasn’t allowed at practice, I wasn’t allowed at the games, I couldn’t travel, and I had all of these imaginations of why, why, why? What’s happened? Why doesn’t he want me? I was trying to think of where I failed. Then he’d come home with all of this tension. I began—oh, dear, all of these women! The female plague—jealousy. Of course, they were mobbing him. He is charming; he could charm the leaves off a tree. And of course this was eating at me. His hostility that he’s capable of.… When you’re not married to someone you don’t know how unpleasant it is to be married sometimes. I had the best relationships when marriage wasn’t involved, but as soon as it happened, the romance went right out the window. I’m not an equal anymore.” Plaintively, she added, “I’d love to be able to make mistakes and have Ted say, ‘I love you anyway, sweetie. I love you for your faults, too.’ ”47

  This was poignant but explosive material. Newbery knew that if he had aired his interview at the time, it would have made front-page news around the country. But he was not a reporter and lacked the scoop mentality. He was more teacher than journalist, and as a human being, he was worried about Dolores. Worried that Ted would go ballistic when this came out, and worried about Dolores’s welfare as a result. So Newbery decided to pack away his cassettes and not release them until after Ted died.48

  Williams tried not to play favorites among his players, of course, but if he had a pet, it was probably Mike Epstein, the young power-hitting first baseman whom his teammates called Super Jew.

  Scanning his roster after he took the job, Williams had concluded that Epstein was too heavy at 230 pounds. So he wrote him a letter and asked him to get down to 210 by spring training. Epstein dieted like mad and reported to Pompano twenty pounds lighter.

  “I’m Ted Williams, who are you?” Ted said to Epstein, introducing himself.

  “Mike Epstein.”

  “Jesus Christ, you look awful. Jesus, are you sick? You better put on some weight.”

  “But you told me to lose some!”

  “Well, I didn’t know you had that big a frame.”

  Williams gave Epstein extra time in the cage that first spring, and after practice, he would take him to the Howard Johnson on Route A1A in Pompano Beach and bulk him up with milk shakes. Ted would usually have a shake or two himself.

  Williams liked the kid’s company, and during the season, he took him hunting. “On days off, we’d go to Sharpsburg, up in Maryland, and we’d hunt groundhogs,” Epstein said. “We’d come off a road trip at three or four in the morning, and he’d say to me, ‘Aw, shit, there’s no reason to go to bed. We’ve got an off day tomorrow—let’s go shooting.’ So we’d go up and wait for the rock chucks, and we’d fall asleep by two p.m. with our rifles in our hands, out in the grass.”

  Epstein was always picking Williams’s brain and firing questions at him about hitting. Ted had asked lots of questions, too, of course, as a young player and throughout his career, so in that sense Mike reminded him of himself. Many of
the great hitters didn’t have a clue about how to teach others, Epstein said: “I’ll talk hitting with Hall of Famers, and you don’t get any answers. Joe DiMaggio is a classic example. He said to me, ‘One day you’ll wake up and realize you’re born with it or you aren’t.’ That was the extent of Joe getting into hitting technique.” Epstein thought Williams was better at teaching the mental part of hitting than the mechanical side. Ted could dissect a swing and demonstrate proper technique, but Mike found years later when he was starting a hitters’ school that Williams sometimes couldn’t explain the why of it all. “He’d say, ‘Hips lead the way,’ but in his book he never tells how that would happen. So I asked him one day, and he says, ‘Well, it just happens. When you’ve got good mechanics, it just happens.’ And I said, ‘But if some kid comes up, and you’re a hitting instructor, and he says, “You say the hips lead the way,” and I say, “They just do,” I’m not Ted Williams. They’re not gonna take a lesson from me.’ ”

  Ted couldn’t really resolve that. Sometimes teaching seemed to only go so far. Mentally, he would encourage his hitters to guess in certain situations and advised them to adapt to how they were being pitched to so they could turn what the pitcher perceived as their weakness to a strength. “He would tell you things like, ‘If they’re pitching you inside, look for that pitch, look for the pitch that’s giving you the most trouble,’ and then he’d walk away,” Epstein said.

  On July 21, Major League Baseball celebrated its hundredth anniversary with a lavish dinner in Washington attended by 2,200 people, including six members of President Nixon’s cabinet and thirty-five members of the Hall of Fame. The Baseball Writers’ Association of America selected Babe Ruth as the greatest player ever, while Joe DiMaggio was voted to the all-time team and named the outstanding living player. Williams was left off the all-time team and voted to the all-time living team. Piqued that he had been bested by DiMaggio, Ted refused to attend the dinner. DiMaggio did come. Williams sent Dolores to accept his award for him, and she tried to explain away her husband’s absence by citing his aversion to dressing up for such fetes.