The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  “You all know Ted’s sentiments on formal occasions,” Dolores said. “Well, he hasn’t changed any, and that’s what makes him great.”

  Not so great, actually, in the eyes of the writers, Bowie Kuhn, and the other lords of baseball, who saw Williams’s absence for what it was: a petty snub.

  The following day, President Nixon, the überfan, hosted a reception at the White House in honor of the centennial, and this time Ted, wearing his bolo tie, showed up, waiting in a long receiving line with some four hundred other baseball dignitaries to greet Nixon.

  Williams’s and the president’s mutual admiration society was one of the more intriguing subplots of Ted’s term as manager of the Senators. Ted hardly disguised his feelings for Nixon, going so far as to hang a large photo of the president in his office at RFK Stadium for all the writers to see, a bald political statement that might have been a first for a major-league manager.*

  Nixon came to a handful of Senators home games each season, and Williams would have Ed Doherty, the former Red Sox public relations man whom he had brought down from Boston to serve in the same capacity, sit next to the president and tend to his every need. Doherty had been hired by Tom Yawkey in 1939 and was so hostile to reporters that the writers in Boston viewed him as the anti–press agent, but that reputation helped him with Williams. Ted and Doherty made sure the president got a good in-house press. A smiling Nixon even ended up on the cover of the team program for the 1970 season alongside the words “Our No. 1 Fan.”49

  During Nixon’s reelection campaign, in 1972, Williams, who thought Watergate was much ado about nothing, made sure that writers covering the team knew how he felt about Democrats such as George McGovern, Ed Muskie, and Hubert Humphrey. “As politicians, they make me puke,” he said. In the presence of Bob Short, however, Williams had to tone down his extreme anti-Democratic views. After a game in 1969, Short, the Democratic Party luminary, asked Ted and Dolores to join him for dinner at the Occidental Restaurant with Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who had lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Hubert Humphrey the previous year. Williams was diplomatic and contained his enthusiasm for Nixon.50

  Ted was also a devotee of Spiro Agnew, the vice president, and loved the way Agnew gave the press hell. In addition, he publicly supported the National Rifle Association and proudly displayed one of the colorful law-and-order bumper stickers on his car that helped fan the culture wars in the divisive late ’60s: IF YOU DON’T LIKE POLICEMEN, THE NEXT TIME YOU NEED HELP CALL A HIPPIE.51 After Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace, he and Ted would remain in touch. In 1977, Nixon invited Williams to visit him in San Clemente for a few days, but Ted had a prior commitment and had to beg off. In the summer of 1984, the president saw Williams interviewed on TV and dashed off a fan note: “Dear Ted: Last night I had a choice between listening to the Democratic National Convention and your superb interview on Channel Nine. You won in a landslide! You were intelligent, articulate and informative.”52 And in 1994, on the opening of Ted’s museum in Florida, Nixon submitted a videotaped testimonial in which he said he “cherished” Williams’s friendship. “In politics,” he said, “I’ve learned that you win and you lose. When you win, you hear from everyone, and when you lose, you hear from your friends. I always heard from Ted Williams. He’s a role model. I’m one of his fans, as millions of Americans are, not just because he was a great baseball player but because he was a fine human being.”

  During the season, Ted would occasionally call his managerial mentor, Joe McCarthy, for strategic advice. Then in early September, when the Senators had two off days in a row, Williams and Ed Doherty went to visit McCarthy at his home outside Buffalo. Ted had his team at 71–66, the best record the Senators had had in decades. Still, he wanted to pay his respects to McCarthy.

  As a writer for the Buffalo Evening News who had been invited to sit in looked on, the two men reminisced about their years in Boston and about McCarthy’s kind words to Ted after the devastating loss in the 1948 playoff game against the Indians. McCarthy had said they surprised everyone by getting along so well.

  The Kid said he’d appreciated McCarthy’s defense of him to the press on another issue that year. “When criticism grew over my taking a base on balls instead of swinging at a pitch just off the strike zone, I went to you for advice,” Williams said. “And I told you that you knew the strike zone better than anyone else in baseball and that you should never change,” McCarthy replied.

  As Williams prepared to leave, McCarthy wished him luck and said, “You’re the only manager I light candles for.” In the car as they drove away, Williams asked Doherty what the candles reference meant. Doherty explained that McCarthy was a Catholic, and it was common to light a votive candle in church for someone you are praying for. Ted, who was, at best, ambivalent about religion, pondered that in silence for a while, then said: “How can I miss with a man like McCarthy praying for me?”53

  Williams went on to lead the Senators to their best season in seventeen years. The team finished in fourth place out of six teams in the new American League East division, with a record of 86–76. Not since 1952 had the club finished above .500, and this team had had essentially the same players as the 1968 club, which had won twenty-one fewer games. It was not hard to conclude who had made the difference.

  Williams “bubbles with enthusiasm and it’s contagious,” said shortstop Ed Brinkman,54 whose average spiked up 79 points from the previous season to .266 in 1969. Frank Howard ended the year with a career-high 48 home runs, a .296 average, and 102 walks, nearly double his previous year’s total. He also cut down on his strikeouts with 96—45 fewer than in 1968. Mike Epstein raised his average 44 points to .278 and hit 17 more home runs than he did in 1968 to finish with 30.

  While batting averages improved by eleven points throughout baseball in 1969 as a result of rule changes that had lowered the pitching mound by five inches and decreased the size of the strike zone, the Senators’ twenty-seven-point increase was much more pronounced. Even the pitching was improved—Dick Bosman led the American League in earned run average, and the team ERA dropped from 3.64 in 1968 to 3.49 in 1969.

  In Washington’s baseball renaissance, fans appreciated the difference in the 1969 club, too. Attendance shot up to 918,016 from 546,661 the year before, even though Short’s ticket prices were the highest in the league.55

  In gratitude, the 17,482 fans who attended the last home game of the season against the Red Sox gave Ted a standing ovation when he walked his lineup card out to home plate. On his way back to the dugout, Williams did not tip his cap but threw his arms out to the side in a knock-it-off gesture and smiled.56 The Senators went on to win, 3–2, and in the clubhouse afterward Ted let his satisfaction show, especially since some of the writers standing before him had predicted he would flame out and quit before the season ended. “Enthusiasm and hustle—that’s all I wanted,” he said. “A lot of times a ballplayer’s got enthusiasm, but he’s playing for a dead-ass coach, so he doesn’t put out, but you put him with an enthusiastic coach, he’s a charger.” Someone with a tape recorder held out asked about the Washington fans: “Let me say that no one has been more enthusiastic than the nine hundred thousand fucking fans. Keep that on your fucking tape if you can, buddy.”

  The writers later rewarded Williams by voting him American League Manager of the Year. Williams was on a safari in Africa when Bob Addie of the Washington Post called him with the news. He was stunned.

  “Manager of the Year?” Ted bellowed on the phone from Lusaka, Zambia. “Me? Forget it. Come on. Really? It’s true? Well, that’s just another example of you writers being all wet again. I’m terribly honored. What does a guy say in a situation like this? I’m flabbergasted. I’m honored, but I’m terribly disappointed that Billy Martin and Earl Weaver didn’t get it. Both of them did a helluva job and both of them deserved the honor. You’re not kidding me?”57

  Weaver had led the Baltimore Orioles to the American League pennant, while Martin
took the Minnesota Twins to a division title in his first season as manager. Martin initially offered Ted his congratulations, but a few years later, he told a reporter what he really thought: “I took a seventh place team and won my division, and they voted Ted Williams manager of the year,” Martin complained. “Then I find out that Williams doesn’t even give the signs from the dugout—Wayne Terwilliger gives them. I told Williams he should give the trophy to Terwilliger.”58

  The Manager of the Year rode high all winter.

  With delight, he flaunted his fashionable Christmas present from Dolores. Mrs. Williams told a reporter that in an effort to spruce up “Mr. Baggy Pants,” she had taken Ted’s favorite ten-year-old black cashmere coat and asked a New York furrier named Mr. Fred to spice it up by stitching in an otter collar. Ted was now wearing his new coat around like a “Czarist,” according to the Boston Globe.59 Williams reciprocated by going to Mr. Fred’s to buy an opossum-lined maxicoat for Dolores that tied on like a bathrobe.

  Ted returned to Boston to do the sportsmen’s show after a four-year absence and was treated like a conquering hero. He spoke his mind freely, as usual, putting the knock on one of his own pitchers, Joe Coleman, for not realizing his potential. He also came out strongly against Curt Flood’s historic challenge of baseball’s reserve clause. Baseball had been going on for a hundred years, “and the first one who thinks he is a slave is Curt Flood,” said the Kid, in one of his more impolitic quotes.60

  Williams arrived for spring training in 1970 still dining out on the rousing success of 1969. “I don’t think I’ll make all the mistakes I made in the ’69 season and I expect improvement from everyone—even the writers,” he said. He fielded some renewed, perfunctory complaints from the press about his fifteen-minute ban, but waved them away with a father-knows-best air. “I know how to handle the Knights of the Keyboard better than anyone else in this business,” he said.61 “I ought to, after all the experiences I’ve had with them.”

  But Ted had a sense of foreboding about his second season as manager. Over the winter, during a long evening of eating and drinking in Washington with Shelby Whitfield, with whom he had grown close, Williams confessed he was worried about how the summer would play out. He knew he’d been at the peak of his power in his first year, when everything was new. He was granted an extended honeymoon—the press and players hung on his every word while paying homage to the prevailing story line: the legend had come out of retirement to save the day. He had owned the town. Yet this was a new season. He knew he could get only so much mileage out of the previous year and that there soon would be a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately reckoning. The Senators had probably played over their heads in 1969. It was an older club, without much young talent and little that was promising in the farm system.62

  One of the first indications that things would be different in 1970 came in April, when the Washington writers, who had fawned over Ted the previous year and rarely challenged him, questioned him aggressively on April 26 after a loss to the Angels. Williams answered their questions but thought the reporters did not adequately reflect his responses in print the next day. So he popped off and blasted them for “second guessing” him.

  “It is bush, just plain bush!” Ted thundered. “I’m going to refuse to discuss strategy with you guys if you keep on second guessing me in the papers.… After the game, you guys come down here and ask me why I did this or why I did that, but none of my quotes ever get in the paper. You guys only print what you think I should have done.”63

  While Ted had a point if indeed his explanations were not being reported, to object to second-guessing at all when baseball had a long tradition of it came off as arrogant, and the writers ripped him. “Williams has a valid case against the writers, a witless group who are without understanding that Pope Theodore II is above criticism and not to be confused with the other 23 major league managers who are subject to post-game comment and other hazards of the trade,” wrote Shirley Povich of the Washington Post in a scathing column that could have been written by Ted’s old nemesis, Dave Egan. “Let there be no second-guessing by those wretches in the press box with their 20-20 hindsight. There can only be one oracle in the stadium and he wears a No. 9 on his back.”64

  Then Williams caused another stir on May 20, when, after a 2–0 win against the Yankees in New York, he explained that even though his starting pitcher, Dick Bosman, was throwing a shutout in the seventh inning, he had taken him out because he’d lost some stamina since getting married. “Bosman is only good for 100 pitches or so,” Ted said.65 “Last year he used to go to 120. He just got married.” Actually, Bosman had been married seven months. Williams later tried to soften his remarks by noting that Mrs. Bosman was “a real cute thing,” but Dick Bosman himself was piqued and went on the record disagreeing with what he called Ted’s “theory,” as did two other married players. Mike Epstein dismissed it as nonsense, while Rick Reichardt, an outfielder and a bachelor, said he thought “a guy gets less sex after he’s married.”

  According to Shelby Whitfield, who spent two seasons traveling with Williams and the Senators, Ted was a “fanatic” about sexual abstinence and did his best to enforce celibacy for the players on the road.66 He thought women were a distraction during the season and that sex sapped energy that was properly saved for baseball. There was growing resentment among the players toward Williams’s puritanical views on sex (especially given their assumption that he had been no wallflower as a player), and they groused that his curfew after games was too early.

  Another beef was that Ted, in his eagerness to teach hitting, was giving opposing hitters too many tips. Once, Ken Harrelson of the Indians was in a slump and asked Williams for help. Ted told him he knew what he was doing wrong but wouldn’t tell him until after the four-game series was over. However, after Washington won the first three games, Ted took pity on Harrelson and told him his problem: he wasn’t clearing his hips quickly enough on his swing. Harrelson thanked Williams and promptly hit two home runs, the second one the game winner. As he rounded the bases, Harrelson looked into the Senators dugout, smiled at Ted, and nodded. Williams was enraged and embarrassed in front of his players.67

  Then there was that $1,000 fine for anyone caught golfing. Some of the Senators who liked to golf asked their player representative, infielder Bernie Allen, to talk to Williams about the rule. Allen, who also liked to golf, went to see the manager and would delight in recounting the exchange that followed:

  ALLEN: Golf is for relaxing, to get away from baseball.

  TED: It’ll hurt your swing.

  ALLEN: It won’t hurt mine. I bat lefty and play golf righty.

  TED: That’s dumb. Why do you do that?

  ALLEN: I don’t want to hurt my golf swing.

  Allen was a wiseacre who enjoyed antagonizing Williams because he didn’t think Ted let him play enough. He particularly resented what he saw as Ted’s imperiousness and failure to communicate with players or explain his rationale.

  “I really like the way you swing,” Williams had told Allen after first meeting him in the clubhouse.

  “You should. I read every book you put out,” Allen replied.

  “You really hang in there good against lefties. Do they bother you?”

  “Some do, some don’t.”

  “Well, I like the way you stand in there. Oh, by the way, I’m not gonna play you against lefties.”

  And then Williams walked away.

  “I have no idea why he did that,” Allen said. “He did that the whole three years I was there. That first year I faced lefties ten times, got four hits, and you’d have thought I’d done something wrong from the way he looked at me. I tried to prove him wrong, but he never communicated things. He was that way with most of the players. He told me he liked me, and I thought, ‘Man, I’m glad he doesn’t hate me.’ ”68 Allen demanded to be traded, and eventually he was—to the Yankees, after the 1971 season.

  Toward the end of June, his team mired in fifth place with a
record of 30–40, Williams picked another public fight with pitcher Joe Coleman, who was 5–6 with a 3.76 ERA. Williams complained that Coleman was reluctant to throw a slider (the pitcher said it gave him a sore arm) and should have developed faster. “I’ve tried everything with him,” Ted said. “I’ve cuddled him, hugged him, mothered him, lectured him, but nothing seems to work. He’s a young, starting pitcher and he should be doing better than .500 for us.”

  Williams made these remarks in Boston, where he knew they would have maximum effect, or embarrassment, on Coleman, who had grown up in suburban Natick. The pitcher, irked by Ted’s remarks, responded in kind to a Boston Globe reporter, saying he disagreed with his manager. “He doesn’t talk often to the pitchers,” Coleman said. “He’s a hitter’s man.”69

  Williams’s continued sarcasm about the supposed inferior intellect of pitchers was wearing on them. “He considered pitchers nonathletes,” said Dick Bosman. “I remember once he’d made sure one of us was around, he’d raise his voice around a sportswriter. He’d say, ‘What do you think is dumber than a pitcher? Two pitchers.’ ” Bosman also noticed that Williams had a needling personality. He’d lob a gratuitous insult at a player, then saunter off, seemingly oblivious to the grenade he’d tossed. “He’d say things like, ‘You working out right? That uniform’s starting to fit a little tighter on you.’ He’d walk away, and you’d think, ‘Why would he say something like that?’ I think he was bored.”70

  One day, as infielder Tim Cullen was taking batting practice, Ted asked him what he did in the off-season. “Stocks and bonds,” said Cullen, one of the few Senators who had seen his average go down under Williams in 1969, not up. He’d finished the year at .209. “I hope you’re good at that, because you can’t hit,” Williams replied.71