But Ted never told Claudia how proud he was. “If there was one thing that I wish my dad had done when I was growing up, I wish he could have been able to tell me how proud he was that I was so independent. How proud he was that despite having him open a door for me, I said, ‘No, Dad, I’m gonna show you I can do it this way.’ I always felt like I was constantly waving flags, going, ‘Notice me!’ He would tell other people. And these people would even come to me and they would tell me these stories, and I’d be like, ‘Why doesn’t he just tell me?’ ”
At Springfield, no one knew she was the daughter of Ted Williams until graduation day, when he showed up. When she spotted him in the crowd, Claudia bolted from the line of students awaiting their diplomas and raced over to give Ted a big hug, causing a stir as people recognized the Kid. Delighted, Williams told her with a smile, “Well, Jesus Christ! Get back in the line!”
“When I graduated from Springfield, there wasn’t a brighter face in the audience than my dad,” Claudia said. “It was so awesome to see how happy my father was sitting in the audience.” She graduated cum laude, with a major in psychology. When the president of the college handed Claudia her diploma, he quietly asked if he could meet Ted after the ceremony.
Claudia returned to Europe after college for another five years, this time to Germany, where she worked for a publishing house and gained fluency in German to go with her French. She fell in love with a German named Roman, whom she brought home to meet her father.
Ted took a break from his fishing and received Roman. Of course the Kid was rough on the young man, and later, when Claudia told Ted that Roman had dumped her, Williams said: “That fuckin’ Kraut! Just be glad there’s no kids involved. Where is he, back in the Fatherland?”
25
The Fishing Life
During and after his baseball career, Williams’s other great passion was fishing.
Ever since he was a kid starting out with a split bamboo pole—first going for bass in a lake outside San Diego, then surf casting for corbina at Coronado, then snagging a raft of barracuda on a deep-sea outing off Point Loma in 1934—Ted had simply been captivated by fishing. “I was just carried away with the whole damn thing,” as he later put it.1
His desire to fish only grew as he prospered in baseball. Playing for the Minneapolis Millers in 1938, he loaded up on walleyes and northern pike throughout Minnesota. By the time he got to Boston the following year, Williams made sure to carve out time for fishing around his baseball commitments. In his rookie season, he went fly-fishing for the first time on Lake Cochituate in suburban Natick, and a girl he had with him lay prone in the boat to avoid being hit as he cast, prompting an inquiry from another curious fisherman who wanted to make sure everything was okay.2
Well into the late 1940s, whenever the Red Sox were playing at home, Williams would often get up early in the morning and go fishing at various local hot spots before coming to Fenway Park. On off days, he might make a run to Cape Cod, or head north of Boston near Cape Ann, where he made headlines in 1949 by catching a 394-pound tuna. At night, he’d unwind after a game by tying flies in his room at the Somerset Hotel for hours. Over the five-year period after he returned to baseball following World War II, he claimed that he tied twenty-five hundred flies.3
Ted’s love of fishing was well noted in the press during his playing days, and some fans took an interest in his interest. One day during a game, a harmless drunk came out of the stands, ambled out to Williams in left field, and announced: “I just wanted to tell you that the fish are really biting at Cape Cod Canal.”4
What was it about fishing that enthralled Williams? For one thing, it gave him solace and a refuge from the celebrity glare. But it was much more than that. He loved the beauty and authenticity of the outdoor life: “No stuffy characters. No formal dinners. No tight ties around your neck. Just good, clean, fresh air and the gamest opponents in the world,” as he put it in 1952.5 That was a sharp contrast to how he felt about people. Williams liked to call himself “a Will Rogers fisherman: I’ve never met a fish I didn’t like.”6
He bathed in the beauty of isolated streams, rivers, ponds, and the sea. He loved “just being there, away from the telephones, away from people. I can’t think of anyone who had more fun out of life than Zane Grey. He had that big three-masted schooner, and he just traveled the world, hunting and fishing.”7 Until he died, Ted would harbor his version of the Zane Grey fantasy: to buy a seventy-five-foot shrimp trawler, equip it with a crew and a small skiff or two for excursions away from the mother ship, and then cruise around the world at his leisure, looking for fish he hadn’t caught before.
Like the novels that Grey wrote, the trawler would remain a romantic fiction. As it was, however, Williams did live out a fisherman’s fantasy, catching a 1,235-pound black marlin off Peru, a five-hundred-pound thresher shark off New Zealand, salmon in Russia, and tigerfish in Zambia. (Other foreign destinations included Iceland, Panama, Costa Rica, Belize, Mexico, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and the Fiji Islands.) He’d fished all over the United States—catching albacore off San Diego, muskie in the Midwest, trout in Montana, bluegill in the Arkansas River, bass in Maine’s Pocomoonshine Lake, and snook in the Everglades. But mostly he favored the Florida Keys and his adopted Islamorada, where he helped put saltwater fly-fishing on the map in the late ’40s and early ’50s while trolling endlessly for tarpon and bonefish. Those two, plus his beloved Atlantic salmon, which he caught for years on the Miramichi, were Ted’s favorites.
He exalted those three fish in Ted Williams: Fishing the Big Three, his 1982 book with John Underwood. It had been Underwood’s 1967 Sports Illustrated piece, “Going Fishing with the Kid,” which pleased Williams so much that he picked the writer to do My Turn at Bat. In 1981, Underwood wrote a Sports Illustrated sequel about Williams going for Atlantic salmon on the Miramichi, which, along with the 1967 piece, formed the basis for Fishing the Big Three.
Just as he had approached hitting as a science, Ted brought to fishing the same spirit of inquiry, energy, and intensity, as well as a thirst for knowledge of whatever fish he was after and its habitat. And just as he had studied the habits and tendencies of pitchers, he studied the ways of fish and strove to develop the most refined technique for catching them, adding his own skill, endurance, and patience to the mix. As it turned out, the drive for excellence that made him want to be known as the greatest hitter who ever lived evolved after he retired from baseball into another goal: not literally to be known as the greatest angler, but to master the art of fishing totally—fueled by his love of the outdoors, an insatiable curiosity about fish, and his innate competitive drive. Ultimately, Williams became so esteemed in the fishing world that he was inducted into both the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame and the International Game Fish Association Hall of Fame. He was delighted by these honors, almost as proud of being designated an angling immortal as he was of his enshrinement in Cooperstown.
Long before leaving baseball, Williams had been able to turn his love of fishing into a paying avocation. In 1952 he’d bought an interest in a Miami fishing-tackle firm. In 1953 he launched a TV show that aired weekly in Miami on outdoor life. In 1955 he made a thirty-minute fishing film for General Electric, which brought him to the Miramichi in Canada for the first time. Then, over several years, he filmed thirty-nine 15-minute TV spots on fishing in which he served as the narrator and sometimes appeared with guests, such as Bing Crosby and Sam Snead. The films were syndicated by Beacon Television of Boston, which Ted and his business manager, Fred Corcoran, held stock in.
In January of 1960, before starting his final year with the Red Sox, Ted unveiled a line of fishing gear for the Bigelow & Dowse Company of Boston, a hardware retailer that dealt in fishing tackle. The line included a spinning reel that was praised for its effectiveness and ease of use, combining the best aspects of the manual and full-bail pickup reels. When he went to work for Sears after finishing his baseball career, Ted had a broad platform from
which to develop effective fishing tackle. He could test his ideas and help build the sort of equipment he wanted, and he played a role in the technological advances of rods, reels, lures, and lines. He watched rods evolve from bamboo to fiberglass to graphite-boron and other synthetic composites; he saw lines go from braided linen to the finest monofilament.
For years, Williams showcased his fishing skills by serving as the headliner for the annual sportsmen’s show at Mechanics Hall in Boston. Tens of thousands packed the hall to watch Williams put on fly-casting demonstrations, sometimes with the former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Sharkey as his friendly foil. There was a carnival atmosphere at the shows, which ran over the course of nine days in February and which featured logrolling, archery, performing dogs, hooded falcons, canoe-handling exhibitions, a “catch ’em and keep ’em” trout pool, and Williams casting to a spot about twenty-five yards away while Sharkey heckled him from the sidelines.
After the 1946 baseball season ended with the Red Sox losing the World Series in seven games, Williams was dying to go fishing. He called a guide in the Florida Keys: Jimmie Albright. Through word of mouth, Ted had heard that earlier that year Albright and his client Joe Brooks had become the first to catch a bonefish using a fly rod. Bonefish cruise in shallow water and are relatively small, weighing seven to twelve pounds and extending close to three feet in length. But they are a widely prized game fish and considered, pound for pound, the strongest and fastest of saltwater fish. Catching bonefish on a fly was unheard of at the time, and it caused a stir in the fishing world. Albright, who lived in Islamorada, soon made his mark as a saltwater fly-fishing pioneer. He took Williams out, the two formed a lasting friendship, and Ted quickly became smitten by Islamorada.
Albright, who was two years older than Williams, had already established himself as a fabled guide, fishing with the likes of Zane Grey, Ernest Hemingway, former president Herbert Hoover, the actor Jimmy Stewart, and the actress Myrna Loy.8 A native of Indiana, Jimmie had come to Miami in 1935 and caught on as a mate for an offshore charter boat. After a stint in the Navy during World War II, Albright settled in Islamorada with his new wife, Frankie Laidlaw, who was an accomplished fisherwoman in her own right.
Jimmie and Frankie built a house and guest cottage on the water. There was no electricity or running water in the village, and the population numbered about seventy-five people—mostly so-called Conchs, descendants of the white Bahamians who fled the American Revolution as Crown loyalists. Jimmie had a charter boat, The Rebel, and a handful of fifteen-foot skiffs that were powered by 7½-horsepower Mercury engines. In the big boat, he fished the Gulf Stream for marlin, dolphin, sailfish, wahoo, and kingfish. He’d use the skiffs to pole the flats for bonefish and permit.
Besides his nose for fish, Albright was also a knot-tying savant credited with developing two knots considered indispensable to anglers: the nail knot and the Albright Special. The nail knot used a nail or tube to tie two lines together, while the Albright Special linked two lines of different diameters.
But it was Ted who became Albright’s longest-lasting and most notable client. They would fish together perhaps fifty times a year, and while other guides were more than willing to fish with Williams free of charge for the cachet it could bring them, Ted always paid Jimmie aboveboard. It had been Albright who introduced Ted to Louise Kaufman, and it was at Jimmie’s house where Ted hid from reporters in 1952, when he was called back for service in Korea. Albright would protect Williams from interlopers who wanted to gawk at him or otherwise invade his privacy—unless it was someone Jimmie thought Ted might like to meet, like Jack Nicklaus, whom he once brought around.
Albright was the guru of guides, but it was Williams’s heralded fishing presence on the Keys that provided a significant jolt to the local economy, and Islamorada soon took to billing itself as the “sport fishing capital of the world.” It certainly was for Ted: by the mid-1960s, Williams had caught more than one thousand bonefish, the species that had first brought him to the Keys. For his next challenge he began to focus on the tarpon, one of the great saltwater game fish. The “silver kings,” as they are known, range from five to eight feet in length and usually weigh anywhere from twenty to 150 pounds. They are best known for their leaping ability and fighting spirit. To boost tarpon fishing, Williams persuaded the Islamorada guides to stage an elite, invitation-only tournament called the Gold Cup. At the first tournament, in 1964, Williams caught the biggest tarpon, but the fish broke free after Ted insisted on using a spinning rod—against the advice of his guide, Clifford Ambrose, who urged him to use a fly rod.9 Williams used Albright as his guide the following year and won the tournament with a fly rod. Ted couldn’t make it in 1966 because he was being inducted at Cooperstown, but he won his second Gold Cup in 1967, again with Albright. “After Ted won the Gold Cup a couple of times he quit fishing it, because everyone was groaning that he’d won it twice,” said Islamorada guide Buddy Grace. “He said he was too damn good for it, that’s all.”10*
Though Ted got the glory, as far as Albright and the other guides were concerned, they were the ones who did the heavy lifting and deserved the credit. Of course Williams would have none of that.
After a day on the boat, Ted and Jimmie would retire to a round table at the Islamorada Yacht Basin, which later became the Lorelei restaurant, and hold court. This central perch became known as “City Hall,” and by the mid-to-late ’50s, it was further enlivened by the addition of Jack Brothers, who would become the second most important guide in Islamorada after Albright. Brothers was a Brooklyn transplant who had arrived in 1953, married a Conch, and after a stint at a local marine park set up shop as a guide.
Like Ted and Jimmie, Jack could be rather crotchety and cantankerous. Business was good by now, and the guides could fish with whomever they wanted to whenever they wished. One day, approached by two oversize men who wanted to go out bonefishing, Brothers told them: “If you think I’m gonna pole your fat asses around all day you’re crazy.”11 Williams got a kick out of that and quickly cottoned to Brothers. Ted took Jack’s son, Frank, under his wing, too. When Frank got to be about sixteen, Williams would take him out on Saturdays and pay him $5 an hour to pole him around after bonefish. Frank was overweight and, unsurprisingly, Ted felt no need for sensitivity. Criticizing the young man’s poling technique, he blurted out, “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Porky!”12
In the ’60s and ’70s, a new generation of fishing guides arrived in Islamorada. They revered Albright, Brothers, and Williams and observed their dynamic at the Lorelei and elsewhere with keen interest—not daring to crash the inner circle but eager for any crumbs of wisdom or acceptance that might be thrown their way.
For all his camaraderie with the guides, though, Williams mostly fished alone. One of his favorite spots—still known as Ted’s Hole—lies south of Islamorada, about half a mile off Long Key. He knew that on certain tides, he could count on plenty of fish running through there, and guides would frequent the Hole, too—but only when Ted wasn’t there, of course. He’d also fish an area called the Pocket, on Buchanan Bank, seven miles southwest of Islamorada, a highly desirable spot that was occasionally the source of turf disputes among the guides. The Pocket was where they sprinkled Jimmie Albright’s ashes after he died in 1998 at the age of eighty-two.
Ted could also be seen poling himself around the mudflats and the mangroves like a gondolier, or even just sight fishing off his dock on Florida Bay. One friend of Ted’s from Boston who wintered in Islamorada for years, Dan Pitts, marveled at the show Williams put on one afternoon off his dock, pulling in one bonefish after another.
“You have to see them in order to catch them—if you don’t you’re just throwing the line in,” said Pitts. “We were out there one day, and Ted said, ‘Here they come, two o’clock, forty feet out.’ I’ve got polarized glasses on, and I don’t see a goddamn thing. So he throws his line out, and boom! Bonefish are the fastest-hitting fish in the ocean, so he got that one. Once again we’r
e waiting, and they call it mudding, they put their jaw in the sand, so you see that little wave of cloudiness, that’s how you see them. So the second time he says, ‘Here they come again, one o’clock, fifty feet out.’ Again, I can’t see them. He says, ‘Jesus Christ, are you retarded!’ And bam! He pulls a second one out. Then here we go again: ‘You ready? Thirty, thirty-five feet at three o’clock.’ I didn’t see them, but I know where three o’clock, thirty to thirty-five feet out is, so I cast it out there, and he says, ‘About friggin’ time!’ But I still couldn’t see the fuckin’ fish anyway. That guy had eyes like there’s no tomorrow.”13
As Pitts’s experience suggests, Williams was less than tolerant of people who couldn’t fish well after he’d taken the time to show them how. He exploded at a local kid who, he felt, hadn’t listened closely enough, screaming and declaring the boy illiterate. Another time, local artist and neighbor Millard Wells was visiting Ted at his house when the phone rang. On the line was a friend who wanted to go fishing. “Ted said, ‘Well, if you can’t fly-fish any better now than you could last time, why don’t you just stay home?’ and he slammed the phone down so hard it bounced off the cradle.”14
But those flare-ups were leavened with acts of kindness that became well known on Islamorada. When guide Gary Ellis wanted to launch a fishing tournament to benefit those who suffer from cystic fibrosis, Williams provided key support, which attracted other big names, and today the tournament generates more than $1 million each year. When a local boy, Billy Bostick, needed money for a lung transplant, Ted got involved and helped raise $250,000 for the operation. When Jimmie Albright fell on hard times toward the end of his life and needed a new roof on his house, Williams gave a contractor $10,000, along with instructions not to tell Albright where the money came from. And when Frank Brothers, Jack’s son, got married and needed to buy his first house, Ted gave him $10,000 as well.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 78