To fish with Williams was to understand four things: he was a perfectionist, he was better than you were, he was a needler, and he was in charge.15 If you were a guide or otherwise an expert, fishing with Williams could be delightful. Otherwise, it would likely be disastrous. He despised fishing dilettantes and thought the only way to fish was to be all in, to be well prepared, and to know what you were doing. “Ted’s major problem, with his famous personality, was he was not tolerant of anybody who was not really good at what they did,” said Ellis.* “He was a tremendously precise fisherman. He was a scientific angler who knew everything about every piece of tackle, knew every monofilament, the oscillation of every fly rod. He was just the way he was at baseball. He was very analytical about fishing. He did it very carefully.”16
As soon as he felt a tug on the line, Williams would switch to battle stations. “When he was pulling on a fish he would use more expletives in one sentence then I’d ever heard in my life,” said Ellis. “It was almost poetic. It was lyrical, like him singing a song. He didn’t do it vindictively or in anger, he was just being himself, always trying to top himself. It was your mother, my mother, his mother, Jesus fucking Christ, he could have put everybody in there. He wanted the fight, he wanted to see them eat the fly, he wanted to see how quick he could turn ’em around and stop ’em. He just wanted to pull on ’em and then turn ’em loose.”
Catching a fish, Williams would pull the rod quickly in three quick bursts to set the hook, then he would check the drag. During the fight, he would use his own body as a check against the fish’s strength and work to decrease its supply of oxygen. He thought using heavy equipment was taking the easy way out, and that the challenge lay in doing the job with lightweight tackle.
Ted came to prefer fly-fishing to other kinds of fishing, but he was not a purist who insisted on a fly. He enjoyed, and was expert at, all kinds of fishing, whether it was for marlin, tuna, or bonefish. He was not just a fisherman. He was an angler who mastered everything associated with catching a fish.
In Islamorada, when he was not fishing or shooting the breeze with the guides, Williams could generally be found in the small shed in back of his house, where he would spend hour upon hour tying flies. Occasionally he would receive guests there who could talk fishing with him or trade gossip on the comings and goings of tarpon and bonefish.
Ted was known for a particular kind of tarpon fly that he made. He would drill a hole one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter in the tail of a wooden plug, then tie a variety of colored feathers on different nails that would be inserted into the hole. So there would be a yellow feather, a red, a black, a brown—a variety. Tarpon are known to favor particular colors depending upon the light or whatever their whim may be at a given time. If a fish refused yellow, Ted would take it out and push in a red, and so on. It was a method of giving the fish what it would take, offering it options. In his shed, he also liked to demonstrate his skill at tying knots, which, he would tell visitors, were the envy of any guide.
Other serious fishing discussions were held in Williams’s second-floor den, where he liked to entertain. There were plenty of fishing photos on the wall but few that featured baseball. The living room downstairs was a neutral zone he shared with Louise Kaufman. Ted’s pals hoped to be invited up to the second floor. If they stayed on the first floor, they realized it would be a short visit. There was a phone in the house, but it usually was not plugged in, so Williams could avoid the distraction of incoming calls. If he wanted to call someone, he’d plug the phone in.
Fishing dominated the conversation, certainly, but Ted was also intellectually curious, and when visitors came to call, he liked to engage them in a free-form discussion on a variety of topics. For example, when John Underwood arrived in the summer of 1967 to report his “Fishing with the Kid” piece for Sports Illustrated, Ted wanted to talk about the Vietnam War, technical aspects of photography, boxing, and the recent book on Ernest Hemingway by the celebrated author’s friend and confidant, A. E. Hotchner.
Edwin Pope, the Miami Herald sports columnist who was there that day, said Williams opined that Hotchner’s book Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir was “good stuff.”17 The book, besides revealing that Hemingway’s death in 1961 was a suicide, contained remembrances of what Hotchner and his friend discussed over the years—including Hemingway’s view that the Yankees’ Whitey Ford must have had a “death wish” when he pitched to Williams and that Ted and Joe DiMaggio knew how to quit when they were on top. If Ted was resentful that Hemingway had omitted him and touted “the great DiMaggio” in The Old Man and the Sea, he didn’t say so. Williams once had a date to fish with Hemingway in Cuba, but, as he told friends, the rendezvous was “broken up by Fidel Castro.”18
Ted’s two-story, two-bedroom white stucco house on Florida Bay, separated from the road by a chain-link fence and a grove of rubber trees, was his second on Islamorada. The first, on the ocean side of the Overseas Highway, was largely destroyed by Hurricane Donna in 1960, after which Ted sold the property to a Chicago businessman for $28,500.
Williams was a fixture around the village, at the drugstore, and at the grocery, where his booming voice signaled his arrival and could be heard two or three aisles over. He usually dressed in long khaki pants and a white T-shirt, an outfit he was reluctant to change for anyone or any occasion. At the Cheeca Lodge, Islamorada’s upscale resort, the women wore long gowns at night and the men were required to wear ties. One evening when Williams showed up in his usual khakis and T-shirt getup, he was turned away. So Ted went home, put on a tie, and returned, still in the same khakis and T-shirt. They let him in, and after that, the Cheeca dress code was effectively broken.
By the early 1970s Williams had caught more than one thousand tarpon to go with his one-thousand-plus bonefish, so he began to turn most of his fishing attention northward, to his camp along New Brunswick’s Miramichi River, one of the most important breeding grounds for Atlantic salmon in the world.
Ted was increasingly enamored of the Atlantic salmon, and he was fond of saying that if he could only choose one fish to pursue, that would be it. It had size, it put up a terrific fight, it took great skill to catch one, it was good eating, and it had that great spawning story: hatching way upriver, maturing for about three years—if it could survive an array of natural predators in and around the river—then shooting downstream and out to sea, only to contend with another raft of threats. If it withstood the new dangers, after a few years it returned to the very same river it came from, making its way against astronomical odds to the exact same location from which it was spawned.19
The prime fishing season on the Miramichi went from June until October, and as the season got under way in 1978, Williams—who kept a handwritten journal spanning two volumes detailing his catches and conditions along the river over the years—wrote that he had caught 947 Atlantic salmon.
When he first traveled to the Miramichi in the mid-’50s to promote fishing for New Brunswick tourism officials and to make the film for General Electric, Ted hadn’t particularly liked it. It seemed too crowded with other fishermen. “But then I made another trip and got a big one, a 20-pounder,” he told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. “It was quite apparent that if I really liked it I’d better get a place of my own because everything was private property. So I bought a mile of river. I spend the summers there and leave in the fall and can’t wait for June. I live the whole year for those three months.”20
Non-Canadians had to hire guides to fish the Miramichi, and Roy Curtis, two years younger than Williams, was the one assigned to Ted on a 1958 trip. Thus began Curtis’s thirty-year hitch—along with his wife, Edna—as guide, caretaker, and custodian of Ted’s camp overlooking the Miramichi. Roy died in 1988.
As he did with the Islamorada guides, Ted developed a close relationship with Roy based on competition and needling. Williams would keep a running tally in his log of how many more fish he caught than Roy, reporting with relish the daily or seasonal sco
re to family and friends. At times, Ted felt that Roy had not shown him the proper respect or deference after he executed some skilled maneuver or another on the river, and the result would be a standard Williams broadside.
Once, early on, after Ted popped off at something or other, Curtis announced, “Mr. Williams, I’m not going to take this from you,” and started walking away. He didn’t understand that Ted wasn’t mad at him, just mad at the world over whatever it was that was frustrating him at that moment. As Curtis walked away, Claudia Williams recalled, Ted was mortified. “Dad was like, ‘Don’t leave! Come back! I’m not mad at you!’ He was just mad that the car stopped, or mad that the car got stuck, or whatever it might have been. He wasn’t mad at you, but he would still scream and curse a streak that people would say, ‘Oh, my God. I’ve got to get away from this.’ ”21
Over the years, Roy, a native guide and student of the salmon, came to be amazed at how accomplished a fisherman Williams was and duly gave his opinion to visiting journalists who came to chronicle the Kid’s exploits along the river—among them John Underwood, who was told, “Forty years and I ain’t seen none better, no. There’s days a feller can beat him, maybe. But day in day out he’s the best. He can do it all. He can tie the best flies, rig ’em just right. He can cast to the toughest spots. He can cover more water than anybody. He knows exactly how to play a fish and he has a fine steady hand to release ’em, and that’s an art, for sure. Sometimes I sit on the bank and never lift a finger.… And persistent? Oh, my. He’ll stay out there all day, any kind of weather. Stay and stay.”22
If Curtis quickly recovered after experiencing Williams’s brusqueness, it took some of the other locals considerably longer to accept Ted. “When he first came up here, he was a little arrogant—that’s what people on the river felt,” said Jack Fenety, former president of the Miramichi Salmon Association, a conservation group Williams became involved with. “He wouldn’t speak to people, and if he did, it was to say, ‘Get the hell out of the way; what the hell are you doing fishing my water?’ He was antisocial, and people knew his record with the press in Boston, so they took him at face value. I think people thought if the press did not like him and he doesn’t like them, he can’t be a good fellow.”23
Another early Williams faux pas on the Miramichi came when he had a run-in with W. W. Doak, owner of one of the leading tackle shops in the area. Recalled W.W.’s son, Jerry Doak, “The altercation occurred because Ted had quite a mouth on him; he was brash and profane, so my dad drew his attention to it a couple of times when he was in the store and told him, ‘If you can’t control your mouth you’ll have to leave.’… Ted was used to doing whatever he wanted whenever he wanted and wherever he wanted, and it didn’t work like that up here. That was pretty much the river’s approach to Ted—it was not impressed by his celebrity. Had he been a hockey player maybe it would have been different.”24
Williams belatedly picked up on criticism that he was putting off some of the locals and made some adjustments to become more welcoming. He got to know his neighbors along the river and stopped shooing away people who fished in his pools. But the main reason that Ted grew to become a highly respected figure along the Miramichi was that he turned into an ardent, if not militant, conservationist on behalf of the Atlantic salmon.
Williams had become involved in fishing conservation early on. As far back as 1961, he was calling for limits on saltwater game fishing and was using his platform at the annual sportsmen’s show in Boston to urge outdoor writers to crusade against pollution in rivers, streams, and oceans. Then in 1971, Williams and Bing Crosby headlined a gala at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to focus attention on the fact that Danish commercial fishermen were killing huge numbers of salmon in their North Atlantic feeding grounds.
“I’m here because I want to try and help save the greatest fish that ever swam,” Williams said. “The problem is simply this. A small number of Danish commercial fishermen operating off the Davis Strait near Greenland are taking huge quantities of young salmon in their North Atlantic feeding grounds. If something isn’t done to stop it, there will be no more salmon for the sports fishermen in North America and Europe.”25
The Danes eventually agreed to phase out the fishery off Greenland, but Williams kept up his advocacy on behalf of the Atlantic salmon, making speeches to business groups from his platform at Sears and assuming a leadership role in the Miramichi Salmon Association. The association held its annual meetings in a Boston suburb, and Ted helped generate extensive news coverage of the many threats to the Atlantic salmon: abuse by Indians of their traditional fishing rights, poaching, and excessive incidental catching by commercial fishermen off Newfoundland of salmon bound for their home streams. Williams would also talk with local game wardens regarding the need to educate people about the importance of Atlantic salmon to the economy of New Brunswick. To raise the chances that a released fish will survive, he told Popular Mechanics in 1989 that he had recently started to file the barbs off his hooks, and he advocated mandatory saltwater licenses for all sport and commercial anglers with a fee that would cover “hard-nosed law enforcement and restoration work.” Though he said he was “basically conservative” and “against government meddling whenever possible,” he felt these steps were needed to save American sportfishing.26
In the fall of 1993, Williams told the Telegraph-Journal of Saint John, New Brunswick, that he was “going to cut my throat right here” if the Canadian fisheries department and law enforcement did not do a better job of enforcing existing laws. Canada required fishermen to release adult salmon to bolster the breeding stock, but Ted said too many anglers were keeping the fish. “All they’re thinking of is getting the big fish now,” he said. “Screw the river, get the fish.”27
This over-the-top outburst caused a flap throughout New Brunswick and beyond, leaving Jack Fenety of the Miramichi Salmon Association to put out the fire. “Ted made these wild statements to the press, and they were all over me,” said Fenety. “So I said to them, ‘He’s a John Wayne type. No matter what he says, it’s good publicity for conservation and good for the salmon.’ ” But Williams was who he was, and toning things down was not always his style. When a local judge let off a salmon poacher with a slap on the wrist, Williams railed against the judge and said he should be “hanged,” and that caused another fuss. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation did a program on the endangered state of the salmon, Ted gave the network an earful on abuses by commercial fishermen.*
In the winter, Williams would give Roy Curtis $10,000 to keep an eye on the camp and shovel snow off the roof. In season, besides serving as Ted’s fishing guide, Roy would do chores around the house. In the mornings, Ted would usually be up by five o’clock and head to his workbench in the basement to start tying flies. The Williams-preferred fly for the Miramichi was the double-hook Conrad, size 8. Another of Ted’s favorites he called the Stoplight, which was a variation on the multicolored fly he made in Islamorada for the tarpon, and then there was the Whore, though his journal entries didn’t explain why he called it that.
Roy and his wife, Edna, lived two or three miles down the road and would appear by 7:00 a.m. or so, and Edna would fix a huge breakfast. If he had guests, Ted would emerge from his basement and rouse them for the meal by playing reveille—without a bugle—which would often morph into “The Marines’ Hymn.” Edna, who also did the housekeeping, cooked three meals a day for Williams, and they would all eat breakfast and dinner together. For lunch, she would fix Ted and Roy salmon-salad sandwiches that they took out on the river with them. For breakfast, Williams liked Red River oatmeal, or eggs, or French toast, and lots of bacon, no matter what the main dish was. For dinner, Edna would make meat loaf, pork chops, steak, roast beef, chicken, or liver. Ted loved liver. They would eat early, around 4:00 p.m., because Williams liked to go back out and fish until dark. Then, returning home, Ted would plop down on a king-size couch facing a Franklin stove and listen to the Red Sox game on the radio. The rec
eption in eastern Canada was usually poor, and sometimes he’d have to strain to pick up the voices of the broadcasters.
Of the various pools along the river that Williams owned or leased, his favorite was called Swinging Bridge, named after a working footbridge that had spanned the river at that point but was destroyed by an ice storm in 1970.
Ted and Roy would take the pickup truck to reach Swinging Bridge, about fifteen minutes away, and Williams made sure to load the necessary equipment: waders, angling vests, rods and reels, rain gear, and an extra rod. You never knew when a tip might break, and an entire day of fishing could be ruined without a spare.28 He was a stickler about his fishing tackle. Before going out, he would take reels apart to make sure all the bearings were free, leaving nothing to chance.
In 1972, Ted told a crew that was making a film of him for Sears that he usually fished eight hours a day and made a thousand casts. He cast right-handed—the way he threw, not the way he hit—with power and ease. He said his normal cast was sixty-eight to seventy feet, but occasionally he would go to ninety if he needed to, depending on the conditions. He used an eight-and-a-half-foot rod, and usually cast at a forty-five-degree angle from the direction of the river, or the direction of the wind.
On August 30, 1978, his sixtieth birthday, Williams reported in his log that he had caught his one thousandth Atlantic salmon a few days earlier. Red Smith, the New York Times sports columnist, had been a guest of Ted’s a month earlier and wrote three columns from the Miramichi, using as one of his pegs the Kid’s approaching Triple Crown of fishing. Smith concluded that Williams’s “fly rod is a deadlier weapon than his bat used to be.”29
Williams’s camp sat in a grove of white birch trees on a hill overlooking the fast-moving river about 150 feet below. There was a main lodge and a small guesthouse. In the main cabin, over the front door leading out to the porch, was a wooden sign that read: GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY SALMON.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 79