The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  Abel had a front-row seat from which he could watch the relationship between Ted and his son develop.

  “Yes, I can describe screaming matches, throwing pots and pans, telling each other to fuck themselves,” he said. “There were many times I said, ‘What am I doing here?’ But thirty minutes would never pass without one of them calling the other back. Early it was John-Henry calling, later it was Ted. But it was always mutual. They were both full of pride, so no one wanted to make the first call. Neither wanted to give in. But someone always did. Some of the moving moments were hearing Ted and John-Henry say that they loved each other. That evolved so they could say that. It was beautiful. They could each say it. Ted’s pride went down as he aged.” John-Henry, Abel concluded, “became the most trusted person in Ted’s life. It got to the point where Ted would rather have John-Henry make the wrong decision than have anyone else do it. Because he knew John-Henry loved him. It was faith and love.”

  In 1996, Ted and Abel began discussing Williams’s desire to revise his previous will, executed in 1991, to make clear that he wanted to be cremated and have no funeral. Then there was another key change. Whereas the 1991 will had divided his estate equally in thirds for each of his three children, now it would exclude Bobby-Jo entirely.

  Ted never told Abel precisely why he wanted to disinherit Bobby-Jo, and the attorney never dared ask him. But Abel noticed that when Ted spoke about his oldest daughter, he did so with despair, and he would complain that he had had to support her throughout her life. Abel thought the last straw for Ted came when Anita Lovely discovered that Bobby-Jo’s younger daughter, Sherri, was getting money Ted had been sending to pay for college expenses despite having dropped out. Ted blamed Bobby-Jo.

  “I tried to dissuade Ted from writing off his daughter,” Abel said. “I wanted him to understand the ramifications and that he’d be subjecting John-Henry and Claudia to allegations that they engineered this thing. He and I talked about Bobby-Jo about ten times. There was not one occasion that he did not refer to her as ‘that fucking syphilitic cunt.’ ” Ted also wanted to cut Bobby-Jo out of her one-third share of a $600,000 irrevocable insurance trust he had established for his three children in 1985, but learned that he couldn’t, Abel added.

  In his revised will, dated December 20, 1996, Williams directed that his remains be cremated “and my ashes sprinkled at sea off the coast of Florida where the water is very deep. It is my wish and direction that no funeral or memorial service of any kind be held for me and that neither my family nor my friends sponsor any such service for me.

  “I have purposely and deliberately eliminated my daughter, Barbara Joyce Ferrell, from this will because I have provided for her in my life,” Williams added. “For purposes of the operation of this will, it is my intent that Barbara Joyce Ferrell shall be deemed to have predeceased me leaving no issue surviving.”

  Later, after the new will was filed, Ted called Bobby-Jo and her husband, Mark, in for breakfast to notify them of his decision. Williams had wanted to avoid the unpleasantness of a face-to-face meeting, but Abel and another lawyer involved in changing the will had insisted that he meet with Bobby-Jo to tell her he was disinheriting her so as to prevent her from bringing a claim after he died. Abel advised Ted to soften the blow by telling Bobby-Jo she was still going to get $200,000 from the insurance trust. And he could remind her that he had given to her generously throughout her life, but he felt he now had to provide more for John-Henry and Claudia. Ted then said he didn’t want to do the talking; Eric could deliver the news.

  Williams sat at the end of a long rectangular table with Eric on his left. When Bobby-Jo arrived, she sat on her father’s right and Mark sat next to his wife. After some chitchat, Abel called the meeting to order.

  “Bobby-Jo, the reason your father called you here today is because he rewrote his will.” “Oh?” said Bobby-Jo.

  “Yes. He made some changes and wanted you to know about it while he’s alive, so there are no questions about it after he dies. You will get two hundred thousand dollars as your share of an insurance trust that your dad set up for his kids in 1985. He’s provided for you during your life, but John-Henry and Claudia have not had the same opportunity, and he wants to make it up to them in his will. So you will not be in the will.”

  Bobby-Jo was stunned, but remained stoic and straight-faced. Eric asked her if she had anything to say.

  “That’s okay with me, Daddy,” she said. “I don’t have a problem with that. But I want to just make sure of one thing. Is that what you want?”

  Ted took umbrage at the question. “That’s what I fuckin’ want,” he replied through gritted teeth.

  “Okay, Daddy, if that’s what you want, okay.” Bobby-Jo was almost cowering.

  Abel returned to his office, typed up notes on the meeting, and then had them notarized in case Bobby-Jo later decided to mount a legal challenge. He felt badly for her. “It was the ultimate humiliation.”

  29

  Hitter.net

  In December of 1996, soon after appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated for a piece entitled “The Kid at 78,” Ted tripped over his dog, Slugger, fell heavily, and broke his hip. He went into the hospital for surgery in January and then began another long recuperation.

  If the story proved the potency of the so-called Sports Illustrated cover jinx—the belief that bad things befall those who appear on the front of the magazine—it was also notable for its attempt to correct the image of John-Henry as someone who was exploiting his father. The article credited the son with giving Ted a renewed sense of purpose, boosting his morale, improving his diet, limiting his alcohol intake, and insisting that he go to physical therapy and use a personal trainer. “If it wasn’t for John-Henry, Ted would be dead right now,” the Williams family friend Al Cassidy was quoted as saying. Frank Brothers, who privately despised John-Henry, gave him public credit for tending to Ted: “He has taken a lot of hits, but how many kids, no matter who their father was, would drop their lives and move 1,500 miles to take care of him? John-Henry did.” Ted himself declared, “I could not have done it without John-Henry.”

  Young Williams took the opportunity to push back against claims that he had become the new scourge of the memorabilia industry and that he was pushing Ted to sign autographs. “I still make mistakes,” he said, “but I’m his son, and I don’t know when you ever beat that.” He got a bit carried away when discussing his baseball foray after he dropped out of college to train under his cousin Sal Herrera. “I was hammering baseballs, 300 a day,” he said. “I’m in Fresno, and I’m hitting off a batting machine cranked to the max, 105, 106 miles per hour. Dad talks in books about how your blisters start bleeding? I knew what that was like. And how you start smelling leather burning off the bat? I knew what that was like. You know, it’s all timing… and ooh, I was so strong. I was hitting the ball so good. Crushing it.” That his attempt at playing baseball had, in the end, been a complete failure went unmentioned.1

  In subsequent press interviews, John-Henry boldly picked up the Al Cassidy theme that were it not for the son, the father would not be alive.

  “My dad would be dead if it wasn’t for me: medically, emotionally, everything,” John-Henry told the Daily Evening Item of Lynn, Massachusetts, which used the first half of the quote as the headline over the story. “The only reason I ever got involved in this business was to protect Dad. He’s 2,000 percent—sometimes not to his benefit—honest, open-hearted and generous.”2

  John-Henry complained that his statements had been twisted in the press, but he added: “I don’t mind what people say. Nothing’s going to change my mind to make me do anything differently.”3 This was the same stubbornness that Ted always projected with the Boston writers back in the day. Then John-Henry took it a step further and suggested that the Boston press, in particular, was intent on maligning a new Williams generation.

  “It’s really impossible to fight someone who has an endless ink pen,” he told the Hartford Courant
. “It’s funny, because it just seems Boston wants to crucify the Williams name. Dad got crucified his entire career there. I don’t know why they have such a bad thing going for me there.”

  The young Williams, while tiring of the criticism, was also getting bored with the memorabilia business. Intrigued by the early promise of the Internet, he had bought a state-of-the-art computer, but access to the Web at the time in isolated Hernando, Florida—there was only a dial-up connection, with frequent busy signals and disconnects—was spotty at best. He tried an Internet service provider in Orlando, which offered a faster and more reliable direct phone connection, but the resulting phone bill was enormous.

  Having experienced the quality of a direct connection, John-Henry began to investigate what it would take to get the same quality in the Hernando area. In July of 1997—using money from Ted Williams Family Enterprises, Green Diamond Sports, and other Ted memorabilia interests—John-Henry acquired some computer servers and a couple of modems and started his own crude network, using a small group of friends, including Eric Abel, to test it out. By the end of August, the group had twelve users, and by September, they had a hundred.

  Encouraged and thinking he could fill a local market void, John-Henry opened for business as a Citrus County Internet service provider in October. He called his new venture Hitter, Inc.4 The domain name was Hitter.net.

  Ted was in a funk while rehabbing after his hip surgery, and John-Henry thought it would be good to take him on what probably would be his last fishing trip.

  The plan was to go to one of Williams’s favorite spots: Ascension Bay, off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Ted asked a friend of his, Brian O’Connor, to join them. O’Connor, a Polaroid executive and Jimmy Fund trustee who had served in Vietnam as a Marine, had met Ted in the ’80s, and the two had become friends. Williams considered O’Connor to be a savvy businessman and wanted to ask him to keep an eye on John-Henry and his various ventures.

  John-Henry had rented a house with a cook. Ted and O’Connor fished all day, from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., in a small boat. John-Henry was on his own most of the time. Williams was still shaky from the hip surgery, so they rigged up a contraption to steady him in the boat. A guide who didn’t speak English stood in the back, leading them to bonefish and permit. O’Connor wasn’t a fisherman and devoted much of his attention to making sure Ted didn’t fall out of the boat.

  O’Connor met John-Henry for the first time on the trip. Then, after returning to Florida, at Ted’s request, he began spending more time with young Williams, analyzing his business record to that point and offering him advice for the future. “John-Henry had this high opinion of himself,” said O’Connor. “Confidence isn’t a bad thing, but it needs to be realistic.” Realistic John-Henry was not. According to O’Connor, he thought he might be the next Steve Jobs.

  “There was nothing but dead business bodies in John-Henry’s wake,” O’Connor noted. “He had so many bad deals it was incredible. He never told me he made a mistake or it was his fault.” As for Hitter, Inc., or Hitter Communications, as it was also known, Ted had told O’Connor what he knew about it on the fishing trip, which wasn’t much. “Ted knew Hitter was an Internet service provider, but he didn’t know a computer from a phone,” O’Connor said. “He didn’t really know what was going on with the business. But I think Ted was aware that a lot of money generated by the memorabilia activities was going into Hitter. Also, the museum was starting up. John-Henry had a captive market there and was selling Ted memorabilia to the museum. There was a lot of commingling of funds going on.”5

  As John-Henry was trying to get his Internet business off the ground in the fall of 1997, he became embroiled in a headline-grabbing memorabilia scandal featuring an FBI sting operation to retrieve two supposedly stolen Red Sox rings that had belonged to Ted before he’d given them to his son. The first ring commemorated the team’s 1946 pennant, which Ted had been instrumental in winning; the second, which the Red Sox gave to Williams, honored the club’s 1986 American League championship.

  The key figure in the rings affair was Rodney Nichols, the Maine state trooper who had befriended John-Henry when he was at the University of Maine. After his graduation, John-Henry had stored many of his personal effects in the basement of Nichols’s parents’ house in Eliot, Maine—including, it emerged, the two rings.

  Nichols had left the Maine state police and was working at a car dealership when, in 1997, he found himself owing a New Hampshire bookie $33,000. Unable to pay, he remembered the rings, which he said John-Henry had abandoned in storage at the Nichols family house. Nichols told the Boston Globe that he and his father, also a Maine state trooper, had repeatedly asked John-Henry to pick up his belongings, to no avail. Finally, the father notified John-Henry he was going to sell off his possessions at a yard sale. Sorting through the material, he came upon the rings. Rodney Nichols called John-Henry, who said, “I wondered where those things went.”

  “He never asked for them back or brought them up again,” Nichols said.6

  Nichols, inferring he now owned the rings, gave them to the bookie to settle his debt. The bookie, wanting to ensure the rings were authentic, gave them to an emissary to bring to Phil Castinetti, who ran the largest memorabilia business in New England from his store outside Boston. Castinetti could see the rings were genuine, but he needed to be sure they were not stolen.

  “The guy who brought the rings in said to me, ‘They’re not stolen—call the kid,’ meaning John-Henry,” Castinetti remembered. “I called John-Henry, and he said, ‘I’ve got to get them back.’ I asked, ‘Are they stolen?’ and he said, ‘No, no they’re not, but I need to get them.’ ”

  Castinetti told John-Henry he would sell the rings back to him for $90,000. Otherwise he would auction them off. He even called in a local TV crew to show them the rings and publicize his auction. John-Henry decided to call the FBI. But whereas he had told Castinetti that the rings were not stolen, John-Henry told federal agents that they were. A meeting was arranged, and John-Henry, accompanied by an undercover FBI agent, showed up at the Hotel Meridien in Boston with a satchel containing $90,000 in cash.

  “Knowing John-Henry was a sneaky little bastard, I brought my lawyer just in case,” Castinetti said.7 The lawyer insisted that John-Henry sign an affidavit confirming that the rings were not stolen, and John-Henry did. Then, after the diamond-encrusted rings with Ted’s name carved on the sides were turned over and the money changed hands, a gaggle of gun-toting federal agents burst into the room and arrested Castinetti. He and two associates were charged with possessing stolen property and selling stolen goods that had been taken across state lines. The whole scene was captured by a camera that authorities had hidden in the hotel room. Later, Rodney Nichols was also arrested and charged separately with stealing the rings.

  “I’m very pleased with the work the FBI has done,” John-Henry told the Globe. “Absolutely first class.”8

  US Attorney Donald Stern, in high dudgeon and groping for what he considered the appropriate baseball metaphor, told a press conference: “These guys must have been out in left field to try to sell these stolen rings back to John-Henry Williams. Ted Williams earned these rings, and his son shouldn’t be shaken down to get them back.”

  At the Castinetti trial in March of 1998, John-Henry testified that Nichols had stolen the rings from him. He said he had gone back to the Nichols family home to retrieve his other Ted memorabilia. But Nichols’s father, Maine state trooper Robert Nichols, took the witness stand to deny that John-Henry had ever returned, and he produced a box of valuable memorabilia as proof, including hundreds of photos of Ted, signed publicity photos, personal family photographs, handwritten letters from Ted to John-Henry, several plaques given to Ted by the Jimmy Fund, and Ted’s handwritten address book. It was in this same box, Robert Nichols testified, that he had found the rings. When he called John-Henry to ask him to pick up his belongings, John-Henry told him to “get rid of everything but my skis and my poles,” N
ichols said.9

  After deliberating nine hours, a jury acquitted Castinetti and his two associates on all charges. In a statement, John-Henry said: “I stand by my testimony. The rings are still my property. I never gave them away.” Castinetti was bitter. “It just didn’t have to happen this way,” he said. The arrests and trial only happened “for one reason: Ted Williams, the name, that’s it.”10

  But three months later, Rodney Nichols was found guilty by a federal jury in Portland, Maine, of stealing the rings and was sentenced to six months of house arrest. Jurors said they concluded that while John-Henry had been careless with his belongings in leaving them at the Nichols house for so long, the rings were still his property, and Rodney Nichols had no right to take them.

  So the rings were returned to young Williams.

  One of the pleasures of Ted’s life was following Red Sox games via a satellite dish and the forty-six-inch television that the club had given him. He liked to watch the players, evaluate the talent, then call general manager Dan Duquette to kibitz about something he saw or someone else on another team whom he liked and thought the Sox should trade for.

  Duquette, who served as general manager from 1994 to 2002, thought Ted’s mind was still razor sharp—at least for baseball. “He could go back and re-create an at bat better than anyone I ever heard—what the pitch was, what the count was, what the situation was. Unbelievable.” And Duquette loved it when Ted came to Boston and visited Fenway Park. His favorite story was the time Williams reunited with Helen Robinson, the team’s legendary telephone operator, whose tenure extended back to Ted’s day. “One day Ted was in my office, and after we were finished talking, I said, ‘Ted, I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring you down to see Helen.’ He said, ‘Helen Robinson! Absolutely!’ So we walked down the hall. Helen sees Ted and said: ‘Ted Williams! Come over here and I’ll give you a hug.’ So he walks over with his cane and said, ‘Is that all you’re gonna give me, Helen?’ And Ted put his arms around Helen. Helen was slight. He was hugging her, and all of a sudden I see tears coming down Helen’s cheek. Later, I asked her why she was crying. She said, ‘He was standing on my foot! I knew he couldn’t see that well, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him to get off.’ ”