Ted returned to Shands, signing in as Chris Rivers, and was gradually weaned off the ventilator. “We’re convinced Shands saved Dad’s life,” Claudia said. “He looked so bad John-Henry wouldn’t allow visitors because he didn’t want Dad to be embarrassed.”
But Bobby-Jo visited, tipped off by a sympathetic nurse that Ted was back. John-Henry, who had been deliberately keeping his older sister in the dark, was furious when he learned she had been at the hospital, and he issued orders that she was not to be allowed back.
Ted was released from Shands in time for his eighty-third birthday on August 30, the first time he had been home for nearly nine months.
Bobby-Jo, forgetting or ignoring the fact that John-Henry had banned her from coming to Ted’s house, called her brother and left a message on his cell phone saying she would be over to celebrate Ted’s birthday. He called her back that evening to bluntly tell her that she was not a “team player” and that he didn’t think she was going to see her father again.
Bobby-Jo and Mark complained to the local sheriff but were told it was a civil issue, not a criminal issue, and that John-Henry was within his rights under the power of attorney Ted had given him.
In late October, Ted had a delightful and often emotional two-day interlude—a visit from two of his oldest Red Sox pals, Dominic DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky.*
Teddy and Dommie (as they’d come to call themselves) had grown closer as they’d aged. Ted admired the richness and fullness of Dom’s life: After retiring from baseball abruptly in 1953, he had founded two successful manufacturing businesses—one that made carpeting for automobiles and another that made foam padding for car seats. He and his wife, Emily, had been married for more than fifty years and had three children. He was a good citizen who gave back to his community.
Ted had told his friend once that by comparison, he had made a hash of his personal life with his failed marriages and absentee fatherhood. Dominic had scolded Williams for coming to such a gloomy conclusion: Ted was an undisputed icon who had achieved so much in his life—the greatest hitter in baseball, a war hero, and a champion to sick kids. But Ted could not shake the comparison.
And now it was Dominic, more than any other friend, who took the initiative in staying in touch with Ted. He would call to deliver his Red Sox reports, and they would shoot the breeze as Williams’s health permitted. In turn, Dominic would relay Ted’s news to Pesky and to the fourth member of their gang, Bobby Doerr, who these days was preoccupied with tending to his ailing wife, Monica, at their home in Oregon.
In early October, Dominic and Emily had been having dinner at a restaurant with their friend Dick Flavin, a former television reporter who had become a well-known humorist and toastmaster in Boston.* The DiMaggios, who lived in Marion, Massachusetts, on Buzzards Bay, were discussing their annual winter move to Florida. Emily said she would fly down soon to get their place ready, but Dom said he was thinking of driving. Emily said she forbade him to drive alone—he was eighty-four, after all—so Flavin volunteered to keep him company. Wonderful, said Dom, who then called Johnny Pesky to see if he wanted to go, too. Pesky said he was game, so the three men set out on October 20 in Dom’s gray Jaguar sedan. Flavin and Dom shared the driving. Pesky was in the backseat and agreed not to smoke his cigar.
Flavin, who was about twenty years younger than Dom and Johnny, was beside himself with excitement. There he was, a lifelong Red Sox fan who never had been able to hit the ball out of the infield as a kid, embarking on a road trip with two of his heroes, on their way to see the great Williams.
Flavin felt like he was in fantasy camp as he listened to Dom and Johnny spin baseball yarns—like the one about the play they used to work together. Dom would be on first and Johnny would be up. If Pesky felt the situation was right—usually with no one out—he would signal to Dom by rubbing his nose, and then he would drop a bunt down the third-base line. Dom would be off with the pitch and race all the way to third, which would be vacant after the third baseman had come in to field the bunt. They worked this so often that the papers wrote about it. Then one day, against the Yankees, the play backfired. Pesky dropped his bunt down and duly drew the third baseman in, but by the time Dom got to third, catcher Bill Dickey was waiting to tag him out. “I read the papers too, you know,” Dickey said to the startled DiMaggio.
The three travelers arrived at Ted’s house on Tuesday morning, October 23, around ten o’clock. When no one answered the door, Dom and the others just walked in. As they entered the living room they spotted Ted in silhouette from a distance. He was on the other side of the room near a sliding glass door, slumped in his wheelchair.
“He was alone, and it was just so jarring,” Flavin said. “Christ, this was Ted Williams, and here is this poor invalid. I can remember Johnny actually gasping.”
DiMaggio took the lead and almost ran to his friend. “Teddy, it’s Dommie! Teddy, it’s Dommie!” he cried. “And Johnny Pesky is here! And Dick Flavin!”
Williams stirred. “Hello, Dommie,” he said.
Pesky couldn’t speak for the first twenty minutes and seemed on the verge of tears. Dom started chatting away and telling Ted about the ride down. Williams’s vision had so declined that at one point he looked at Johnny and said, “Who are you?”
“Ted, I’m Johnny Pesky!”
“Needle!” Ted said with conviction, using his favorite nickname for Pesky, a reference to his long nose. Then Williams greeted Flavin, whom he knew a bit. They had conspired on the phone together about how best to boost Dominic for the Hall of Fame. This had been a pet cause of Ted’s from his perch on the Veterans Committee, to no avail. Dominic, after all, had fallen just short of the .300 mark as a hitter (.298 lifetime), and while he’d been a scintillating fielder, they didn’t pay off on fielding, as Ted himself had famously said.
Dom noticed several ceramic knickknacks in the kitchen that paid tribute to Ted’s beloved Dalmatian, Slugger.
“That was a helluva dog, right, Ted?” Dom said.
“Helluva dog,” Ted agreed.
“What kind of dog was it?”
Williams paused for a moment or two to think about that. “A German shepherd,” he said.
Then Ted, livening up a bit, said he had a trivia challenge for his guests. He was thinking of a Yankee who was a great clutch hitter. His initials were PT. Dom, Johnny, and Dick racked their brains but couldn’t come up with anyone who had the initials PT.
“Paul O’Neill,” Ted finally told them.
The guests graciously failed to point out Ted’s mistakes and moved on.
During lunch, Williams had to be helped with his food, and this infuriated him, underscoring as it did his lack of independence. When he went off on a swearing jag, one of the nurses handled him kindly and skillfully. “Now, Ted,” she said, speaking to him as if he were her naughty son.
John-Henry appeared and said hello. Flavin looked askance at the cameras the young Williams had stationed around the house but said nothing. “He apparently wanted to make sure none of the caretakers got an autograph from Ted or something.”
That night, over a glass of wine, Dominic announced that he was going to sing an aria for Ted. Williams sat and listened, rapt and smiling. After Dom finished, he explained what the song was about. A guy was in love with a girl, but he was too afraid to tell her, so he had his friend do it. The friend did and stole the girl. An exuberant Ted asked Dom for another rendition. After the second aria, Flavin, not to be outdone, said he, too, had a song for Ted, and he launched into one of his favorite Irish ballads, “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” “Ted thought my song was pretty good, but he said, ‘Dom’s better than you,’ ” recalled Flavin, laughing.
From time to time during the course of the two-day visit, Flavin noticed that Ted would quietly weep—especially on the first visit in the morning, when he appeared overwhelmed that his two old Red Sox teammates had come to see him. Once, Ted, who always liked to measure himself against the great DiMaggio, asked Dom
if Joe had ever cried. “He did toward the end,” Dom said. “But there was a difference. Joe was never going to get out of his bed again. You’re getting stronger and better.”3
John-Henry was still bruised by the Hitter.net failure. Its success could have helped him at least partially emerge from Ted’s considerable shadow and forge his own identity outside the memorabilia business, which was dependent upon his father’s famous name. Paradoxically, John-Henry was also acutely aware that Ted had only limited time left, and he felt a strong need to do his father proud in some way while he still could.
The 9/11 attacks had helped trigger this soul-searching, the taking stock of where he was in life. Someone had called Ted’s house that day to let him know that a plane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York. John-Henry and his father turned on the TV. “He and I just sat there, stunned, watching it, watching the aftermath, and seeing how precious life all of a sudden is again,” John-Henry recalled later. “I just sat there and got a sense that life is… passing me by and that motivated me. I think it motivated a lot of other Americans too, to get off their tush and start doing something positive. And that’s what I did.”4
What he decided to do—improbably and, some would say, ridiculously—was embark on a career as a baseball player at thirty-three years of age.
John-Henry, who had failed to make his college baseball teams and whose foray to California in 1989 to train under his cousin Sal Herrera had been a bust, now wanted to give it one last serious shot. His goal, his fantasy, would be to become a good enough hitter, and a passable enough fielder, to be able to sign a minor-league contract. Then, if he progressed and rose through the ranks, who knew? Maybe he could make it to the majors. Maybe he could get just one at bat with the Red Sox.
John-Henry presented his plan to Ted and asked for his blessing. Williams must have realized that the idea was hopeless, but he loved his son and knew how deeply John-Henry needed his approval, so he gave it.
There was only one hitting instructor in the land, Ted said, who could deliver the crash course necessary to give John-Henry even a remote chance of success: Steve Ferroli. Ferroli was a Williams disciple who had been an instructor at Ted’s baseball camp in Massachusetts and then had established a business on his own teaching the Williams theory of hitting. He had practically memorized Ted’s book The Science of Hitting and then had self-published his own book: Disciple of a Master: How to Hit a Baseball to Your Potential, for which Ted had written a foreword. Ferroli liked to say that he was the successor Ted anointed to teach the Williams theory of hitting to future generations.
So in November, following the visit by Dick Flavin and the teammates, John-Henry called Ferroli out of the blue and said: “I want to try and hit baseballs.” Ferroli, who was then in his early forties, had known John-Henry for years and regarded him as something of a kid brother. In his sporadic displays of interest in baseball growing up, young Williams had attended some of Ferroli’s instructional clinics and later had been supportive of Ferroli’s desire to preach the Ted gospel.
John-Henry proposed that Ferroli come down to Florida for thirty days and see how things go. He could live at Ted’s house or at his condo. Ferroli had a wife and kids and a business, but he knew he had to drop everything and go.
“Ted Williams was my hero,” Ferroli said. “It’s, like, who does Elvis send his kid to for singing lessons? It was the ultimate compliment. How could I have turned my back on that?”
When he arrived, Ferroli took one look at John-Henry—dressed in casual business clothes, driving his BMW—and wondered what he had signed up for. He took his pupil down to a local high school field and ran him through his paces to make a baseline assessment.
“The first practice, we had a machine that pitched to him,” Ferroli said. “Out of thirty pitches he might have fouled off one of them. The machine was probably throwing seventy to seventy-five miles an hour, like a high school fastball. He was horrible in every way, shape, and form. He didn’t throw right, he had no conception of ground balls, bunts—he didn’t understand where the ball’s supposed to be bunted; he didn’t understand baserunning at all. At the plate, he had good hip rotation, he seemed to see the ball well, but he had no sense of timing.”
Before long, Ted cornered Ferroli and started grilling him: “How’s the kid doing? Is this a bunch of bullshit or what?” Ferroli would be as encouraging as he could. “I’d say, ‘He’s pretty good; he’s coming along.’ ”
Soon the first thirty days were up, and Ferroli settled in for an extended stay, into the new year—2002. Then John-Henry decided to buy a batting cage. He and Ferroli drove over to Orlando, where John-Henry bought a $75,000 cage, practically the most expensive one on the market. It consisted of a pitching machine placed behind a life-size screen featuring a virtual pitcher throwing toward the plate. The ball would come out of a hole in the screen where the pitcher’s hand was. The machine could throw fastballs at speeds up to the high nineties as well as curves, sliders, and other pitches. John-Henry had the cage installed amid a grove of trees in front of Ted’s house. He wanted it positioned near the window of his father’s bedroom so Ted could hear the rhythmic crack of the bat. A concrete path was built from the front of the house to the cage so that Ted could be wheeled out to watch his son flail away. Floodlights were installed for night sessions. Over the next several months the frail Williams would regularly emerge to check in on John-Henry’s quixotic quest and to offer commentary that ranged from encouraging to acerbic. “Keep your elbow in, and turn your wrists,” Ted would say. If John-Henry resisted his father’s suggestions in any way, or said he wanted to try something his way, Williams was dismissive: “Yeah, okay, do it your way. See if you hit .400.” But Ted would generally try to keep his remarks from sounding too harsh.
Soon the Kid looked forward to coming out to the cage each day. “That would be his reason to get up,” Claudia Williams said. “To get up out of bed, to get dressed, to get in the wheelchair—you’ve got to understand, that could take close to an hour to do. Then he’d go rolling out and just watch John-Henry.” The daily hitting sessions around the cage became prime entertainment not just for Ted but for the whole household and any guests who might be present.
“John-Henry made a great tape of him talking with Dad around that time, and he let me hear it,” Claudia added. “John-Henry said to Dad, ‘Do you think there’ll ever be another .400 hitter?’ Dad said, ‘Yeah, I think there will be. Probably our boy in Boston.’ I think he meant Nomar. Then there was a pause, and John-Henry goes, ‘Do you think I could?’ And Dad goes, ‘And you. And you. Yeah, you could, too.’ It’s just precious. Precious.”
To supplement Ferroli’s hitting tutorials, John-Henry decided he needed a conditioning and speed coach, someone who could teach him to be quicker, run faster, and develop better technique. He called another old friend, Steve Connolly, then sixty-two, who had an eclectic background: he’d played baseball and run track at San Jose State University, become a Marine, and made his mark professionally as a paparazzo, taking photos and digging for dirt on celebrities for various tabloids and movie magazines.*
“It became a circus at the house,” said Connolly, who moved in with Ted and established a training regimen for John-Henry, running him on golf courses, sand dunes, and high school fields to improve his speed. When Connolly first timed John-Henry in the sixty-yard dash, he ran it in 8.4 seconds. When he finished with him, in April of 2002, his time was 6.9, which was the average for major leaguers.5 John-Henry also ate well and lifted weights vigorously to build his strength.
Meanwhile, on the hitting front, Ferroli was noticing steady progress as well. He put John-Henry in a local semipro league, where the kid was hanging in there and getting the bat around regularly against pitchers throwing eighty to eighty-five miles per hour.
One day, Ferroli was throwing batting practice and beaned John-Henry. “I drilled him. I can’t believe he stood there and watched it hit him right in the head. He just didn’t th
ink that I would ever hit him. I didn’t mean to. I tried to throw him a high inside fastball, and it got away from me. I just kind of put it in his ear, and he stayed there and it hit him. Bam! He got up and looked at me, and I said, ‘Sorry. Part of the game.’ We got that out of the way.”
Ferroli would give Ted almost daily progress reports, and he told him about the beaning. “I hit your fuckin’ kid today,” Ferroli said. “It was like a deer when you put the headlights on him—he just stood there.” Ted shrugged it off as a rite of passage.
Sometimes Ted would summon Ferroli from his room down the hall to talk at three in the morning. Williams would be restless and couldn’t sleep. After talking about John-Henry for a bit, they’d talk baseball in general.
“He’d say, ‘What do you think of Greenberg?’ And we’d start talking about Hank Greenberg, the old Detroit slugger. And he’d start picking apart all sorts of old-time hitters. He’d say, ‘Who was the best push hitter of all time? And you better fuckin’ get it right.’ I’d say, ‘Cobb; I told you last year.’ ‘Jesus, you’re right. What did he hit?’ ‘.366.’ You know, it was fun.” And Ferroli learned some of Ted’s personal quirks: he used to iron his money so he could hand out crisp bills; he always put his shoes on before his pants. Ted also told Ferroli he’d never get married again.
“I don’t go 0 for 4,” he explained.
In the spring of 2002, John-Henry suddenly brought in a strength and conditioning coach from Colorado named Jim Warren. Warren had trained Barry Bonds, who was widely suspected of using steroids to inflate his record-setting home-run totals for the San Francisco Giants. He had hit seventy-three in 2001.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 95