The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (111 page)

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.
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“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.
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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 think 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.

Ferroli and Connolly were surprised by the move and found Warren’s Bonds connection alarming. Soon enough, John-Henry was asking them what they thought of steroids. Both men, though they understood the allure of a shortcut for John-Henry, told him they strongly opposed the substances. “I just said, ‘If you’re going to cross that line, I’m out,’ ” Ferroli said.

Neither Ferroli nor Connolly thought John-Henry went on to take steroids, but they couldn’t rule out the possibility that he did. “If God came down and asked me, ‘Did John-Henry Williams take steroids?’ I would say no, but I can’t say for sure,” Ferroli said.

But Dom DiMaggio was suspicious: “He took all kinds of tablets and pills. God knows what he was taking. He had me feel his arm. It was like steel. He was a big guy.”

Two of the most important women in Ted’s life—two of his loves—came back to him toward the end: his second wife, Lee Howard, and Isabel Gilmore, the art teacher he had met in 1957, during spring training at Sarasota, and later proposed to. She’d turned him down because Ted’s offer came with a big condition: that she send her two sons off to boarding school.

Lee and Isabel had surfaced again in 1994, around the time of Ted’s big stroke. They had never stopped loving him, really, and reached out not to try to rekindle a romance but simply to reconnect in the way that any two people who care about each other deeply would want to do—especially since Williams was infirm and obviously in rapid decline. Dolores, Ted’s third wife, would make forays to Citrus Hills from Vermont and was a presence at the end, too, but her access was facilitated by her children, John-Henry and Claudia, both of whom still liked seeing their mother and father together. While Ted regarded Dolores as something of a wacky nuisance, he also felt affection and admiration for her. But he viewed Lee and Isabel differently—as two of his loves that could have been lifelong.

Lee had been visiting her friend Dotty Lindia in Citrus Hills, and one day they decided to drop in on Ted.

“We went to the door, and Ted answered, and he was surprised as he could be to see me,” Lee recalled. “We visited for quite a while that afternoon. He told me to stay in touch, to keep calling him, but to call collect. He didn’t want me to pay, and he had trouble dialing at that time unless he asked the guy that was taking care of him. So when I’d call I’d call collect, and it worked a few times, but then John-Henry started getting in on the act and refused to accept the charges.”

When they were able to talk on the phone, Lee noticed that Ted would speak louder than normal. “He wanted John-Henry to hear. He’d say, ‘I still love you and always will,’ and then he would repeat it even louder.”

Lee still loved Ted, too. “If he would have just been the way he was near the end, when he was sick, if he was like that all the time, it would have been perfect. I’ve said many times that I probably should have been a little more patient when he said he would change, and maybe I should have went back and tried it, but who knows if he would have changed?” But Ted was now part of a package deal—one that worried Lee, as it did so many others. “Ted’s big mistake when he got sick was giving John-Henry power of attorney,” she said. “One of the last times I talked to
him, he said, ‘I wish I had a lot of money to give to you.’ And I thought, ‘Why is he saying this?’ He paused and said, ‘But it’s all gone.’ So he had to know what John-Henry was doing.”
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Isabel had reappeared suddenly and attended the opening of Ted’s museum in 1994. Following Louise Kaufman’s death the previous year, and after John-Henry and Claudia had dispatched Lynette Siman, they had pondered how to get a woman involved with their father again. They considered Isabel but felt she wasn’t the right match. “She was very nice and sweet, but too soft for Dad,” Claudia said. “He’d talk of ‘dames and broads.’ Though he acted more the gentleman with her, I think they knew it wouldn’t work out.” But before long, Isabel, who was living in Alabama then, began driving over to see Ted once a month, and they would talk on the phone regularly. Williams would send her flowers on her birthday and on Valentine’s Day.

“He was in a pathetic condition at the end, with tubes and wires everyplace,” Isabel said. “He should have passed on when he was ready to, in peace. John-Henry kept him alive for financial reasons.”

When Isabel visited, she’d check into a local motel and stay for a few days. She’d go up to Ted’s house and sit with him. They’d have lunch, and sometimes John-Henry and Claudia would be there.

“Ted would always thank me for coming,” Isabel said. “He’d tell me what a dear friend I was. We’d reminisce. And he’d smile. He’d say, ‘I was so dumb not to have married you.’

“At the end, I called him every few days. He couldn’t talk, really, but he’d say a few words. ‘Thank you for calling and thank you for loving me.’ The nurse would hold the phone for him.”
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In January of 2002, John-Henry excitedly went to see
Vanilla Sky,
a new movie starring Tom Cruise in which cryonics plays a significant role. He knew the power of the arts, especially film, to shape public perception, and he was curious to see how Hollywood would treat the controversial practice to which he was now committed. He was also curious to see how the young woman he was taking to the movie would react.

Jenna Bernreuter was a twenty-nine-year-old critical-care nurse from Mississippi who was giving dialysis to Ted at night in his house. She had started in October of 2001, and she and John-Henry began dating in December, after which Jenna resigned her position because she felt she had a conflict of interest. Anita was shattered by John-Henry’s betrayal and returned to Massachusetts.