The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (4 page)

And unlike many professional ballplayers—most of them, probably—Ted was embarrassed that he never went to college and had no formal education beyond high school. In 1991, on the fiftieth anniversary of his .406 year, Harvard University wanted to give him an honorary degree, but he turned it down, feeling that he would have been out of place among the intelligentsia in Harvard Yard.

“It’s too bad he didn’t get to go to college,” said Dave Sisler, a Red Sox pitcher in the late ’50s and the son of Hall of Famer George Sisler. “He was very, very smart. I went to Princeton, and was around some guys with big IQs. I bet if he took the test, he would have done very well.”
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Ted certainly was inquisitive. He bought a set of encyclopedias in middle age and couldn’t wait to delve into them. He liked verbal jousting and a good argument, which he would often start on a given subject—after marshaling his facts in advance, the better to sandbag his opponent.

But facts were only part of it.

Bob Costas, the television broadcaster, interviewed Ted several times and found him “curious about excellence. ‘How do you do what you do? Whatever it is you do, how do you do it?’ Curt Gowdy [the longtime Red Sox announcer] said he was the most capable man he ever knew. My [own] impression was if Ted was walking down the street and you said to him, ‘Over there is the best carpenter who ever lived,’ he’d have gone over and talked to the guy.”
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Williams would end up repeating some of his parents’ mistakes. He was repeatedly unfaithful and an absentee father himself. When Ted was introspective, he’d talk about his failures, according to Steve Brown. “He never talked about his accomplishments. He was humble. He looked at his failures very heavy. His biggest was as a father. He felt he’d never been a good father. He felt he had many areas to make up for.”

Added Manuel Herrera, one of Ted’s cousins: “Ted’s exact words to me were: ‘As a father, I struck out. I was for shit as a father. I was never there. I was always gone. I had my commitments. I just didn’t do the job.’ It was obscure to him. He didn’t know how to do it. I think Ted tried to compensate for being a lousy father by trying to help other kids.”
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Gino Lucero, a cousin on May Williams’s side of the family, said, “Ted was a great hero, and he was dysfunctional. When he was pissed, he was lethal. You had this anger thing that he courted, that he embraced. No matter how distasteful it was, he embraced it.

“He was a kid who wanted to fit in, and here’s his mom banging tambourines on a street corner and spreading the Gospel. Ted always gravitated to his friends’ fathers. Think about it. His dad had a photo business. His dad was never home. His dad was a drinker who showed no interest in Ted. How many men are screwed up because they were never validated by their fathers?”
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Manuel Herrera thought Ted hid his fears with anger: “We were driving back from LA once. I said, ‘Why were you so hard on the people in Boston?’ He says, ‘You know, I was afraid.’ ‘What were you afraid of?’ ‘I really don’t know what I was afraid of, but I didn’t want them to know I was poor, didn’t have a good home, didn’t have the intangibles. I didn’t want them to know my private life, so I backed them away with my anger. But despite all that they loved me.’ ”

The news of Williams’s passing hit hardest in Boston, where city flags were ordered flown at half-staff and talk radio began to give voice to a
sense of communal grieving and remembering. At the Ted Williams Tunnel, which runs under Boston Harbor and had been dedicated in 1995, condolences were posted on electronic message boards. Newspapers ran updated obituaries of Williams that had been filed years ago; some papers ran special commemorative sections. Wondrous archival footage of the Kid in his prime aired on cable channels and on newscasts across America.

President George W. Bush, the über–baseball fan who had once owned the Texas Rangers and whose father, President George H. W. Bush, revered Ted, said of Williams’s nearly five-year-long military service as a Marine Corps pilot in both World War II and Korea: “Ted gave baseball some of its best seasons—and he gave his own best seasons to his country.”

Bob Feller, who once had said that trying to get his blazing fastball by Williams was “like trying to get a sunbeam by a rooster,” called Ted “the greatest hitter I ever faced.” And Yogi Berra, the old Yankees catcher, who used to enjoy needling Williams and trying to distract him as he stood in the batter’s box waiting to hit, echoed Feller and scores of others in concluding that Ted “sacrificed his life and career for his country. But he became what he always wanted to be: the greatest hitter ever.”

At the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, events scheduled for the day Ted died were canceled. Officials placed a wreath under Ted’s plaque and flowers under his life-size statue, which stands next to Babe Ruth’s in the entrance to the museum. Around Major League Baseball, stadiums held moments of silence and lowered their flags. At Fenway Park in Boston that night, where the Red Sox were playing the Detroit Tigers, the grounds crew carved Ted’s number, 9, into the left-field grass. A lone bugler played taps at the base of the 9 as a Marine honor guard carried the flag. Both teams stood along the baselines in tribute, the Red Sox with black armbands on their right sleeves. A long-stemmed red rose was placed in the right-field bleachers on seat 21, row 37, section 42, where Ted had hit a massive 502-foot home run in 1946, crushing the straw hat of the man sitting in the seat.

Ty Cobb may have hit for a higher average, and Babe Ruth with more power, but nobody combined power and average the way Williams did. He was a pure hitter—not a fielder or a complete player—and never pretended or aspired to be anything else. “They don’t pay off on fielding,” as he once explained it.

Williams pioneered the use of a lighter bat—once considered heresy for sluggers—arguing that bat speed, not heft, was the key to power. Over the course of his entire career, Ted studied pitchers intently for their tendencies and quizzed hitters about what a pitcher threw to them in what situation. “Ted always said: ‘I don’t guess what they throw. I
figure
what they’re going to throw,’ ” said Tom Wright, a backup outfielder and pinch hitter for the Sox from 1948 to 1951.
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And his hitting credo was simple: get a good pitch to hit. Critics said he followed this rule to the extreme by refusing to chase a pitch that was even an inch off the strike zone, thereby hurting his team by having its best hitter often pass up an opportunity to drive a runner home. But Ted made the slippery-slope counterargument: that if he chased a pitch an inch from the plate, it would only encourage pitchers to throw two inches outside the zone, then three inches, and so on. History has vindicated Ted’s approach, and there is now broad acceptance of the value of reaching base, or having a high on-base percentage—a statistic that was not appreciated and barely even kept in Williams’s day.

His eyesight was exceptional, and his command of the strike zone so renowned that opponents often complained that the umpires effectively gave him four strikes. The umps loved Ted because he never showed them up by arguing a call. One oft-told story, perhaps apocryphal, has it that when a catcher beefed about a pitch that had been called a ball, the umpire told him: “Mr. Williams will let you know when your pitcher throws a strike.”

A small minority of Ted’s teammates was less charitable, and resented his aloof, individualist persona and his temper tantrums, but most liked and admired him enormously, even worshipped him. “You’re not going to like everybody or be liked by everybody,” said Ted Lepcio, a Red Sox infielder from 1952 to 1959. “Geniuses have their own intricacies, and maybe that best describes Ted. He had a hard time understanding why guys like me couldn’t hit better. I think he had a hard time relating to nonperfectionists.”
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Of Ted’s many nicknames, the Kid was his favorite, followed closely by Teddy Ballgame. Johnny Orlando, the longtime Sox clubhouse attendant, had first called Williams the Kid after he arrived at his first spring training in 1938. Never lacking in self-confidence when discussing his hitting prowess, Ted wouldn’t hesitate to use either nickname or to refer to himself in the third person.

“He was really in love with himself,” said Jimmy Piersall, the splendid
Red Sox outfielder who played from 1952 to 1958. “He’d be in that mirror talking, saying ‘Teddy Ballgame’; I think he kissed the mirror right in the clubhouse.”
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Asked by the writer Cleveland Amory following his .406 year in 1941 what he could possibly do for an encore, Ted was ready with his answer: “I wanna be an immortal,” he said.
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T
ed was always ashamed of his upbringing.

Ashamed of his mother, the Salvation Army devotee and fixture of Depression-era San Diego who seemed far more committed to her street mission than she was to raising her two sons.

Ashamed of his largely absent and indifferent father, who ran a cheesy downtown photo studio that catered to San Diego’s sailors and their floozies, and who had a fondness for the bottle.

Ashamed of his younger brother—a gun-toting petty miscreant always one step ahead of the law—who bitterly resented Ted’s fame and success.

This sense of shame manifested itself in a reluctance to talk about his family with friends, outsiders, and especially reporters—at least until he was much older and out of baseball.

But there was one aspect of his family life that Ted for many years decided to conceal outright. It was one of the most interesting parts of his background, an important element that did not emerge publicly until near the end of his life: the fact that he was half Mexican—on his mother’s side.

Based on Ted’s All-American appearance and his white-bread last name, this was an improbable revelation, but that did not stop Hispanic activists from claiming him as one of their own. Not long before he died, Williams became the first inductee into the fledgling Hispanic Heritage Baseball Museum Hall of Fame.

May Williams was the second of eight children born to Pablo Venzor and the former Natalia Hernandez, a native of Chihuahua, Mexico. Pablo, a mason, married Natalia in 1888. Natalia had a brother who
worked in the Mexican government, and the family, feeling vulnerable to Pancho Villa and the coming revolution, emigrated from Chihuahua to Santa Barbara, California, in 1907.

As immigrants often do in their effort to assimilate in a new country, some of the Venzors sought to play down their roots south of the border and claimed a Basque, or “Basco,” heritage with a strain variously said to have been French or Spanish. May’s younger sister Sarah Venzor Diaz, who died in 1999 at the age of ninety-four, went so far as to tell writer Bill Nowlin: “We have no Mexican heritage in our family. We are Basque.” And she suggested that attempts by writers to delve into Ted’s Mexican background were a slur against him.
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Yet genealogical research reveals that May’s Mexican roots extended back at least three generations—as far as records could be traced. No records on Pablo’s side could be found, but interviews with surviving Venzor family members reveal nothing to indicate that his lineage is not cemented in Mexico as well. The Venzors’ sensitivity probably reflected the fact that in Mexico, those with European or Anglo roots are often more socially esteemed than those with “indio,” or indigenous, roots. This tension was also evident in the next generation of Venzors—Ted’s cousins and May’s nieces and nephews.

“We were fruit pickers,” said Frank Venzor, son of May’s younger brother Paul, speaking of the extended family.

“My dad was no fruit picker,” replied Frank’s sister Carolyn Ortiz.

“The hell he wasn’t,” said Frank, who, in a private interview later, sarcastically offered the Venzor family line on their Mexican roots: “We’re not fruit pickers per se. We’re Basques. We don’t come from Mexico. We just happened to be passing through. My uncle Bruno would say, ‘I ain’t no Mexican! I’m a French Canadian!’ ”
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If those sentiments represented normal immigrant sensitivity to what the Venzors perceived as the garden-variety prejudice of the day, Ted thought he had much more at stake. Coming of age as a baseball player in the 1930s, he decided then to hide his Mexican heritage for fear that deeply ingrained prejudice in baseball would hurt his career. He maintained silence on the topic throughout his tenure with the Red Sox and beyond.

“Ted didn’t want anyone to know he was part Mexican,” said longtime friend Al Cassidy, the executor of Ted’s estate. “It concerned him. He was afraid they wouldn’t let him play. He’d say, ‘It was an entirely different time back then.’ ”
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In late 1939, after Ted’s sensational rookie season with the Red Sox, he returned home to San Diego for a visit, the conquering hero. But when a gaggle of his relatives on the Mexican side of the family gathered to meet him at the train station, Ted beat a hasty retreat after spotting the ragtag group from afar.

According to one of Ted’s relatives who was there, Williams took “one look at this big group of Mexicans, and he says, ‘Oh, my goodness, my career is down the drain if I’m seen with these people,’ and he walks away.”
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Carolyn Ortiz said that when she was about twelve, “Aunt May called and told us Ted was going to be coming through Santa Barbara and he’d stop for a visit. Well, you would have thought the pope was coming. My aunt Jeanne painted the house inside and out. They had us kids cleaning and making all kinds of preparations. But when the day came, he didn’t show up. He never even called. That’s the way he was.”
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Several years later, a host of Venzors traveled to Los Angeles to watch Ted and the Red Sox play an exhibition game against the Los Angeles Angels, then a Pacific Coast League team. When the Venzors hollered and waved at him from the stands, Ted made a motion to indicate that he would see them later, but he never did. “All the family went to root him on and he didn’t have the guts to come over and say hi to them,” said Ted’s cousin Rosalie Larson.
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Another cousin, Salvador Herrera, used to spar with Ted about denying his roots. “Ted was a Mexican,” Herrera said. “He was embarrassed to be a Mexican. He wanted to be an American, a gringo. I said, ‘You asshole, you’re a Mexican! Say you’re a Mexican and say the Mexicans are the best hitters in the world.’ I used to push his button. He laughed and he’d say, ‘I’m Basco.’ He wanted people to think he was Basque. But he was Mexican, just like me. He just laughed me off. He’d say, ‘Don’t tell nobody’ and hang up the phone.”
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Years after he retired, Ted did say in his book: “If I had my mother’s name, there is no doubt I would have run into problems in those days, the prejudices people had in Southern California.”
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In
My Turn at Bat,
published in 1969, he even misspelled his mother’s maiden name as “Venzer,” and devoted just one line to her heritage, saying she was “part Mexican and part French.” Herrera thought the misspelling was deliberate. “Venzer with an
e
, that’s the way Basque people spell it. Hispanics, it’s Venzor with an
o
.” Yet no reporter developed this theme or dug into his Mexican heritage until Nowlin explored some of the Venzor family
lineage in an article for the
Boston Globe Magazine
published in June of 2002, a month before Ted died.
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The Venzors were a colorful collection of cowboys, longshoremen, evangelicals, bricklayers, sandlot ballplayers, and truck drivers. And many of them had serious drinking problems.

The patriarch, Pablo Venzor, was a stonemason and a sheepherder. Occasionally he would also get work as an extra at Flying A Studios, a onetime Hollywood outpost in Santa Barbara, but he finally quit in a huff after being cast as a Mexican peon once too often. Pablo died in 1920 at the age of fifty-two.
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His widow, Natalia, never remarried and would outlive her husband by thirty-four years. Natalia chopped wood, rolled her own Bull Durham cigarettes, and never learned to speak or write English. She raised eight children (two others died in childbirth) and also watched over most of them as adults from the family’s Santa Barbara base at 1008 Chino Street. Son Bruno lived next door at 1006 Chino, son Paul was at 1002, youngest daughter, Jeanne, lived across the street, and daughter Mary lived several blocks away, at 1716 Chino.

The oldest of Natalia’s brood, born in 1889, was Pedro Venzor, known as Pete. A World War I veteran, Pete was a working cowboy at Santa Barbara’s Tecolote Ranch, whose owners would stage grand barbecues that attracted California political notables and Hollywood cowboys like Will Rogers, Gene Autry, and Tex Ritter. Several of Pete’s siblings worked stints at Tecolote at various times, and Ted visited the ranch as a boy.

Ted’s mother, May, was born next, on May 8, 1891, though there is confusion about her place of birth. On her 1913 marriage license, she wrote that she was a native of Mexico. But in 1918, on Ted’s birth certificate, she wrote that she was born in El Paso, Texas, though the city has no record of that. (On the 1920 US census she said her native language was Spanish.)

The next Venzor child, Mary, was born in Mexico in 1893, according to her marriage license. Thus it appears more likely that in 1891, the
Venzors were still in Mexico and that May was born there, too. In 1895, son Daniel arrived.

May and Mary were “inseparable,” according to Mary’s daughter Teresa Cordero Contreras, the youngest of twelve children, who said the sisters always stayed in close touch until Mary’s life ended tragically in 1943, when she and her daughter Annie were murdered by Annie’s husband, who then killed himself.
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Daniel was killed in World War I on November 11, 1918, the day the armistice was signed. This made Natalia a Gold Star Mother, and provided benefits that financed the purchase of her home at 1008 Chino in 1920.
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The Venzor sibling who had the greatest influence on Ted’s baseball development was Saul, born in 1903. He was a longshoreman and an accomplished ballplayer himself, a pitcher who managed the local semipro team, the Santa Barbara Merchants. Saul was about six foot five, with arms that dangled down to his knees and huge hands.

When May brought young Ted to Santa Barbara for visits, the boy would gravitate to his uncle Saul and pester him to play catch. Saul would turn these sessions into tough-love tutorials. The driveway at 1008 Chino was slanted; Saul would stand at the top and put Ted at the bottom, and challenge him to stand in there and see if he could hit any of the nineteen different pitches that Saul boasted he threw.

Saul would taunt and tease Ted, belittling his ability. “Ted picked his brain on how to throw a curve,” said Manuel Herrera, Salvador’s brother. “Saul wouldn’t let Ted pitch to him, told him he wasn’t mature enough yet.” Sometimes Ted would cry in frustration after the driveway sessions, wishing he were bigger and stronger.
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Natalia thought her son was being too harsh. “Grandma used to lean out the window and say, ‘Leave that kid alone,’ ” remembered Dee Allen, Saul’s daughter. “May would, too. My dad liked to do things and do them right. He would challenge Ted, to teach him.”
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Ted had seen Saul pitch in a sandlot game once and was duly impressed. Saul had gotten into a bases-loaded, no-outs jam. He then called time, walked over to the opposing team’s bench, and took bets that he would get out of the inning without that team scoring a run. Saul collected the bets, then went back out and retired the side without further damage. “Ted was there and saw this, and told the story at a family barbecue,” said David Allen, Dee’s husband.
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According to unconfirmed Venzor family lore, Saul also struck out Babe Ruth in 1935, after Ruth had retired and barnstormed through
Santa Barbara. “Saul did this while he was playing with a bunch of ragtag Mexicans,” said Salvador Herrera with some sense of awe.

Ted was closest to the next Venzor, Sarah, because she had come to San Diego and done yeoman duty helping to raise him as May worked the streets for the Salvation Army, and also because it was Sarah who would take care of May in her final days in Santa Barbara.

After Natalia, the Venzor matriarch, died, Sarah took over the main house at 1008 Chino, along with her husband, Arnold Diaz, a musician who had a mariachi band. Sarah became the backbone of the family and its chief caretaker. She would tend to her brothers when they went off on benders, and after her sister Mary and niece Annie were murdered, Sarah helped raise Annie’s son, Manuel Herrera, and his twin sister, Natalie.

For many years, Sarah served as Ted’s point of contact with the family. “Ted would say to Sarah, ‘I’m coming on such and such a date, and don’t you dare tell anyone that I’m there.’ He didn’t want to see any of the other relatives,” said Ruth Gonzalez, May’s first cousin.
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If Ted called for Sarah and someone else answered the phone, he couldn’t keep track of who was who. “Ted called one day out of the blue,” Dee Allen recalled. “ ‘Hello, this is Ted; who’s this?’ ‘This is Dee.’ ‘Who’s Dee?’ ‘I’m Saul’s daughter.’ He asked what Sarah needed. Whatever I felt needed to be done—a new roof, windows, a wooden fence—I got bids for all that stuff and sent them to his office. Ted was a hard person to get into. You could only get so close. He wouldn’t allow it.”

Ted also enjoyed his uncle Bruno Venzor because they both liked to fish. Bruno was an excitable, happy-go-lucky sort who had a stutter. He drove a cement truck and also played some baseball, but not as seriously as his brother Saul. Once, when Bruno was pitching, he kept laughing at the hitters, and an irritated Saul yanked him from the game. Bruno was active in the Elks club and liked to dress up in Western duds. Arnold Diaz called him the sheriff of Chino Street.
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