The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (58 page)

Increasingly, the sudden drops in altitude necessitated by combat flying maneuvers, coupled with the cold, damp weather, were causing Ted serious health problems. He was hospitalized with pneumonia for three weeks aboard a Navy hospital ship off Pohang. After returning to K3, his head was all plugged up, he couldn’t hear the radio, and flying was painful. He wrote his friend Bill Churchman in Philadelphia that he was nearly totally deaf in one ear. Churchman told the press, which prompted a flurry of stories.

Further testing revealed that his eustachian tube, connecting his middle ear to his throat, was inflamed and would require more specialized treatment than was available in Korea. So the Marine Corps decided to cut its losses with Ted Williams after he had flown thirty-nine missions. He would be mustered back home to the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland and eventually released.

On June 28, as he was packing his bags to go home, Williams gave an inflammatory interview to the International News Service in which he made public the sentiments he had expressed privately to several officers: the Americans were holding back in Korea and not fighting to win. “The United States ought to be ashamed of itself the way this thing is going on out here,” Ted said. He described Korea as the “forgotten war” to all but the families of the men fighting and those close to them. He wondered why the United States kept its forces at the 38th parallel and the atom bomb went unused, asking rhetorically, “Do you think we are trying? We’re not trying one-tenth of what we could.” Finally, asked about his baseball future, Williams said it depended on “how the Red Sox feel about it and how I feel about it.”

After stops in Tokyo and Honolulu, Ted landed at Naval Air Station Moffett Field, outside San Francisco, on July 9, along with thirty other Korean War veterans. Navy and Marine Corps commanders had arranged a full-dress press conference for Williams with writers, photographers, and TV, radio, and newsreel reporters all waiting. Several hundred sailors had also assembled to watch in the wings.

Ted said he didn’t expect to return to the Red Sox that year but would be ready for the following year. He joked that his ear problems might help with those hecklers in left field. He said the only time he had swung a bat while he was away was when he and Lloyd Merriman of the Reds had given a baseball clinic—in a rough field, equipped with only twelve balls—on orders of the commanding officer. Ted said he was struck by how important baseball was to the enlisted men in Korea, and that they had hounded him for news of their teams because he received the
Sporting
News
regularly. He was able to keep up on daily scores and games through shortwave radio broadcasts.

Ted heaped praise on the men he’d served with, saying he’d never met a better bunch, and adding cryptically: “I only wish I fitted in better into their ways and feelings.” Asked to elaborate on his blast against US war policy in Korea, Williams wisely begged off, saying, “I was in a bad mood that day.” On reflection, he’d likely realized (or had been counseled by agent Fred Corcoran) that his off-the-cuff ruminations, those of a line officer, on the weightiest of national security issues—whether to deploy the atomic bomb—had come off as ill-considered, to say the least.

Before leaving for further tests on his ear at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, Williams was told that Ford Frick, the commissioner of baseball, was on the phone for him. Could he come to the All-Star Game in Cincinnati on the fourteenth and throw out the first ball? Frick wanted to know. Certainly he could, Ted replied.
⁵⁸

Then Corcoran called from New York, telling Ted he should start thinking about returning to baseball
this
season, not next. “There’s still two months left in the season,” Corcoran said. “Everybody wants you back.”

“Hell, Fred,” Williams replied. “It’s the middle of July. The Red Sox aren’t going anywhere. I’m not ready to play baseball. Mr. Yawkey says I can do what I feel like doing. I feel like fishing.”

“You’re not a fisherman, you’re a ballplayer.”

“You’ve never seen me handle a fly rod. I’m the best there is.”

“I’m serious, Ted. You’ve got to get started. It’ll be the best thing in the world for you. Work yourself in gradually, then be ready for a full season next year. Listen, baseball is your
business.
”
⁵⁹

That got Ted’s attention. Baseball was, in fact, his business, and he needed to tend to it again. Of course he would have to be released from the Marine Corps first, following a ten-day evaluation in Bethesda, but that was looking more and more like a formality. Having taken him out of baseball for more than a year in a questionable calculation, the Corps was plainly getting ready to face reality and spring him.

Ted’s appearance in Cincinnati for the All-Star Game, where he was greeted like a returning messiah and stole the show, only made him more eager to return to baseball soon.

He had checked into Bethesda, then arrived in Cincinnati with
Corcoran on the overnight train. Tom Yawkey had a car waiting to bring Williams to a private breakfast meeting with him and Joe Cronin. Both told Ted they wanted him to play as soon as he felt ready. Appearing in the stands at Yawkey and Cronin’s box, he was engulfed by autograph hounds and brought batting practice to a standstill. When Ted’s name was announced before the game, the 30,846 fans gave him an ovation of several minutes’ duration, and then he tossed out the first ball, a crisp strike to Roy Campanella. Ted, dressed in civvies (dark brown slacks, light brown blazer, and an open flyaway collar), was cheered again as he made his way to the American League dugout, where Frick had decreed he could watch the game. Ted delighted in greeting some of his teammates, such as George Kell and Billy Goodman, as well as old rivals like Bob Lemon of the Indians and Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, and Allie Reynolds of the Yankees. Casey Stengel welcomed Williams back warmly and thanked him for his service to the country.

About playing again, Ted said it was possible the Marines might release him in a few weeks, in which case he’d like to return to the Red Sox that year. “I do not hear as well as I used to,” he said. “As a flier, I am of no use to the Marines. A lot of fellows flying jets have the same kind of ailment.” He said that his eyesight was still twenty-fifteen; that it would take him about a month to get into playing shape; that he was sure he could hit but unsure about the other aspects of the game. Yawkey, when asked about Ted’s return to baseball, said he was just happy that the Kid had returned alive.
⁶⁰

On July 27, after more than three years, the so-called “police action” in Korea ended with the signing of an armistice agreement. The next day, Ted was formally discharged at a morning ceremony at the Marine barracks at the Naval Gun Factory in Washington. As he handed Williams his official papers, Colonel K. G. Chappel, commandant of the barracks, said, “I’m sure that what you have done will be an inspiration to thousands of young men who have left their careers and families in order to help their country in these trying times.” Then, smiling broadly, Chappel added: “I guess now your home will be Fenway Park.” Williams, wearing his Marine uniform for the last time, thanked the colonel and said he was headed to Boston right then.
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He promptly drove to New York and spent the night at Fred Corcoran’s apartment, then pulled into Fenway late in the morning of July 29.

The Red Sox were playing the White Sox that afternoon. Ted avoided the players’ parking lot, where hundreds of fans had arrived early to greet
him, and burst into Tom Yawkey’s office unannounced. Interviewing the owner at that very moment was George Sullivan, the former Red Sox batboy who had once cleaned up the dead pigeons Ted shot.

Sullivan by then was a student at Boston University and a stringer for the
Traveler.
He’d written a flattering profile of Yawkey the previous winter and sent the owner a clipping down at his plantation in South Carolina. Yawkey wrote Sullivan a thank-you note—“best story ever written about me”—along with an invitation to come by his office the following summer to see him.

“A few days before,” remembered Sullivan, “I saw Ted was due back in Boston from Korea. That morning I called the secretary and I said, ‘I see Ted’s due back, and I understand if Mr. Yawkey wants to reschedule.’ She checked with Yawkey, and he said, ‘Let’s go ahead.’ So I was in with him, and all of a sudden Ted comes busting in like John Wayne.

“They get caught up a little, then finally Yawkey says to Ted, ‘Why don’t you go down and hit a couple?’ Ted says, ‘No, I haven’t hit for a year.’ They go back and forth like that for a minute or so, and Ted finally agreed to go down to the batting cage. A lot of times Ted wanted you to outlast him and talk you into something. I made a beeline for the batting cage because I wanted a box seat for this.

“This is the scene I remember most about Ted. It was long before the game. Ushers were there and concessions kids. I don’t think they’d opened the gates yet. Some of the players were out playing catch.

“All of a sudden Ted comes striding out in those long, loping strides, and there’s a roar from the concessionaires and even the ballplayers. They used to have a wonderful batting-practice pitcher—Paul Schreiber. He was in there. Everyone is clapping.

“Ted hit a couple of line drives. Then he hit one out, next to the bull pen. This is the first time he’s hit since coming back from Korea. Schreiber threw another. Ted hit it out. Then a third that went way out. Schreiber was following the flight of the ball. ‘Never mind watching,’ Ted screams at him. ‘Throw the fuckin’ ball!’

“He must have hit about twelve out. Then I noticed that blood was coming through his clenched fingers. His skin was tender. Finally, after, like, the thirteenth one, he just went back to the dugout.

“It was the greatest display I ever saw.”
⁶²

The Kid was back.

T
o keep hitting while the blisters simmered on his still-soft hands, Williams began wearing golf gloves, a habit that other players later picked up and that would eventually lead to the use of batting gloves by most hitters today. He quickly signed a contract for the remainder of 1953 and the entire 1954 season, announcing that he would work out twice a day, aiming to begin pinch-hitting in ten days and to return to the starting lineup in three weeks. He was eager to play but didn’t want to disrupt a team that, while still in third place and nine and a half games out, had won eighteen of its last twenty-four. So he decided to take batting practice alone some of the time to minimize distractions.

But of course Williams couldn’t help making his presence felt, and the dynamic around the team changed immediately, as if the carnival were back in town. Taking batting practice one day, Ted caused a stir by announcing that home plate was out of line by a hair. Joe Cronin happened to be in the vicinity, and he responded that they had, in fact, reset home plate recently. Cronin thought Ted was crazy, but to humor his star with the renowned eye, he agreed to bring in a surveyor. Sure enough, the point of the plate was off-kilter by an inch.

They brought in extra clubhouse kids to tend to Ted as he got in shape—to shag flies in batting practice and to generally be his gophers. Two of them were the Murphy brothers—John and Tom—sons of Johnny Murphy, the former Yankees pitcher who had joined the Red Sox front office in 1948 as farm director.

Tom was nineteen that summer, John just twelve. They couldn’t wait to finish their chores on the field and get into the clubhouse so they could listen to Ted hold court. Topic A for Williams was still Korea.

“We’d be usually sitting in the trainer’s room,” John remembered. “Ted would be getting a massage, telling stories about Korea—Truman sticking him in the war, the vendetta Williams felt Truman had against professional ballplayers. He had a deep-seated hatred for the government for fucking up his career. ‘They didn’t know what they were doing. Nobody told us about the antiaircraft fire in some fuckin’ valley. The reconnaissance was pathetic. They were putting lives at risk unnecessarily. They never warned us.’ These were angry, derisive outbursts, but terribly funny, too. He was a great raconteur. Me and my brother, the clubhouse boys and batboys, we were enthralled all the time. Players would wander in and out.”
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Ted made his pinch-hitting debut on August 6, popping up to first in the ninth inning of a ten-inning 8–7 loss to the Browns before just 6,792 fans. But the small crowd nonetheless roared appreciatively, both as Ted was introduced and as he made his way back to the dugout. Leo Monahan of the
Record
called the innocuous pop-up the biggest news of the week in the American League.

Williams’s next appearance, three days later, in a game against the Indians, was more auspicious. Sent up by Lou Boudreau as a pinch hitter against Mike Garcia with one on and two outs in the seventh, Ted drilled a 3–1 fastball 420 feet into the center-field bleachers, sending the crowd of 26,966 into a frenzy.

Boudreau called it “the greatest ovation I’ve ever witnessed on a ball field.” The dugout was a mob scene as all his teammates pounded Ted with gusto and glee. Harold Kaese of the
Globe
ranked the homer as Williams’s third best, behind the 1941 All-Star blast and the farewell shot before he left for Korea. Ted downplayed the crowd reaction, telling the writers: “I’m working on a new theory this year: I’m not going to take too much for granted when things are going good, and I’m not going to get down in the dumps when they’re bad.”
²

Williams decided he was ready to make his first start on August 16, in the second game of a doubleheader against Washington at Fenway. He doubled and homered in three at bats, leaving after five innings with tired legs and the Red Sox one run down. His replacement, Hoot Evers, was booed.

With their star and main gate draw safely in the fold again, the Red Sox were eager to stage a welcome-home-Ted event of some kind, but Williams rejected the idea. He just wanted to get back in shape and down to business. Yet when someone suggested a $100-per-plate banquet to raise money for the Jimmy Fund, the Boston charity to benefit cancer research, Ted agreed.

The Jimmy Fund had become the official charity of the Red Sox earlier that year. (The team’s sponsorship replaced that of the Boston Braves, who had succumbed to declining attendance and moved to Milwaukee.) Williams had already spent countless hours on behalf of the Jimmy Fund and at various hospitals around Boston, visiting sick children and bringing them good cheer. In fact, he was always on call, especially for patients with leukemia, which in those days was nearly always fatal. Without exception, the visits came with the same string attached: there could be no publicity. Williams’s compassion was genuine, and if his visits were hyped in the press he worried that it could look self-serving.

But sometimes word of these appearances would leak out, and in the run-up to the dinner, writers like Harold Kaese of the
Globe
and Austen Lake of the
American
detailed some of Ted’s acts of kindness. Kaese, concluding that Williams preferred the company of children to adults, told the story of a mechanic who was surprised to find that Ted had paid his child’s hospital bill after taking a liking to the boy. The mechanic admitted he used to be among those who would “ride Williams just for the fun of it” at Fenway.
³
Lake wrote that Ted gave away thousands of dollars every year, “often to insignificant people,” and said that when he visited sick kids, he would come laden with gifts, including TV sets and autographed baseballs.
⁴

The dinner was set for August 17 at Boston’s Hotel Statler. A motorcade of forty cars left Fenway Park at 5:00 p.m., with Ted in the twenty-fourth car. He was preceded by Commissioner Ford Frick, American League president Will Harridge, Tom Yawkey, and Braves owner Lou Perini, as well as television’s Ed Sullivan, singer-entertainer Morton Downey, and actress Elaine Stewart. The rest of the Red Sox players followed Williams.
⁵

Some one thousand people attended the dinner, which was televised live locally. A total of $150,000 was raised, including $50,000 from the Kennedy family, a check for which was presented by twenty-one-year-old Ted Kennedy, then still nine years away from being elected to replace his brother John as a US senator from Massachusetts. In a short speech, which he wrote himself, Williams declared, “All the bullets and all the bombs that explode all over the world won’t leave the impact—when all is said and done—of a dollar bill dropped in the Jimmy Fund pot by a warm heart and a willing hand.”
⁶
Williams wore a tie at the beginning of the festivities, but he took it off during dinner and was later photographed with the tie dangling from his pocket.

The Red Sox finished a distant fourth in 1953, sixteen games behind the Yankees, but the summer had been redeemed by Ted’s return. He hit
.407 in 91 at bats, with 13 home runs and 34 RBIs. His on-base percentage was .509, his slugging percentage an astonishing .901. Yogi Berra of the Yankees remarked in September that Ted “don’t look like he used to. He looks better.”
⁷
And one writer, Jerry Nason of the
Globe,
concluded that Ted’s superlative performance after returning from the battlefield had made a mockery of spring training.
⁸

Korea was a watershed for Williams, both in terms of how he viewed baseball and how he came to assess his own life.

“When I returned late in ’53, [the Red Sox] were no longer a factor,” Ted would write late in his life. “For the rest of my career we always finished back in the pack. Baseball was never as much fun for me after Korea as it had been before.”
⁹

That summer of 1953, in a reflective, as-told-to piece for the
American Weekly,
the now-defunct Hearst Sunday supplement magazine, Williams made clear he’d been seared by the Korean experience. “It was good to be home again, back in a ballpark, but I wonder if anyone ever leaves Korea, even when you’re thousands of miles away from its filth and mud, and its nauseating stench no longer fills your nostrils,” he said.
¹⁰
“The forgotten men who have stood or fallen there come home with you in spirit, I believe. And all the unanswered questions and confusion of this strange conflict—the war that is not a war—continue to haunt you, and you wonder if there is a solution at all. I’m not bitter. Any guy who has been in combat knows that bitterness vanishes quickly when you gamble with death—and win.”

Yet he
was
bitter. The bitterness came in his rants to the clubhouse kids, in his plaintive, private talks with friends and teammates about what his total numbers might have been, and in the public explosions to come in the 1956 Johnny Podres affair and the New Orleans airport meltdown of 1957.

Still, in time, Williams would come to realize that the positives of being called back—taking his medicine, sacrificing career goals to serve his country, and surviving a spectacular crash landing—outweighed the negatives of time missed, the lost at bats, and the lost chances to set records. Korea was an undeniable plus, as it gave him heroic legitimacy. So gradually, that bitterness evolved into an ambivalence about his military service and finally into a sense of great pride and accomplishment. Fortunately for Williams, his quiet efforts to avoid being recalled and the unappealing bitterness he later expressed publicly would be largely forgotten or ignored.

Ted spent most of the off-season in the Florida Keys. Since the end of World War II, he had gravitated to Islamorada, a village in the Upper Keys about seventy-five miles from Miami, just down from Key Largo.

He’d come at first to fish with Jimmie Albright, a saltwater fly-fishing pioneer and legendary Islamorada guide who schooled Williams in the ways of bonefish and tarpon. It was Albright with whom he’d been fishing two years earlier, when word came that he’d been recalled for Korea.
^*

Now, in the fall and winter of 1953 and early 1954, Ted was back in Islamorada, still a disciple of Albright and, more recently, of Jack Brothers, a Brooklyn transplant who was quickly becoming a formidable, though friendly, competitor of Albright’s. Brothers concentrated on bonefish.

Williams was alone on the island; Doris was up in Miami. They were now effectively separated. But although they hadn’t functioned as a married couple for years, Ted was in no hurry to get a divorce. There was still a stigma associated with that, which he wanted to avoid. And of course there was the couple’s daughter, Bobby-Jo, now six. A divorce couldn’t be good for her, either, he thought.

But Doris had decided she’d had enough of Ted. So on January 19, she filed a formal separation petition in a Miami court that accused her husband of beating her and making her life “an intolerable burden and physical impossibility.” The petition cited six years of marriage “in which he mistreated and abused” her and used “language that was profane, abusive, and obscene… swearing at her both in private and public.” Doris further asserted that Williams hit, beat, and struck her, even though she had done all she could to be a “kind and dutiful and loving” wife. She asked for “reasonable sums” of money for support, the use of their Miami home and Ted’s Cadillac, as well as custody of Bobby-Jo. A hearing was set for February 19.

Today, of course, such allegations of physical abuse would have ignited a multimedia maelstrom, but the press of 1954, especially the baseball writers, gave Ted a pass on the issue. Within days, they were back to speculating on how many spring training games Lou Boudreau would let Ted sit out. And the public seemed to care even less about his marital problems. On February 6, eighteen thousand adoring fans turned out for
Ted’s annual fishing and casting exhibition at the sportsmen’s show in Boston and mobbed him with autograph requests.

Doris’s filing did have the effect of outing Evelyn Turner. Gossip maven Walter Winchell revealed her romance with Williams on his February 7 radio show and speculated that the couple would soon be married; then the wires picked up the story. Evelyn professed shock at the reports. “Ted’s a real wonderful fellow and we’ve been friends for a long time—but strictly friends,” she was quoted as saying. “After all, he’s still married.”

Asked many years later whether she knew if her father had ever struck her mother, Bobby-Jo said she had been assured by her grandmother—Doris’s mother, Ruby Soule—that he had. Ruby told her it had happened in Boston in late 1947, when Doris was about seven months pregnant with Bobby-Jo. There had been an argument, some pushing, and Doris had fallen down the stairs, though it was unclear if Ted actually intended to push his wife down the stairs.

Ruby had flown in from Minnesota to be with her daughter after the stairs episode. Doris “had a big bruise on the side of her stomach, and a bruise on one side of the arm, big bruise,” Bobby-Jo said. “Grandma said it was black.”
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