The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (79 page)

Williams spoke for a bit longer, about Stengel and about his own hope to stay involved in baseball. When he was done, the crowd rose to its feet and gave Ted a long, loud ovation. The six-minute speech, which Williams read from the handwritten text he’d composed on the Oneonta hotel stationery, had been delivered flawlessly, with grace, humility, poise, and humor.

There had been only one hiccup. After Commissioner Eckert introduced Ted and handed him his plaque, a fan sitting in the first few rows called out to Williams, “What would Dave Egan think of this?” Ted, standing about five feet behind the microphone as he waited for the applause to subside, then scowled, put his head down, and muttered a remark about Egan, his onetime nemesis, who had died in 1958.

Tim Horgan, the
Traveler
columnist, was sitting about twenty rows back and was quite sure he heard Williams say: “Fuck Dave Egan.” Henry McKenna, Horgan’s colleague from the
Traveler
’s sister paper, the morning
Boston Herald,
thought he heard the same thing.

Horgan, recalling the incident years later, said two Red Sox officials, Neil Mahoney and Ed Kenney, who worked with Mahoney in
minor-league operations, spun around immediately to see if any of the writers had heard what Ted said. He also noticed others in the crowd whispering about it. “That gave me more confidence about the thing because I wasn’t the only one who heard it,” Horgan said.

He filed his column for the afternoon paper without mentioning Ted’s remark about Egan, but he told his editor about it, and the editor decided that the obscenity should be the lead of Horgan’s piece and proceeded to write the first four paragraphs himself.

“Red Sox slugger Ted Williams, apparently unawed by the solemnity of his elevation [to] baseball’s Hall of Fame, cast a vulgar tone on today’s ceremonies by making an obscene response to a heckler which left a majority of the crowd of over 10,000 stunned,” the first paragraph read.
¹¹
That was a clear overstatement, since only a fraction of the crowd sitting near the front had heard the remark, and the person who had called out to Ted about Egan was an admirer, not a heckler. McKenna’s ten-paragraph account of the incident the next morning in the
Herald
added some detail the
Traveler
did not include, such as characterizing Ted’s quote as “- - - - Dave Egan,” so the reader could easily figure out which offending four-letter word had been involved. He concluded that “the profanity detracted from a noble day.”
^12
*

No other newspaper reported on the incident, and in his book, Williams denied that he had cursed out Egan. After the fan called out asking what Egan would have thought, “I made a face and said, ‘Yeah, that Egan’ and mumbled under my breath, carrying the joke out,” Ted wrote. “It was one of the few times in my memory when I
didn’t
use a few choice words to describe Egan. I was in too good a mood to let his memory spoil my day.”
¹³

Tom Yawkey thought that the
Herald
and
Traveler
had unconscionably sullied Ted’s fete and was outraged. Though the
Herald
had written about the episode in more detail and more extensively, Yawkey focused his ire on Horgan and the
Traveler,
perhaps because the evening paper had come out first and thus began stirring the pot. Three or four days later, Horgan was at Fenway and received word that Yawkey would like to see him in his office. Horgan went up. Yawkey was sitting behind his desk, and to his right sat two Red Sox executives, Haywood Sullivan and Dick O’Connell. Fifteen or twenty feet away were a chair and a tape recorder.

“It looked like the electric chair,” Horgan said. “Yawkey asked me to sit down and play the tape. It was a tape of Ted’s speech. I played it several times, but I couldn’t pick up exactly what he said about Egan.”

Then Yawkey leaped out of his chair and began screaming and cursing at Horgan, saying he had maligned Ted and ruined his grand occasion. Horgan let him vent, then walked over to O’Connell and Sullivan, both of whom he knew better than the owner, and said, “I don’t care who this guy is. If he keeps talking to me that way I’m gonna punch him.” O’Connell and Sullivan smirked.

Finally Yawkey calmed down and said to Horgan, “Ted wanted to handle this, but I said I would.”

“What do you want?” Horgan asked.

“I want a page-one retraction.”

Horgan turned to leave, and as he did, Yawkey reminded him that the
Herald-Traveler
corporation owned WHDH radio, which broadcast the Sox games and made the newspapers a lot of money. The inference was clear: he might give the broadcast rights to another station. “If you give us the retraction, you’ll never hear from me or Ted again,” Yawkey said. “I promise you.”

Back at the paper, Horgan told his editors what had happened, and they quickly folded. “They realized the awkward position the paper was in,” Horgan said. “So they said to go ahead and write the correction. I had no recourse if I wanted to keep my job. I wrote the correction myself over my byline. From that day on, Yawkey and I were pals.”
¹⁴

Under the headline
ANOTHER LOOK AT TED’S TALK
, Horgan wrote: “Nobody likes to eat crow, but this time I don’t mind. This time it’s better that I, rather than Ted Williams, be wrong.”
¹⁵
He said he’d thought Williams had made a vulgar remark, but after hearing the tape, he’d concluded that Ted had said “Let Dave Egan…” with the rest of what he said muffled in background noise. He had to fall on his sword. The
Herald
followed the next day with its own front-page mea culpa, headlined
TED WILLIAMS, WE APOLOGIZE
.
¹⁶

Though little remarked upon at the time, the most significant section of Williams’s acceptance speech was his totally unexpected and surprising call for the Hall of Fame to induct the Negro League greats, who had been deemed ineligible because they didn’t have the requisite ten years of major-league experience. This, of course, was a catch-22 restriction, since the color line had barred them from playing in the first place.

Ted’s remarks amounted to a bold and courageous political statement.
Most ballplayers are inherently apolitical. Williams, the iconoclast, was opinionated and willing to speak his mind when asked, but he certainly wasn’t in the habit of calling for fundamental policy changes in baseball. And while his brand of Republican conservatism didn’t seem consistent with a call to break down racial barriers, he was a strong believer in the egalitarian, democratic ideal. He might have hidden his own ethnicity from the public, but growing up as part of a Mexican-American extended family, he had witnessed discrimination firsthand. In addition, Williams had a basic sense of fairness. He’d heard about the exploits of Negro League old-timers since he was a kid, and at age fourteen he had gone to see Satchel Paige pitch, marveling at how hard he could throw. He’d competed against black players in high school, including Jackie Robinson in the 1936 tournament in Pomona. And while he was in the Pacific Coast League, and at least once in the majors, Ted had faced barnstorming Negro League players, including Buck O’Neil, who would go on to become a pioneering coach and scout in the major leagues and work in the commissioner’s office. Williams, O’Neil recalled, always treated black players as equals.

Though Williams’s statement at the Hall of Fame certainly caught the baseball establishment and most everyone else off guard, his actions and statements about black players and civil rights generally—both during his career and in the six years before his induction—actually foreshadowed it. When Robinson broke the color line with the Dodgers, Williams had sent him a letter of congratulations. When Larry Doby integrated the American League the following year, Ted had befriended Doby, going out of his way to make him feel welcome and frequently offering him batting tips. When Doby and his black Cleveland Indians teammate Luke Easter came to visit Ted in the hospital in 1950 after he broke his elbow, and were initially not allowed in to see him, Williams had insisted they be sent up to his room.

He’d touted black players to the
Saturday Evening Post
in 1954, declaring, “These fellows are not only great players but also a credit to the game.” In 1957, Ted had met with Robinson in Boston when Jackie was visiting as part of an NAACP tour, and Robinson said he considered Williams “a fine person.”
¹⁷
When the Red Sox finally integrated in 1959, with Pumpsie Green, Williams had taken the lead in welcoming Green, making sure to set an example by playing catch with him in front of the dugout during warm-ups before each game.

In 1963, at the beginning of his retirement, Ted, writing in his syndicated column, had called for network executives to televise more basketball and thereby showcase black players. Noting the rioting in Birmingham,
Alabama, earlier that year, an outgrowth of the civil rights movement, Williams wrote, “There should be room to show the world… there is another side to our country. Sports do not ask what a man’s color is.”
¹⁸
A few years later, after learning that a young black pitcher for the Kansas City A’s, Johnny “Blue Moon” Odom, couldn’t get a room at the team’s hotel in Florida, Williams went to the front desk and quickly forced his accommodation.
¹⁹

On a private hunting trip around the same time with his longtime friend Joe Davis, a Florida businessman, Williams made it clear what kind of talk he would and would not tolerate. “There were some boys from Georgia with us, telling stories about taking the doors off of black families’ homes if they couldn’t pay the rent,” Davis recalled. “Ted got up and wouldn’t listen to their talk. He didn’t think it was funny.”
²⁰

And there was Williams’s sense of honor and the generosity that followed. Theodore Roosevelt Radcliffe had once managed a black All-Star team that played against Ted’s San Diego Padres in the Pacific Coast League. Years later, Williams, the major-league star, encountered Radcliffe and asked him, out of the blue, “Are you broke, Ted?” Radcliffe didn’t answer directly, but Williams knew that, as Radcliffe put it, “We didn’t make much money in the old Negro Leagues.” Williams took a photograph of Radcliffe and paid him $900 for the privilege.
²¹
Williams could be abusive, nasty, and narcissistic, but when he encountered the unlucky—be they those denied a chance because of racism or children denied a chance because of disease—he followed his heart.

Curt Gowdy, the longtime radio and TV voice of the Red Sox, said he considered Williams to be one of the most honest and fair men he’d ever met. “That’s one thing I admired about him—that he was really open. And he said to me, ‘You watch for that day that the major league players will be fifty percent black.’ ” When Gowdy asked why he thought that, Williams replied in the politically incorrect vernacular of the day: “Well, they’ll go play in the minors for a hundred bucks a month and work their way up, get out of their element. Their bodies are stronger, they walk everywhere, they lift. They’re great athletes.”
²²

Ted’s prediction that the major leagues would be half black proved way off the mark. The number of black players would peak in 1975 at 27 percent and has been in steady decline since, hitting 8 percent as of 2012.
²³
Still, Williams’s speech—along with the 1970 publication of Robert Peterson’s pioneering history of the Negro Leagues,
Only the Ball Was White
—forced baseball to reassess its exclusion of the old black stars from Cooperstown. Bowie Kuhn, who in 1969 had succeeded William Eckert
as baseball commissioner, admired Williams and considered him the greatest personality in baseball.
²⁴
At first, Kuhn proposed only to give special recognition to the Negro League greats, not full membership in the Hall of Fame, since none of the players satisfied the requirement of ten years of service in the big leagues. It was a clumsy move akin to invoking a separate-but-equal doctrine, and there was strong backlash from the press, fans, and some leading black players, most notably Jackie Robinson himself. “If it’s a special kind of thing, it’s not worth a hill of beans,” Robinson said. “It’s a lot of baloney. It’s the same goddamned thing all over again. If it were me under those conditions, I’d prefer not to be in it. They deserve the opportunity to be in it but not as black players in a special category.… Rules have been changed before. You can change rules like you change laws. If the law’s unjust…”
²⁵

Kuhn and the Hall relented. A special committee was appointed to select Negro Leaguers it deemed worthy of full Hall of Fame membership, and on July 7, 1971, the committee announced its first inductee: Satchel Paige. Paige would be followed later by Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Monte Irvin, James “Cool Papa” Bell, Oscar Charleston, Martin Dihigo, William “Judy” Johnson, and John Henry “Pop” Lloyd. More former Negro League players would be enshrined in subsequent years.

Two days after the Paige announcement, Williams was honored in Washington by historically black Howard University for his role in opening up the Hall of Fame. “I’ve been thankful for baseball,” Ted told the crowd, which included Buck Leonard, the former slugging first baseman for the Homestead Grays, and track great Jesse Owens. “It’s what I’ve done best. It’s what I know. But a chill goes up my back to know I might have been denied this had I been born black. I think it’s time we realized that these great players were not just great black players, they were great players period. They should rightfully be enshrined next to the Musials, Alexanders, Cobbs and Ruths.”
²⁶
That statement brought a standing ovation from the crowd.

Former Negro League stars also praised Williams for giving their ranks a key boost. Monte Irvin, a standout outfielder with the Newark Eagles before signing with the New York Giants in 1949, and who two years later sparked that team to its historic comeback pennant win over the Dodgers, was the fourth player admitted to the Hall of Fame after Paige, Gibson, and Leonard. Irvin credited Ted’s statement for his induction: “There are eleven men from the old Negro Leagues who are now in the Hall of Fame due to the fact that Ted spoke out, and when Ted speaks, people listen, and so everyone was very grateful that he made that
statement.”
²⁷
Added Buck O’Neil, who was there the day Ted entered the Hall, “He really got the ball rolling.… We all knew it needed saying by someone like him. Regardless of how much we black ballplayers were saying it, it didn’t mean much. He said it because it’s the way he felt.”