The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (84 page)

In the second series, at Baltimore, Washington won the first game but lost the next three by a combined score of 20–0, prompting Short to panic and call a meeting with Ted and his coaches. Short was furious at the way things were going, but Williams was more furious with the owner’s attitude. The two started screaming at each other, and Williams cussed Short out.

“I ought to fire you!” Short exclaimed.

“I’ll quit first!” Ted screamed back.

There was an awkward silence, then Short asked if the coaches had any thoughts. Wayne Terwilliger offered a face-saving way out for both men, saying he thought the Orioles were the best team in baseball. They were going to win a lot of games that year, and some of them inevitably would come against the Senators. Williams walked out of the room and slammed the door as hard as he could.
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On his return to Yankee Stadium on April 15, Ted got the loudest ovation,
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and in Boston, of course, the goodwill tour continued in earnest. More than a hundred writers, broadcasters, and photographers were waiting outside the visitors’ dugout at Fenway Park for Ted, and when he poked his head outside, he received his first standing O of the day. The second came when he walked his lineup card out to home plate before the game started. Then the 28,972 stood again and cheered, but this being Boston, Ted did not tip his cap.

The Senators won the game, 9–3, and afterward, one of Williams’s more controversial policies came in for a vigorous debate. He had reinstituted his rule—originally started when he and Dom DiMaggio pressured Red Sox management decades earlier—barring reporters from entering the clubhouse for fifteen minutes after a game to give his players a “cooling-off” period. Dick Young, the
New York Daily News
columnist who was president of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America at the time, had written Williams a letter of protest, which Ted had ignored. Now Young was banging on the clubhouse door, yelling at
Ted to open up.
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Williams screamed back at Young that he could go fuck himself.

When the doors were finally opened, Young walked right up to Ted. “What’s this, after a 9–3 victory?” he asked.

“What’s what?” replied Williams.

“Making these men wait. It’s not dignified.”

“Oh, you’re going to make a project out of that?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing’s going to be done about it.”
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Bob Short was in the clubhouse, watching this scene unfold with amusement. The Washington writers had also groused about the policy, but Short, though sensitive to the need for good press, was not about to cross his manager on something that was obviously important to him. The Senators players loved the fifteen-minute ban, and it helped establish Williams in their eyes as a players’ manager. Even President Nixon, who of course had spent his career jousting with reporters, weighed in on the issue—in support of Williams. That helped Ted finesse the mild pressure he was receiving from Bowie Kuhn, who, after receiving a copy of Young’s protest, had written Short and Williams asking if anything could be done about the situation.

“Neither Kuhn, Nixon, or Jesus Fucking Christ could change this goddamn ban!” Ted gloated to Shelby Whitfield, the radio and TV broadcaster for the Senators, adding he’d resign before relenting.
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If the Senators played poorly, Williams didn’t hesitate to let them know. Once, after an especially sloppy performance, he locked the clubhouse door and let them have it. “Gentlemen,” he said, “that was the worst exhibition of baseball I have ever witnessed. I’m afraid we’re going to have to start over at the beginning.” He reached for a ball and said, “Now this, gentlemen, is a baseball.”

At that moment, Frank Howard raised his hand from the back of the room to interrupt. “Uh, Skip,” he said, “would you mind taking that a little slower?” Everyone laughed, and the tension was broken.
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But tension remained. Williams was consistently annoyed because his hitters often couldn’t remember what kind of pitch they’d faced against a given pitcher—either when they struck out or got a hit. (Williams claimed to recall the key details of all of his 521 home runs.) He was not always shy about making his bewilderment known.
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Still, by July 1, Williams had the Senators just over .500 at 40–39. In Washington, accustomed to decades of losing badly, this was enough to have the writers give Ted rave reviews in their midyear assessments of
the club. “Stop the clock, right now, and baseball’s manager of the year, no dispute permitted, is Theodore S. Williams,” wrote Shirley Povich, lead sports columnist for the
Washington Post.
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Povich noted that Williams had improved virtually all the players’ batting averages, commanded their respect, had them hustling, and was making strategic moves with the self-assurance of a polished veteran manager rather than the rookie he was.

Forgotten now, it seemed, were the preseason concerns about Ted’s churlish, mercurial personality and his reputation as an impatient loner. Even with the fifteen-minute rule, he had won the writers over with his witty charm. He was proving to be a hands-on leader who didn’t hesitate to trot onto the field and argue a call with an umpire, something he hardly ever did as a player. Once, he even had an assistant call the press box to lobby for a scoring change on behalf of one of his starters. He said he was finding that the hardest part of managing was knowing when to take a pitcher out: if anything, he was tending toward an early hook rather than leaving someone in until he was gassed and prone to being shelled. But otherwise, he seemed confident and expert. Asked at midseason how he was enjoying managing, Ted replied, “Well, a lot of it’s fun. A lot of it’s horseshit. When it gets to be more than fifty percent horseshit, I’ll quit.” Ted said the percentage was currently about fifty-fifty.
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Ted got another burst of publicity at midseason with the publication of his autobiography,
My Turn at Bat.
He promoted and signed the book for fans zealously, both at home and on the road. By now, Williams was even getting more attention than that other new coach in town: Vince Lombardi. Life was good.

In his relationships with the players, Ted was helped significantly during his first season by his iconic status. He leveraged the awe he received from virtually all his charges to maximum effect. The players relished merely being in his orbit, so they strove to learn from the Great Man and please him.

“I remember the pedestal that Ted was put on,” said Dick Billings, an infielder on the 1969 team who was later converted to a catcher. “It was an unbelievable feeling to be around him, not just for me but for everyone. He was so dynamic and animated about everything. It didn’t matter if he was talking about hitting, fishing, cameras, or whatever. That first year, when he walked in a room, everything just stopped.”
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Billings and the others had never heard the sorts of stories about hitting that they heard from Ted. Recalled Billings, “He’d say that when he
was playing, in the early innings, he’d try to hit the top half of the baseball for singles and doubles. Then from the seventh inning on, he tried to hit the bottom of the ball for home runs. We’re all looking around at each other like, ‘Yeah, right.’ But he was adamant about it.”

If that was a bit of esoterica, another was Ted’s continued infatuation with Bernoulli’s principle, so whenever he was bored, Ted delighted in gathering a group of players, especially the pitchers, since this was their department, and asking them if anyone could tell him what made a curveball curve. “They’d answer, ‘Well, it has to do with the spin and the grip,’ ” Billings recalled, chuckling. “Ted would scream, ‘I’m not talking about that blankety-blank crap. I’m talking about the physics of it.’ No one knew.”

Bernoulli’s principle was also central to a friendship Williams forged that first year with a most unlikely species: a sportswriter. Dave Burgin, then thirty, wrote a column and was sports editor of the
Washington Daily News,
a now-defunct, Scripps-owned afternoon tabloid.

Burgin had been sitting in the dugout at Pompano Beach during spring training with about thirty other writers, talking with Ted. Williams was saying that he’d asked one of his pitchers, Notre Dame graduate Jim Hannan, what made a curveball curve. He said, “Even the fuckin’ college boy didn’t know the answer.” Ted wondered if any of the writers did.

Burgin had been raised in Dayton, Ohio, home of the Wright brothers, and if you grew up there, chances were you might know something about aerodynamics. “It’s differential pressure,” Burgin piped up meekly.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, I don’t believe it!” Ted bellowed. “A sportswriter knows that?”

Then one night at the bar in the hotel where the players and writers were staying, Ted had spotted Burgin sitting with his wife, a dark-haired beauty, and had come over to introduce himself, teasing the writer about how he could have landed such a girl. Not long afterward, Ted was driving back to Pompano from Palm Beach after an exhibition game, going about ninety miles an hour in his Cadillac, when Burgin screamed by him in his Porsche Targa, going well over a hundred. Williams tried to catch him, to no avail, and when Burgin arrived first at the hotel, Ted came over to him and said, “Goddamn! What is that thing?”

Burgin’s car, his wife, and his knowledge of Bernoulli’s principle had marked him as an intriguing character in Williams’s eyes. During the Senators’ first homestand, Burgin got a phone call. “This is Teddy Ballgame,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “What are you doing
for dinner tonight?” Of course, Burgin could have had a dozen different plans and would have canceled them all immediately. “It was like that all summer long,” Burgin said. “He’d always call me. We must have had dinner twenty times.”

Williams never specified if any of the sessions were off the record, though Burgin considered them so and never burned his new friend. He only told his wife and a few others about the dinners he was having with Ted and the friendship they were developing—never his staff at the
Daily News.
He took no notes at each session they had, nor did he ever write about the experience. “I kept it private. First of all, I did not think anyone would believe it. I kind of thought he wanted something, but that wasn’t the case at all. He just liked me, and here’s a guy that’s supposed to hate sportswriters.” Ted was not reticent in the least, either. “He loved to argue. He was right-wing, but he didn’t know right-wing. If you said he was a right-winger, he didn’t know what you were talking about. It was just, ‘America’s great, dammit.’ He was an optimist.” Burgin was especially interested in hearing about Ted’s service in Korea, but they also talked about newspapers, managing, and women. Recalled Burgin, “I wanted to know all about being a pilot in Korea. He told me a hundred stories about what it was like doing that. I really enjoyed it. He did it with gesticulations and sound effects. He’d grab the stick and
rat-a-tat-tat
the machine guns. He was in the jet and they were supposed to cross the Yalu River. He’s saying, ‘I’m going across and I see a convoy of trucks crossing a bridge. I see it’s gooks. They don’t see me till the last second. I put five trucks on fire.’ He said, ‘I betcha I killed a hundred gooks. Worthless commie cocksuckers.’ ”
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As they met over the course of the season, Burgin got the impression that Williams felt managing the Senators was becoming a chore. He was frustrated with the level of talent but liked what he’d done with it. He took pleasure in teaching people how to hit, but he made it clear he wasn’t going to last too long. And after initially being enamored with Bob Short, Ted was souring on him.

They discussed the concept of team chemistry, and Williams said he thought it was “bullshit,” Burgin recalled. “He thought team chemistry was playing your heart out. Didn’t mean you had to love the guy playing first base. Team chemistry was winning.”

A fundamental psychological point about Williams, Burgin thought,
was that he always seemed angry. “He reminded me of the grandfather or father who tells his kids, ‘You don’t know how tough life can be. I had to walk to school three miles in the snow.’ Something was bugging him. It ran deep, and I have no idea what it was, and I never asked him.”

Burgin—who later would become editor of the
Orlando Sentinel,
the
San Francisco Examiner,
the
Dallas Times Herald,
and the
Houston Post
—said he remained dazzled by what seemed in hindsight like the fleeting moments he had with Williams that summer of 1969. “Other than the Babe himself, is there another ballplayer more likely to tongue-tie a kid from my generation?”
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Dolores had thought Ted becoming a manager was a good idea. She knew her husband was basically bored with the Sears job and that helping the Red Sox with spring training and assorted other chores, along with going fishing, wasn’t challenging enough. Baseball was what he knew best, and as a manager, he could make a contribution and have a real impact. “I said he should take the job,” she remembered. “He wasn’t going to take it.”

Of course, Dolores didn’t have a clue about baseball and had never even attended a game before. She liked the idea of learning about it, but soon found that Ted had no interest in teaching her any of the fine points. And while part of Williams’s motive for taking the job was surely to get back in the limelight, Dolores, already uncomfortable in the role of celebrity wife, soon became even more distressed by the concomitant effects of fame as she watched the spotlight shine brighter and brighter on her husband.

Once, she went to a game only to find a beautiful girl sitting in one of her seats. “I wondered, ‘Who is she? How come she’s in my seat?’ But I didn’t introduce myself to her and ask her to leave. Maybe that could have been Lee Howard or someone. I don’t know. I let it go. I didn’t want to look for a confrontation. If someone didn’t want me, that’s fine. Let me go my way.”