The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (87 page)

Ted grew frustrated that he couldn’t get through to some players on things that he thought should have been basic, like the need for a hitter to guess in certain situations. The players thought Williams didn’t understand that not everyone could be as good as he was. “Ted would talk about mental approach,” said Joe Camacho, the bench coach. He’d say, ‘If you’re in a count, you should be looking for a certain pitch. So you should be guessing properly. If you’re not, you’re hitting defensively.’ He would talk to them like that, but they’d say, ‘I’m not Ted Williams.’ ”
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Casey Cox remembered once sitting on the bench with Williams as Ken Harrelson of the Indians was coming back from an injury. Harrelson was struggling in batting practice, and Williams couldn’t understand why he couldn’t get right back in the groove. “Christ, I was gone five years, and it didn’t bother me,” Ted said.

“Yeah, but how many could do that?” asked Cox. “You’re Ted Williams.”

“It doesn’t make any difference.”

“Well, the fuck it doesn’t.”
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Ted knew his 1969 sheen was wearing thin. He was losing the confidence of a number of players and squabbling openly with some of them. Also, the writers were criticizing him on his handling of several phases of the game, such as platooning too much, burning out his bull pen, playing percentages too rigidly, not bunting enough, and not paying enough attention to fundamentals. Williams confided to Shelby Whitfield that he regretted not taking a front-office job that year and quitting managing while he was ahead.
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Ted had bonded with the broadcaster and began spending more and more time with him. They’d hit it off from the first time they met, after Williams took the job. Whitfield—who had worked for radio stations in the Southwest and been sports director for the Department of Defense’s Armed Forces Radio and Television Service—helped Ted get up to speed on the Senators players. Over the next two seasons, they sat together on the plane during road trips and often took meals together.

When the team traveled, Ted and Whitfield looked for ways to pass the time. Sometimes they’d go to gun shows or even art shows. “The art shows were a little out of character,” said Whitfield, who was seventeen years younger than Ted. “He’d look at the paper, or somebody would tell him about a show, and we’d go. He looked for places to get away. I never knew him to buy a piece, but he was always the center of attention, and he enjoyed that. He also valued his privacy, but I think deep down, if he did not have that recognition he was unhappy about it.”

Ted loved to talk politics with Whitfield and enjoyed making the uphill argument that Herbert Hoover was the greatest man of all time. “Not Lincoln, Washington, Alexander Graham Bell, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Attila the Hun,” Ted would say. “Not Jefferson, Wilson, Churchill, not even FDR, but Herbert, by God, Hoover. Every cure of the Depression was thought up by Hoover. Here is a man who is blamed for things that are not his fault, yet he never complained, and continued to help his country for the rest of his life. To me, that’s a real man.”
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After Hoover, Ted told Whitfield, the five other men he respected most were Nixon, General MacArthur, Tom Yawkey, Richard Cardinal Cushing—the Catholic archbishop of Boston in Williams’s day—and Marine general Louis B. Robertshaw, Ted’s commanding officer in Korea.

Williams would often vent to Whitfield about having been called back to Korea and being stuck at 521 career home runs. He would name each hitter who had more than five hundred and talk about what might have been. “He’d say, ‘If I hadn’t missed so many at bats, no one would have been close to me.’ Without the two wars, he meant, not just Korea. ‘If I’d been able to play those years, this guy and that guy and that guy wouldn’t be close to me.’ He was very ego-driven, but this was never something he would dare pop off to the media about.” Whitfield thought it interesting that Ted’s public image never reflected that career bitterness. He was seen as the fighter pilot hero, akin to a John Wayne stick figure. “That always surprised me, because it was not accurate. You’d think the media, hating him the way they did, would have picked up on it more.”

At home, Whitfield and his wife, Lora, would dine out with Ted and Dolores. Whitfield liked Dolores: “She was quite a gal,” he said, “a tall beauty, outspoken. I could tell that marriage was not long for this world. She had her own mind. And Williams was probably one of the worst people to be married to that you could imagine. He was the most profane guy I’ve ever met. His favorite adjective was ‘syphilitic.’ As in,
‘syphilitic Jesus,’ this and that. I thought he drew the worst connotation he could think of.”
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And despite his restrictions on his players, on the road, Williams, while discreet, had a voracious sexual appetite, Whitfield said: “Besides hitting a baseball, fishing, eating, and fucking were Ted’s favorite things to do—not necessarily in that order. A pretty girl always turned his head. When we walked together in cities or in airports, he would always say, ‘Look at that, look at that! I’d screw her in a minute, wouldn’t you?’ That was frequent dialogue.” Unpacking her husband’s suitcase after a road trip, Dolores would tell Lora Whitfield that she’d found lipstick on his shorts or a package of condoms. When jousting with Ted during dinners with the Whitfields, Dolores threatened to write a sequel to his book. She would call it
My Turn at Bat Was No Ball
.
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“She repeated that quite a bit. She was flirtatious. We had a good relationship. She’d confide in me about how difficult life with Ted was. She’d say, ‘How do you put up with him when he’s on the road?’ ”

As the 1970 season drew to a close, Whitfield told Ted and Dolores that he was having more and more difficulty with Bob Short. He said the owner expected him to “learn to lie” on the air in the interest of promoting the team. To boost attendance at home games, he would have to predict good weather even if the forecast called for driving rain. He couldn’t mention the number of men the Senators left on base after an inning lest it reflect poorly on the club’s hitters. He couldn’t mention the size of a crowd unless it was more than twenty-five thousand. And he couldn’t talk about losing streaks or poor player performance. Short also expected Whitfield to give back to the club any money he made from speaking engagements.
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“When it looked like Short was getting rid of me, Dolores, who was always a rebel anyway, said, ‘Why don’t you write a book?’ ” Whitfield remembered. When Short did fire him at the end of the year, he went ahead and wrote a kiss-and-tell memoir of his years with the Senators,
Kiss It Good-Bye,
that was filled with behind-the-scenes detail and included two chapters on his relationship with Williams. Whitfield dedicated the book, published in 1973, to his wife—and to Dolores, whom he credited with suggesting that he write it.

Whitfield spent a lot of time in the clubhouse observing the dynamics of Ted’s relationships with the players, and he found the differences between the first year and the second year to be stark. He thought Williams plainly got bored and that the players grew to dislike him—especially toward the end of the 1970 season, which spiraled out of
control with the loss of fourteen straight games. The team finished last in the American League East. After their 70–92 season, Williams suggested that more than half the team should take stock of themselves and perhaps look for another line of work before returning the following year.
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Over Ted’s objections, Short then pulled the trigger on a major trade. He sent the starting left side of his infield—shortstop Eddie Brinkman and third baseman Aurelio Rodriguez—as well as starting pitcher Joe Coleman and reliever Jim Hannan to the Detroit Tigers for troubled pitcher Denny McLain and three other players.

McLain had made history in 1968 by winning thirty-one games for the Tigers, along with the MVP and the Cy Young Award. Then in 1969, he’d won another Cy Young by posting a 24–9 record. But in 1970, McLain tumbled to 3–5, and he was suspended three times: first by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn for gambling violations, then by the Tigers for throwing a bucket of water at some writers, then again by Kuhn for carrying a gun on a plane. Apart from the behavioral issues, McLain, though still only twenty-seven, was having serious arm problems and was taking cortisone injections in secret so that he could keep pitching. Still, Short was thrilled. “McLain is the greatest pitcher in baseball,” he proclaimed. “This is my trade.”
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Williams, in highly unusual public remarks distancing himself from his owner, made his position clear. “This is not my trade,” he said. “It looks now that he gave up more than he should.… I’m really disappointed to have our two best infielders leave our club.”
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When spring training for the 1971 season started at Pompano Beach, Dolores learned she was pregnant. Ted was not happy to receive this news, because he and his wife had been fighting frequently and were on the skids. The prospect of a third child was so troubling to Williams that, to make sure there would not be a fourth, he decided to have a vasectomy.
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Dolores confirmed that her pregnancy was “unplanned,” and that Ted was unhappy about it. She left for Vermont, and for the baseball season they were effectively separated.

On October 8, in Brattleboro, Dolores gave birth to a girl, whom she named Claudia, after her friend and New York agent, Claudia Franck. (The agent inspired young Claudia’s middle name as well: Franc.) Ted was absent for the birth again, making him three for three in that department. “He came around after he was finished with his fishing,” Dolores remembered.

By this time, Dolores was considering her options. “It was getting rough with Ted,” she said. “I had been to see a lawyer, and the lawyer advised me to hang in there as long as possible.”
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On one occasion during his first year as manager, Williams had humiliated his wife publicly when she joined the team for a road trip to Minnesota. After the game, as the team bus was preparing to go to Bob Short’s house for a party, Dolores was talking to a few people, apparently unaware the bus was waiting for her. “We’ll get going as soon as this fuckin’ cunt gets on the bus!” Williams said, loud enough for all to hear. Dolores boarded, and there was awkward silence during the trip. Russ White, the beat reporter for the
Washington Daily News,
later told Dolores: “I really felt sorry for you back there. There was no need for that.”

“He’ll get his,” Dolores replied.
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Once, during a private argument in Washington, Dolores said, Ted had punched her in the jaw. “It hurt to open my mouth,” she recalled, “and I figured the next time he tries that, I was going to do like the Aborigines do in Australia. I was going to grab him with my teeth around his throat and not let go.” That next time wasn’t too long in coming, but this time Ted “checked his swing. He didn’t slug me that time—the second time. His cheeks started jumping, his veins were bursting. I thought, ‘This time I’m ready. I’m ready.’ I must have just looked wild in my eyes. I was going to just launch for him, just put my teeth right on his throat and hang on for dear life. He didn’t do it. He checked his swing and brought it back.”
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The arrival of Denny McLain changed the dynamic of the 1971 Senators substantially and further eroded Williams’s influence. Ted couldn’t stand McLain, and the pitcher couldn’t stand him.

McLain was a free-spirited prima donna who chafed under authority, played the organ, and sang at Las Vegas lounges. He made a dramatic arrival at Pompano Beach in his own plane, and before long he was taking his new teammates on joyrides over to the Bahamas. Williams viewed him as an over-the-hill troublemaker. McLain was predisposed to dislike Ted after reading that his new manager had stressed that this was Bob Short’s trade, not his own. McLain said that he was further turned off by his first meeting with Ted when Williams did a variation of his pitchers-are-stupid shtick: “What’s dumber than one fucking pitcher? I’ll tell you what. It’s two of you dumb fucking pitchers.”
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When McLain said he liked to pitch every fourth day, Williams replied he preferred that his pitchers be on a five-day rotation. “All I
could say in response was that I had won 117 games and lost only 62 in the major leagues before I came under the guidance of one of the game’s great hitting experts,” McLain wrote in his 1975 memoir,
Nobody’s Perfect,
in which he savaged Williams.

After an early losing streak, Ted called a practice one morning when the team was scheduled to play that night. The players were angry, and McLain led a minirevolt in which they went to the practice on their own, not on the team bus. When the bus left the hotel for the field, it carried only Ted and his coaches. “Williams was seething,” McLain said. “For a couple of days, he went around like a wild ship captain looking for the culprit who stole his strawberries. Ted wanted to know who organized the bus boycott.”

One of McLain’s next capers was to flout Ted’s no-golf rule. He pulled together three other players who liked to golf, and they called themselves the Touring Pros. They hit the links as a foursome every day on the road. “Our baseball was so pitiful, the golf couldn’t hurt it,” McLain said. The Touring Pros also thumbed their noses at the $1,000 fine their manager had imposed. “Williams never got a dime from me, or from anyone else in the foursome, as far as I know,” McLain added.

Another time, Ted, who generally sent coach Sid Hudson out to the mound when he wanted to remove a pitcher, instructed Hudson to go out and yank McLain. McLain told Hudson: “If that fat fucker wants me out, you tell him to come take me out.” So Williams, steaming, came out to the mound, and when he got close, McLain flipped him the ball and headed to the clubhouse.

“I’d never seen Ted so mad,” said infielder Dave Nelson, who witnessed the scene. “I could hear the veins in his neck pumping, and I was on the field, not in the dugout.”
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