The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (91 page)

Soon, John-Henry was spending almost every weekend with Ferd and his wife, Mary, at their home near Portsmouth, more than a hundred miles away. Ferd thought John-Henry had a lot of energy and a short attention span. He was Hollywood handsome, slender with dark hair, and growing like a weed. In the ninth grade, he had been five foot ten; a year and a half later, he was six two; and by his senior year, he would be six five, more than an inch taller than his father.
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He was not a good writer, and so they would practice on a subject he was familiar with, perhaps something in his past or baseball trivia. Most of all, Ferd was struck by how lonely John-Henry seemed. It was hard to tell why, but he had no friends. So Ferd and Mary became his friends. He called Ferd “Dear Buddy” and Mary “Mrs. Old Buddy.”

Getting to know John-Henry, Ferd talked of his own early years as a baseball fan, how he was drawn to Ted, what Williams had been like in his prime, and what he had meant to him. On his wedding day, Ferd had said to Mary, “Honey, you know what? Ted Williams hit three home runs today.” Ted loved that story, and so did John-Henry.

The Ensingers came to regard John-Henry as an adopted son, giving him love and affection. “I like to think we represented a source of elder counsel, mature counsel,” Ferd said. “We had a background of communicating with young people from strength and maturity, and I think John-Henry found that rewarding, satisfying, and comforting.”
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And it worked: after much time working with Ferd, John-Henry applied for early admission at Bates College, in Maine, and was accepted. That
Christmas in Islamorada, Claudia remembered, John-Henry wrapped his acceptance letter from Bates in a green velvet envelope with a red velvet rope and gave it to his father as a present. Ted was delighted, and Claudia snapped a photograph of him holding up the letter in triumph.

When he arrived at Bates in September, John-Henry went to see varsity baseball coach Chick Leahey. Leahey had contacted John-Henry’s coach at Vermont Academy and received what he termed “a modest evaluation” of the young man’s baseball skills. Leahey said there would be a two-week tryout period indoors in the early spring, followed by a cut.

Before the season rolled around, Ted came for a visit, and John-Henry asked Leahey if he could set up the batting cage in the field house so his father could watch him hit and give him some tips.

Leahey agreed, more than curious to see Teddy Ballgame himself expound on the art of hitting.

“So at three o’clock Sunday afternoon they came in, and Ted barged into my office and said, ‘What’s it all about here? What kinda things do you do?’ ” Leahey recalled, chuckling. “So I talked about the baseball program, reminded him that I had a cut day but everybody had an opportunity for two weeks of daily practice and then the hammer came down, and he understood that. He had such an image, you were taken aback by this guy.”

Leahey set up the pitching machine and watched John-Henry hit. Ted was standing outside the netted area and watched as his son put on an indifferent performance. Leahey wondered what Ted would say, but he offered only neutral, measured comments, like “Keep your head in there”; “Don’t lunge”; “Let the ball come to you.” After about a half hour, Ted told John-Henry to wrap it up, take a shower, and meet him in the coach’s office.

Williams, taking over, then quizzed Leahey about the hitting technique he taught. “Now, what’s this about the top-hand thing you’re trying to sell to these kids?” he asked.

“If you’re right-handed, your right hand is doing two to three times the amount of work as your left hand, picking up things, opening doors, et cetera, so your left hand is passive while your right hand does the work,” Leahey said.

“That wouldn’t have done much for me. I was a left-handed hitter and I was a right-handed person.” Ted threw that out, as if to say, answer that one.

Leahey paused for a moment and said: “I have no problem figuring that out, because there’s only one Ted Williams.” It was a nice answer. He wasn’t going to get into the weeds of a discussion on batting with the last of the .400 hitters. Ted laughed, John-Henry appeared, and they said good-bye.

When the tryouts were held, John-Henry didn’t make the cut.
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The Ensingers came to visit John-Henry at Bates. Ferd suggested they go to a basketball game, but John-Henry seemed uninterested. Indeed, he didn’t seem to know anyone and didn’t introduce them to any other students. “I was just shocked that John-Henry wasn’t more involved,” Ferd said. “He was still pretty much a loner. And at the end of that first year, his grades suffered badly. I think he was on probation.” Soon afterward John-Henry called Ferd to say that he was transferring to the University of Maine.

Ted had felt things slipping away for his son at Bates. In the fall of 1986, he’d asked Sam Tamposi and Al Cassidy to meet John-Henry in Boston for lunch during the World Series, when the Red Sox were playing the New York Mets. Williams wanted his two successful business friends to preach the importance of college to the boy and give him a pep talk. But neither man had been to college, and they didn’t deliver the pitch with enough verve, much to Ted’s dismay.

Before John-Henry moved on to the University of Maine, Ted thought he needed the discipline of a job to help him focus and get serious about his education. So he went back to Tamposi for help, along with his daughter Betty, who had a leading role in the Tamposi Company real estate development firm, based in Nashua, New Hampshire. Sam said the boy could live with him at his home and Betty, who was helping manage the development of a five-hundred-unit residential complex, would create a job for him. It was the spring of 1987 when Ted came to Nashua to discuss John-Henry with the Tamposis. He had his dog with him, a Dalmatian named Slugger—the same name as his previous dog. Louise’s grandchildren had given him the pet as a Christmas present. Ted groused at the time that the last thing he needed in his life now was a dog, but he had quickly come to love the animal.

Betty took Ted on a boat ride along the Nashua River. It was a sunny day, and she wanted him to see how beautifully it had been cleaned up after being contaminated by textile mills and a cannery. The river used to be covered with a fluorescent green coating. Now you could fish in it.

“We came back, and in the car driving back to my office, Ted had Slugger in the back,” Betty remembered. “He started to get upset about
John-Henry, and I was asking him what was going right and what wasn’t going right. He said he wasn’t taking his education seriously, just being cavalier about everything, he wasn’t able to stick with anything, he was all over the map, and he needed to get focused. He was getting angry talking about it, and out of nowhere he turned around and he punched Slugger.

“I said, ‘Why did you hit the dog?’ and he didn’t answer me, he just sat there fuming, but that was an indication to me that he had real demons, real problems containing his anger, his hostility. I was just in my early thirties. It was difficult to figure out how to handle both Ted and John-Henry.”

Betty found the younger Williams charming. So she decided to have him meet and greet prospective customers at the development they were building. He could also give them an overview of the project and perhaps help determine if the buyers were qualified. But it was hard for John-Henry to keep a regular schedule. Some days he didn’t show up at all; other days he’d breeze in late. Then, after the first month, Betty got the phone bill for the sales and marketing department, and it was thousands of dollars higher than it should have been. John-Henry had been making personal calls all over the country, and she made him pay the money back by docking his salary.

When shortly thereafter the Tamposi partners were coming in to inspect the project, Betty chose John-Henry to greet and attend to them. But on the appointed day he was nowhere to be found, and Betty was forced to make do by herself. Finally, as they were finishing up their tour, they came upon John-Henry lying on a chaise lounge and sunbathing with some friends as hot dogs and hamburgers sizzled on the grill.

His entitled behavior continued. At Fenway Park, he would saunter into the owner’s box uninvited, often with an entourage. Once, Betty heard Tom Yawkey’s wife, Jean, say to him: “John-Henry Williams, all you’re doing is using your father’s name to get a passport into these places. You don’t have any reason to be here, you’re not allowed to be here because you’re not an owner, and I don’t want to see you in this box again.”

In 1988, during the American League Championship Series, when the Red Sox were playing the Oakland Athletics, John-Henry, lacking a ticket, assumed he could work his connections at the Fenway gate to get in. He left his car directly in front of the main entrance on Yawkey Way with the red hazard lights flashing and called Betty, who was inside with her father, sitting in an owner’s box.

“It was a mob scene pregame, and everybody was just walking around the car with the hazards on. I knew he was trying to get into the park and he didn’t have tickets. So I said to him, ‘John-Henry, listen, you can’t just park on Yawkey Way, on the sidewalks, nobody does that,’ and he was laughing and said, ‘Come on, lighten up, it was fun.’ ” Then John-Henry decided to go over Betty’s head and call her father to appeal for help in getting into the game. “I was standing with my father, he picked up, and it was John-Henry, and he said, ‘Mr. Tamposi, no one will let me into the park. My usual people won’t let me in.’ ” He added that Dom DiMaggio and his wife were also outside and having difficulty getting into the park for some reason. Sam Tamposi went downstairs and waved the DiMaggios in, but not John-Henry.

“What was endearing about him is he really wanted to do good, the intention was there, but it was heartbreaking to watch when he started to unravel, to a trajectory where bad things were going to happen,” Betty concluded.

By now, John-Henry was questioning why he needed to be in college at all. Recalled Betty, “He’d say, ‘I don’t understand why I can’t just start developing. I want to make money.’ So we had discussions about money. It was just important to him, a way of accomplishing things. He saw the money as an end in and of itself. John-Henry could be extraordinarily thoughtful. He had a depth and richness to the way he thought about things, and he really did have charisma. He was beyond his years in some ways, but John-Henry’s dictum was ‘Anything goes as long as you don’t get caught.’ ”
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One positive for Williams about John-Henry going to the University of Maine was that its principal campus, in Orono, was just north of Bangor, so Ted’s old friend Bud Leavitt could keep an eye on the boy. Also, the baseball coach at Maine, John Winkin, was a pal who had been an instructor at Ted’s camp in Lakeville, Massachusetts. Winkin had spent twenty years as the baseball coach and athletic director at nearby Colby College and had come to Orono in 1975. Ted had called Winkin and asked him to facilitate John-Henry’s transfer to Maine.

Not that he had any reasonable chance of playing varsity baseball at Maine. After all, he had not made his team at Bates, a Division III program; Maine was in Division I and had gone to the College World Series in Omaha six times since Winkin arrived.

Winkin said he had talked to the Bates coach about John-Henry, so he knew what sort of player he was. Winkin had also talked to Sam
Tamposi. “Sam and I exchanged views about John-Henry, and he told me that he had difficulty getting him to really work, that he was kind of a lazy kid,” Winkin recalled.

There were two baseball diamonds at Maine. At the first practice, Winkin’s policy was to have the returning lettermen go on the varsity field and the new players report to the freshman field. John-Henry showed up carrying several of his own bats and walked over to the varsity field. Recalled Winkin, “I said, ‘John-Henry, you go where the new guys go,’ and I guess he was upset about that, and he left the field. I got a call from Ted that night, and I explained it to Ted, and he said, ‘Oh, well, that’s the way it should be.’

“So John-Henry came back the next day, and he said, ‘Did Dad call you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ I think he thought his dad had made it possible for him to go to the regulars’ field. I said, ‘No, you’ve got to go with the guys who are starting out fresh,’ and he was disappointed. He decided not to come out for baseball. I think he was looking for special treatment. To be honest with you, he was a difficult kid to deal with. He was hard to trust.”
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John-Henry never told Ted that he had walked out. One day, Ted called Jim Vinick, a longtime friend of his from Springfield, Massachusetts, who had purchased the movie rights to
My Turn at Bat.

“I was going to North Miami,” Vinick remembered. “I have friends down there—and Ted says to me, ‘While you’re down there, why don’t you go to see Miami play? They’re playing against Maine. John-Henry’s on the team,’ ” Vinick said. “Well, I got to my buddy’s house in North Miami, and I said, ‘Let’s take a ride down to Coral Gables. John-Henry Williams is playing for Maine against Miami.’ These guys are big Miami fans. We get down there, and I knew one of the assistant coaches. I walked out onto the field, talking to the guy, and I said, ‘Where’s John-Henry Williams?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘What do you mean?’ And I said, ‘Isn’t he on the team?’ And he says, ‘No, he never made the team.’

“He’d lied to Ted. He told Ted he made the team. He never made the team. So I called Ted and I said, ‘Got down to see Maine play Miami, but John-Henry wasn’t there.’ He said, ‘What do you mean he wasn’t there?’ And I said, ‘Ted, he never made the team.’ He went freakin’ nuts on the phone.”
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By now, John-Henry was clearly chafing at Maine. His grades were decent, but he annoyed some of his professors by bringing his cell phone to classes, and it would often ring, causing a distraction.
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He was living
alone, off campus. He was restless and again not making many friends. So in January of 1989, he called Ferd Ensinger and told him he’d decided to take the spring semester off and go to California. “He said, ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’ve got to hit baseballs. I have to find out if I really can hit baseballs,’ ” Ensinger remembered.