The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (93 page)

In the ’60s and ’70s, a new generation of fishing guides arrived in Islamorada. They revered Albright, Brothers, and Williams and observed their dynamic at the Lorelei and elsewhere with keen interest—not daring to crash the inner circle but eager for any crumbs of wisdom or acceptance that might be thrown their way.

For all his camaraderie with the guides, though, Williams mostly fished alone. One of his favorite spots—still known as Ted’s Hole—lies south of Islamorada, about half a mile off Long Key. He knew that on certain tides, he could count on plenty of fish running through there, and guides would frequent the Hole, too—but only when Ted wasn’t there, of course. He’d also fish an area called the Pocket, on Buchanan Bank, seven miles southwest of Islamorada, a highly desirable spot that was occasionally the source of turf disputes among the guides. The Pocket was where they sprinkled Jimmie Albright’s ashes after he died in 1998 at the age of eighty-two.

Ted could also be seen poling himself around the mudflats and the mangroves like a gondolier, or even just sight fishing off his dock on Florida Bay. One friend of Ted’s from Boston who wintered in Islamorada for years, Dan Pitts, marveled at the show Williams put on one afternoon off his dock, pulling in one bonefish after another.

“You have to see them in order to catch them—if you don’t you’re just throwing the line in,” said Pitts. “We were out there one day, and Ted said, ‘Here they come, two o’clock, forty feet out.’ I’ve got polarized glasses on, and I don’t see a goddamn thing. So he throws his line out, and
boom!
Bonefish are the fastest-hitting fish in the ocean, so he got that one. Once again we’re waiting, and they call it mudding, they put their jaw in the sand, so you see that little wave of cloudiness, that’s how you see them. So the second time he says, ‘Here they come again, one o’clock, fifty feet out.’ Again, I can’t see them. He says, ‘Jesus Christ, are you retarded!’ And
bam!
He pulls a second one out. Then here we go again: ‘You ready? Thirty, thirty-five feet at three o’clock.’ I didn’t see them, but I know where three o’clock, thirty to thirty-five feet out is, so I cast it out there, and he says, ‘About friggin’ time!’ But I still couldn’t see the fuckin’ fish anyway. That guy had eyes like there’s no tomorrow.”
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As Pitts’s experience suggests, Williams was less than tolerant of people who couldn’t fish well after he’d taken the time to show them how. He exploded at a local kid who, he felt, hadn’t listened closely enough, screaming and declaring the boy illiterate. Another time, local artist and neighbor Millard Wells was visiting Ted at his house when the phone rang. On the line was a friend who wanted to go fishing. “Ted said, ‘Well, if you can’t fly-fish any better now than you could last time, why don’t you just stay home?’ and he slammed the phone down so hard it bounced off the cradle.”
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But those flare-ups were leavened with acts of kindness that became well known on Islamorada. When guide Gary Ellis wanted to launch a fishing tournament to benefit those who suffer from cystic fibrosis, Williams provided key support, which attracted other big names, and today the tournament generates more than $1 million each year. When a local boy, Billy Bostick, needed money for a lung transplant, Ted got involved and helped raise $250,000 for the operation. When Jimmie Albright fell on hard times toward the end of his life and needed a new roof on his house, Williams gave a contractor $10,000, along with instructions not to tell Albright where the money came from. And when Frank Brothers, Jack’s son, got married and needed to buy his first house, Ted gave him $10,000 as well.

To fish with Williams was to understand four things: he was a perfectionist, he was better than you were, he was a needler, and he was in charge.
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If you were a guide or otherwise an expert, fishing with Williams could be delightful. Otherwise, it would likely be disastrous. He despised fishing dilettantes and thought the only way to fish was to be all
in, to be well prepared, and to know what you were doing. “Ted’s major problem, with his famous personality, was he was not tolerant of anybody who was not really good at what they did,” said Ellis.
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“He was a tremendously precise fisherman. He was a scientific angler who knew everything about every piece of tackle, knew every monofilament, the oscillation of every fly rod. He was just the way he was at baseball. He was very analytical about fishing. He did it very carefully.”
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As soon as he felt a tug on the line, Williams would switch to battle stations. “When he was pulling on a fish he would use more expletives in one sentence then I’d ever heard in my life,” said Ellis. “It was almost poetic. It was lyrical, like him singing a song. He didn’t do it vindictively or in anger, he was just being himself, always trying to top himself. It was your mother, my mother, his mother, Jesus fucking Christ, he could have put everybody in there. He wanted the fight, he wanted to see them eat the fly, he wanted to see how quick he could turn ’em around and stop ’em. He just wanted to pull on ’em and then turn ’em loose.”

Catching a fish, Williams would pull the rod quickly in three quick bursts to set the hook, then he would check the drag. During the fight, he would use his own body as a check against the fish’s strength and work to decrease its supply of oxygen. He thought using heavy equipment was taking the easy way out, and that the challenge lay in doing the job with lightweight tackle.

Ted came to prefer fly-fishing to other kinds of fishing, but he was not a purist who insisted on a fly. He enjoyed, and was expert at, all kinds of fishing, whether it was for marlin, tuna, or bonefish. He was not just a fisherman. He was an angler who mastered everything associated with catching a fish.

In Islamorada, when he was not fishing or shooting the breeze with the guides, Williams could generally be found in the small shed in back of his house, where he would spend hour upon hour tying flies. Occasionally he would receive guests there who could talk fishing with him or trade gossip on the comings and goings of tarpon and bonefish.

Ted was known for a particular kind of tarpon fly that he made. He would drill a hole one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter in the tail of a
wooden plug, then tie a variety of colored feathers on different nails that would be inserted into the hole. So there would be a yellow feather, a red, a black, a brown—a variety. Tarpon are known to favor particular colors depending upon the light or whatever their whim may be at a given time. If a fish refused yellow, Ted would take it out and push in a red, and so on. It was a method of giving the fish what it would take, offering it options. In his shed, he also liked to demonstrate his skill at tying knots, which, he would tell visitors, were the envy of any guide.

Other serious fishing discussions were held in Williams’s second-floor den, where he liked to entertain. There were plenty of fishing photos on the wall but few that featured baseball. The living room downstairs was a neutral zone he shared with Louise Kaufman. Ted’s pals hoped to be invited up to the second floor. If they stayed on the first floor, they realized it would be a short visit. There was a phone in the house, but it usually was not plugged in, so Williams could avoid the distraction of incoming calls. If he wanted to call someone, he’d plug the phone in.

Fishing dominated the conversation, certainly, but Ted was also intellectually curious, and when visitors came to call, he liked to engage them in a free-form discussion on a variety of topics. For example, when John Underwood arrived in the summer of 1967 to report his “Fishing with the Kid” piece for
Sports Illustrated,
Ted wanted to talk about the Vietnam War, technical aspects of photography, boxing, and the recent book on Ernest Hemingway by the celebrated author’s friend and confidant, A. E. Hotchner.

Edwin Pope, the
Miami Herald
sports columnist who was there that day, said Williams opined that Hotchner’s book
Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir
was “good stuff.”
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The book, besides revealing that Hemingway’s death in 1961 was a suicide, contained remembrances of what Hotchner and his friend discussed over the years—including Hemingway’s view that the Yankees’ Whitey Ford must have had a “death wish” when he pitched to Williams and that Ted and Joe DiMaggio knew how to quit when they were on top. If Ted was resentful that Hemingway had omitted him and touted “the great DiMaggio” in
The Old Man and the Sea,
he didn’t say so. Williams once had a date to fish with Hemingway in Cuba, but, as he told friends, the rendezvous was “broken up by Fidel Castro.”
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Ted’s two-story, two-bedroom white stucco house on Florida Bay, separated from the road by a chain-link fence and a grove of rubber trees, was his second on Islamorada. The first, on the ocean side of the
Overseas Highway, was largely destroyed by Hurricane Donna in 1960, after which Ted sold the property to a Chicago businessman for $28,500.

Williams was a fixture around the village, at the drugstore, and at the grocery, where his booming voice signaled his arrival and could be heard two or three aisles over. He usually dressed in long khaki pants and a white T-shirt, an outfit he was reluctant to change for anyone or any occasion. At the Cheeca Lodge, Islamorada’s upscale resort, the women wore long gowns at night and the men were required to wear ties. One evening when Williams showed up in his usual khakis and T-shirt getup, he was turned away. So Ted went home, put on a tie, and returned, still in the same khakis and T-shirt. They let him in, and after that, the Cheeca dress code was effectively broken.

By the early 1970s Williams had caught more than one thousand tarpon to go with his one-thousand-plus bonefish, so he began to turn most of his fishing attention northward, to his camp along New Brunswick’s Miramichi River, one of the most important breeding grounds for Atlantic salmon in the world.

Ted was increasingly enamored of the Atlantic salmon, and he was fond of saying that if he could only choose one fish to pursue, that would be it. It had size, it put up a terrific fight, it took great skill to catch one, it was good eating, and it had that great spawning story: hatching way upriver, maturing for about three years—if it could survive an array of natural predators in and around the river—then shooting downstream and out to sea, only to contend with another raft of threats. If it withstood the new dangers, after a few years it returned to the very same river it came from, making its way against astronomical odds to the exact same location from which it was spawned.
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The prime fishing season on the Miramichi went from June until October, and as the season got under way in 1978, Williams—who kept a handwritten journal spanning two volumes detailing his catches and conditions along the river over the years—wrote that he had caught 947 Atlantic salmon.

When he first traveled to the Miramichi in the mid-’50s to promote fishing for New Brunswick tourism officials and to make the film for General Electric, Ted hadn’t particularly liked it. It seemed too crowded with other fishermen. “But then I made another trip and got a big one, a 20-pounder,” he told a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times.
“It was quite apparent that if I really liked it I’d better get a place of my own because everything was private property. So I bought a mile of river. I spend the
summers there and leave in the fall and can’t wait for June. I live the whole year for those three months.”
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Non-Canadians had to hire guides to fish the Miramichi, and Roy Curtis, two years younger than Williams, was the one assigned to Ted on a 1958 trip. Thus began Curtis’s thirty-year hitch—along with his wife, Edna—as guide, caretaker, and custodian of Ted’s camp overlooking the Miramichi. Roy died in 1988.

As he did with the Islamorada guides, Ted developed a close relationship with Roy based on competition and needling. Williams would keep a running tally in his log of how many more fish he caught than Roy, reporting with relish the daily or seasonal score to family and friends. At times, Ted felt that Roy had not shown him the proper respect or deference after he executed some skilled maneuver or another on the river, and the result would be a standard Williams broadside.

Once, early on, after Ted popped off at something or other, Curtis announced, “Mr. Williams, I’m not going to take this from you,” and started walking away. He didn’t understand that Ted wasn’t mad at
him,
just mad at the world over whatever it was that was frustrating him at that moment. As Curtis walked away, Claudia Williams recalled, Ted was mortified. “Dad was like, ‘Don’t leave! Come back! I’m not mad at you!’ He was just mad that the car stopped, or mad that the car got stuck, or whatever it might have been. He wasn’t mad at you, but he would still scream and curse a streak that people would say, ‘Oh, my God. I’ve got to get away from this.’ ”
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Over the years, Roy, a native guide and student of the salmon, came to be amazed at how accomplished a fisherman Williams was and duly gave his opinion to visiting journalists who came to chronicle the Kid’s exploits along the river—among them John Underwood, who was told, “Forty years and I ain’t seen none better, no. There’s days a feller can beat him, maybe. But day in day out he’s the best. He can do it all. He can tie the best flies, rig ’em just right. He can cast to the toughest spots. He can cover more water than anybody. He knows exactly how to play a fish and he has a fine steady hand to release ’em, and that’s an art, for sure. Sometimes I sit on the bank and never lift a finger.… And persistent? Oh, my. He’ll stay out there all day, any kind of weather. Stay and stay.”
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If Curtis quickly recovered after experiencing Williams’s brusqueness, it took some of the other locals considerably longer to accept Ted. “When he first came up here, he was a little arrogant—that’s what
people on the river felt,” said Jack Fenety, former president of the Miramichi Salmon Association, a conservation group Williams became involved with. “He wouldn’t speak to people, and if he did, it was to say, ‘Get the hell out of the way; what the hell are you doing fishing my water?’ He was antisocial, and people knew his record with the press in Boston, so they took him at face value. I think people thought if the press did not like him and he doesn’t like them, he can’t be a good fellow.”
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