The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (98 page)

About two weeks later, Ted suffered a mild stroke.

He had driven the seventy miles from Citrus Hills down to Tampa to meet with Stacia Gerow, his longtime secretary. She lived in the vicinity, and they were scheduled to spend a few days catching up on his mail and other paperwork. When he arrived, he developed a severe headache, which was unusual. Ted liked to brag that he never got headaches.

He checked into a motel and took two aspirin. When the pain persisted, he took two more, and after a while, another two. Then he noticed that he couldn’t see normally, especially with his peripheral vision. Though it was only afternoon, he went to bed, and he didn’t get
up until the next morning, when he decided to drive home and see an ophthalmologist. The ophthalmologist told him he had lost his peripheral vision permanently and recommended that he go to the hospital to determine if he had had a stroke. At the hospital, he was told that he had, and after tests, Williams’s carotid artery was found to be 95 percent blocked. He would have to have surgery to clean the vital artery out.
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The surgery was booked for mid-January, after the holidays. In the meantime, Williams began pondering his own mortality and decided to take care of one piece of business that was important to him. Though he had talked with his personal attorney in Boston, Robert McWalter, about the sort of arrangements he wanted to have when he died, Ted thought now would be a good time to formalize his wishes in writing.

So he wrote McWalter a letter on December 19, 1991:

Ted used “Ted Williams” when he signed autographs. “Theodore S. Williams” was for legal documents or other papers of serious intent. And concerning the arrangements after he died, the Kid appeared to be quite serious.

T
wo days after laying out his wishes in writing for his lawyer, Williams was feeling well enough to travel to Orono, Maine, for John-Henry’s graduation from the University of Maine.

It was the first time any one of his three children had graduated from college, and Ted was filled with pride. Dolores, John-Henry’s mother, did not attend, perhaps because of tension between her and Ted, but Claudia was there, along with Ted’s fishing buddy Bud Leavitt, family friend Brian Interland, Williams’s lawyer, Robert McWalter, and Rodney Nichols, a young Maine state trooper who had become acquainted with John-Henry the year before.

When he watched his son walk across the stage to get his diploma, Ted cried. “I had never seen him cry, and I didn’t think he knew how,” recalled Interland. “But the tears were spurting out, and unabashedly. It was unbelievable to see. He was always a very proud man, and it just hit him—that his son did something that he never did, that nobody ever did in the family.”
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But when John-Henry showed his leather binder to his father, there was no diploma inside. John-Henry said there must have been a mix-up.

It turned out he was just shy of the necessary credits to graduate, but the university, knowing Ted would be there, let John-Henry walk the line anyway to avoid embarrassment. For Ted, this latest misstep reminded him of John-Henry’s previous faux pas—his pretense that he had made the University of Maine baseball team and his entitled escapades in California while living with his Herrera cousins—and it would also be a harbinger of egregious errors in judgment to come. Despite his genuine love for his father, John-Henry would consistently display a
pattern of using Ted’s famous name to enrich himself or to skate through difficulties caused by overconfidence in his business acumen. This behavior would be abetted by Williams’s own love for his son and by the long slack Ted extended John-Henry in an effort to make up for years of neglect.

After young Williams made up the credits the following summer, he presented the diploma to his father with fanfare. “John-Henry put his cap and diploma in a gold-laminated frame, with the graduation program included,” Claudia remembered. “Well, you would have thought Dad got the best present of his life. He loved it! Hung it right in the middle of the best place in his office. ‘That’s my son! He went to college.’ ”
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A year before graduating, John-Henry had gotten his first significant press coverage, a coming-out of sorts, when he was the subject of a feature story in glossy
Boston
magazine entitled “The Kid’s Kid.” (The phrase would always remain the default position for any headline writer charged with dressing up a piece on John-Henry.) Interviewed while watching a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, Ted’s son—described as six foot five and “movie star handsome”—was depicted as privileged but searching for his identity. He was said to be a fixture at Fenway who was allowed to park his car in the players’ parking lot and was well known to the front office—as well as to secretaries, ushers, and concessionaires—walking around “as if he owns the place.”

The
Boston
writer thought the son was struggling to find a way to make his own mark. “Let’s not kid ourselves—Ted Williams’s son, that’s why you’re here,” John-Henry told the reporter. “It’s going to be fun when—and it will happen some day—when Dad’s going to say, ‘I’m
his
dad.’ ” At times, John-Henry’s haughtiness was striking: he said he argued with his father about hitting technique, but Ted always had the ultimate comeback: “Oh is that so? I don’t see
you
in the Hall of Fame.” He knew that escape would be nearly impossible. “I don’t know,” he told the reporter. “Maybe it’s better the way it happened. It’s kind of sad sometimes. Not sad, but what the hell. Everything will fall into place. I’m sure of it. Dad’s looking out for me. There are a lot of opportunities out there.”
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Seven months before his college graduation, John-Henry had seized his first opportunity to make money off his father’s reputation. In the run-up to Ted Williams Day at Fenway Park in May, he decided to try dabbling in the memorabilia business by exploiting the hoopla surrounding
the fiftieth anniversary of .406. Ted reluctantly gave his consent but advised his still-green son to accept the counsel of Brian Interland. Interland had first met Ted in 1951, when he and two other members of his Little League team were plucked out of the stands at Fenway Park to pose for a picture with the Kid and Lou Boudreau. Years later, when he was in college and interning for a Boston television station, Interland tagged along with a reporter who was doing a feature on Williams. The reporter told Ted that Interland had compiled an array of statistics on him over the years. Williams arranged a time for Interland to meet him at his hotel and show him what he had. A friendship developed, and Interland eventually purchased a condominium in Islamorada so he could be close to his hero. Later, he served as a mentor for John-Henry as he grew up.

Interland was as excited as John-Henry about going into the Ted business—if not more so. He fawned over Williams and told him he needed to be marketed as the legend he was. “We were going to do something that nobody had ever done before,” he said, “which was really represent a former athlete in a way that no one had. I mean, we’d walk through airports and it was amazing. People thought he was a god.” Interland took a leave from his job in the recording industry and he and John-Henry formed Grand Slam Marketing, financed with $60,000 in start-up funds from Interland’s business partner, Jerry Brenner.

At the time, the Antonucci debacle was still playing out in the courts, and Williams’s legal bills were piling up. He was receptive to the argument that he needed people he could trust to run his affairs. “I just took over where Antonucci kind of was,” John-Henry told the
Boston Globe
in 1995. “What I wanted to do was take the fear out of Dad’s mind of someone else trying to scam him. If he can’t trust me, he can’t trust anybody. I’d do anything for him.”
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Grand Slam started with the limited goal of producing Ted Williams Day T-shirts, and then it expanded into marketing and licensing all things Ted. On May 16, 1991, just five days after the Red Sox honored Williams, Interland seized the commercial moment and arranged for the Kid to appear on the Home Shopping Network to hawk his wares, including baseball cards, autographed balls, a replica of a 1941 Red Sox jersey ($498.75), a commemorative plaque of Ted and Mickey Mantle ($159.75), and a replica of a 1946 World Series press pin ($99.75).

It was jarring to see Williams on the Home Shopping Network, long relegated to the remote precincts of the cable television dial. As a perfectly manicured and bejeweled female hand incongruously caressed each ball
and card up for sale, a fast-talking announcer extolled the virtues of the pieces and the value of memorabilia as investment vehicles. An earpiece in Ted’s left ear allowed him to communicate with callers. He gave them some inside tidbits, like how he used to weigh his bats constantly and how he used to be able to smell the burning wood on his bat when he hit a ball on the screws.

Other ballplayers—like Pete Rose, Reggie Jackson, and Mantle—had gone on the Home Shopping Network before, but some observers thought Ted should not have stooped. “It was if John Hancock were selling commemorative copies of the Declaration of Independence, as if Ernest Hemingway were hawking signed copies of
A Farewell to Arms,
as if Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart or Spencer Tracy were peddling plastic replicas of Oscar,” wrote
Sports Illustrated
’s Leigh Montville at the time. “The eye had trouble convincing the mind about what it was seeing.”
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Later in 1991, as John-Henry finished up college, Interland negotiated a deal for Ted with Upper Deck, the baseball card company. The agreement, which was signed in November and ran through the end of 1993, called for Williams to sign up to 2,800 cards over the two-plus years and make himself available for occasional promotional duties. Upper Deck was starting a new line of cards called Heroes of Baseball, for which Ted’s card was to be the centerpiece, or “chase card,” as it is known in the trade. When a buyer of a Heroes set drew Williams’s signed card in the mix, it was said to be worth $500 or more. Ted also agreed to appear at two Heroes of Baseball games sponsored by Upper Deck, the first of which was the 1992 All-Star Game in San Diego.

These were no-heavy-lifting deals, grossing Williams $250,000 for the first thirteen months and $250,000 for the subsequent year. During the negotiations, both sides also discussed a second, even more lucrative agreement. Upper Deck wanted to use Ted as the springboard to start a second company known as Upper Deck Authenticated, which would move beyond baseball cards and enter the larger autograph market of so-called flats—such as photographs, postcards, and lithographs—as well as signed balls and bats.

The Upper Deck arrangements were in sync with John-Henry’s plans to broaden his father’s commercial horizons. He and various other partners would launch four more companies tied to Ted besides Grand Slam Marketing: Major League Memorabilia, which handled the sale of Ted stuff on the Home Shopping Network; the Ted Williams Card Company, which made specialized themed baseball cards; Global Electronic
Publishing, which produced CD-ROMs about the Kid; and the Ted Williams Store, which sold Ted paraphernalia in a shopping mall outside Boston. Such entrepreneurial flurry represented an attempt to capitalize on the sports collectibles craze of the early-to-mid ’90s, a market that was driven in no small part by Williams. “Ted Williams was the first one who made autograph prices soar,” said Phil Castinetti, owner of Sportsworld, the largest memorabilia store in the Boston area. “After Ted Williams’s autograph got to be hundreds of dollars, everything else went up.”
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But John-Henry’s quick build-out was an overreach, an effort to do too much too soon without a coherent, interconnected business strategy. Among the things he had ignored in his rush to riches was that memorabilia prices were (like prices in general) dependent on scarcity, and the more Ted memorabilia he put out there, the less collectors were willing to pay for it and the fewer items they were willing to purchase. As the saturated market peaked, John-Henry suddenly declared in the press that fully 80 percent of Ted Williams signatures were fakes. With little evidence that this was so, John-Henry proceeded to launch a mostly self-serving jihad to clean up the industry.

“He just burned bridges every place he went,” Castinetti said. “Everybody he talked to, everything had to be his way. He’d go to card shows and say, ‘That’s a forgery; where’d that come from?’ And the dealer would say, ‘I bought it from you two months ago.’ ” John-Henry would visit a store, approach a salesman, and demand to know the provenance of a Williams-autographed ball or simply label it a phony in a preemptive strike. He’d do the same at card shows, further alienating a large slice of the collectibles industry.
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Some of John-Henry’s tough-guy tack seemed designed to impress his father and convince him that he could succeed in the business world.

“He was a kid who really was wanting his dad’s approval, wanting to impress his dad that ‘Dad, I’m a good businessman, I’m gonna be here to look after you like nobody else will,’ ” said Interland, who had watched John-Henry grow up. “He would go down to Florida to be by his dad’s side. He’d come back, and they ended up developing the relationship that I think John-Henry always wanted.”

Ted and his son bonded further in July of 1992 on a trip to San Diego. John-Henry was agog as he watched his father throw out the first ball at that year’s All-Star Game and attend a ceremony at which a local highway was renamed the Ted Williams Parkway. Williams made his arrival at the highway ceremony in a black 1940 Ford convertible, and a big crowd surged around him. At another event, Ted donated several of his most important trophies to his childhood friend Bob Breitbard’s museum, the San Diego Hall of Champions.
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But the highlight of the trip for John-Henry came when Ted took him on a tour of his childhood home on Utah Street.

“There was never a bigger thrill in my life than going into the house where he grew up,” John-Henry told Ed Linn for Linn’s 1993 book on Williams. “I saw his room. I saw where he slept, and I was there with Dad to see it.… I mean, I saw his roots. And that was tremendous.”

As for Ted, he looked pained to be back in his old house, filled with all the bad memories. “I remembered how rundown it was until I made enough money so that I could send home and get it fixed up… so that I wasn’t ashamed to have anybody come to it.”

But Williams brightened up when talking about John-Henry. “We’re so close. God, I enjoy every minute of the time I look at him. He’s so bright and honest. And so nice. I want all my friends to get to know him.”

John-Henry said that starting Grand Slam Marketing had facilitated a new beginning for him and Ted. “I’m spending an awful lot of time with Dad now, which is great. One reason we started this company, it keeps him very involved with me, both ways, and Dad enjoys watching me grow up, and I get to enjoy Dad’s company.… I want to take good care of Dad. I’m going to be watching him, making sure he’s protected. He’s too easy, too nice to everybody. I’m a buffer zone for him.”
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