For decades, he was the face of the Jimmy Fund Clinic, the pediatric cancer center in Boston, for which he worked tirelessly to help raise tens of millions of dollars. “Ted was a teddy bear,” recalled Suzanne Fountain, the charity’s director of community relations. While Williams never raked in anything near what today’s All-Stars make, as a retiree in Florida, he would not hesitate to write $10,000 checks for fellow ballplayers down on their luck. And he had an abiding sense of justice. At his Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1966, he urged baseball to honor “the great Negro players.” “His speech had an impact,” former New York Giants outfielder Monte Irvin has noted. “The powers-that-be at the Hall of Fame had to kind of perk up and take notice.” Five years later, Satchel Paige became the first black player to be enshrined in Cooperstown.
Williams’s sensitivity to racial discrimination—in 1959, he also took under his wing the first black player on the Sox, Pumpsie Green—had roots in his deepest fears. While most baseball fans, even die-hard members of Red Sox Nation, assume that Manny Ramirez was the first great Hispanic player to patrol the Green Monster, that distinction actually belongs to Williams. (Ramirez’s quirky temperament was also foreshadowed by Williams; two generations before the Fenway Faithful resigned themselves to “Manny being Manny,” Ted set the gold standard for eccentricity.) Ted’s maternal grandparents, Pablo and Natalia Venzor, both hailed from Mexico, and his mother spoke Spanish at home during her childhood in Santa Barbara. His younger brother, Danny, who had dark skin and a round face, looked Mexican. Ted, in contrast, resembled his father, Samuel, who was of English-Welsh extraction. “If I had had my mother’s name,” Theodore Samuel Williams later wrote, “there is no doubt I would have run into problems in those days, the prejudices people had in Southern California.” Like Lauder, the young phenom wound up creating the personal identity that best suited him (and his obsession). To the press, the Sox star stated that his mother was French (the family had ties to the Basque region). And he officially changed his date of birth from August 30 to October 30 during his rookie year because, as he later told the Boston Globe, “I didn’t want to celebrate my birthday during the playing season.”
Samuel Williams was a nonentity in Ted’s life. “My dad and I,” the retired ballplayer would note in his memoir, downplaying the truth, “were never close.” Ted hardly got to know his nomadic father. Born in Mount Vernon, New York, at sixteen, Samuel Williams ran away from home to join the United States Cavalry. After serving for a few years in the Philippines, Corporal Williams was stationed in the Hawaiian Islands, where he met his future wife, Micaela (“May”) Venzor. The couple was married in Santa Barbara in 1913 before settling in San Diego, where Ted was born in 1918. The stern and moody Samuel Williams, who has been described as a “semiderelict,” cared more about getting his next drink than about spending time with his growing family, which by 1920 included Ted’s brother, Danny. In the mid-1930s, with his photography business floundering, Samuel Williams moved up to Sacramento to take up a position as a state jail inspector. He also took up with his secretary, whom he later made his second wife. Ted felt that his father had shortchanged him, as the now ninety-something Bobby Doerr, the Red Sox Hall of Fame second baseman who also played minor-league ball with Williams in California, noted in a phone interview. In late 1936, Doerr invited his teammate to dinner at his family’s Los Angeles home. In contrast to Williams, Doerr had a warm relationship with his father, who gave him whatever he needed to begin his baseball career. “As we left,” Doerr recalled, “Ted told me, ‘You’re lucky to have a dad like that.’” As Ted metamorphosed into a celebrity, Samuel Williams kept trying to wangle money from his son. When his father died in a Bay Area nursing home in 1952, Ted chose not to attend the funeral.
Like her husband, May Williams, known up and down the Southern California coast as “Salvation May,” frequented taverns; the teetotaler went not to imbibe, but to collect money for the Salvation Army. After her son became famous, the avid proselytizer’s pitch to patrons ran, “I’m Ted Williams’s mother. Empty your pockets.” May first took up the cause as a teenager in 1907, and she kept at it for the next half century. Not so Ted, who hated marching in parades with his mother and dropped out of Sunday school as soon as he could. “I’d stand behind the bass drum,” Williams later wrote, “trying to hide so none of my friends would see me.” While his mother’s religious fervor made Ted squirm, her single-minded determination proved to be a model. A fearless and tireless advocate for the needy, she thought of little else. “Mrs. Williams,” the San Diego Sun noted in 1936, “is the Salvation Army.” Tambourine in hand, she would ride hour after hour on the city’s two streetcar lines, shouting in her booming voice, “Praise the Lord!” A slick networker who befriended many of the state’s leading politicos, including Governor Frank Merriam, she once held the world’s record for selling the most copies of the Salvation Army paper, War Cry, in a calendar year. But she ignored the needs of her family. “Always gone,” Williams wrote in 1969. “The house dirty all the time. Even now I can’t stand a dirty house.” Thus was made the germaphobe, whose bachelor pads would be remarkable for their cleanliness and order, and who, before sitting down to a meal, would insist that everyone at the table scrub their hands.
In contrast to Ted, who filled the nurture deficit with baseball, the unathletic five-foot-four-inch Danny turned to petty crime. Dubbed “the city’s most incorrigible youth,” by the San Diego Police Department, the teenage Danny did not hesitate to filch from the family; he once pawned his mother’s coronet. But by the 1950s, the former juvenile delinquent turned to the straight and narrow, became a contractor, got married, and started a family. He died of leukemia in 1960 at the age of thirty-nine.
In the late 1950s, the cancer-stricken Danny moved back into his boyhood home with his wife, Jean, and sons Sam and Ted, then in grade school. Today Ted Williams, the nephew of the baseball slugger, runs his own graphic design firm in the Bay Area. “Living with my grandmother wasn’t easy,” the Hall of Famer’s nephew told me. May Williams once swatted him with a broom, complaining that he was getting in her way. “My mother had to tell her not to hit kids,” he added. Noting that his father, Danny, also beat him, Ted Williams suspects that May also hit both her sons when they were boys. “My uncle Ted, like my father, had a temper, and they must have learned that behavior at home,” he added. While the future Sox star presumably did not take to his bat solely to defend himself against his mother’s broom, he could connect with it much more easily than with her. Bill Swank, now a retired San Diego probation officer, ran into May Williams in 1957 when he was working as a shipping clerk. “Mrs. Williams,” Swank stated in a recent phone interview, “was kinda nuts. She was in her own little world. She would jabber nonstop about God. It was impossible to figure out what she was saying.”
By then, May Williams was in her midsixties, and a bad back, stemming from a bus accident, prevented her from marching around town on behalf of the Salvation Army. No longer able to pursue her all-consuming obsession, her mental state began to deteriorate. “She was depressed, but if she started talking about the Lord, her face would light up,” recalled her grandson Ted Williams. While she once collected objects that held meaning for her, such as tambourines and all the published materials about her son, she turned to junk. She became both a compulsive hoarder, filling every room from floor to ceiling with old newspapers, as well as a serial shoplifter. In addition, May developed hypergraphia; she could not stop jotting down gibberish on the newspapers and on the backs of old photos. “My uncle Ted used to scold her,” the graphic designer said. “He would give her a photo of his daughter Bobby-Jo, and tell her, ‘Don’t write on this.’” In late 1958, Ted Williams sent Danny a letter in which he urged him to place their mother in a nursing home so that she could get “the proper care which she obviously needs so badly.” Suffering from the early stages of dementia, May Williams eventually moved in with a sister in Santa Barbara, where she died in 1961.
/> Growing up with a domineering mother whom he feared, Ted Williams was too shy to go out on any dates in high school. “[If] a girl looked at me twice,” he later wrote, “I’d run the other way.” And the little that the girls saw, they did not like. High school classmate Ruth Browning has recalled thinking he was “very arrogant, conceited.” The adolescent with the thinnest of ties to his own mama had not yet figured out that girls were separate human beings (a fact that he never quite could get his arms around). According to the late Boston Globe sportswriter Will McDonough, in his minor-league career Williams was “like a Neanderthal.” In 1938, a few minutes into one of his first dates, as a clubhouse attendant was driving him around town, Williams jumped a woman in the backseat of a car. “He didn’t know,” said McDonough, “that maybe you were supposed to talk to each other, maybe eat dinner, whatever.” Journalist John Underwood, who was a friend of Williams from the 1960s until his death in 2002, noted, “He never paid attention to the normal rules of male-female relationships.”
Left to his own devices by his neglectful parents, the San Diego boy managed to find a series of surrogate fathers who helped him develop his athletic prowess. At the age of five, Ted dragged his bat across the street to the house of his neighbor John Lutz, a twenty-four-year-old chicken salesman, whom he got to pitch to him. Lutz also taught him how to hunt and fish, sometimes taking him on day trips to Mexico. At nine, the budding ballplayer told his mother that he’d “ruther [sic] be a Babe Ruth than a captain in the Salvation Army,” and turned to Rod Luscomb, the director at the North Park playground and a former minor-league ballplayer, for guidance. Six days a week for the next seven years, he and Luscomb would pitch to one another for hours at a time. “He was a baseball nut, too,” Williams noted.
At Luscomb’s urging, the gawky boy began to beef himself up. His daily exercise regimen included squeezing tennis balls to strengthen his wrists and doing dozens of daily fingertip push-ups, a practice he continued for decades. Convinced that he would not have made it to Cooperstown without Luscomb, whom he later called “my first hero,” Williams mentioned this mentor in his Hall of Fame induction speech along with Wofford Caldwell, his baseball coach at Hoover High. Caldwell used the stick more than the carrot. To get Williams to run faster, he would chase him around the bases with a switch.
In 1934, Williams chose to attend Hoover High over the larger and more established San Diego High, the school located in his district, for reasons baseballic. “I didn’t think,” he later told the Boston Traveler, “that I had a chance of winning a letter on the San Diego High team.” As a teenager, the gangly Williams, who was a born right-handed hitter, could not drive the ball with power consistently. At Horace Mann Junior High, he struggled to make the baseball team and was far from a standout performer. For Williams, as for NBA legend Michael Jordan, who was cut from his varsity basketball team as a high school sophomore, this brush with failure would just add fuel to his competitive fire.
To fulfill his dream of getting to the major leagues, Williams was willing (and eager) to hit and hit and then hit some more. “From the time I was eleven years old,” Williams later stated, “I’ve taken every possible opportunity to swing at a ball.” At the beginning of each season, before his hands developed calluses, he would bat until he bled. While the hero of The Natural, the Robert Redford baseball film, was partly based on Williams (Roy Hobbs wore the Sox outfielder’s uniform number, 9, and hit a homer in his last time at bat), the man himself had to work at everything. “Hundreds of kids have the natural ability to become great ballplayers,” Williams later told Time, “but nothing except practice, practice, practice will bring out that ability.”
Like San Diego High, Hoover High was also a big school—it had a student body of about 1,500—and the competition to make the starting lineup was keen. In his first season, the San Diego Union reported, Williams was used primarily as “a reserve outfielder.” He went to the plate just eighteen times, swatting six hits. The following spring, Williams initially worked his way onto the field as a pitcher. “He was a skinny bastard,” his coach recalled. “But he could rear back and really throw the ball in there.” In an April game, he struck out sixteen batters. And then when he finally got a few chances to start at first base and in the outfield, Williams began tearing up the league. As the season wore on, the sixteen-year-old, who swigged milk shakes to bulk up, emerged as a hitting sensation, batting .588. With Williams also winning four games on the mound, the Hockers from Hockerville, as the upstart Hoover High team was referred to (and denigrated) by the locals, pulled off a surprising victory in the league championship. After another stellar season, in which he hit .403, scouts from the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals came calling. Unwilling to let her boy leave home, May Williams insisted that he turn down all contract offers from big-league teams. In June of 1936, three days after his last high school game, he signed on with his hometown team, the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League. Though Williams was not yet a high school graduate—he would not finish up until the following February—he would be earning $150 a month as a professional ballplayer.
While the Splendid Splinter’s Red Sox career, as John Updike has observed, fell into three phases—Jason (Youth), Achilles (Maturity; like the Greek warrior, he pouted), and Nestor (Old Age)—his run-up to the major leagues was another matter. Before becoming anybody’s idea of a Greek hero, the obsessive with no social skills often floundered. In the spring of 1939, as Williams was about to begin his rookie season in “the Show,” the Boston Globe noted, “He was notorious throughout his minor league career for his screwball tactics.” In his first year with the Padres, Williams startled his roommate Cedric Durst, a veteran assigned to watch over him, by jumping up on his bed one morning at six o’clock, shouting, “Christ, Ced, it’s great to be young and full of vinegar.” In the second appearance of his pro career, the still just 147-pound athlete was forced to abandon his pitching aspirations. “I got hit,” Williams later noted, “like I was throwing batting practice.” For the Padres in 1936, as a part-time, mostly eighth-place hitter, he batted a modest .271 with no homers. The following year, as a regular outfielder, he upped his average to .291 and banged out 23 homers. Part of the reason for the relative dearth of power was that the fences in Lane Field were far away—350 feet down the right-field line and 500 feet to dead center. Remarkably, those would be the last two seasons Williams would dip below .300 until his injury-plagued 1959 campaign with the Red Sox, who obtained him from the Padres in December 1937.
Two months later, Sox general manager Eddie Collins, who was aware of Williams’s reputation for eccentric behavior, asked Bobby Doerr, then about to start his second season in Boston, to escort his fellow Californian to spring training in Florida. Williams met up with Doerr and two other players: Babe Herman, a veteran who had hit .393 for Brooklyn in 1930, and Max West, a young first baseman with the Boston Bees (Beantown’s National League team), in El Paso, Texas. Soon after their train left the station, the four ballplayers found themselves at one end of a long, mostly empty car; at the other end were four oldish women. The excitable, fingernail-chomping motormouth, who hardly slept at all on the three-day trip east, immediately began quizzing the former Dodger star about hitting. “And Ted,” Doerr later recalled, “he’s pumping Babe, and being loud like he is, using pillows for swinging the bat. These women finally told the porter, ‘Can you shut that guy up a little bit? He’s too loud.’” Each morning when the train stopped, Max West would open the window and do a double take. “There’s Ted,” stated West years later, “walking up and down and balancing himself on the rails. And he’s got a newspaper or a magazine in his hands, making like he’s hitting a ball.”
Once in Florida, his batting stroke quickly convinced reporters that he was likely to be the next incarnation of Babe Herman, if not Babe Ruth. But though Williams was ready for the major leagues, he was still an emotional basket case. He called everyone in the Red Sox camp in Sarasota “Sport,” i
ncluding his manager, Joe Cronin. To the San Diego boy whose central relationship was with something made out of wood, the concept of a social hierarchy was alien. Assuming that all institutions were as rudderless as the Williams family, he was not trying to challenge authority figures; he just had no idea that they existed, even when staring them in the face. When introduced to California’s then governor Frank Merriam, the adolescent stuck out his hand and said matter-of-factly, “Hi, Guv.” Likewise, when entering the office of Hoover High principal Floyd Johnson for a chat about baseball or hunting, he did not hesitate to put his feet up on Johnson’s desk. “I’d be enjoying the conversation so much,” Johnson later mused, “that I’d be oblivious…to his unconventional way of talking to the principal.” Not so forgiving was the dumbfounded Cronin, who banished “the Kid,” as the nineteen-year-old was nicknamed on day one, to Daytona Beach, the spring home of the Sox top minor-league team, the Minneapolis Millers, after just a week.
Williams would spend the entire 1938 season with Minneapolis. The nonstop nonsensical chatter continued, as did the other quirky manifestations of his internal disorganization. At a dinner party with new neighbors, Williams went up to a top-level executive at Woolworth’s and patted him on the stomach, saying, “Good evening, Whale Baby.” When chasing after a fly ball, the right fielder would slap his butt and shout, “Hi-yo, Silver.” He would also ride his bicycle to the refrain of “Yippy-Yi-Yo” on the outfield grass before games. “He was just a cuckoo guy,” Millers pitcher Lefty Lefebvre, whom Williams once took for a hundred-mile-an-hour spin in his Buick, later recalled. “A loner.” Referring to him as “Peter Pan,” his Millers teammates would keep their distance in an effort to stay safe and sane. Williams’s temper tantrums were what most exasperated his manager, Donie Bush, a former major-league shortshop. After a rare off day at the plate, he might tear up towels or punch the water cooler. When Bush threatened to quit, Sox GM Collins responded, “The day Williams doesn’t put on his uniform, don’t bother to put on your uniform, either.” The moody star was also hitting like crazy, and Collins knew that the future of the Sox was inextricably tied to Williams.
America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation Page 32
