The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  If Egan helped shape, even manipulate, public perceptions about Ted, he also directly affected Williams’s views of the writers as a whole. It didn’t matter to Ted that the vast majority of his press was favorable; when the Colonel unloaded on him, it was as if all the nice notices had never appeared.

  After Ted popped off to Austen Lake—lashing out at Boston and saying that he had demanded to be traded—Egan wrote that “Williams is the prize heel ever to wear a Boston uniform.” When Ted was being honored by the Red Sox before going off to Korea in 1952, Egan again blasted him. “It seems disgraceful to me that a person such as Williams now is to be given the keys to the city. We talk about juvenile delinquency, and fight against it, and then officially honor a man whom we should officially horsewhip for the vicious influence that he has had on childhood in America.”

  Some of the things Egan wrote about Ted were so harsh that the Hearst Corporation, owner of the Record, got nervous. Record publisher Pat Curran confided to Red Sox broadcaster Curt Gowdy, who took over as the voice of the team in 1951, that a Hearst lawyer had instructed him to have Egan tone it down. “Pat told me one day that a lawyer from Hearst came to him with a warning, saying, ‘Listen, this kid playing for the Red Sox, this Williams, it’s almost impossible for someone to win a libel/slander case against a newspaper, but we’ve gone over some of Egan’s columns, and this kid’s got a great case,’ ” Gowdy said. “This was somewhere in the fifties. So I went and told Ted, and I said, ‘Look, you’ve got a great case here. You ought to sue ’em.’ He said, ‘I wouldn’t lower myself to do that.’ That’s the way he was.”32

  Bob Ajemian, then a young baseball reporter at the American, said Egan’s barbs against Ted made the jobs of the beat reporters much harder. “The bile Egan delivered, Williams would take it out on me and the other writers. Egan would write from the bunker. He was a figure in the locker room, which he never visited. GIs like me would dig out the information from the players in the locker room and take the abuse, and Egan would take the information while never going into combat himself.”

  Ted would later mellow a bit in his attitude toward the press, but never toward Egan. Once, surrounded by a group of writers toward the end of the 1954 season, Williams was in a reflective mood about the interplay between ballplayers and reporters. Recalled George Sullivan, a former reporter for the Traveler, “He said, ‘You know, there are a lot of jerks in your business but a lot in mine, too.’ ” Then Williams added, “ ‘There’s one SOB that if someone came in that door and said, ‘Dave Egan just dropped dead,’ I’d say, ‘Good.’ ”33

  Reflecting back on their time with Ted and the press, Williams’s teammates are virtually all sympathetic with the pressures inflicted on him by celebrity in general and by the Boston reporters in particular.

  All the writers looked for a fresh story on Williams because that’s what their editors thirsted for, the only thing that would satisfy insatiable reader demand for all things Ted. As John Lardner—the humorist, reporter, and critic—once put it: “By the time the press of Boston has completed its daily treatment of Theodore S. Williams, there is no room in the papers for anything but two sticks of agate type about Truman and housing, and one column for the last Boston girl to be murdered on a beach.”

  “When he would sit in the dugout, he’d see them coming, and he’d ask them, ‘What kind of goddamn rumors are you going to start today?’ ” said Tex Clevenger, who pitched for the Red Sox in 1954.34

  Added outfielder Jimmy Piersall: “One day a writer in KC said both me and Ted were mentally ill, and Ted got up and spat at him. [The writer] was a fuckin’ prick.”35

  Charlie Maxwell, a substitute outfielder in the early ’50s, had another story: “One time there was a Boston writer who was ragging on Ted. In the clubhouse there were buckets of water and ammonia to keep us cool. The writer said some not-so-nice things to Ted, and Ted asked him to leave. He didn’t, and Ted picked up the bucket and dumped it over his head. The writer just turned and walked away. If he had walked away the first time, it wouldn’t have happened.”36

  One of the things that struck the Globe’s Clif Keane about Williams was his unpredictability. “You never knew what it was going to be from the middle of a sentence,” Keane told Ed Linn. “No idea what to expect.… I might walk in the dressing room. He might say, ‘Did you see the fight last night, Clif? Hell of a fight.’ [Then] he might look at me and say, ‘What the hell smells around here?… Did somebody shit in here? Oh, never mind. It’s only the sportswriters.’ ”37

  The players seemed to enjoy watching Ted give the writers what for in a manner that most of them would never even have contemplated. When the reporters came into the clubhouse after the game, the players would groan audibly, Ajemian remembered. “When Ted would tear into us, the other players would be amused and enjoy it. It was something they wouldn’t do. Few players would take reporters on. They admired Ted for doing it.”

  Ajemian, like his colleagues, noted that Williams was more approachable if he had a bad game rather than a good game. “Coming around after a good game was easy. He was struck by the fact you’d come after a bad game and ask questions. Even though he’d still give you a bad time, you could read signs of approval. It reflected his personal code of really being demonstrably down on weasels and behaving somewhat differently toward those who would take more of a dare or risk.”

  Ed Linn, who wrote two books about Williams, felt that in dealing with writers, Ted played to his bad-boy stereotype and appeared harsher than he really was. “If you ask a question that shows you know something about him and about baseball, you will get a thoughtful, forthright answer; if you ask a general question, you will get a short answer,” Linn wrote in a 1958 Sport magazine profile of Ted. “And yet, through it all, there is a sense that Williams is really putting on an act, that he is only doing what he knows is expected of him. A mannerly Ted Williams would be as much of a disappointment to a writer in search of a colorful story as a sober Joe E. Lewis. Williams would deny it indignantly, but he was a great showman.”38

  That didn’t mean his outbursts were always without justification. Once, Ajemian wrote a piece that was critical of Ted for taking a walk in a key situation when the tying run was at second. When Williams saw him later, he lit into him: “Hey, you bush cocksucker, get over here! What the fuck do you know about the strike zone? What do you know about the discipline of taking a pitch?” Ajemian said he took the heat and said nothing, and on reflection, decided that Ted had a point. “He had an astuteness that became more publicly winning later. People came to see him as someone who thought things through. He always brought some adroitness to his thinking.” But for all the times teammates privately enjoyed the way Ted treated the writers, or watched the show in silent amazement, there was at least one occasion when a player called Ted on his behavior. According to Harold Kaese’s notes, in August of 1948, following a Red Sox victory over the Indians at Fenway Park, Ted popped off at the scribes for no apparent reason. Afterward, shortstop Vern “Junior” Stephens said to Williams: “Why don’t you smarten up?”

  “Oh, you’re Irish, too,” Ted told Stephens, apparently using “Irish” as a synonym for “wiseguy.”

  “And you’re colored,” replied Junior.

  Ted stalked off to the showers. Complimented by the writers on what they considered a snappy comeback, Stephens said: “Somebody’s got to tell him off sometimes.”

  Williams of course expected his teammates and friends to keep his confidences and never dish about him to the press. Pal Jim Carroll, a Boston liquor distributor, got in trouble once for getting too cozy with Huck Finnegan, of the American. One day in 1958, Finnegan, trolling for a story, called Carroll and asked him how Ted was feeling. Actually, Carroll said, he had dysentery. Finnegan promptly blew the story up, and Ted called Carroll, furious, demanding to know why he had confided in the reporter. “Now you have it all over Boston that I was shitting my pants the whole month of August!” said Ted. “It almost cost me
my friendship,” Carroll said.39

  Others thought Ted’s distrust of the writers bordered on paranoia. Recuperating in the hospital from a fractured elbow in 1950, Ted was urged to walk over to the window and wave to a flock of kids who were gathered outside hoping to get a glimpse of him, remembered Jim Cleary, another friend, who was in the room at the time. “Ted didn’t want to because he said the press would say he was giving kids the finger,” Cleary said.40

  Williams considered Curt Gowdy a good friend and once sought his advice on dealing with the press. Gowdy found Williams fundamentally naive about the way the media worked. Ted didn’t understand or accept the premise that the public would be interested in the personal life of a star of his magnitude and that therefore writers would want to ask him about his life off the field. “We’d talk,” Gowdy said. “He asked me, ‘Maybe you can help me—what I don’t understand is why they write about my mother, my brother, my dad. That’s my personal business. It’s my family. If I strike out with the bases loaded or drop a fly ball that costs the game, then hell, they can get on me all they want. I accept that.’ And I’d say, ‘Ted, that’s just the way it is. It may not be fair. But you’re a star, you’re in a goldfish bowl, and it’s the same way with Sinatra and everybody, and they’re going to do it. So you’ve just got to accept it. And he said, ‘I don’t want to accept it.’ You couldn’t convince him. ‘Fuck them!’ he’d say.”*

  As sensitive as Williams was about his own notices, he also paid careful attention to what the press wrote about his teammates and resented it if he was upstaged. That was one reason there was friction between him and Piersall, who, Ted felt, was too much of a publicity hound. And when Mickey McDermott, the hard-throwing and colorful left-handed pitcher, came up in the late ’40s and a newspaper headline proclaimed him a star, Williams called McDermott over and said: “Bush, don’t let that write-up go to your head. You’re not the star here. I am.” Another time, McDermott was given Ted’s uniform pants by mistake and noticed that they had stars embroidered inside the waistband. When Williams discovered the mix-up, he again admonished McDermott: “Come here, Bush. Don’t make me tell you again. Hand over those pants. I’m the star.”41 (McDermott found himself back in Ted’s good graces in 1953, after the pitcher got into a brawl in the clubhouse with Globe beat writer Bob Holbrook. Williams applauded and said to him, “Way to go. You’re the first player to pop a writer in 20 years.”42)

  Ted would use the press as his all-purpose whipping boy and, rather than take responsibility for his own behavior, blame the writers. In August of 1956, in the aftermath of another spitting episode, Austen Lake called Ted on this point. “Each time this scaramouche foams into one of his copyrighted tantrums he uses a rubber stamp excuse: ‘The Boston sports writers drive me daffy,’ ” Lake wrote. “No blame to himself! He shrugs off responsibility for his hooliganisms by saying the writers are persecuting him maliciously. Nothing is further from fact.… It’s half past time the writers told the stark naked truth about this Johnny-jump-up, who paints himself a martyr to sports page oppression.”

  Then, delving into Ted’s psyche, Lake speculated that Ted had substituted the writers for the adults who had failed him in his childhood. “As a psychotic personality who grew up from a nerve-frazzled childhood, among eccentric adults and an insecure atmosphere, he built a protective wall around himself to shut out what, in his junior sight, was a hostile world run by adult tyrants,” Lake wrote. “It stunted his spiritual development. So he clung to this adolescent obsession and in time, as he became an adult himself, substituted the tyrants of his childhood with a similar set of tyrants, the sportswriters. We stand as carping critics, symbols of censure, the disciplinary eyes, the thought police, antagonists. He had to have a new set of antagonists to replace the old, obsolete set.”43

  Though there was quite a drop-off in impact after Egan, the two other leading Boston columnists in that era were Lake and Bill Cunningham of the Post and later the Herald. Together they comprised what was known in local sports circles as the Big Three.

  “Egan was an entertainer, Cunningham a spellbinder, Lake a preacher,” wrote Harold Kaese in an appraisal of the three men following Lake’s death in 1964.44

  Cunningham, a former All-American football player at Dartmouth, was a tall, extroverted, pompous dandy who usually wore a blue beret and a sleeveless yellow sweater and carried a walking stick. He had famously panned Ted in 1938 after he was sent down to the minors, and the following spring, when Ted was up for good, he had an unpleasant encounter with the columnist. Cunningham or his editors had decided that a make-good column on the rookie he had written off twelve months earlier would be appropriate. Cunningham, however, didn’t seem too enthused about the prospect, and apparently he had had one too many on the day of the encounter.

  “The elevator door opens, and out pops Cunningham wearing a porkpie hat, and it was obvious he had been drinking,” recalled pitcher Elden Auker. “He walks straight over to Ted and interrupts us, saying, ‘C’mon, kid, let’s get this over with. I have to interview you because the people in Boston want to know what this kid coming up from Minneapolis is like.’ Ted just looked at him and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Cunningham, I don’t talk to sportswriters after they’ve been drinking.’ Well, you could see the steam coming out of him as he walked away.”45 Despite that incident, Cunningham generally liked Williams and would often come to his defense when he was under attack over the years.

  Lake, like Cunningham, had once starred in football—first as a halfback at Lafayette College, in Pennsylvania, and then in Buffalo and Philadelphia, where he played professionally. He served as a college football referee until shortly before his death.

  Nicknamed the Duke, Lake worked with Egan in the Hearst building that housed the Record and the American, but the two were unfriendly rivals and sometimes feuded publicly. Although it was Lake to whom Ted gave his pivotal rant in August of 1940—the story that would permanently change the tenor of his tenure with the Red Sox—Lake, unlike Egan, was never obsessed with Williams and seemed more interested in the interplay between the star and his fans. He once wrote that the murmur of the crowd when Ted came to bat was “like the autumn wind moaning through an apple orchard.”46

  Besides the Big Three, the longest-serving, most influential, and most colorful beat writers and columnists who covered Williams included Hy Hurwitz, Harold Kaese, Clif Keane, and Roger Birtwell—all of the Globe—Joe Cashman of the Daily Record, and Ed Rumill of the Christian Science Monitor. These men were characters and players in their own right, and they had a significant role both in shaping public perceptions of Williams and in framing Ted’s own view of the press and the world around him.

  Few writers had as many ups and downs or jousts with Ted as Hurwitz, a former Marine who was just a shade over five feet tall. Hurwitz had joined the Globe as a copyboy in the late ’20s, when he was a senior at Boston’s English High School. He covered Ted throughout his career, and they served in World War II at the same time, from 1942 to 1946.

  Hurwitz and Ted were thrown together in earnest in 1946, when the Globe announced that Williams, for the hefty sum of $1,500 per week, would write a column at the end of the Red Sox’s pennant season. The paper did not announce that Hurwitz, also the Globe’s Red Sox beat reporter, would be the ghostwriter. Each dreaded the daily meeting, in which Ted would riff on some subject or other and then Hurwitz would produce the column, entitled TED WILLIAMS SAYS. According to Al Hirshberg, around the seventh inning of every game, Hurwitz would say to his colleagues in the press box: “In two more innings I’m going to have to go down to listen to that big sonofabitch.” Ted, for his part, would sit on the bench and complain to teammates: “In two more innings I’m going to have to talk to that no-good little bastard.”47

  One of the most colorful characters among the writers of the day was the Globe’s Clif Keane, who was known as the Che Guevara of Boston’s sporting press. Short, paunchy, balding, and bespectacled, Keane constantly push
ed the boundary between friendly ribbing and overly harsh needling. He carried out his often riotous repartee with the deft timing and delivery of a stand-up comedian, but he softened his blows if the targets were people he liked.

  When Roger Maris was chasing Ruth’s record in 1961 and the Yankees were making their last visit of the season to Fenway Park, the New York writers told Keane that Maris was in the bunker and not talking to anyone. “Really?” said Keane. He walked over to the Yankees dugout, spotted his target, and called out, “Hey, Maris, you shoemaker! You busher! Who would want to talk to you?” Maris laughed and said, “Come on, Clif, I’ll give you a story.”48 And Keane got a scoop.

  Baseball was Keane’s realm, but occasionally his editors gave him an assignment off the diamond. Once, he was dispatched to cover a dog show—unfamiliar turf, to say the least. He filed a routine story, then later learned that one of the leading dogs in the show had died of a heart attack. Keane called in a perfunctory paragraph to be added to the end of his story. The next day Globe editor Larry Winship called Keane in and chewed him out, telling him that the drama of the dog dying should have led the story, not ended it. Keane was unmoved. “Larry,” he explained, “the dog died and I buried it.”49

  Keane grew up in the Dorchester section of Boston and was married to a Globe classified ad taker. He joined the paper’s sports staff in 1939. He always called Williams Bush, tossing Ted’s familiar greeting right back at him. Ted once threw a ball toward Keane in jest, but the ball hit a pebble and bounced up to shatter Keane’s eyeglasses. Williams apologized and offered to buy him a new pair of glasses. Keane declined and said, “I’ll get you, but I’ll get you between the eyes.”50

  Roger Birtwell was a Boston Brahmin (Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, class of ’23) who spoke with the lockjawed, languid manner characteristic of the city’s self-styled aristocracy. Before joining the Globe in 1942, Birtwell, who was known as the Rajah, had worked in New York for the Daily News, the World-Telegram, and the Herald Tribune. He wore blue suits, often with his slippers for extra comfort. Before tapping out a story, he would back a spool of copy paper up to his typewriter, roll it out to the desired length, then write his piece to order. He was infamous for showing up at Fenway Park around the sixth inning, sidling up to a colleague in the press box, and saying, “Yeeeeaaas, could you catch me up a bit?” After some requisite eye rolling, the fellow scribe would give Birtwell his fill, and the Rajah—partly out of enthusiastic gratitude and partly to rev himself up for the task at hand—would say, “Ye-e-es! Ye-es! Yes!” with increasing near-orgasmic intensity as he scribbled out his notes on what had transpired.