Having given up on getting his interview, Linn asked if he could at least ask one question. Williams, now feeling some empathy for the inexperienced young writer, who after all had had nothing to do with the 1948 retribution, answered at length. Linn ended up staying on to interview Ted and his teammates over a period of three days. When his teammates asked if it was okay if they spoke to Linn, Ted would respond, “Yeah, yeah. Talk to the son of a bitch.” Linn modestly concluded that neither his technique nor his interviewing skills had had anything to do with Williams changing his mind: “Ted could see that he had someone there who had not the slightest idea what he was doing. And Ted has always had a thing about lending a helping hand to the disadvantaged.”2
Every year after that for the rest of the decade, Sport called on Linn to write an article on Williams, and now here he was for the ending.
On his last day, Ted arrived at the park at 10:50 a.m., nearly four hours before game time. He was wearing dark brown slacks, a yellow sport shirt, and a tan pullover sweater. When Williams saw Linn, who had finagled his way into the Red Sox clubhouse in violation of the team rule that barred reporters for two hours before the game, he snapped: “You’re not supposed to be in here, you know.”
“It’s your last day,” replied Linn. “Why don’t you live a little?”
Williams started to the trainer’s room, but then wheeled around. “You’ve got a nerve coming here to interview me after the last one you wrote about me.”
What was the matter with the last piece? Linn asked.
“You called me unbearable, that’s what’s the matter.”
Linn noted that the full quote was actually that he “was sometimes unbearable but never dull,” which had a different connotation.
Williams then reverted to bashing Sport for its original sin—the 1948 piece, now twelve years old. What he objected to in that article, it turned out, was the mere fact that the reporter had deigned to interview his mother to elicit a complimentary quote about him. As far as Williams was concerned, his family was off-limits, even if they said nice things about him.
“Why don’t you just write your story without me?” Williams suggested to Linn. “What do you have to talk to me for? What can I tell you now that I haven’t told you before?”
“Why don’t you let me tell you what the story is supposed to be? Then you can say yes or no,” Linn said before realizing this phrasing invited only one reply.
“I can tell you before you tell me!” Ted shouted. “No! No, no, no.”
Linn retreated, hoping Williams would largely forget he was there and just let him observe. He proceeded to spend the entire time before the first inning with Ted, and later walked him out of the park when all was done. His lead piece, published in February of 1961, entitled “The Kid’s Last Game,” would be the definitive behind-the-scenes account of Williams’s finale.
As his teammates dressed and went out on the field, Ted remained in the clubhouse and read his mail. Then he took his spikes into the trainer’s room and began shining them. A photographer came by and asked him to sign a ball. “Are you crazy?” Ted sneered before demanding that the clubhouse boy throw the offending photographer out.
Williams did not leave the clubhouse for the dugout until 12:55 p.m., just thirty-five minutes before the game was scheduled to begin. He’d decided to skip batting practice—the better to make a dramatic entrance, Linn thought. As he climbed the stairs to the dugout, he bumped into his fishing pal Bud Leavitt, sports editor of the Bangor Daily News. Spotting Williams, a group of photographers closed in and began firing away. Ted leveled a few choice obscenities at them and guided Leavitt to the far end of the dugout. “Let’s sit down so we don’t get bothered by all these blasted cameramen,” he said.
Leavitt let Ted know that he had brought Cornelius Russell III and a bunch of his friends to the game. Russell was a friend of Leavitt’s, a young man from Bangor who had broken his neck in a sports mishap and was now confined to a wheelchair. Several years earlier, while Ted was in Bangor, Leavitt had taken him to meet Russell, an avid Red Sox and Ted fan known as Connie. Ted and Connie became friends, and Williams would visit him whenever he came to Bangor to hunt or fish, and he would call him on holidays to offer good wishes. Connie had never seen a major-league game, so now Leavitt had invited him and several of his friends to Fenway for Ted’s finale. They were all sitting behind the Red Sox dugout. Ted told Leavitt to bring Connie and his friends around to his suite at the Somerset Hotel after the game.3
As Leavitt walked away, a young, attractive redhead peered into the dugout from her box seat and asked Ted if he would sign her scorecard.
“I can’t sign it, dear, league rules. Where are you going to be after the game?”
“You told me that once before,” the woman said.
“Well, where are you going to be?” Williams shouted.
“Right here.”
“All right.”
Joe Cronin, Ted’s first manager and now the president of the American League, came into the dugout to greet his old charge. They talked quietly for a while, and as Cronin left he said to Ted, “Behave yourself.”4 Then Williams came onto the field to do a television interview with a local anchorman, Jack Chase of WBZ-TV, and his colleague Betty Adams. By this time, most of the surprisingly small crowd of 10,454 in attendance that day were in their seats, and they let out a lusty cheer at the sight of Ted. It was foggy and dark with a threat of rain.
Chase asked Ted how he felt. “You can’t get blood out of a turnip,” Williams replied. “I know I’ve gone as far as I can go as a player. I wouldn’t try to go any further.” Betty Adams followed up with a question about his future plans. “Sweetheart,” Ted said, “all I know is I’m going to spring training. After that, I don’t know what I’ll be doing.”5
Williams pushed his way through a gaggle of photographers who had been taking pictures of him doing the interview and headed back to the dugout. Someone asked him to pose with Cronin, and he did. Then Ted grabbed his glove and went out to play catch with Pumpsie Green, as he generally did during pregame warm-ups. At this the photographers closed in again. “Why don’t you cockroaches get off my back?” Ted sneered at them. “Let me breathe.”
A bell rang to signal the end of warm-ups before Ted could make more than a few dozen throws to Green. Most of his teammates went back into the clubhouse, but Williams stayed in the dugout and put on a jacket to ward off the chill. An older photographer asked him to pose, but Ted would have none of it. “Get lost,” he said. “I’ve seen enough of you, you old goat.”
Curt Gowdy, the Red Sox broadcaster who would preside over a pregame ceremony honoring Williams, stopped by to go over the script. Then an old woman leaned in from the box seats with a plaintive wail: “Don’t leave us, Ted! Don’t leave us!” Williams was unmoved. “Oh, hell,” he said, turning his back on her with disdain. When the young redhead saw this, she said to him: “Why don’t you act nice?” Ted ambled over to her, smiling broadly, and said teasingly: “Come on, dear, with that High Street accent you got there.”
Williams noticed Ed Linn soaking in the scene from a seat in the dugout. “You getting it all?” he asked him sarcastically. “You getting what you came for?”
In watching Williams’s serial displays of rudeness and bad manners since his arrival that morning, Linn had concluded that Ted was determined to go out with his hardness on full display, without betraying even a hint of sentimentality.
Gowdy called the proceedings to order at home plate. “As we all know,” he said, “this is the final home game for—in my opinion and most of yours—the greatest hitter who ever lived, Ted Williams.” There was loud applause. After some more preliminary remarks from the broadcaster, the chairman of the Boston Chamber of Commerce presented Williams with a silver bowl “on behalf of the business community of Boston.” Another chamber representative offered a plaque in appreciation for Ted’s visits “to kids and veterans’ hospitals.” Boston mayor John Collins then proclaimed it Ted Willia
ms Day and handed Ted a $4,000 check for the Jimmy Fund.
As this was going on, the Orioles starting pitcher, Steve Barber, a twenty-two-year-old rookie left-hander, limbered up on the sidelines, trying to stay warm. Pitching coach Harry “the Cat” Brecheen, the former Cardinals ace who had owned Ted in the 1946 World Series, supervised Barber. Williams fidgeted nervously—head mostly down, with one foot pawing the ground—waiting for the ceremony to wrap up.
Gowdy said, “Pride is what made him great. He’s a champion, a thoroughbred, a champion of sports.… I don’t think we’ll ever see another like him.” He then asked for another round of applause “for number nine on his last game in Boston.” At that, Williams gave Gowdy a hug and whispered in his ear that he’d like to get a copy of his remarks.6 Gowdy told him he’d ad-libbed it. “Aw, shit!” Ted said, then he grabbed the microphone and addressed the crowd.
“Despite the fact of the disagreeable things that have been said about me by the Knights of the Keyboard—and I can’t help thinking about them—despite these things, my stay in Boston has been the most wonderful thing in my life. If I were asked where I would like to have played, I would have to say Boston, with the greatest owner in baseball and the greatest fans in America. Thank you.”
The crowd roared and applauded. Williams walked back to the dugout, where his teammates were standing and waiting for him, also applauding. He smiled and winked at them, bounded down the steps, and took a seat on the bench.
Of course the writers were not thrilled at Ted’s “Knights of the Keyboard” dig, but they had grown accustomed to his scorn over the years and well knew that his retirement also meant the passing of a reporter’s dream. No one, after all, was better copy than Williams. In fact, John Gillooly of the Record had announced his own mock retirement that morning. “Dear Boss,” he wrote. “This is it. Deal me out. I am through. Get another boy and give him a new ribbon and let him take over the keyboard. This is my official resignation. Williams has retired.… The loss of Williams to a Boston sports columnist is like a bad case of athlete’s fingers to Van Cliburn. You just can’t pound the keys any more. The song has ended.” Gillooly said Ted was “our Hemingway. Oh, the stories he has written for us.”7
Besides Ed Linn, there was another keen follower and admirer of Williams in attendance that day, a different kind of writer who had already established his bona fides as an ascendant man of letters: John Updike. Updike—who died in 2009 after producing a vast collection of fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism that established him among the leading lights of American literature—was then twenty-eight, just six years removed from Harvard, where he had graduated summa cum laude. He was firmly ensconced at The New Yorker magazine, for which he had already written more than one hundred articles, essays, short stories, and poems. In addition, he’d already published three books: a collection of poems, a collection of short stories, and a novel—The Poorhouse Fair.
The married Updike was at Fenway Park that day only by chance, he later admitted. He had come up from New York to rendezvous with another woman, but when he went to her apartment on Beacon Hill he learned that he had been stood up. So knowing this was Williams’s last appearance in Boston, he went to the ballpark instead and ended up writing a piece for The New Yorker entitled “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which is considered by many to be the best sports essay ever.
Growing up in Shillington, Pennsylvania, near Reading, Updike loved baseball but was uninterested in either Philadelphia team—the Phillies or Athletics—but he latched onto the Red Sox. In a 1986 article for the Boston Globe entitled “Loving the Sox,” Updike wrote that he had become aware of the great Williams before World War II, though it was the 1946 World Series that turned him into an enthusiastic Boston fan. He had a vivid memory of sitting in his father’s Chevrolet at the age of fourteen and listening to the seventh game.
Working for The New Yorker after college, he would take the subway to Yankee Stadium to watch the aging Williams duel with Mantle. Then in 1957, Updike and his family moved to Ipswich, on Massachusetts’s North Shore, where he would listen to Sox games on the radio. He loved Curt Gowdy’s voice, “with its guileless hint of Wyoming twang,” and became such a devotee of the team that he once got stranded in the Vermont wilderness after pulling over to listen to a game and draining the car battery.
In a 2008 interview, Updike told Globe sports columnist Bob Ryan, “No other sports figure has moved me as much as Ted Williams.”8 He was drawn to Ted’s fragile persona, his constant warfare with the fans and the writers, and the sense of drama that seemed to always surround him. “The fact that he had these detractors in the stands and in the press just made Williams all the more appealing,” Updike said. “It made you like him more and root for him harder. It gave him a heroic ethos.… He never had a smooth season where he just played ball and everything just fell into place. There was always something going wrong.”9
For Ted’s last game, Updike arrived early and bought a good seat, near the Orioles dugout, behind third base. For his New Yorker audience, he immediately set the scene: “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark,” he wrote, a description that would be quoted ad nauseam in the ensuing years and etch its way firmly into Red Sox lore.10
Batting third as usual, Ted came to the plate in the bottom of the first inning. There was one out and a runner on first. Willie Tasby—the center fielder acquired from the Orioles that June in a trade for Gene Stephens, Ted’s caddy—had walked. Barber started Ted off with a curve that was inside; then a fastball was low. The crowd began to boo, wanting to see Williams hit. But the next two pitches were balls, too, and Ted trotted to first with a base on balls. After a hit batsman and a wild pitch, Williams found himself on third. Lou Clinton then lined out deep to center fielder Jackie Brandt. Ted tagged up and slid into home past catcher Gus Triandos as Brandt’s throw hit him in the back. The crowd, which was cheering Ted’s every move, was delighted by the uncharacteristic sliding hustle play.
When Ted returned for his second at bat in the third inning, Barber had been replaced by Jack Fisher, a twenty-one-year-old right-hander in his second year. Williams drove a one-and-one pitch to deep center, but Brandt drifted back and made the catch easily.
It was then announced over the public-address system that Ted’s number, 9, would be retired by the Red Sox “after today’s game.” That meant that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to its final three games of the year at Yankee Stadium. So this would not just be his final home game but his final game, period.
In the fifth inning, with two out and nobody on and the Sox trailing 3–2, Ted came to bat for the third time. By then a fog was coming in, and an east wind had kicked up. He lashed a ball hard and deep to right-center. Off the bat it looked gone, but the right fielder, Al Pilarcik, raced back as far as he could, and with his back against the bull-pen wall, out from the 380-foot sign, caught the ball chest high. “I didn’t think I could hit one harder than that,” Williams said after the game. “The conditions weren’t good.”11
In the sixth inning, the lights were turned on to counter the advancing darkness and gloom. Jack Fisher was having few problems with the Red Sox and appeared in command as he took a 4–2 lead into the bottom of the eighth. Williams was due up second for what figured to be his last major-league at bat.
Willie Tasby, the first batter, came out of the dugout, followed quickly by Ted, whereupon the crowd roared. Tasby, rather than do the customary dawdling by the on-deck circle to swing a bat or two, proceeded directly to home plate, as if he couldn’t wait to cede the spotlight to Ted. He hit the first pitch on the ground to shortstop for a routine out.
Williams had barely settled into the on-deck circle on one knee, swinging the lead bat to limber up, when it was his time. As he strode to the dish, everyone in the ballpark stood, but the cheers heard all afternoon now stopped in favor of more respectful sustained applause. Home plate umpire Ed Hurley—who, like all the umpires, admired Williams and
who would stop by the clubhouse after the game to pay his respects—called time as the applause swelled and continued with no sign of dying down. Ted stood in the box, swishing his bat back and forth and staring at Fisher, all business, ready to hit. He seemed oblivious to the fans’ acclaim and did nothing to acknowledge it. After about two minutes, Hurley signaled for Fisher to pitch, and he did so, even as the applause continued. Only after he threw his pitch—a ball, low—did the ovation stop.
The second pitch was a fastball, neck high. Williams swung mightily—and missed. The fans oohed, but they seemed to take some satisfaction in seeing that he was obviously going for the downs—neither he nor they would be cheated. Ted said later he couldn’t believe he missed it. After the first pitch, he’d thought Fisher “humped up, as if he were going to try and fire the ball by me. I knew he was going to try and pump it right past. And gee, here comes a ball I should have hit a mile, and I missed the son of a gun. I don’t miss, completely miss, very often and I don’t know yet how I missed that ball.”
He’d swung a tad late, so he told himself to be quicker on the next pitch: “Fisher couldn’t wait to throw the next one,” Ted remembered. “He must have thought he threw the last one by me, and maybe he did, but all my professional life I had been a fastball hitter, and whenever I had an inkling one was coming it was that much better for me.”12 But even guessing fastball and getting it, there was still the matter of delivering: he had hit the ball in the fifth inning on the screws, and it had not gone out. Then there was the singular pressure of this moment, the last at bat of his career, and the keen strain to satisfy his own yearning—and those of legions of others—to go out in style.
Fisher was confident. “I had just thrown a fastball right by him,” he remembered. “So I came right back with another one. He hit it real good.”13
Yes, he did.
The pitch came in waist high—on the outside corner, but still too fat. Williams turned on it and sent the ball screaming on a grand trajectory out to deep right-center. Jackie Brandt, who’d denied him in the fifth, couldn’t reach this one. The ball sailed into the Red Sox bull pen and struck an aluminum canopy that covered the bench where the relief pitchers sat, making a loud racket.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 59
