Reaction to Williams’s ascent among players, public, and press was almost universally favorable. A notable dissenter was Jim Murray, the gifted Los Angeles Times columnist, who broadened the Egan-Gillooly critique to the national stage. Ted was an objet d’art who belonged in the Louvre, not Cooperstown, Murray felt. He wrote that Ted was “probably the greatest pure striker of the baseball who ever lived. But this translated out into exactly one pennant for his team in 19 years.… His main adversary was a decimal point. He fought the public, the press, the Marine Corps—but not necessarily the New York Yankees. He was a stylist, not a struggler.
“I know it would be easier to keep snow out of Alaska than Ted Williams out of the Hall of Fame,” Murray continued. “I wouldn’t if I could. As I say, he was unique. I only hope they keep his trophy case well aloof from that of the rest of them in there, well away from the Frankie Frisches, Lou Gehrigs, Joe DiMaggios, Ruths, Robinsons and Cochranes—so that nobody will get the idea he’s part of a team, and will know that it’s just another All-Star appearance.”7
But Murray was decidedly in the minority. Generally, Ted was showered with kudos, and the newspapers were filled with fawning tributes, series, and retrospectives on his career. Soon, Williams would also be hailed for his forward thinking and his surprising decision to leverage his induction to help right a wrong.
The ceremony was held six months later, on July 25, a Monday. Ted hadn’t been in Cooperstown since 1940, his second year, when the Red Sox played an exhibition game against the Cubs on June 13. He had belted two home runs, one of them landing on the porch of a house on nearby Susquehanna Avenue. Still a boy, dreaming, he’d thought that day how great it would be to have a career that would make him worthy of the Hall of Fame. Now he was about to be inducted, along with Casey Stengel, who had been voted in separately by the Veterans Committee as a manager.* The Stengel-Williams relationship was a mutual admiration society. “I don’t think anybody contributed more to baseball than Casey Stengel,” Williams wrote in his book. “He ranks right there with Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and Judge Landis. He was in baseball 50 years and caused as much copy to be written about the game and about himself as anybody.”8 And Stengel, for his part, loved Ted. “I wouldn’t let my pitcher throw to Mr. Williams, because he could see the ball better standing sideways than the umpires could standing straight ahead,” said Casey, who was about to turn seventy-six. “Williams was the most aggressive hitter I ever saw.”9
On Sunday, the day before the ceremony, Ted, in his capacity as a Red Sox executive, joined farm director Neil Mahoney in Oneonta, New York, about twenty miles south of rustic Cooperstown. Williams had originally planned to watch the Sox’s minor-league club play a game, but he begged off and decided to stay in his room at Oneonta’s Town House Motor Inn. He began writing his acceptance speech on the hotel’s stationery.
That night, Ted rendezvoused for dinner with about twenty friends, as well as with his quite pregnant daughter and her husband, at the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown. The Otesaga, with its thirty-foot columns and striking federalist architecture, is located on the southern shore of Otsego Lake—the Glimmerglass of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels. It’s the grande dame of Cooperstown, where all the immortals stay when they’re in town.
The Williams circle included old teammate Bobby Doerr; war pal Bill Churchman of Philadelphia; Ted’s accountant, Paul Brophy; and his agent, Fred Corcoran. Sometime girlfriend Lynette Siman of Islamorada made the cut, along with her husband. Bobby-Jo wore her hair up in the then-fashionable beehive. Ted had to excuse himself early from dinner to continue working on his speech. “I’ve never seen him so nervous,” Doerr remarked to a reporter.10
Some seven thousand fans turned out the following morning on a hot, cloudless day, swarming the village of Cooperstown in what was said to have been the largest crowd ever to come to an induction. The ceremony is usually held on the front steps of the museum and spills over onto Main Street. But that year the stage was set in Cooper Park, behind the museum, where there was more space—though, it turned out, still not enough to accommodate everyone. People sat in folding chairs and packed the slopes overlooking the lawn; others hung from the nearby elm and oak trees to get a better view of the platform. The spillover crowd in front of the building could hear the proceedings via loudspeakers but could not see the goings-on.
Williams, characteristically tieless despite the august occasion, was dressed in a white knit polo shirt buttoned to the throat, slacks, and a plaid sport jacket. He had requested to speak before Stengel, not wanting to follow the eccentric, comical former manager. Prior to the ceremonies, Hall of Famers Joe Cronin, Joe McCarthy, Bill Dickey, and Bill Terry were introduced to the crowd from the platform. Williams had connections to all four. Cronin and McCarthy were two of his managers, Dickey had been a Yankees rival, and Terry one of his childhood heroes with the New York Giants. Also introduced were the widows of Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, and Eddie Collins, who had scouted Ted for the Red Sox.
William Eckert, a former Air Force lieutenant general who had been named commissioner of baseball the previous year, introduced Ted and was forced to stop and wait several times as the crowd erupted in cheers when he cited Williams’s litany of hitting accomplishments. “He gave five years to the service of his country and if he hadn’t, probably would have hit one hundred and fifty more home runs,” Eckert said. A voice from the crowd yelled, “Two hundred and fifty!” “Okay, two hundred and fifty,” Eckert replied, laughing.
After Eckert handed Ted his Hall of Fame plaque and the crowd roared its approval, the photographers called for him to hold the plaque up in triumph. He obliged. Finally, after a suitable interval, he approached the microphone.
“Mr. Commissioner, baseball dignitaries, and fans, I’m happy and I want to emphasize what a great honor it is to have the new commissioner of baseball here, General Eckert,” Williams said. “The general and I have at least one thing in common. We each did some flying. He was in the Air Force and I was a Marine, and I want you to know that no matter what you might have heard, there were many times when the Air Force went out first and the Marines had to go out and hit the targets they missed.” The crowd erupted in laughter.
“I guess every player thinks about going into the Hall of Fame. Now that the moment has come for me, I find it difficult to say what is in my heart. But I know that it’s the greatest thrill of my life.
“I received two hundred and eighty–odd votes from the writers. I know I don’t have two hundred and eighty–odd close friends among the writers.” Again there was laughter and applause, and Ted chuckled. “I know they voted for me because they felt in their minds, and some in their hearts, that I rated it. And I want to say to them, ‘Thank you. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.’ ”
And then Ted stepped into dicey terrain for the Hall of Fame. He had come to thank—but also to chide.
“The other day, Willie Mays hit his five hundred and twenty-second home run. He has gone past me and he is pushing ahead, and all I can say to him is, ‘Go get ’em, Willie.’ Inside this building are plaques to baseball men of all generations, and I’m privileged to join them. Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel—not just to be as good as someone else but to be better than someone else. This is the nature of man and the name of the game, and I’ve been a very lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform; to have struck out or hit a tape-measure home run. And I hope that someday, the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol of the Negro players that are not here only because they were not given a chance.”
Williams spoke for a bit longer, about Stengel and about his own hope to stay involved in baseball. When he was done, the crowd rose to its feet and gave Ted a long, loud ovation. The six-minute speech, which Williams read from the handwritten text he’d composed on the Oneonta hotel stationery, had been delivered flawlessly, with grace, humility, poise, and humor.
There had been only one hiccup. After Comm
issioner Eckert introduced Ted and handed him his plaque, a fan sitting in the first few rows called out to Williams, “What would Dave Egan think of this?” Ted, standing about five feet behind the microphone as he waited for the applause to subside, then scowled, put his head down, and muttered a remark about Egan, his onetime nemesis, who had died in 1958.
Tim Horgan, the Traveler columnist, was sitting about twenty rows back and was quite sure he heard Williams say: “Fuck Dave Egan.” Henry McKenna, Horgan’s colleague from the Traveler’s sister paper, the morning Boston Herald, thought he heard the same thing.
Horgan, recalling the incident years later, said two Red Sox officials, Neil Mahoney and Ed Kenney, who worked with Mahoney in minor-league operations, spun around immediately to see if any of the writers had heard what Ted said. He also noticed others in the crowd whispering about it. “That gave me more confidence about the thing because I wasn’t the only one who heard it,” Horgan said.
He filed his column for the afternoon paper without mentioning Ted’s remark about Egan, but he told his editor about it, and the editor decided that the obscenity should be the lead of Horgan’s piece and proceeded to write the first four paragraphs himself.
“Red Sox slugger Ted Williams, apparently unawed by the solemnity of his elevation [to] baseball’s Hall of Fame, cast a vulgar tone on today’s ceremonies by making an obscene response to a heckler which left a majority of the crowd of over 10,000 stunned,” the first paragraph read.11 That was a clear overstatement, since only a fraction of the crowd sitting near the front had heard the remark, and the person who had called out to Ted about Egan was an admirer, not a heckler. McKenna’s ten-paragraph account of the incident the next morning in the Herald added some detail the Traveler did not include, such as characterizing Ted’s quote as “- - - - Dave Egan,” so the reader could easily figure out which offending four-letter word had been involved. He concluded that “the profanity detracted from a noble day.”12*
No other newspaper reported on the incident, and in his book, Williams denied that he had cursed out Egan. After the fan called out asking what Egan would have thought, “I made a face and said, ‘Yeah, that Egan’ and mumbled under my breath, carrying the joke out,” Ted wrote. “It was one of the few times in my memory when I didn’t use a few choice words to describe Egan. I was in too good a mood to let his memory spoil my day.”13
Tom Yawkey thought that the Herald and Traveler had unconscionably sullied Ted’s fete and was outraged. Though the Herald had written about the episode in more detail and more extensively, Yawkey focused his ire on Horgan and the Traveler, perhaps because the evening paper had come out first and thus began stirring the pot. Three or four days later, Horgan was at Fenway and received word that Yawkey would like to see him in his office. Horgan went up. Yawkey was sitting behind his desk, and to his right sat two Red Sox executives, Haywood Sullivan and Dick O’Connell. Fifteen or twenty feet away were a chair and a tape recorder.
“It looked like the electric chair,” Horgan said. “Yawkey asked me to sit down and play the tape. It was a tape of Ted’s speech. I played it several times, but I couldn’t pick up exactly what he said about Egan.”
Then Yawkey leaped out of his chair and began screaming and cursing at Horgan, saying he had maligned Ted and ruined his grand occasion. Horgan let him vent, then walked over to O’Connell and Sullivan, both of whom he knew better than the owner, and said, “I don’t care who this guy is. If he keeps talking to me that way I’m gonna punch him.” O’Connell and Sullivan smirked.
Finally Yawkey calmed down and said to Horgan, “Ted wanted to handle this, but I said I would.”
“What do you want?” Horgan asked.
“I want a page-one retraction.”
Horgan turned to leave, and as he did, Yawkey reminded him that the Herald-Traveler corporation owned WHDH radio, which broadcast the Sox games and made the newspapers a lot of money. The inference was clear: he might give the broadcast rights to another station. “If you give us the retraction, you’ll never hear from me or Ted again,” Yawkey said. “I promise you.”
Back at the paper, Horgan told his editors what had happened, and they quickly folded. “They realized the awkward position the paper was in,” Horgan said. “So they said to go ahead and write the correction. I had no recourse if I wanted to keep my job. I wrote the correction myself over my byline. From that day on, Yawkey and I were pals.”14
Under the headline ANOTHER LOOK AT TED’S TALK, Horgan wrote: “Nobody likes to eat crow, but this time I don’t mind. This time it’s better that I, rather than Ted Williams, be wrong.”15 He said he’d thought Williams had made a vulgar remark, but after hearing the tape, he’d concluded that Ted had said “Let Dave Egan…” with the rest of what he said muffled in background noise. He had to fall on his sword. The Herald followed the next day with its own front-page mea culpa, headlined TED WILLIAMS, WE APOLOGIZE.16
Though little remarked upon at the time, the most significant section of Williams’s acceptance speech was his totally unexpected and surprising call for the Hall of Fame to induct the Negro League greats, who had been deemed ineligible because they didn’t have the requisite ten years of major-league experience. This, of course, was a catch-22 restriction, since the color line had barred them from playing in the first place.
Ted’s remarks amounted to a bold and courageous political statement. Most ballplayers are inherently apolitical. Williams, the iconoclast, was opinionated and willing to speak his mind when asked, but he certainly wasn’t in the habit of calling for fundamental policy changes in baseball. And while his brand of Republican conservatism didn’t seem consistent with a call to break down racial barriers, he was a strong believer in the egalitarian, democratic ideal. He might have hidden his own ethnicity from the public, but growing up as part of a Mexican-American extended family, he had witnessed discrimination firsthand. In addition, Williams had a basic sense of fairness. He’d heard about the exploits of Negro League old-timers since he was a kid, and at age fourteen he had gone to see Satchel Paige pitch, marveling at how hard he could throw. He’d competed against black players in high school, including Jackie Robinson in the 1936 tournament in Pomona. And while he was in the Pacific Coast League, and at least once in the majors, Ted had faced barnstorming Negro League players, including Buck O’Neil, who would go on to become a pioneering coach and scout in the major leagues and work in the commissioner’s office. Williams, O’Neil recalled, always treated black players as equals.
Though Williams’s statement at the Hall of Fame certainly caught the baseball establishment and most everyone else off guard, his actions and statements about black players and civil rights generally—both during his career and in the six years before his induction—actually foreshadowed it. When Robinson broke the color line with the Dodgers, Williams had sent him a letter of congratulations. When Larry Doby integrated the American League the following year, Ted had befriended Doby, going out of his way to make him feel welcome and frequently offering him batting tips. When Doby and his black Cleveland Indians teammate Luke Easter came to visit Ted in the hospital in 1950 after he broke his elbow, and were initially not allowed in to see him, Williams had insisted they be sent up to his room.
He’d touted black players to the Saturday Evening Post in 1954, declaring, “These fellows are not only great players but also a credit to the game.” In 1957, Ted had met with Robinson in Boston when Jackie was visiting as part of an NAACP tour, and Robinson said he considered Williams “a fine person.”17 When the Red Sox finally integrated in 1959, with Pumpsie Green, Williams had taken the lead in welcoming Green, making sure to set an example by playing catch with him in front of the dugout during warm-ups before each game.
In 1963, at the beginning of his retirement, Ted, writing in his syndicated column, had called for network executives to televise more basketball and thereby showcase black players. Noting the rioting in Birmingham, Alabama, earlier that year, an outgrowth of the civil rig
hts movement, Williams wrote, “There should be room to show the world… there is another side to our country. Sports do not ask what a man’s color is.”18 A few years later, after learning that a young black pitcher for the Kansas City A’s, Johnny “Blue Moon” Odom, couldn’t get a room at the team’s hotel in Florida, Williams went to the front desk and quickly forced his accommodation.19
On a private hunting trip around the same time with his longtime friend Joe Davis, a Florida businessman, Williams made it clear what kind of talk he would and would not tolerate. “There were some boys from Georgia with us, telling stories about taking the doors off of black families’ homes if they couldn’t pay the rent,” Davis recalled. “Ted got up and wouldn’t listen to their talk. He didn’t think it was funny.”20
And there was Williams’s sense of honor and the generosity that followed. Theodore Roosevelt Radcliffe had once managed a black All-Star team that played against Ted’s San Diego Padres in the Pacific Coast League. Years later, Williams, the major-league star, encountered Radcliffe and asked him, out of the blue, “Are you broke, Ted?” Radcliffe didn’t answer directly, but Williams knew that, as Radcliffe put it, “We didn’t make much money in the old Negro Leagues.” Williams took a photograph of Radcliffe and paid him $900 for the privilege.21 Williams could be abusive, nasty, and narcissistic, but when he encountered the unlucky—be they those denied a chance because of racism or children denied a chance because of disease—he followed his heart.
Curt Gowdy, the longtime radio and TV voice of the Red Sox, said he considered Williams to be one of the most honest and fair men he’d ever met. “That’s one thing I admired about him—that he was really open. And he said to me, ‘You watch for that day that the major league players will be fifty percent black.’ ” When Gowdy asked why he thought that, Williams replied in the politically incorrect vernacular of the day: “Well, they’ll go play in the minors for a hundred bucks a month and work their way up, get out of their element. Their bodies are stronger, they walk everywhere, they lift. They’re great athletes.”22
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 66
