The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  There were card shows, personal appearances, and various other permutations of the market to be taken advantage of. By the early-to-mid ’90s, the Kid and the Clipper could make up to $250,000 for a weekend of signing. Ted couldn’t believe how easy the money was, yet unlike DiMaggio, he declined to game the system for all it could bring him.

  Williams had started out in 1983 doing a few appearances—one in Connecticut, another in Kansas City—for $1,000 an hour. By 1989, he was making a minimum of $5,000 an hour and attending more shows, like one in Atlantic City that featured all the living players who had hit five hundred or more home runs. DiMaggio refused to sign bats or balls, but Ted would sign anything. Joe didn’t bother to look up when he signed to acknowledge his fans, while Ted was engaged, chatty, and willing to pose for pictures.

  In February of 1989, for example, more than a thousand people, middle-aged or better, assembled outside Chicago to wait four hours for Williams to sign autographs at $20 each. People were ready with their autograph books, photos, bats, balls, and even an old sign bearing the legend TED’S CREAMY ROOT BEER. One man in a Red Sox uniform thrust a baby in Williams’s arms and started snapping off pictures, while a blonde posed with him and kept clinging to his arm well after their photo was taken.21

  Sometimes, if the spirit moved him, Williams would do a signing show for free, as he did in October of 1989 for Eddie Walsh, a retired Boston cop who had gone into the memorabilia business. Ted wanted to help Walsh because the officer had been kind to John-Henry. “The guys in charge of security wouldn’t let John-Henry into the ballpark because they thought he was a pain in the ass,” Walsh recalled. “I told them his father built Fenway Park and they should let the kid in.” Williams’s complimentary signing went on for more than two hours.

  “I made fifteen thousand dollars,” said Walsh. “Ted wouldn’t take any money. I gave the Jimmy Fund five thousand dollars. I gave John-Henry five thousand dollars—he was still in college—and the rest to one of my daughters. We had one thousand seven hundred and eighty-three people. Ted was talking to everyone. Sometimes they don’t let these guys talk at these shows.”22

  In the early-to-mid 1990s, Ted would ratchet up the number of signing shows he did annually, because John-Henry had taken over his business affairs by then and wanted him to be more active. While Williams often grumbled about the escalating demands on his time, especially as his health started to fail, he was generally a willing participant, motivated by a desire to leave a significant inheritance for his children.

  The son’s entrée to a position of power and influence over his father was facilitated by the fact that Williams had fallen victim to a memorabilia swindle in 1988, a scam that would cost him dearly.

  One day that year, Ted had gotten a call from a man named Vince Antonucci, who ran a baseball card shop in Crystal River, Florida, just down the road from the Kid’s new home in Citrus Hills. Though Williams didn’t know it at the time, Antonucci was a con man who had been convicted of various charges ranging from fraud to larceny. Antonucci lured Ted to his store, which was called Talkin’ Baseball, by saying there was a package there for him that he had to sign for.

  After arriving, Williams quickly learned there was no package and that the purpose of the visit was to give Antonucci and his partner, Barry Finger, a chance to talk Williams into entering the memorabilia business with them. Ted was bored and looking for something else to do. He was also naive and credulous, and Antonucci had a clever line of patter. His pitch essentially was that Ted could get off the autograph-show grind and just sign bats, balls, and other items for Talkin’ Baseball, which Antonucci and Finger would then market and sell.

  Ted agreed to take a one-third interest in the company. Soon Finger and Antonucci were arguing about the direction of the business, and Finger wanted out. Williams bought out his share, at which point he owned two-thirds of Talkin’ Baseball.

  Ted gave Antonucci $38,700 to buy one hundred cases of baseball cards, but Antonucci promptly put the money into his own checking account and spent it. When Williams noticed that the cards never appeared and that other inventory they had assembled was also unaccounted for, he went to civil court to dissolve the partnership. Antonucci countersued, claiming Ted owed him money from various signings he had done.

  Williams went all out and hired Washington superlawyer John Dowd, best known for representing Major League Baseball as chief investigator and author of a report that led to the banning of Pete Rose for betting on games. Dowd, who had grown up in Brockton, Massachusetts, and served in the Marine Corps, regarded Williams as a hero and was thrilled to meet him. But he tried to persuade him to drop the litigation. “I told him it would be very expensive,” Dowd said. “He ‘goddamned’ me a few times. He wanted to do it. I told him he shouldn’t. I didn’t take the case.” Williams called Dowd back a few weeks later. “I was getting this ‘Goddamn it, I checked you out. You’re the man. You gotta do it.’ I said, ‘Ted, it’s crazy. You don’t need to relive this thing.’ I went through the costs. ‘I don’t give a good goddamn’ about the money.” Dowd tried again to distance himself. “Then he showed up in my office in Washington without an appointment. Down the hall there was all this noise. The place was going crazy. He was signing autographs. The word went through this place like lightning that Ted Williams was here. We’ve got Red Sox fans all over the place. He said he was not leaving until I took the case.”23

  So Dowd signed on—and, as he predicted, the cost of the case quickly reached the point of diminishing returns for Williams. Ted’s legal fees for chasing Antonucci exploded to nearly $2 million, and in the end only a portion of the missing memorabilia was recovered.

  In February of 1992, Antonucci was found guilty of grand theft for taking the $38,700 and sentenced to five and a half years in prison and ten and a half years of probation. He got out of prison early, in August of 1993, then violated his probation and began crisscrossing the country selling Williams’s forged signatures. He was finally captured in Washington State in 1995 after being featured on television’s America’s Most Wanted program.

  After the Antonucci saga, John-Henry would successfully argue that in order to continue to play in a business filled with cheaters and sharks, Ted, a gullible sort anyway, would need to rely on someone he could trust totally. And who could he trust more than his own son?

  The Antonucci affair and its attendant expensive misery represented an anomaly from the exalted star turns commonplace in Ted’s retirement routine. But the everyday acclaim intensified in 1991, the fiftieth anniversary of his .406 season, for which he would be honored by the Red Sox and by the Bush White House—twice. Harvard University had also hoped to use the anniversary as a peg upon which to hang an honorary degree they wanted to give Williams, but Ted declined the invitation, a decision that underscored his lingering insecurity about not having an education beyond high school.

  Harvard and Williams had extensive talks that progressed to the point where the university sent him a detailed letter in February, spelling out the logistical arrangements for the day he would receive his honorary degree—he would have a limousine at his disposal while staying at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, the president of Harvard would host a dinner the night before for him and the other honorees, at which no press would be allowed, and at the commencement itself, Ted would stand while a citation was read and bask in the applause without having to make a speech.

  “This will be a unique occasion in your life,” Jack Reardon, associate vice president for university relations, wrote Williams in a February 26, 1991, letter. “Harvard has recognized unique achievement in all fields of endeavor; and you are as deserving of this special recognition as any other winner of a Harvard honorary degree.” But Ted ultimately said no.

  “We had several conversations,” recalled Reardon. “He was always coming back to, ‘This isn’t the right thing for me. I’d be very uncomfortable. I did not earn it.’ And he’d say, ‘The biggest mistake I ever made was not getting a co
llege education.’ I told him he joined Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn among those who turned us down. He laughed and said he thought that was pretty good company.”24

  On May 10 and 11, during a homestand against the Texas Rangers, the Red Sox hosted a weekend Tedfest. On the first day, the team paid homage to the great DiMaggio as well, saluting his famed hitting streak of 1941. The Kid and the Clipper met underneath the center-field bleachers and had a few quiet moments together before they emerged in separate golf carts—Ted’s heading toward left field and Joe’s through center toward right—and rendezvoused at home plate, where they shared a poignant embrace.

  Ted had John-Henry, then twenty-two, and Claudia, nineteen, there that day. He’d arranged for them to throw out the first ball and insisted they spend some time practicing the day before. As their father beamed, they both delivered crisp pitches.

  The following day was just for Williams, and 33,196 fans turned out. Each received a folder containing a collage of photos and news clippings commemorating Ted’s career. In the Red Sox clubhouse before the game, as Williams bantered with manager Joe Morgan, players like Roger Clemens and Wade Boggs, who had also gotten the Ted folders, were lined up, waiting for him to autograph them. Williams signed and chatted with Boggs, telling him he watched Sox games through his satellite dish in Florida now. He asked why Wade had chased a bad pitch on a three-and-one count the other day. Boggs was stunned to be asked such a specific question, but knew which pitch Ted meant.

  “Well, Ted, it was 3–1 and I was looking for a fastball in, and sometimes a fastball can look like a slider, you know, Ted,” Boggs explained.25

  Two of the opposing Rangers also came over to pay their respects. Williams asked one, Julio Franco, how he could hit with such a contorted stance, and he quizzed the other, pitcher Scott Chiamparino, on his knowledge of Bernoulli’s principle.26

  Curt Gowdy, who had called Williams’s last home run and toasted him before that game, was to be the master of ceremonies again this day, and Ted had thought carefully about what he wanted to say and do when he addressed the fans. One nice touch, he decided, would be to finally do something he had stopped doing as a player for twenty years: tip his cap to the fans. He confided his plans to John-Henry the night before with instructions not to tell anyone and to get him a Red Sox cap when the time came.

  But as he accompanied his father onto the field for the ceremony, John-Henry suddenly realized he’d forgotten to get the hat, so he raced into the clubhouse and borrowed the cap of Red Sox closer Jeff Reardon. Then he came back to the field and discreetly slipped the hat to Ted, who stuffed it in the back pocket of his pants, beneath his sport jacket.

  After Gowdy introduced him and the cheers rang out, Williams soaked up the moment, smiled broadly, and, like the showman he was, delivered one of his signature imaginary swings of the bat, clasped hands slashing through the air as the wrists rolled over and the hips turned, still smoothly.

  In his remarks, and with the intended hat tip, Williams wanted to bury the hatchet forever with his public, but as he did when he retired that day in 1960, he couldn’t resist taking another dig or two at the Boston press.

  “I used to get just a little annoyed when some of my teammates would kid me about how lucky a hitter I was, and I didn’t mind that because I knew how lucky I was,” Williams announced. “But when they started writing, or when they would even intimate in any way that I was hard-headed, that did bother me a little bit. And it really annoyed me when the Knights”—he pointed up to the press box—“elaborated on it in print. That did annoy me a lot.”

  Then the Kid started his windup. “So they can never write ever again that I was hard-headed, never write again that I never tipped my hat to the crowd”—at this he pulled out the hat from his hip pocket, threw his head back, and laughed, perhaps both in delight at the cleverness of his own gambit and at himself as he could sense the crowd catching on to the caper—“because today, I tip my hat to A-A-ALL the people of New England, without question the greatest fans on earth.”27

  Williams and DiMaggio made another joint appearance on July 9, this time at the White House. The appearance came about because the All-Star Game that year was to be played in Toronto on the same day, and then-commissioner Fay Vincent had invited President George H. W. Bush to be his guest at the game. Bush suggested to Vincent that they honor Ted and Joe at the White House first with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, then they would all fly together to Toronto on Air Force One for the game.

  A problem emerged. It seemed Joe had already received a Medal of Freedom—from Gerald Ford in 1977. “Please thank the President, but I already have one,” DiMaggio told Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu—with some delight, according to Morris Engelberg’s book.28 It was agreed both men would be given presidential citations instead, and Williams would get his Medal of Freedom separately later that year. Vincent recalled that when he invited DiMaggio to attend, Joe responded: “Do you want me to come, Commissioner? Is it personal to you?” Joe made it quite clear he was keeping track of favors.29

  Ted needed coaxing, too. Sununu invited Williams by letter, but received no reply. Vincent suspected that the reason Williams hadn’t answered was because he didn’t want to wear a tie. Sununu said he wouldn’t have to, whereupon Vincent called Ted with that message, and he accepted.

  Ted had brought Louise Kaufman with him, and they spent the night before the ceremony in the Lincoln Bedroom. Rob Kaufman, Louise’s son, said that was the highlight of his mother’s later life. Late that night, Bush suddenly appeared in the Lincoln Bedroom. He wanted to talk fishing with Ted and took him to the adjacent room, to two large dressers. Bush opened a drawer and revealed a gorgeous collection of fishing flies, all beautifully tied in a variety of colors—red, green, orange, and yellow—and made of goose feathers, sealskin, and other exotic materials. Then Bush showed him a collection of reels, and they talked about those. Williams liked a president who knew his fishing.30

  The morning of the ceremony, a Marine, saying he was risking going to the brig, asked Ted and Joe to sign his white glove. Then Sununu appeared and gave each of them forty-eight balls to sign. Ted cheerfully obliged and plunged into the assignment with gusto, but Joe turned to Vincent and asked, “Is he kidding?”

  “He’s not kidding,” Vincent replied.

  Joe fumed, but gave in. “I’m going to do it, Commissioner, but I don’t like it.”31

  After a private meeting and photo session in the Oval Office, Bush, Ted, and Joe emerged for the ceremony in the Rose Garden, where a throng of senators, congressmen, White House staffers, and guests, most of a certain age, had gathered for a glimpse of the two great men. Also present was the Louisiana State University baseball team, which was being honored for winning the College World Series. DiMaggio looked characteristically elegant in a tailored dark blue suit, white shirt, and purple paisley tie. Ted wore an ill-fitting gray sport coat, his bolo tie, and blue-gray slacks over brown-and-tan suede saddle shoes.

  Bush, the good-field-no-hit former Yale first baseman, was plainly delighted to be in the presence of baseball royalty. He recalled that in 1941, when Ted and Joe had had their sterling seasons, he’d been seventeen, “and like many American kids in those days… I followed those box scores closely, watched the magnificent season unfurl.” Then the president turned to DiMaggio. “In those days I was, Joe, a Red Sox fan.” The Clipper nodded as Bush, hoping to make amends, added that his brother had been a Yankees fan. “Fifty years later, that ’41 season just remains a season of dreams.… Who even now does not marvel at the Splendid Splinter and the Yankee Clipper?

  “These genuine heroes thrilled Americans with real deeds,” Bush said. “Both men put off their baseball careers to serve their country. Their service deprived them, I think every baseball lover will tell you, of even greater statistics, but also enhanced their greatness in the eyes of their countrymen.” Williams, the president added, was “John Wayne in a Red Sox uniform,” while DiMaggio “bespok
e excellence.”

  Ted accepted his citation first. “I’ve always realized what a lucky guy I’ve been in my life,” he said. “I was born in America. I was a Marine. I served my country. I’m very, very proud of that. I got to play baseball. Had a chance to hit. I owe so very, very much to this game that I love so much. And I want to thank you, Mr. President.” Williams, the staunch Republican, then looked at Bush and added: “I think you’re doing a tremendous job. And I want you to know that you’re looking at one of the greatest supporters you’ll ever have.” The bipartisan crowd laughed.

  Then it was Joe’s turn. “Thank you Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I’m honored. Thank you so much. And to you LSU players out there, congratulations on your championship. I know the feeling. I’ve been in one or two myself.”32

  After the ceremony, it was off to Toronto for the All-Star Game aboard Air Force One. Joe was awed by the plane, later describing its interior in great detail for his agent, Morris Engelberg. And the Clipper was anxious to tell Ted that he had already received a Medal of Freedom, to which, as Joe later wrote in his diary, Ted responded that they were now even when it came to medals.33 This was apparently a reference to the fact that Ted’s service record, when all was said and done, was longer and far more substantive than Joe’s, because the Clipper had mostly sat out World War II playing ball.

  Williams also enthused over the plane and inquired how much thrust the engines put out. While they were airborne, Bush placed a surprise call to Ted’s daughter Claudia, who thought it was a prankster on the line.34 Barbara Bush brought some more baseballs back for Ted and Joe to sign—mostly for the traveling press corps. The amiable Mrs. Bush was harder for DiMaggio to resist than Sununu, so he complied without a fuss this time.