Going Fishing with The
Kid
No longer a splinter, Ted Williams is just as splendid—and brash—as ever when he turns his skill against another worthy opponent, the leaping tarpon of the Florida Keys
by John Underwood
Issue date: Aug. 21,
1967
The Kid said it was about time we showed up. It was 5:15 in
the morning. The sun had not yet begun its assault on the
Florida Keys. By 10 o'clock it would be 85°, and
Charley Trainor, the photographer, would have his freckles
double-coated with a
petroleum compound made for World War II aviators marooned
at sea. The Kid had bacon—a good two pounds of bacon—bubbling and spitting in twin skillets on the stove,
and the coffee was hot. ''All right,'' he said, ''get the
hell out of the
road.''
We were standing there like children who have awakened to
strange events. ''Just sit your behind down and stay out of
the road. We're making history here. How do you like your
eggs?''
| |
The Splendid Splinter's .406 average in 1941 still stands as a benchmark.
(AP)
| There was some ponderous shuffling as the three of us who
were now his subjects found seats at the large dinette
table. There were Charley the photographer and Edwin Pope,
the writer from Miami, and myself, and however improbable
our status as
fishermen, we were there to go for tarpon with The Kid, who is an
expert at it, who may be, in fact, the best at it, the way
he used to be the best at putting a bat on a ball. He had
invited us to breakfast because he said he didn't trust us
to find our own at
that hour and he wanted to be at the fishing spot no later
than seven. He had it
scouted.
The Kid said his cooking would not win prizes, but as a man
alone after two aborted marriages, he knew some of the
mysteries of steaks, chops, broiled chicken and roast beef.
''I do a pretty fair job with them,'' he said. ''I do not
make pies,'' he
said, raising his eyebrows and the side of his mouth. He had on
the red Bermuda shorts I have come to think of as his home
uniform in Islamorada, and a faded red shirt that had a few
character holes in it. He wore Sears, Roebuck tennis shoes
without socks,
and his copper-brown calves stuck out prominently from the
tails of the Bermudas. In 1938, when he was 19 years old
and a pitcher-outfielder in San Diego, just starting as a
professional ballplayer, he was 6 ft. 3 in. and weighed 168
pounds. Eventually,
when he had been exposed to major league regimens, he got up
to 200 pounds, but it was still appropriate to call him The
Splinter. The Splendid Splinter, to be sure, because there
was more to him than attenuation. His own particular
preference for a
nickname was always The Kid. Occasionally in conversation he
still refers to himself as The Kid. It is a pleasing way of
taking the edge off the first person
singular.
The exposed calves were a giveaway to his enormous natural
power. He had never appeared terribly strong in a baseball
uniform, but baseball players do not audition in Bermuda
shorts. The power had to be there somewhere. There were
always the wrists and
hands, of course, and the eyes. Everybody talks about the
wrists and eyes. People used to say he could read the label
on a revolving record with those eyes, but he says that was
fiction. The wrists and eyes look ordinary enough. His legs
give him
away.
He decided that the way we wanted our eggs was soft-boiled.
He brought them to the table hot and distributed them
unopened in little egg holders and was back at the stove
when we began fumbling with them, trying to get inside
without burning our
fingers. ''Will you look at that?'' he said, mocking us in a loud
voice. ''Isn't that something? Isn't that something? What
an exhibition.'' He fixed a particular scorn on Pope, whose
attempts must have been spectacular. I do not know, because
at the time I was
trying desperately to be nonchalant with my egg. ''The
great Edwin Pope. The great Edwin Pope can't even open an
egg. Here,'' he said, circling the table with a knife and
spoon, deftly opening all our eggs. ''Isn't that funny?''
he said.
''Boy.''
Pope had been itching for two days to tell of an episode
involving his 16- year-old son, Eddie. When told that his
daddy was going fishing with Ted Williams, Eddie had
replied, ''Gee, Ted Williams. That's great. That's the guy
who designs all that
terrific fishing equipment for Sears!'' Pope said he pointedly
informed his son that Williams had also appeared in a few
major league box scores in days gone by. Eddie said, ''Oh,
does he play ball, too?'' Pope was apprehensive that
Williams might take the
episode as a knock on his baseball skills and the historical
position they deserve. The Kid had always guarded that
reputation zealously, kicking and spitting his way through
the stormy years in Boston, baring his teeth to
sportswriters and tipping his hat
to no
man.
Williams is strangely patient while waiting for the fish to appear, but always reverts to character once he casts and hooks one. He then becomes all action until he brings the fish to gaff.
(Charles Trainor)
| | Once Williams said all he wanted in life was to walk down
the street and have people say, ''There goes the greatest
hitter who ever lived.'' Those of us who think he made it
and would gladly so testify may not represent the majority
opinion, but if he
did not make it, there were certainly mitigating
circumstances. He was interfered with by two wars, each one
drawing him uncomplaining into the cockpits of fighter
planes, each extracting precious
time—4 1/2 years—from the peak
of his young man's physiology. He hit .406 one year (1941)
before he went to World War II, and when he came back from
Korea, he had a season in which he hit .388. That was 1957,
when, like Williams, who was then 38 years old, baseball
was passing from
its golden age. None of the alleged great hitters of today
have come close to either of those
figures.
Williams had been a fisherman almost before he was a
ballplayer, and he said that when he could no longer hit
.300 he would just quit and go fishing, but he never proved
he could not hit .300. At 42 he batted .316. Three-sixteen
is what Frank Robinson
hit to win the American League batting championship last year.
Pope told of his son's sacrilege anyway, risking it, and
Williams laughed the loudest. He has an almost limitless
enthusiasm for spontaneity, for getting the most out of a
moment. He reacts. Getting the most sometimes means to
ignite his famously
combustible temper, to engage his iridescent vocabulary. If,
however, he ever had the egotist's inability to laugh at
himself, he surely does not have it
now.
''Hell, it's been almost seven years,'' hesaid to Pope.
''Your boy is a new generation. Listen, listen, I'm a
grandfather. Isn't that something? Isn't that funny? A
grandfather.'' He said he could tell he must be getting old
by the way he was getting so
critical of young hitters. ''I remember when Cobb
criticized me for not trying to punch the ball to leftfield
away from Boudreau's shift. Boy, I thought Cobb was an old
crab, and here I am getting older, and I find I'm more
critical.'' He did that
little thing with his mouth and eyes, denoting scandalous
behavior. ''I try not to knock anybody,'' he said, ''but
some of these guys just aren't hitting what they should be.
Listen, you know I have a lot of respect for hitters like
Mays and Kaline and
Clemente, and I like some of these young kids—Rico
Petrocelli of our club [the Red Sox] and that kid in
Houston—Rusty Staub—I'm impressed with him.
But they all could be
better.
''So many of them get up there just to swing. You see them
all the time, hopping after that first pitch. Dammit, take
a strike. See what the guy's got. I bet if you checked
you'd find the guys who swing at that first strike hit
about .050 on that pitch.
Do they learn? No, hell, no. They keep swinging at it. You
sure as hell ought to be able to remember what you learn. I
think, I know I can tell you the exact pitch and pitcher I
hit every one of my first 250 home runs off
of.''
Jack Brothers arrived almost simultaneously with a little
black cat that began to mew at the back door in response to
the aroma of Williams's cooking. ''Where the hell you been,
Bush?'' said Williams to Brothers. ''We're trying to make
history, and
you're sleeping. Pour yourself some
coffee.''
Brothers said Ted would be pleased to know he had already
eaten and was ready to go, but he took a cup anyway. More
often than not Williams fishes alone; he just gets into his
custom-made 17 1/2-foot open boat with its 100 horses and
goes out and finds
his own. But he also likes to patronize the guides and has
firm friendships with many of them, and there were too many
of us for one boat. Brothers has been an Islamorada fishing
guide for 15 years. He is from Brooklyn. Williams had known
Brothers a long
time but had not fished with him prior to the day before,
when we had also chartered young Billy Grace's boat. Today
Grace would meet us at the fishing
spot.
The little cat was now mewing in earnest at the back door.
''Damn cat,'' said The Kid. ''I hate cats. Been trying to
run him off for weeks. I've thrown things at him—for crissakes, I've done everything but drown him.'' He
began to gather up the
leftover bacon. There was enough to feed 10 cats. He opened the
screen door and fended off the cat gently with his foot.
''Get the hell out of the road,'' he said. He laid the
platter of bacon down on the concrete floor of the porte
cochere, and the cat went
to it hungrily. ''No sense letting it go to waste,'' said
The Kid.
''All right, let's go,'' he said. ''Let's get serious. It's
time to start thinking about fishing. Bear down, Bush.
Let's start bearing
down.''
Islamorada is the jewel inset of a two-mile key called
Upper Matecumbe, 68 miles south of Miami and 82 miles north
of Key West. Until the word got around about the fishing,
it was mostly inhabited by a tribe of big-hearted,
hardheaded, industrious white
natives called Conchs who years ago had infiltrated from
the Bahamas after first having fled the American Revolution
as supporters of the
Crown.
The Gulf Stream runs by, five miles offshore to the east, a
playground for sailfish, dolphin, marlin, wahoo and
kingfish. On the coral reefs there are snapper, jack,
barracuda and grouper; on the flats of the Gulf side, or
Florida Bay side, there are
snook, bonefish, permit, redfish and the champion fighter from
prehistoric days, Tarpon atlanticus, the silver-king
tarpon.
Bonefish drew Ted Williams to Islamorada years ago, and the
Conchs have helped keep him there. The best thing about
Conchs, Williams found, was that they did not make a fuss
over him. They took him for granted. He was just ''Hi,
Ted'' to them. He could
bonefish in peace. As the years went by, he ran his box
score to more than a thousand bonefish. Satiated, the
thrill fading, he switched to tarpon as the principal
quarry. He became hooked on tarpon. In 1964 he needled the
Islamorada Fishing Guides
Association into putting together a highly selective invitational
tarpon tournament called the Gold Cup, which he won in
1965. The guides say it is the best fishing tournament in
the world, and one of the most heavily gambled on. The Kid
was using our trip to
get himself tuned up for the
tournament.
Williams had left his boat at the Coral Shores Marina on
Long Key, where he has a standing 50-cent bet with the
proprietor that every time he goes out he will get a
tarpon. It would be quicker by car to Long Key and, from
there, quicker by boat to the
spot. We piled into Williams's Ford and he
drove.
The Kid drives much the way he used to get ready to hit a
baseball. When he was waiting in the on-deck circle or
standing at the plate, he could not be still. He moved his
arms and jerked his shoulders, pumped his bat, squeezing
the handle as if to
wring out the reluctant base hits. When he drives a car, he is
no less convulsive. He is a highly animated
conversationalist and sometimes finds it necessary to take
both hands off the wheel to make a point. He drives with
his knees. He does not drive
slowly.
To fish with Williams and emerge with your sensitivities
intact is to undertake the voyage between Scylla and
Charybdis. It is delicate work, but it can be done, and it
can be enjoyable. It most certainly will be educational. An
open boat with The Kid
just does not happen to be the place for one with the heart
of a fawn or the ear of a rabbit. There are four things to
remember: 1) He is a perfectionist; 2) he is better at it
than you are; 3) he is a consummate needler; and 4) he is
in charge. He brings
to fishing the same hard-eyed intensity, the same unbounded
capacity for scientific inquiry he brought to hitting a
baseball.
Fishing guides are, by tradition, bullies, but the guides
do not bully Williams. Jimmie Albright, who has fished with
him for almost 18 years and is more or less his regular
companion the six months a year Williams lives in
Islamorada, says that this is
because Williams knows more about fishing than they
do.
Williams encourages a constant ebb and flow of ideas,
theories, critiques, digs, approvals and opprobriums. His
favorite appellation is "Bush," short for bush-leaguer, but
with Williams a mark of accreditation. If he calls you
Bush, you're in. Often he
confers it on the
guides.
That first day we had gone with the falling tide to a spot
a mile east of Long Key. Most of the time was spent
situating the boat in the prospective line of the tarpon
run at the edge of a channel. Naturally, Williams
questioned Brothers's choice of
position. Brothers asked him if he had brought his fly rod,
just in case. ''I think you'll find spinning gear better by
two to one,'' said The Kid. ''I think you will also find
I'm prepared, that I'm very well prepared.'' He began to
switch the color of his
lure from red and yellow to pink. The lures he makes
himself from dyed bucktail. Brothers joked that the color
of the lure was to satisfy the fishermen, not the fish;
that it was a matter of ''proper presentation.'' Williams's
fingers moved nimbly, tying the knots and biting off the ends with his teeth. He
winked at me. ''Boy, the guides would like to know how to
tie that knot,'' he said. ''That's one knot I'll never show
them.'' He said it was a 100% knot. Brothers said there was
no such thing. They
argued about that for a
while.
The Kid put a shapeless white hat on his head and an extra
layer of grease on his lips and assumed his waiting stance
on top of a tackle box, looking out across the water, his
left hand on his hip, his right holding a weapon: a Ted
Williams reel with
15-pound monofilament line and a Ted Williams seven-foot rod.
Sears puts the Williams name on its top line of equipment,
after Williams himself approves it. He grants Sears about
60 days a year of his time, attending clinics, making
films, doing
promotional work. It takes another 45 days to fulfill his obligation
as a Red Sox vice president, which consists mainly of
trying, in the spring, to pound into the heads of young
hitters the recipe for becoming the greatest hitter who
ever lived. Another 60 days
are spent at his boys' camp in Lakeville, Mass. From August
to October he retires to a little cabin on the Miramichi
River in New Brunswick and fishes for Atlantic
salmon.
From the tackle box Williams could make conversation and
watch for the coming of the tarpon. In this stance The Kid
allowed his stomach to take its course uninhibited, letting
it stick out. Sometimes he rolled on the sides of his feet
as he kibitzed
with the rest of us. His stomach is no longer a splinter's
stomach, but otherwise he appears in excellent condition.
He is 48 now but looks 35. As a young man he had been
shocked to see the hair on his chest turning silver, but
only a little of the silver
ever got to his head. His great curly thatch is still brown.
He weighs 230 pounds. Late in his baseball career, when he
was harassed by injuries, he hit pinch home runs in four
straight at bats, and I suggested that he looked like he
could go up there
right now and make a living pinch-hitting. He said that
prospect never appealed to him at
all. Nor had he ever wanted to be a manager. He said it had something to do with the "knights of the keyboard," his antangonists in the press box.
Standing there, he gave the impression he did not have to
talk at all to enjoy himself; that he could stand there,
perfectly silent, by the hour waiting for fish, a
demonstration of patience he had never exhibited waiting to
bat.
''Bear down, just bear down, Bush,'' said The
Kid.
When the fish came, his demeanor abruptly changed. He went
into a slight crouch, like a cornerback anticipating a
charge; where before only his eyes were alert, the prospect
of action seemed to galvanize and bring to attention the
rest of his body, and
when he made his cast, it was quick and
sure.
It is The Kid's opinion that he will average one score for
every five tarpon that strike. The average for lesser
tarpon fishermen is much lower, maybe one for 10. That
first day he had four fish on the line. One was down at
Long Key. When we switched
across to the Florida Bay side, seven miles southwest of
Islamorada on the edge of Buchanan Bank, to catch the
falling tide there, he had three more. On this side,
especially in June, Brothers said, the tarpon seem more
eager to
cooperate.
The first one jumped and spit out Ted's bucktail. The
second rolled and spit it out. Finally the third took it
firm. The fish exploded into the air. Sawhack-whack-whack.
The tarpon jumped seven times, swooshing spectacularly into
the air as Williams
played it, worked it, reeled, kept the pressure on. All the
time he was instructing us, telling us what he was doing,
advising Charley when to shoot and what lens opening he
might use, cautioning Jack about getting too eager with the
gaff.
''It's a medium-size fish . . . about 50, 60 pounds. . . .
When he rolls, that's the time to put on the pressure. If
you can turn him there, it takes a lot out of him. If he
jumps, get on him again. . . See how I lighten the drag
when it's under the
boat? Watch, now, he'll jump. When I say, 'Now,' be ready to
shoot. Now!'' and the fish was up again, just feet away
from the boat. The fish tired rapidly, and then when he had
it next to the boat and Brothers stood waiting with the
gaff, the silver monster
slipped the hook, as if at that critical moment it decided
the entire episode was distasteful, and it was
gone.
I have heard of the carnage when the Williams temper stirs.
The fractured golf clubs. The snapped fishing rods. The
busted watercoolers. He does not have much sympathy,
either, for another man's errors when the man is
represented to be something he is
not. Once on this same Buchanan Bank, when he was going
through his paces for a movie photographer he had hired to
get footage for Sears, a tarpon he was playing actually
jumped into the boat. He predicted aloud that it was about
to happen, sensing the
line of the jump, and when he discovered the photographer had
missed this wildest of scenes, he paid him off on the spot
and told him to just get the hell back to shore. But with
himself he is especially severe. So I expected him to
blow.
But he did not. ''That's all right, it happens,'' he said
calmly. ''It
happens.''
In the meantime I had found time to make a few tentative
tries myself at getting in the way of a tarpon. I had made
up my mind I would not attempt to carry out a fiction that
I knew the ins and outs of tarpon fishing. I was very
careful to point out
that I had never fished for tarpon, had never used a rod that
required two hands for casting. I did this as insulation
against the inevitable embarrassment. Things not done out
of habit usually feel awkward, and awkwardness is the
mother of
error.
In short order I had proved to their satisfaction that if I
was no tarpon fisherman, I was also no liar. Williams began
to refer to my casts as ''Chinese,'' as in Chinese homers,
or bloopers. He tried to advise me. ''Here,'' he said,
grabbing the rod.
''Now, keep the line here, just off the fingertip, and wait
longer before you let it go.'' He shot one out about 60
feet. ''Yes,'' I said, ''I got it. Right.'' I popped
another straight up into the air. ''Damn,'' I
said. ''Beautiful Chinese cast,'' he said, but shortly after the
cast a fish hit my lure in spite of myself. It jumped once,
a silver blur in my face, and broke the
line. ''Wow,'' I said. Williams was paternally comforting. ''It wasn't your fault,'' he said. ''It must have been one
of Jack's knots.'' He grinned as Jack tried to make a comeback. ''It wasn't my
knot, it was....''
Continued
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Flashback 1967: Going Fishing with The Kid
Flashback 1996: Rounding Third
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