Rounding Third
Several strokes have robbed Ted Williams of his fabled
eyesight, but at 78 he's as cantankerous as ever and
enjoying fatherhood at
last
by S.L.
Price
Issue date: November 25, 1996
Early one Tuesday morning in October, in a hilltop house
nestled among live oaks dripping Spanish moss—a house
set on the highest point in Citrus County, Fla., dominating
all it surveys like a medieval castle—an old man
struggles. He is close to blind.
His long feet are wrapped in leather slippers with elastic
across the instep so they won't fall off. A Boston Red Sox
cap is on his head. A TV producer smiles and holds up a cue
card that isn't
helping.
Ted Williams says, "I know a
young—"
"No, not 'I know a young man,'" the producer
says. "'This young
man.'"
"All right," Williams says. "This young
man...said he'd go to prison himself before releasing
prisoners early. And he's got ...inmates working for the
people of Middlesex
County."
"That was good—the first part," the producer
says. "But the
second—"
"All right," Williams cuts in. "If you don't
like the second, let's go
again."
| |
The effects of his strokes have forced Williams to give up his beloved fishing and spend much of his time in physical therapy.
(Bill Frakes)
| And with that the temperature in the cozy den ticks upward
ever so slightly. Not good. Williams's temper has long been
famous for its sudden, lung-tearing explosions, and
everybody in the room—the producer; the cameraman;
Frank Brothers, Williams's
live-in aide; and Buzz Hamon, director of the Ted Williams
Museum & Hitters Hall of Fame in Hernando,
Fla.—has been grinning, cajoling, trying to take the
edge off the morning's project. Williams is making a TV ad
for Brad Bailey, a candidate for sheriff of
Middlesex County, Mass. Problem is, three strokes in five
years have chipped away 75% of Williams's field of vision,
so that he sees as if looking through a pipe, and it
doesn't help that the glare of the TV light makes the
phrases on the cue card nearly
unreadable. Long ago Williams bent his life into a furious
pursuit of perfection. Now here he is, in a roomful of
people, tripping over
words.
Hamon protectively suggests that Williams talk off the top
of his head. Williams won't have it. "I've got to have
the idea to start with," he rasps. "You've known
me two years, and you think you can run my goddam
life."
Williams grabs the card, wrenches it back and forth in
rhythm with a classic example of Ted-speak, his uniquely
cadenced blend of jock, fishing and military lingo, marked
by constant profanity and a growling emphasis on the most
unlikely word. "Now,
look, see where that goddam light is?" he says. "The
light is on that sonofabitch, and that's where I want
it."
In 1941 Williams hit .406 for the Red Sox. In the 55 years
since then, few players have come close to hitting .400,
and the legend of The Kid's eyesight has only grown: He
could follow the seams on a baseball as it rotated toward
him at 95 mph. He could
read the label on a record as it spun on a turntable. He
stood at home plate one day and noticed that the angle to
first base was slightly off; measuring proved him right,
naturally, by two whole inches. In the '60s
Brothers—the son of Williams's friend
Jack Brothers, a famous Florida Keys fishing
guide—would show up on Williams's porch in Islamorada
every Saturday morning to spend the day helping Williams
pole his skiff through the shallows. Each time, Williams
would bet Brothers one hour's poling
that he could cast his line and guess, within six inches, how
far the lure had flown. "I lost every time,"
Brothers says. "He'd cast 112 feet and say, 'A hundred
eleven feet, 10 inches.' No marks on the
line."
But that was long ago. Williams is 78 now. Since falling in
his driveway and breaking his left shoulder two years ago,
he has been unable to drive. This year, for the first time
in five decades, he didn't go fishing. His buddies Jack
Brothers, Joe
Lindia, Sam Tamposi—and, worst of all, his longtime live-in
girlfriend, Louise Kaufman—have died in the past five
years, and the lines on Williams's face have sunk deeper
with each loss. His voice carries a jagged weariness, a
residue of seeing bits of his
rich life fall away one by
one.
And the parade of trouble didn't stop there. Looking to
cash in on the late-1980s sports-memorabilia craze, he
entangled himself in a partnership with a scam artist that,
when it all crashed in a welter of lawsuits, cost Williams
close to $2 million in
losses and legal bills. Williams then signed up with the
well-established trading card and collectibles company
Upper Deck Authenticated, but that deal, too, unraveled in
a messy whirl through the courts. Meanwhile, his clean,
highly readable signature
brought such a bonanza to forgers that the Ted Williams
autograph—once a symbol of sporting quality—has
become one of the most suspect in the
business.
It has been, to say the least, a far more public and
contentious walk through the sunset than Williams ever
dreamed. And while nothing can threaten his legacy as one
of the American Century's cultural icons, the result of all
his travails is a
bewildering new image of Ted Williams as dupe, Ted Williams
controlled, that hardly jibes with nearly 60 years of tales
depicting him as alternately cold and warm, bitter and
sentimental, obnoxious and funny, tough and
generous—but always savagely independent.
This is, after all, a man who turned down a reported $100,000
and a chance to pal around with Robert Redford as an
adviser on The Natural because Atlantic salmon were
running. This is a two-war Marine pilot who flew half his
39 missions in Korea as John
Glenn's wing man, but when they jetted deep into enemy
territory, just as often it was Williams leading one of
America's greatest
pilots.
Thirty-six years after he last played a game, Williams still looks natural with a bat in his hands.
(Bill Frakes)
| | One summer in the early 1960s, Williams was at his baseball
camp in Lakeville, Mass., when a call came in from nearby
Hyannis Port: President Kennedy wanted to speak to him.
"Tell him I'm a Nixon fan!" Williams
roared.
And on this Tuesday morning? He will not be pushed. He does
it his way: "No one has impressed me more in such a
short time... as a man....Ahhh ...well, hold it
there...turn it towa—... the right.... No one has
impressed me more in such a short period of
time as an up-and-coming young man: Brad Bailey....I can't
see that big print, for
chrissakes!"
Then, abruptly, Williams nails it, the rhythm and tenor of
a sweet endorsement: "Just wait till you meet Brad
Bailey, and you'll be soooold yourself." The TV guys
murmur how perfect it is. Williams beams and leans back in
his chair as the men start
packing. "That'll be nice," he says. "Why didn't
you bring Cecil B. DeMille? All
right!"
He's happy now, and he starts talking baseball. The Red Sox
will finally win a World Series, he says, when they get a
new ballpark. Fenway Park's cockeyed outfield throws off
the game's balance, and when the wind comes in, you have to
crush the ball,
and then there's the annoying matter of the Green Monster and
how it rewards the lefthanded hitter with neither the will
nor the talent to pull the ball the way Williams did year
after year because a pure hitter, a perfect hitter, swings
quick-quick-quick.
"That little chummy leftfield fence," he says,
voice dropping, then picking up speed. "And
lefthanders do more against it than righthanders...if
they're late! Well, jeez, who wants to be
late?"
Someone wonders why Williams didn't hit to left more, and
he says, "I can show you real quick why the hell I had
so much trouble going to leftfield." For a heartbeat,
no one says a word. Show us? This is a man who uses a cane
to walk, who hasn't swung a
bat in public in five years, whose left arm was so numb
after his last stroke, in 1994, that he couldn't feel a set
of keys lying in his hand. "Where's the bat?" he
says.
Someone hustles up a bat ("Oh, that's a heavy
sonofabitch, isn't it," Williams says. "Babe Ruth
model, probably"), and as he works his palms into the
grain, a jolt of delight hops from person to person: This
is, after all, the sporting equivalent of
Michelangelo taking up his chisel. But that lasts only an
instant. For as Williams rises to his feet, it becomes
clear that he isn't wearing any pants. His green polo shirt
is tucked into his Hanes. Dread courses through the room:
This could be awful. This
could be Ted Williams—who, as a young man, once
strutted the streets of Boston muttering, "Teddy
F------ Ballgame, the best f------;
hitter in the major f------ leagues"—falling in a pathetic heap. But Williams
isn't worried. His voice takes on a sharpness it
hasn't had all morning. His eyes flash. He pulls himself up to
his entire 6'3", leans toward a hassock and points
down with the huge black bat and says, "O.K.! Here's
the
plate."
Williams wobbles, rights himself, directs the hassock into
place. "Move it back this way," he says.
"Christ, don't put it in my ass! Hold it right
there." His Dalmatian, Slugger, sniffs at his ankles.
Williams plants his feet. "Now, look," he says.
"I
was on the plate like this, and I pulled everything. If I'm
right here, they put everybody on the right side, and they
pitched me inside." He takes a step, bumps his shins
against the hassock, teeters. Four hands reach up to steady
him. "Whoops! O.K. And
they pitched me inside, so that I had to pull everything:
Pull, pull, down and in, down and in! Whoops, bye-bye! In
order for me to hit the ball to leftfield, look what I had
to do: When I pulled the ball, it was out here like
that—see my bat? It's
horizontal. But when I tried to go to leftfield, I had to go
inside out, and look where my bat is!
Vertical!"
He's shouting, swinging the bat smoothly, his muscled right
arm guiding it through more than fast enough for a
78-year-old man, because who wants to be late? His wrists
crack, and the bat snaps up at the end, making it easy to
imagine him in Fenway,
lean and whole. "So I have this much to hit the
ball," he says, "and here I'd be on a flat plane,
and I had six, seven inches to hit it. So anyway, I moved a
little farther back, and it was
perfect."
And for the next 30 seconds the old man stands over a
hassock, the years falling off his shoulders and his bat
gliding over the plate. He tells of that hitting lesson
from Pittsburgh Pirates star Paul Waner, and of outwitting
the Cleveland Indians'
great pitchers of the late '40s and early '50s, and of the time
New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra picked up on that small
adjustment Williams made in the batter's box. Finally,
after reaching to show how he went after outside pitches,
Williams comes back
to the present. "Whoa, I'm going to fall down," he
says lightly, and he plops safely back into his easy
chair.
It has been a priceless performance, surreal and somehow
grand, and now that it's over, there isn't much to say.
Brothers clears the room, and Williams shuffles out last.
"Hard right," Brothers says, and Williams turns
down the hallway toward his
bedroom for some rest. Then he stops. "Where's
John-Henry?" he says. "John-Henry said he could
come this
morning."
Brothers says John-Henry had a meeting. "Aw,
hell," Williams says. "He's always in a
meeting."
Ted Williams's only son is out of his car and moving,
feeling that adrenaline again, that hop in his gut. "I
don't know what it is," says John-Henry Williams, 28,
snapping his fingers. "It's like, I know what I'm
doing now. I'm in my element. Like Ted
Williams: Put him at the plate, something happens. When I go
into a store looking for Ted Williams autographs, I walk in
and I can just see one—wherever it is. I can pick 'em
out."
For five years he has been cruising malls in New England,
in Las Vegas, wherever, pulling up at places like this one,
the Sports Treasures kiosk in the Natick (Mass.) Mall. He
zeroes in on a $175 plaque or a $199 ball, accosts an
unsuspecting clerk and
asks about the autograph on the item, its history, who had
it last. He demands phone numbers. Sometimes John-Henry
buys; he claims to have $40,000 worth of forgeries in
storage. Some pieces he confirms as
real.
"That Ted Williams plaque you have?" John-Henry
says now. "It's fake." The clerk's mouth drops
open.
"It is?" he
says.
"The ball, too." John-Henry grills the clerk at
length about the items' histories. Then he
leaves.
Asked later if he makes many mistakes in assessing the
authenticity of Williams memorabilia, John-Henry says,
"I've never been
wrong."
He is not a popular man. One store in the Boston area has
threatened to arrest him for trespassing. "He's
probably one of the most disliked people I know," says
Phil Castinetti, owner of Everett, Mass.-based Sportsworld,
the largest memorabilia dealer
in New England. And Castinetti is one of John-Henry's
allies.
Barry Halper, owner of the world's largest private
collection of baseball artifacts, bumped into John-Henry
last March at the opening of the Yankees' spring training
stadium in Tampa. The two went down to the gift shop, and
John-Henry buttonholed a
clerk. "He says, 'Where'd you get that?'" Halper
recalls. "'I'm John-Henry. He's my father.... What
show? Where?' All of a sudden it's a war. All of the items,
he said, are fake. He talked about suing." Halper says
he saw John-Henry do the same thing at the
1992 All-Star Game in San Diego. "He's very
hyper," Halper says. This isn't meant as criticism.
Both Halper and Castinetti say forgery is rampant in
memorabilia
today.
"It's a field larded with fakes," says Charles
Hamilton, the handwriting expert who helped expose the
fraudulent Hitler diaries in 1983. "A tremendous
number of Williams forgeries are coming on the
market." However, Hamilton volunteers, "I've been
very
suspicious of Ted Williams's son. When a man becomes
incapacitated like Williams is, and his son continues to
pour autographs onto the market, I naturally wonder where
they're coming from." Told that Ted had been seen
signing photos just a few days
earlier, Hamilton murmurs, "Is he still signing? I was
misinformed."
News of such an exchange comes as no shock to John-Henry.
"Plenty of people think I'm the one forging these
signatures," he says. Others say his crusade against
fakes is merely a cynical ploy to pump up the price of the
memorabilia he now peddles for
Ted. "It's the furthest thing from the truth,"
John-Henry says. "It doesn't matter what type of
forgeries are out there; it's not going to affect the
amount of money I make. But when I see people devaluing his
autograph, that's not
fair."
In the 1940s and '50s no baseball player evoked as much
love and loathing as Ted Williams. Today no figure in
memorabilia polarizes opinion or elicits gossip the way
John-Henry does. Separated by 50 years and 1,500 miles, Ted
and John-Henry had an
arm's-length relationship for most of John-Henry's childhood. But
beginning in 1991 the two grew closer, and John-Henry
gradually assumed responsibility for his father's business,
cutting out some of Ted's old cronies and advisers and
earning resentment in
the process. John-Henry's campaign against forgeries only made
more enemies, and while some collectors, dealers and
friends of Ted's defend John-Henry's zeal as necessary to
protect his father's interests, others spin Sonny Dearest
tales of greed and
opportunism. "Some of the things I've heard?" says
John-Henry. "That I don't let him do what he wants.
That I force him to do things. That isn't
right."
Forgery, rumor, character assassination—not a pristine
world, memorabilia. "You're dealing with a lot of real
sharpies," Ted says. "And little did I realize
it."
In 1989 Ted Williams, without consulting anyone, entered
into a partnership with Vincent Antonucci—who,
unbeknownst to Ted, was a convicted felon—in a
memorabilia business in Crystal River, Fla. Within a year
Williams had invested at least $150,000 in
the business and signed about 15,000 items for Antonucci to
sell. He received nothing in return, and Antonucci skipped
with at least $38,000 of Williams's cash. Williams
consulted John Dowd, the lawyer who had conducted Major
League Baseball's
investigation of Pete Rose, and he advised Williams to wash his hands
of the matter. Dowd said it would cost Williams far more to
sue than he would ever recover. But Williams had never
taken losing easily. "Every month I called Ted and
told him what the bill was,"
Dowd says. "And he'd say, 'I don't care. Whip his
ass.'" The final legal tab was $1.6 million. Williams
won the suit but has received no money from Antonucci, who
was subsequently convicted of grand theft and now sits in
jail on the Florida
panhandle.
In 1990 John-Henry, then studying business at the
University of Maine, got the idea of selling a T-shirt
commemorating the 50th anniversary of Ted's .406. "He
said no way," John-Henry says. "He didn't trust
me, a kid, at all." Two of Ted's friends wore
him down, however, and the success of the T-shirt helped
bring Ted and John-Henry closer together and resulted in
the creation of Grand Slam Marketing, a family
clearinghouse for Ted Williams photos, autographs, jerseys
and a CD-ROM biography, all
presided over by John-Henry. His task? "Protection," he
says. "A buffer so that someone else isn't handling
the money, so that another Antonucci problem doesn't come
up."
There have been problems anyway. John-Henry ran into
serious legal trouble when, after Ted had signed an
exclusive three-year, $2 million contract with Upper Deck
Authenticated in '92, John-Henry and Grand Slam started the
Ted Williams Card Company, a
direct competitor. The two sides sued each other: John-Henry
claimed that certain Williams cards released by Upper Deck
were unauthorized, and Upper Deck claimed that John-Henry
had tried to break Ted's contract. According to Upper Deck
communications
director Camron Bussard, John-Henry said Ted was unable to sign
just after his third stroke, in 1994, and "then Ted
would sign for Grand Slam Marketing and appear at
shows." The two sides settled out of court in April
1995, and Ted honored the rest of his
Upper Deck contract. Later that year the Ted Williams Card
Company was
dissolved.
After the '94 stroke John-Henry closed the Ted Williams
Store he had opened 1 1/2 years earlier in Chestnut Hill,
Mass., and moved to Florida to care for his father. There
John-Henry became the buffer against the outside world that
he and Ted wanted him
to be. "I still make mistakes," John-Henry says.
After five years he still doesn't feel he has his father's
total confidence. "But I'm his son," John-Henry
says, "and I don't know when you ever beat
that."
Some of Ted's current and former associates, including
Dowd, don't like the new arrangement. There was a time when
any of Ted's pals could go to Ted with a project, a favor
to ask, a call to make. No more. "Every project has to
go through John-Henry,"
says one friend of Ted's, who requested anonymity.
"Every time you make a move, John-Henry says, 'How
much?'"
John-Henry and Ted have heard that before, have read
anonymous quotes saying Ted signs autographs all day. The
fact is, Ted says, he spends most of his time in physical
therapy and watching CNN. He signs 30 to 40 items twice a
week—if that. "He doesn't
make me sign any more than I feel like signing," Ted
says. "I just decide: Boom! And that's it.
John-Henry's been a helluva guy and a helluva son. He's
smart, and he's honest, and of course he thinks, Jee-sus,
Ted Williams is really
something."
John-Henry makes no apology for liking the things that
money brings. He shows off his top-of-the-line BMW and his
souped-up Porsche. And he no longer worries much about what
people say of him. Not long ago he read that someone had
said he would be
handsome if he didn't have dollar signs in his eyes. So he took
two pieces of adhesive note paper, drew dollar signs on
them and stuck them to his eyelids. He smiled wide. Someone
took a
picture.
Continued
Historical Photo Gallery | Sports Illustrated Covers Gallery
Flashback 1967: Going Fishing with The Kid
Flashback 1996: Rounding Third
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