Power of Caring
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The hands that launched 2,654 major league hits, the hands that guided the stick of a bullet-pocked F-9 Panther as it screamed out of the Korean sky on its way to a crash landing, the hands that made Ted Williams the only man to be enshrined in both the baseball and the fishing halls of fame, hover over a photograph. "Where?" Williams asks, narrowing his eyes. The color picture shows Williams and Ruth in 1942. Brothers points to a spot just above Williams's 23-year-old chest.

"Right here?" Williams says. He lays his left hand on the photo and, with his right hand, firmly scripts his name across the gloss. He pushes the picture aside, signs another of the same scene. Then another. Five hundred dollars for the signature, $750 for a personal message. He leaves four fingerprints on each photo, right next to his 23-year-old knee.

"I'm doing all right," Williams says. "I feel right enough most of the time, but I can't sign for hours like I did." He squints hard. The other day he stayed too long in a hot shower ("Shampooed the hell out of my hair!" he says) and emerged dizzy and weak. "But, jeez," he says, "I guess I'm lucky to be able to sign at all."

Here is Ted Williams, rounding third. The first epoch of his public life began with the Red Sox in 1939 and ended 21 years and 521 home runs later as he stood on second base during a midseason game, noticed how far away third base seemed and thought, I'm done. He quit playing at the end of that year. In the second epoch he learned how to live without baseball, trying his hand as a big league manager but pouring his heart into becoming one of the world's best fishermen; for two generations he seemed, with his three broken marriages and his fishing-shack sensibility, the prime example of what used to be called "a man's man." Today, for some people, Ted Williams is but a signature on a photo, a collection of squiggles and dots to be bought and sold, the price rising every time he falls ill and expected to skyrocket the day he dies.

Most people have to pay for the slugger's signature, but for a fan in the rehab center Williams happily waives the fee.    (Bill Frakes)

The big news for collectors is that he will be signing for the public during the 500 Home Run Hitters Show at the Tropicana Hotel in Atlantic City from Nov. 22 to 24. Of the 11 living 500-home-run hitters, all of whom are scheduled to be there, Williams will get the most for each signature. He hasn't done a large autograph show since 1991. This will probably be his last.

Yet, even though his body is breaking down, there is a rare vitality to Williams. His mind and competitive zeal remain sharp. Earlier this year Hamon was discussing the .400 hitters' display in Williams's museum, and Williams asked innocently, "We got DiMaggio's bat coming in?" Hamon fell for it and said, "Joe DiMaggio never hit .400," and Williams grinned, spat on his fingertips and shined them up nice on his lapel.

He was never cuddly. In his playing days he was called Terrible Ted as much as he was called the Splendid Splinter. Disgusted by a home crowd that jeered and cheered him in the same inning of a game between the Red Sox and the Yankees in 1956, Williams trotted in toward the dugout spitting toward both the left- and rightfield stands. Then, to make sure everyone got the message, he stepped back out of the dugout and spit again. As he retells the story—as he feels that moment, that crowd—he begins to boil again.

"I have compassion for Roberto Alomar," he says, his voice starting to rise as he refers to Alomar's spitting at umpire John Hirschbeck in September. "I know how upset you can get at a certain thing, and I was so upset!" His face twists, his mouth gapes to reveal a pair of incisors worn to nubs. "I had dropped a fly ball. Just as I started looking up to get the fly ball, bases loaded, a goddam raindrop came down, you know? And I lost just a little bit of the ball, and it hit my glove and bounced out. Well, I really got booed. Boy, I can understand how a guy can get so pissed. He hears that boo, boy, he wants to crack the goddam bark off!

"All those things happened to me because I wasn't doin' as good as I should, or they didn't think I was tryin'." He pauses, and when he speaks again his voice is quaking. "God almighty, was I tryin'. But I was a long, skinny guy, couldn't run. If you can run good, they all think you're a hustler. Well, crap, not everybody can run. I think every day about it: God, do I wish I could've run. They bring in that guy, Rickey Henderson. Christ! I wish I'd had wheels like that. I just close my eyes and say to myself, Oh, boy."

Even now he maintains a touch of innocence. He's thrilled by anything new, curious with the intensity of someone who, having missed out on college, has an autodidact's respect for knowledge, books, information. What's going to happen in the Middle East? Is Penn State going to win? Who's the greatest man of the century? Yes, the ball is juiced, but, Williams says, "there's as much talent in the big leagues today as there's ever been. I see plays in the outfield I have never seen before." He doesn't stop with baseball. "What do you think of that Agassi? You know who's done more for tennis in the last 15 years? Bud Collins. You know he used to chew me out in the goddam papers? I hated the little bastard. But he knows what he's talking about, no question! He should be the commissioner of tennis! You tell him that."

It's that odd, outsized passion, as much as his .344 lifetime average and his 4 1/2 years of service in World War II and Korea, that always made Williams larger than life. So big that four U.S. presidents—Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush—speak of him on tape at his museum. So big that Boston just named a tunnel after him. Unlike DiMaggio, who carried himself with Olympian reserve, Williams was all too human, radiating flaws and ambition. Bats flew into the stands, fishing rods splintered and sank. "He always wanted to be perfect," says Florida Keys fishing guide George Hommell. "And when he wasn't, he'd get mad."

His wars with the Boston fans and media so scarred Williams that he refused to tip his hat after homering in his final at bat, in Boston in 1960. But in time this denial took on power, became a strange symbol of integrity, of one man's insistence on remaining true to himself. How else to explain why a thirtysomething candidate for sheriff in Massachusetts goes all the way to Florida to seek Williams's blessing? How else to explain why, in 1988, Bush asked Williams to campaign for him during the New Hampshire primary? The two hit a fishing show in Manchester, and, Bush says, "I might as well not have existed."

"Ted would bring out these tremendous crowds," says Hommell, who accompanied Bush and Williams on those campaign stops. "In that area Ted is God. After all these years, it's still the same."

So is he. When Williams began rehabilitation from his stroke in March 1994, he met a 17-year-old girl named Tricia Miranti from nearby Inverness, Fla. Confined to a wheelchair since the age of five because of a brain aneurysm, Tricia had a lively manner and a roaring laugh that struck a deep nerve in Williams. He is famous for his charity work, but when he is with Tricia, he shows a tenderness few people ever see. "If you could explain love, that would be it," says Tricia's mother, Vicki.

"Have you met her?" Williams says of Tricia. "Didn't you think she was special?"

For a while Williams visited Tricia on weekends, but that wasn't enough. He made calls that helped her get into college; he has arranged weekly training sessions for her with his personal trainer, at his expense. All this took Vicki by surprise. "Close friends of ours would say, 'We see him on the golf course, and he's always very abrupt and very rude,'" she says, "but they haven't seen the side we've seen."

When people hear of Tricia's relationship with Williams, they ask her to get his autograph for them. She refuses. "I don't see Ted Williams," Tricia says. "I just see him. As he is." He will sit by as she works out in his pool, suggest new exercises and goad her to try harder. Since Tricia began working with Williams's trainer, she has been able to do more assisted walking than doctors thought she ever would. This has given her a confidence she didn't have before. "It has made me want more," Tricia says. "Anything is possible."

Wanting, however, isn't good enough for Williams. "Oh, Christ," he says, eyes tearing up. "I look at her and I damn near cry every time. I look at her and I say to myself, Oh, God, I wish I could do more." When he gets tired of wishing, he gets mad—"angry at life," Vicki says. Angry at fate, at God.

Williams isn't happy with God. At an age when most men make peace with their maker, Williams rages. While Tricia splashes, he looks up at the sky and demands to know why she should suffer, and when he gets no answer, he curses God. As for himself, Williams scratches the belly of 10-year-old Slugger and snaps his eyes upward to make just one snarling request: "I absolutely pray to that ---- Jesus Christ that I die before my dog."

There was a moment, just a sliver of time, when John-Henry Williams had a taste of what his father knew as a hitter. It was in late winter 1989, and John-Henry had left the University of Maine against Ted's wishes to give baseball one serious shot, in a semipro league in California: three games a week and all the batting practice you could ask for. "I was hammering baseballs, 300 a day," John-Henry says. "I'm in Fresno, and I'm hitting off a batting machine cranked to the max, 105, 106 miles per hour. Dad talks in books about how your blisters start bleeding? I knew what that was like. And how you start smelling leather burning off the bat? I knew what that was like. You know, it's all timing...and ooh, I was sooo strong. I was hitting the ball so good. Crushing it."

John-Henry got a tryout as a first baseman with the Toronto Blue Jays, but it went nowhere. He could hit some, but he hadn't played much in high school or at Maine. When it was his turn to hit for the Blue Jays scouts, he was so jacked up that he nearly fell over. "The first one came in, and I swung and finished my swing before the ball ever got there," he says. "It was sooo slow. The next one, I did the exact same thing."

And that was that. It hurt some, but not as much as you might think, because John-Henry didn't love baseball. He was born eight years after his father stopped playing, and he didn't follow the Red Sox growing up. His mother liked it that way. Already twice divorced, Ted had met Dolores Wettach, a former Vogue model, on a flight to San Francisco in the early 1960s. They married, and for six years they fished and hunted together and argued, Dolores giving as good as she got. She moved away to a 60-acre spread in Vermont when John-Henry was six and his sister, Claudia, was three. Dolores, not Ted, taught John-Henry and Claudia how to fly cast.

"My mother loves my dad," says Claudia, 25, "but when she married Ted Williams, she married baseball, she married the fans, she married everything else. She couldn't deal with it. No one can deal with it. Don't tell me there's a famous relationship out there that works. My mom saw what was happening, saw how it would affect John-Henry and me—and she took us away."

John-Henry says it didn't faze him, growing up without his dad. He would see Ted once a year, talk to him on the phone in between. Not until high school did he begin spending summers with Ted. Still, if John-Henry struck out in Little League, it was cause for celebration among his opponents; if he got a hit, well, He's Williams's kid, whaddya expect? He tried to shrug it all off.

Claudia was different. She wanted no one to know who her father was. She applied to one top private college three times without success; when Ted found out, he made some calls, and all of a sudden the dean was on the phone, welcoming her to the school. Claudia told him no thanks. All the money Ted gave her is in a bank account, ready for her to give back. She is an English teacher in Weilheim, Germany. She competes in triathlons, happy that almost no one in Germany cares about baseball. "Whatever was there that represented Ted Williams, I went the opposite way," Claudia says. "Not out of resentment. I was determined to have people know I am Claudia, not the daughter of...."

Ted suffered his first stroke in December 1991. It took a quarter of his vision. He bounced back, and doctors later found that he'd had a second stroke without knowing it. But the 1994 stroke changed everything. Williams had just taken a shower and toweled off. A blood clot broke out of his heart and floated to the right side of his brain, numbing his left side and wiping out another 50% of his eyesight. "I had my shorts and my T-shirt on the bed, and I started to reach for my shorts," Williams says. "Jeez, I get down on my knees, then I'm lying on the bed, and I couldn't move. Finally I got my shorts, crawled and got my shirt. But I couldn't do anything else."

John-Henry was handling Ted's business affairs from Boston then, and when he got to the hospital in Florida the next day, he was horrified. Ted was blind. John-Henry moved down, took charge of Ted's care. He changed Ted's diet, cut out fats and alcohol, yanked him out of bed when he cursed and said he didn't want to exercise. John-Henry took showers with Ted to make sure he didn't fall, escorted Ted to the bathroom, clipped his toenails. "He has taken a lot of hits," says Brothers, "but how many kids, no matter who their father was, would drop their lives and move 1,500 miles to take care of him? John-Henry did."

Brothers is right. John-Henry has taken hits for his inexperience, his demeanor, his supposed motivation. But two facts are indisputable: Before John-Henry's arrival, Ted was vulnerable to criminals such as Antonucci, unsure of whom to trust. He isn't anymore. More important, because of his son, Ted has gained one of life's fabled rarities: a new lease. "If it wasn't for John-Henry," says longtime family friend Al Cassidy Jr., "Ted would be dead right now."

It wasn't easy, making room for each other. There have been arguments, the two men blowing up, neither backing down, phones slamming in midsentence. Meanwhile, Ted's blindness has been partly reversed, but he has had other setbacks. When he broke his shoulder two years ago, he sank into self-pity. "I was concerned it was the beginning of a downward spiral," says Williams's cardiologist, Rick Kerensky. "I thought we might lose him. But there's been an amazing turnaround since then."

Everybody has a theory about the turnaround: It's Tricia or exercise or will or all of those. Maybe it's luck. Ted has his own idea. "I could not have done it without John-Henry," he says. "Could not."

Claudia has flown back repeatedly from Germany. "I've seen my dad more in the last three years than in my whole life," she says. "The type of person Dad is now is the type of father we've always needed. Too bad it's now. Who knows how long it's going to last? At least we've got him all to ourselves. He's my dad now."

Ted has a daughter from his first marriage, Barbara Joyce, whom he doesn't see as often. "Had any kids?" he asks a visitor. "They can be the most disappointing part of your life, but they can be an awfully joyful part, too."

"He's discovering something brand spanking new: two kids," says Williams's old friend Bob Franzoni. "That's one reason he's so happy. He's got another life to look forward to."

Saturday morning. A fishing show is on ESPN, and Brothers is serving up a hot breakfast, eggs and turkey sausage. Ted and John-Henry sit at the kitchen table, trying to figure out the fish on the screen. "That's a salmon, I think," Ted says. "No!" he shouts. "It's a big brook trout! No, it might be a salmon, small salmon!"

Ted stayed up last night to watch the baseball playoffs, but as usual he steers the conversation all over the map: Nixon's funeral, President Clinton's tribute to Nixon, Gen. Douglas MacArthur's handling of Japan. "The greatest idol in my life," Williams says of MacArthur. "He signed a picture for me." John-Henry has moved from the table, out of Ted's sight line, and Ted yells, "How would you like to have a sister, three years younger than you are, weighs 135 to your 195—and there's no way you can beat her? She swims 1,000 yards, what the hell, let's go! He's disappeared already, eh?" Ted turns his torso left, cranes his neck, finds his son. "He's hiding behind the door, for Christ's sake. Where's Claudia?"

"She's at my house," John-Henry says.

"Boy, you hide when the news starts spreading," Ted says.

"Just listening to you sling it."

Sometimes Ted closes his eyes, and his mind conjures up the pitchers he beat and the ones who beat him long ago. He sees the ball pulled cleanly to right. But more and more he is haunted by visions of his happiest moments, alone with a line and a stream. "I dream of bonefish, I dream of salmon," he says. "I dream of casting for them, I dream of the beautiful spots I've been. And then I dream of some of the fish I've lost."

He speaks about his refuge on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick, Canada, and about spending hours tying thousands of flies and about the throat-catching moment after you've cast the fly and played the fish and you feel the hook dig in. Talking about fishing is not like talking about baseball or politics or history. No, Williams calls what he did in the water "a privilege" and lowers his voice as if describing something holy. And he keeps coming back to the same fish, that 35-pound salmon he hooked 3 1/2 years ago on Quebec's Cascapedia River. It was the middle of the day. "Jeez, what a place!" he says. "Only kings and presidents and big shots and billionaires get to fish in there."

It was as big a salmon as he ever fought. "I made a helluva good cast because I was in kind of a narrow spot, and I was picking at it," he says. His hand slices back and forth across the kitchen table as if it were the surface of the river. His face is alight. "Picking at it this way, and I'm shootin' it that way! I was casting 60, 70 feet—a dry fly—and he took it."

Williams leans forward, sets his feet and bears down. His face reddens. "And I fought him," he growls. His voice drops, goes soft as goose down. "And I fought him a little harder. And I fought him really hard. I'm thinking, Jeez, I can't bring this fish home, and I'm really flossing it to him, see! And it's a deep little run there. He was down maybe 10 feet, and I couldn't see him...and I'm really lifting him up! Ummmmph!" He has an invisible fly rod in his hands, and he's trying like hell to pull the fish up through the kitchen floor, his face screwed up from the strain.

"And then I let go," he says. The invisible rod drops. He crooks a finger in his mouth and tugs. "I had hooked him on this big, dry single hook, and I was just pulling him too hard! I tried the hard pull and he didn't break, so with a good bend I dragged him right up, and the hook pulled out just as he came out of the water." The salmon dropped with a splash. Gone.

It's over. Ted Williams comes back to himself, to a chair in a kitchen, with a fish show on TV. "I didn't get him," he says. "I'll always remember that moment when I close my eyes." He is asked to name the river again, and he repeats it: Cascapedia.

"The closest place to heaven I'll be," he says. "I know that."

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