Splendid summer

At least one happy camper remembers Williams fondly

It's nearly three weeks after Ted Williams' death and people haven't stopped talking about him. Hey, if cryonics actually works he may STILL be the greatest living ballplayer. Wake him up right now and I guarantee he hits better than Greg Vaughn.

Just a couple of days ago, fans gathered 18,000 strong at Fenway Park to honor the greatest Red Stocking of all. In the stands, folks did what everyone has always done, can't stop doing and will be doing for years and years to come: They swapped stories of Williams at the bat; they clucked admiringly with each retold tale; they wondered how many more great years he would have had without his prime-time stint in the military. Why, the Williams v. DiMaggio for MVP in '41 discussion may go on for another 60 years.

I'm not here to engage in that. My memory traces to somewhere far from the major leagues. It was the summer of '79 when I met Ted Williams. He looked to be 60 ... Maybe I was 10.

We were on the grounds of the Ted Williams Baseball Camp in Lakeville, Mass. The sun was out. I was a camper, happy enough, and Williams had stopped by to check on things. Until this day I hadn't imagined that he actually lived. He was a mythic figure out of the books of my youth. For me, going to Ted Williams Baseball Camp was like playing in the Babe Ruth League or attending a John F. Kennedy Elementary School -- you knew better than to waste time waiting for the namesake to show up.

Yet there he was, huge and leathery with flapjack hands. He wore a camp cap and his face was lined, and he swaggered when he walked.

One of the guys on my team at camp was a gifted left-handed pitcher named Jim Poole, who went on to have a solid 10-year career as a big-league reliever. Poole recently retired but when he pitched for the Tigers a couple of years ago, I visited him in Detroit. I hadn't seen him in two decades. We played catch before a game and reminisced.

"What I remember is the way everything stopped when he came into camp," said Poole. "We were always so busy with games or batting practice or fielding drills or running or whatever. But when Ted Williams came, a hush fell across every field. Everything stopped."

What I remember most is not a silence but a sound. One of the batting-practice tools at the camp was a heavy rubber cylinder that hung off a tree branch. We took dozens of swings at it every day. I think it was supposed to help build wrist strength. When you connected with it your bat bounced back a bit and a twanging vibration filled the air.

When Williams arrived he went straight for this hitting station. A bunch of us gathered around. "What you want to do," said Williams -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- "is extend your arms all the way." Williams got in his left-handed stance. The rubber cylinder was at about two o'clock in front of him. "You wait until you know the ball is going where you want it. Then you whip the bat around so that your arms are out to here and -- boom! -- you hit the ball 400 feet."

Williams swung and hit that hard rubber. Pock it went. It was a clean, promising sound, kind of like the sound of a champagne bottle opening, only bigger. There was no twang and no reverberation. I guess he got all of it.

For the rest of that summer and the next, I tried to get a pock like that. No chance. I just got a lot of ringing in my ears.

Before he left that day Williams stood beneath the flagpole and signed some autographs. I had run to the canteen and bought an orange baseball that had the Ted Williams Baseball Camp logo on it. I brought it up to him. He took it in his big hands. He used a blue ballpoint pen and when he gave the ball back he looked straight at me and nodded.

I still have the ball, wrapped in a plastic sheath. Maybe John Henry Williams and the other keepers of Ted Williams' name would challenge its authenticity. Maybe, because it lacks the official seal of the Williams estate, the ball wouldn't sell for as much as it might. Not that that matters. I wouldn't give it up for anything.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Kostya Kennedy takes sides every Wednesday at CNNSI.com.

 

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