America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (39 page)

With expectations sky-high, his second season in the majors turned out to be a bust. But only Williams could hit .344—just eight points behind the league leader, Joe DiMaggio—and be accused of having an off year. Critics pounced on his inability to hit the long ball; he ended up with just 23 homers, the lowest total of his career for a full season. What highlighted his power outage was that in an effort to help Williams, the Red Sox had shortened the right-field fence in Fenway Park by twenty feet. Frustrated by his performance, Williams popped off, as only he could. Midway through the 1940 campaign, in response to an innocent question from a reporter at the
Boston American
(“What’s the matter with you, Ted?”), he let loose, saying he hated everything about Boston, its fans, and its writers. After his tirade—minus the F-bombs—hit the newsstands, the war between Williams and his adopted hometown was officially on; Jason was fast becoming Achilles, whose rage knew no bounds. Psychoanalyzing “the problem child,” the
Boston Globe
argued that Williams had a “repressed desire to dominate the Red Sox and afterward, perhaps, the American League.” But the severity of his case of arrested development didn’t allow for much repression. “Terrible Ted” would be forever mired in the “terrible twos.” “TELL THEM TO ALL GO FUCK THEMSELVES” was the message that Williams asked the rookie reporter at the
Boston Record
to pass on to his colleagues.
3
What the toddler wanted above all was to spend endless hours of quality time with his bat. For Williams, both the writers as well as the fans were intruders; to tip his cap to the fans after a homer, which he stopped doing after his rookie year, would be to acknowledge that he and his bat did not have the right to be left alone. Like Jefferson and other obsessives, to combat his considerable social anxiety, he was prone to pretending that other people didn’t exist.

Rebounding from his “sophomore slump” in 1941, Williams put together his season for the ages. But .406 wasn’t the number that had Americans buzzing about baseball that year; it was 56. From May 15 until July 16, Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio did the unthinkable; he got a hit in every game. And after being held hitless in Cleveland on July 17—and thus missing out on the $10,000 that the H. J. Heinz Company was prepared to pay had his record-setting feat reached the magic 57—the Yankee centerfielder started another streak of 17 games. With Joe D. hitting .357 and knocking in 130 runs, five more than Williams, and the Yankees winning the pennant by 17 games, the Kid came in second in the MVP voting. “Hell,” Williams would later declare, “I’d’a voted for DiMaggio myself.” But Williams was himself guilty of getting caught up in the DiMaggio hype. During his streak, DiMaggio hit
only
.408; during the same stretch, Williams hit .412; Williams essentially did for an entire season what DiMaggio could manage for only a third. Even more surprising, Williams failed to nab the MVP in 1942, when he won his first Triple Crown with an otherworldly 36 homers and 137 RBIs to go along with a .356 average. That year, the award went to another pennant-winning Yankee, second baseman Joe Gordon, who hit a modest .322 with just 18 homers and 103 RBIs.

Williams did not win the first of his two MVPs until 1946, when the Red Sox led the American League in batting and were in first place most of the season. That September,
Life
could not help but attribute the team’s stunning success solely to Williams’s hitting, lauding “his monomaniacal attempt to perfect himself in the one thing he really cares about.” For the first time since 1918 and for the only time in his career, Boston won the pennant, finishing twelve games ahead of the second-place Detroit Tigers. But the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals turned out to be a disaster. The highly favored Red Sox lost four games to three, and Williams hit .200, eking out just five puny singles. “I was so disgusted, so unhappy,” Williams later recalled. “Shell-shocked. And so disappointed in myself.” In this instance, his rigidity, rather than being an asset, seemed to work against him. During the Series, the Cardinals employed a “right-shift” against Williams, a strategy devised earlier that season by the Indians manager Lou Boudreau, which featured four infielders on the right side of second base. The day before the decisive seventh game, Williams told the
Boston Globe
that he would not change his batting style, “now, next year or ever.” Obsessives are addicted to their routines, and the thought of changing his approach on the fly was anathema to Williams. According to his calculations, the shift still left thirty feet of open space between first and second base, and he had little interest in slapping the ball to left field. “Don’t let anyone fill you up with the baloney,” he emphasized, “that the Cards’ defense has me worried and has caused me to press.” But his actions suggested otherwise. Right after finishing that locker-room interview with the
Globe
, Williams got undressed and picked up a bat, which he toted all the way to the shower. With nothing—not even bat bonding—able to quell his jitters, the third-place hitter in the Sox lineup went hitless in the Series finale. On the train out of St. Louis, he broke down and cried. “I was looking out the window,” he later recalled, “so I had to shut the shade.”

April 30, 1952, was “Ted Williams Day” at Fenway Park. Boston was paying homage to its thirty-three-year-old star because on May 2, he was due to report to a U.S. Navy base in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, to begin a seventeen-month tour of duty. In pregame ceremonies, the left fielder was showered with numerous gifts, including a memory book signed by four hundred thousand fans from across the country, a movie camera, and a light blue Cadillac. “This is the greatest day of my life,” an emotional Williams told the crowd of 24,764. “I’ll always remember it.” In the seventh inning, in what both Williams and the fans assumed would be his last time at bat—he was not counting on a comeback at thirty-five—he parked a curveball eight rows deep into the right-field stands. Despite the wild cheering, the “Hub Kid” failed to tip his cap (as would also be the case on September 28, 1960, when he bid adieu for the final-final time with another long ball).

This would be Williams’s second stint in the armed forces. He had signed up in May 1942 and first got called up that November, a couple of months after completing his Triple Crown–winning season. Of all the branches of the military, Williams enlisted in the most demanding, Naval Aviation—the Air Force was not established until 1947. When asked why he did not seek out something less perilous, he quipped, “Because I like to hit!” For Williams, the bat and the machine gun were first cousins.

His decision to take to the air, as he later acknowledged, was inspired by the exploits of his boyhood idol, Charles Lindbergh. At the age of nine, Williams had seen Lindbergh fêted in a packed San Diego Stadium not long after his return from Paris. “Lindbergh,” he said in the 1960s, “had this great obsession to want to be alone and to want his own life.” (The Splinter was of course no different.) “He [Lindbergh] is still doing great things,” Williams added. “I’d put him among the five men that I admire the most that I’ve ever known in my lifetime.”

Like Lindbergh, the lackadaisical C student turned into an academic whiz once his studies were geared toward a goal that excited him. In November 1942, the high school graduate, who had little idea what a college was—on a visit to Harvard University that June, he had commented, “It’s old, right?”—began a civilian pilot training program at Amherst College. “I’m not batting .400 in this flying course yet,” he told the
New York Times
after a couple of weeks, “but I’m going to do it.” Williams handled all subjects, including advanced math and physics, with aplomb. “He mastered intricate problems in fifteen minutes, which took the average cadet an hour,” stated his Sox teammate and fellow cadet, Johnny Pesky, who struggled academically at Amherst that winter. And surprisingly, like Lindbergh, the fiercely independent Williams also took to military discipline. As opposed to the outfielder, the cadet was capable of controlling his moods. Squadron commanders considered Williams a model soldier, with one calling him “enthusiastic, industrious and cooperative.”

The following year, Williams began intermediate flight training in Pensacola, Florida. Due to his preternatural hand-eye coordination, he excelled. In aerial drills, he repeatedly tore the sleeve target to smithereens, setting all kinds of records for hits. On May 2, 1944, he earned his wings, becoming a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. That same day, he married Doris Soule, whom he had known since his days with the Minneapolis Millers (she was the daughter of his Minnesota fishing guide). While his bride met his
specification
s—(1) hourglass figure, and (2) likes to hunt and fish—their relationship would be stormy. Soon after their arrival in the Everglades for the honeymoon, Doris spotted a snake, and she shut herself in the cabin while Williams fished by himself.        

Having demonstrated remarkable ability and composure in his new line of work, Williams stayed on in Pensacola as a flight instructor. In mid-1945, he headed to San Francisco, where he began preparing for combat duty in the Far East. After the surrender of the Japanese in August, he was transferred to Hawaii, where he spent the rest of the year playing baseball in a Navy league. Williams was discharged from the Marines in January 1946.

As he left the armed forces, Williams signed up for the inactive Marine Reserves. Like most exiting soldiers, he figured that his military days were over. But six years later, with pilots in short supply and a new war to fight, the Marines came calling. In private, the Red Sox star fumed, but in public, for the sake of his country, he bit his tongue. (Aware of his tendency to pop off, he also repeatedly gave reporters the slip.) The war in Korea he supported; his recall he hated. “I didn’t think it was right,” he later said, “to be called up again.” And this time around, he would go directly to the front.

During his eight-week refresher course in Willow Grove, Captain Williams, as he was now called, chose to work with the new kids on the block: jets. “Easy to fly,” later observed the technology geek, who also liked souped-up cars and cameras, “easier than props because they had no torque, less noise, tricycle landing gear. Wonderful flight characteristics.” Early on, he got a huge scare when a pilot crashed his F-9 near the Pennsylvania base. Rushing to the scene, a horrified Williams saw the only remains of the crumpled soldier, a shoe and a leg. “So I was never a totally relaxed flyer,” he later recalled, “because I knew it was my ass if I didn’t pay attention.”

After completing several months of jet training in Cherry Point, North Carolina, Williams headed for Korea, arriving in early February 1953. The hut in Pohang that he shared with two roommates looked like “a real dog box,” as he later put it. Due to the cold and damp conditions, he would do frequent battle with viral infections as well as with Communists on the other side of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. On a busy day, his elite squadron, whose roughly three dozen members included John Glenn, the future astronaut and senator, flew about thirty sorties into enemy territory. “There was certainly nothing ‘bush’ about him [Williams] as a Marine combat pilot,” wrote Glenn in his autobiography. “He gave flying the same perfectionist’s attention he gave to his hitting.” And if Williams had not displayed his characteristic conscientiousness in the cockpit, he might never have made it home alive.

On February 14, after a couple of test flights and some target practice on an old bridge, he flew his first combat mission. Two days later, Williams took part in a massive air attack, in which a couple of hundred planes from several bases pounded a troop-and-supply area twenty miles south of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.

February 16, 1953, turned out to be the most harrowing day of Williams’s life.

That morning, soon after dropping a few 250-pound bombs on buildings in enemy territory, Williams noticed that he had been hit. He did not feel a thud, but suddenly nothing worked. The light indicators were out of whack. The stick in his hand was gyrating wildly. The radio was dead.

Figuring he could not complete the return flight, Williams took his Panther jet out over the Yellow Sea, which was half-frozen. He thought about ejecting, but worried that he wouldn’t be able to get out. “Not for this boy,” he said to himself. Just then, a squadron mate, Lieutenant Larry Hawkins, spotted Williams’s plane going in the wrong direction. Flying up alongside, Hawkins used hand signals to guide him back to the base.

Fifteen minutes later, as Williams was above a field near the base, smoke was coming out of his tail and fuel was leaking. His plane was on fire. But Williams could not tell exactly what was happening and decided to crash-land. He was going 225 miles an hour—twice the speed of a normal approach—and he could not do anything to slow down. Only one wheel popped down, and neither his dive brakes nor his air flaps were functioning. Once he hit the ground, he kept skidding and skidding, causing him to yell, “When is this dirty S.O.B. going to stop?” (The neatnik was trying to tar his malfunctioning machine with the ultimate insult.) The landing strip was 11,000 feet long, and about 2,000 feet from the end, his plane finally came to a halt. Just a few minutes after he stepped out, it burst into flames.

The next morning, without missing a beat, Williams was back in the cockpit. He would fly a total of thirty-nine combat missions before being sent to Japan for medical treatment in mid-June. Besides numerous bouts with the flu, which more than once progressed to pneumonia, he was suffering from inner ear problems.  

Ted Williams was now more than just a great hitter. Proud of his military record, which earned him a handful of medals and gold stars, Williams would call the Marines “the best team I ever played for.”

“Ted served his country in two wars,” President George H. W. Bush has stated. “As a Marine pilot, he set a tremendous example for other celebrities in America. He believed in service to country, and indeed he served with honor.”