The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (105 page)

Ted’s favorite Red Sox player, the one he asked Duquette about most, was Nomar Garciaparra, the shortstop who had been named Rookie of the Year in 1997.

“He called me after the first time he saw Nomar and said, ‘Where did you get this kid?’ ” Duquette recalled. “I told him he’d gone to Georgia Tech, been in the Cape League, and so on. Then he said, ‘You know, he reminds me of somebody that I’ve seen. I can’t put my finger on it. I’ll think of it.’ Ten days later I get a call. Voice on the end of the line said: ‘DiMaggio.’ ”

“One day Ted calls again. Nomar’s hitting about .380. Ted said, ‘Dan, this guy can hit .400. Take his walks and double them. This guy can hit .400 if he wants, but he’s got to be a more selective hitter.’ Nomar was a notorious first-pitch hitter.

“After Nomar won the batting title for the second consecutive time, I picked up the phone, called Ted, and said: ‘DiMaggio.’ Ted said, ‘That’s what I told you.’ ”
¹¹

When Williams met current Red Sox players, he’d ask them a range of questions—what pitches they looked for, how they approached a certain pitcher, what they thought about Fenway Park. In Nomar’s rookie year, Ted asked Duquette to arrange a phone call so that he could quiz the shortstop on the fine points of the game. Garciaparra had heard about Williams’s skull sessions with the players and was nervous before the call came through.

“He pounded me with questions to see how much I knew and what I was thinking about hitting,” Garciaparra recalled. “He would ask about certain situations and what am I trying to do in those situations. ‘What are you thinking on a three-and-two count? When you’re struggling, how do you get out of it?’ I just answered him instinctively.”

Williams liked Nomar’s answers and called Duquette to tell him so. Duquette then called Nomar to report that Ted had said he was the first Red Sox player he’d talked to who answered all his questions correctly.

“From that time on, Ted and I became friends,” Garciaparra said. “We would talk numerous times during the season. Even after we took batting practice the phone would ring in the clubhouse. Helen Robinson, the operator, would say, ‘I’ve got your hitting coach on the line.’ It was Ted checking in. ‘How are you doing? How you feeling?’

“Baseball was obviously our connection, but once we got to know each other it was about life. We had things in common. We were both from Southern California and had played ball in Boston. Then his mom was Mexican, and both my parents are Mexican. So we were talking about family.”
¹²

Following his brief star turn for George H. W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary of 1988, Williams continued to dabble in politics at both the local and national levels. He endorsed the Citrus County sheriff, Jeff Dawsy, even though Dawsy was a Democrat. And Ted got involved in a Massachusetts sheriff’s race on behalf of the incumbent in Middlesex County at the time, Brad Bailey, a Republican whom he had met through John-Henry. Williams filmed a TV commercial for Bailey and
even flew up to Boston to attend a fund-raiser for him, but Bailey lost the election.

Ted’s next political foray came in the summer of 1997.
Esquire
magazine had asked Arizona senator John McCain, the famed Vietnam War hero and Navy pilot who had been shot down and taken as a POW, who his hero was, and he had said it was Ted. The two had first met in 1993, when John Dowd, McCain’s lawyer, who’d also represented Ted in the Antonucci affair, introduced them. Williams signed a baseball, and McCain still kept it on his mantel at home. Now McCain was preparing to run for reelection to a third term in the Senate the following year. After that he planned to seek the Republican nomination for president. A Hernando visit was arranged

McCain waited a while in Ted’s house for Williams to appear. Finally Ted came out from his bedroom, using a walker. From the hallway, he bellowed: “Where is that guy that’s gonna be the next president of the United States?”

McCain was struck by how much frailer Ted had become in four years. He asked a question: Was it true, as the Williams mythology had it, that he really could see the laces on the ball after it left the pitcher’s hand?

“Shit, no,” Ted replied. “You’re reading all these sportswriters. Jesus, that ball looked like a pea coming in there.”

They talked about the wars they’d served in and about flying in combat. McCain asked Ted about the time his plane had been shot up in Korea and why he hadn’t ejected. Williams had told the story a thousand times, but cheerfully went through it again. He was almost six four and knew that if he’d ejected he would have broken both knees. “I’d have rather died than never to have been able to play baseball again,” Ted said.

Williams remarked that McCain looked like a million bucks and should think about running for president. The senator was encouraged. “If Ted Williams thought I could do it, well, why shouldn’t I give it a shot,” he wrote in his 2002 book,
Worth the Fighting For,
in which he devoted a chapter to Williams.
¹³

McCain announced his candidacy for president in September of 1999. Williams liked McCain and wanted to back him, but there was a complication: George W. Bush was also running. Ted loved Bush’s father. After he helped George H. W. in New Hampshire in 1988, the president had honored him at the White House twice in 1991, and he’d come down to Hernando in 1995 for Ted’s annual museum shindig. Williams knew he had to stay loyal to the Bushes, so he endorsed the Texas governor a few weeks before the New Hampshire primary in 2000.

The endorsement stung McCain, but he would defeat Bush in the primary decisively. John-Henry was concerned that his father had backed the wrong horse. He called Dave McCarthy, the New Hampshire state trooper, complaining that McCarthy had assured him Bush would win. It wasn’t good for Ted’s brand to back a loser. An annoyed McCarthy assured John-Henry that Bush would go on to win the Republican nomination and the presidency, which he did.
^*

Despite Ted’s frail condition, John-Henry still had him out working the memorabilia circuit. In their mind’s eye, fans who hadn’t seen Williams for a time no doubt assumed that he was still vigorous, so they were startled by what they actually saw. In January 1998, for example, at an autograph show at the Ramada Plaza Hotel near JFK Airport in New York, there were gasps in the crowd as the Kid, pale and sickly-looking, was wheeled into a conference room and helped into a chair on a raised platform to begin his work, for a $225 minimum per signature. “It was a sickening sight,” said David Armstrong, then a
Boston Globe
reporter, who was present.

Ted turned eighty on August 30 of that year.
^*
“Well, I’m getting along pretty good,” he told Dan Shaughnessy while in a reflective mood. Shaughnessy was one of the few writers Williams liked. “I can’t run. I can’t fish, and I don’t see that good. I can’t drive. But… thank God there’s a television.”
¹⁴

Ted, as he mellowed, found that he actually enjoyed doing interviews and staying in touch with his public. Earlier that year he’d flown up to New York to go on television’s
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
program. Two months later Ted was asked to throw out a first ball at the first game that the Tampa Bay Devil Rays played at Tropicana Field in Saint Petersburg. The Rays sent a helicopter to Hernando to pick him up from his front lawn.
^15
*

That October, Williams went over to the Kennedy Space Center to see his old pal John Glenn return to space aboard the shuttle
Discovery,
thirty-six years after he became the first American to orbit the earth. Williams was introduced to another celebrity attending the launch, rocker Steven Tyler of the Boston-based band Aerosmith, but the name didn’t ring a bell. “So, you’re in a band, huh? What kind of band?” Ted asked. Tyler, graciously, didn’t try too hard to explain, saying simply: “Ted, I think it was more of a pleasure for me to meet you than for you to meet me.”
¹⁶

The following month, Ted took John-Henry with him to a reunion of his 1969 Senators team in Chantilly, Virginia. Williams made a dramatic late entrance in a wheelchair pushed by his son. As the crowd stood and applauded, Ted stood up by himself, hobbled to the stage, and began to speak.
¹⁷

On March 8, 1999, Joe DiMaggio died. Ted, quite sick himself by then, was in bed watching the History Channel on television when one of his caretakers came in to give him the news. Soon Dan Shaughnessy called and asked for his thoughts on Joe’s death. “I can only tell you that I’m sad, but I’m glad Joe’s not suffering anymore,” Ted said. “He was an American hero and a legend for sure. I never, ever compared myself to him. I thought there never was a greater player in the history of baseball. For me just to be mentioned in the same breath, boy, I always felt like I was two steps below him. I thought I could hit with anybody, but he was in my opinion as good as any that ever played the game.”
¹⁸

Williams did a round of interviews on the occasion of Joe’s death, including an appearance on the
Today
show, where he appeared to doze off after being questioned by Tom Brokaw, as Brokaw interviewed another guest.

Ted always considered himself a foodie, so he was delighted, that spring, to be visited by Molly O’Neill, the food columnist for the
New York Times Magazine,
for an in-the-kitchen-with-Ted spread that was headlined
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN TED WILLIAMS—THE SPLENDID SPATULA—STEPS UP TO THE PLATE
. (Actually, Ted wasn’t doing the cooking anymore. He was barking orders at one of the men who cooked for him.
¹⁹
) When O’Neill said the best egg she’d ever had was in Paris, Williams playfully erupted, badgering her to admit that his were better.

Besides food, there was another connection between O’Neill and Ted: baseball. Her brother happened to be New York Yankees outfielder Paul O’Neill, who at that moment was 5–50 in spring training, Molly told Ted.

“Get that brother of yours on the phone!” Williams yelled. “I need to talk to that kid. Get him on the phone!”

“Paul? This is Ted Williams. I been thinkin’ ’bout you. You’re a helluva ballplayer,” Ted said before passing on a few tips: hit inside out and swing low to high. “But you know all this. Don’t let anybody change ya. Hit the ball hard up the middle. Don’t pull it. Wait for your pitch. And remember that the lousier you’re hittin’, the more you’re thinkin’ about hittin’. You shouldn’t have a worry in the world. I’m tellin’ ya right now, you’re a helluva player.”

That afternoon, Paul O’Neill broke out, going 3–4.
²⁰

By its first anniversary, in July of 1998, Hitter, Inc., John-Henry’s Internet venture, had succeeded in attracting four thousand paying customers in the three-county area around Hernando. In November of ’98, Hitter expanded into Gainesville and Orlando, and by the end of the year, to Tampa. John-Henry laid out an ambitious goal of extending the company’s reach throughout Florida by the end of 1999 and going national by 2000. Hitter invested heavily in the newest and most advanced computer technology, including a state-of-the-art server and the infrastructure for high bandwidth through ISDN phone lines and T1 lines. Hitter also offered website design and maintenance services, twenty-four-hour technical support, a training center, and a repair store.
²¹
For his staff, John-Henry insisted on hiring only Microsoft-certified professionals and was willing to pay high salaries to get them.

Soon he found that the funds from the memorabilia companies, while considerable, were insufficient for the ambitious expansion he had in mind for Hitter. So in the spring of 1999, he borrowed about $500,000 from Gerry Rittenberg, the CEO of Party City, the largest retail party-supply chain in the country. Rittenberg was also a leading collector of Ted Williams memorabilia (he had acquired Ted’s 1947 Triple Crown trophy, among other items) and a board member of the Williams museum who had become a friend and booster of John-Henry’s.

Rittenberg agreed to loan the half million dollars for Hitter on condition that the loan be secured by the equivalent amount of Ted memorabilia. A grateful John-Henry threw in two more valuable items that he said Rittenberg could keep: Ted’s newly retrieved Red Sox rings from 1946 and 1986.

But six months later, John-Henry asked for the rings back. “I said, ‘Oh, shit.’ I liked the rings but understood he should have them,” Rittenberg said. “He also asked me if I’d give him the Triple Crown. So we did a deal. The deal was he would buy the Triple Crown and the rings back in return for giving me certain other memorabilia.”
²²

John-Henry repaid the $500,000 loan within three months, and Rittenberg said he provided young Williams with other short-term loans secured by memorabilia. John-Henry was apparently able to repay Rittenberg so quickly because he obtained another loan for Hitter in the amount of $570,000 from a local SunTrust Bank on July 6, 1999. The SunTrust loan was in turn secured by an investment account valued at about $740,000 that Ted maintained at the bank.
²³
According to Eric Abel, Ted signed off on the loan to Hitter in which his funds were used as collateral.

In moving aggressively to expand Hitter, John-Henry struck deals with a number of major telecommunications companies—including AT&T, BellSouth, Qwest, Sprint, MCI, and Time Warner—to acquire large amounts of bandwidth. Getting the bandwidth to remote Hernando required the companies to invest a lot of money: Time Warner, for example, dug a dedicated fiber-optic line from Tampa to Hernando just to service John-Henry’s order for Hitter, and AT&T had to expand its infrastructure in Tampa. These costs were reflected in the companies’ monthly bills to Hitter, which were enormous. AT&T alone was charging $1.5 million a month, and Eric Abel estimated that when the other firms’ bills were added in, Hitter’s monthly costs for bandwidth were $4 million. Though Hitter would grow and eventually attract tens of thousands of subscribers, the customers’ monthly payments of about $22, along with revenue from local small businesses, did not begin to generate enough income to service the high bandwidth costs. Faced with this shortfall, and knowing he had lots of unused bandwidth to sell, John-Henry decided to take Hitter in a radical new direction: pornography.