The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (33 page)

Though elated, Williams felt placed on the defensive when he commented about the ruling. “I had nothing to do with the draft deal,” he told a reporter. “I just made a routine report. The appeal did not come from me.” The headline over the United Press story in the
Evening Globe
of the twenty-seventh was:
I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH DRAFT DEAL—WILLIAMS
. The story indicated that a national appeal was rare, and reported that Massachusetts had had no more than a dozen people appeal their draft status to the presidential board since the Selective Service law went into effect in 1940.

At spring training in Sarasota, the Red Sox reacted with ambivalence. Press-savvy Joe Cronin was delighted from a baseball standpoint but
clearly worried that the writers and the public would conclude that the fix was in, that somehow Williams had been accorded special treatment at the urging of the Red Sox. Cronin felt compelled to stress that Ted would surely fight if eventually called upon to do so.

Eddie Collins told the
Globe
’s Harold Kaese that the team had not known that Ted appealed to the presidential board. “The news that Williams was placed in 3A by the president hit me like a bolt out of the blue,” said Collins. “People who think the Red Sox had anything to do with Williams being deferred are crazy, that’s all.”

Kaese, reflecting the skeptical initial press reaction to the deferment, wrote that Ted had had plenty of challenges in his short career thus far. “If he clears this challenge of public opinion, that .406 batting average will seem puny by comparison.”
¹¹
Five out of six people interviewed by the
Globe
said they opposed the deferment. But the only serviceman in the group, a Marine, said whatever Washington decided was okay with him.

George Carens of the
Traveler,
usually a reliable pro-Williams voice, wrote that the general reaction to Ted’s deferment is that “it smells.” Carens added: “I personally do not think that Williams will be able to continue baseball while the roar of the crowd rises against him.”

But Sam Cohen, the
Record
sports editor who loved Williams, wrote a rare editorial headlined
THE KID MADE NO APPEAL
, in which he argued that the decision was consistent with FDR’s green light to baseball and that Ted had “talked gleefully about dropping his bat and taking up a gun and knocking some Japs out of the park.”
¹²

On February 28, recognizing they had a significant public relations problem on their hands, the Red Sox summoned the writers to the Sarasota Terrace Hotel for a faux press conference. There, Joe Cronin spoke by phone to Ted in Minnesota, and the Kid’s words were piped in via speakerphone. This session, in which questions from reporters were not entertained, was to serve as a stopgap measure and allow Williams to offer some, but not all, details of what had happened on the draft front. Upon his arrival in Sarasota, he’d submit to a full cross-examination by the writers.

“Neither I nor any member of my family took any appeal to the ruling, which put me in class 1A,” Ted began, saying that the initiative had come from Herbert Estrem, a member of his Minneapolis draft board. “He never discussed the matter with me, nor I with him.”

Ted claimed he’d been “too stunned to think” about the deferment,
and that “right up to Friday morning [the twenty-seventh] I expected an induction order at any minute and I was ready to go. Then came the president’s decision. There’s really nothing more I can say in the matter. I’ve been completely in the dark as to what was going on right from the start. I registered and filled out my questionnaire. I was put in class 3A without saying anything. Then I was placed in class 1A. I figured if that was where the board felt I belonged, then I belonged there. So I accepted the ruling without comment. What’s happened since, while I daily awaited word to join the Army, was brought about by the agent of the board. That’s the whole story.…

“If it had been finally ruled that I should enter the Army, it would have been all right with me. Now that it has been decided that I should go on supporting my mother, that’s all right with me. I only hope folks won’t think I brought about this change in my draft status. Gee, I had nothing to do with it. I want folks to like me. I’m not going to pop off. I’m always ready to do what the authorities think best. And now, Cronin, what are you expecting me to do?”

When Cronin suggested that he fly down to Florida to get there sooner, Ted replied: “Nothing doing; I’m coming in my own car.”
¹³

Ted added that “the quickest route to a solution of this whole matter is to earn some big dough this year, then just as soon as I lay down my bat in September or October, I’m in the Navy. And quick, too. I certainly do not feel I have committed any crime or done anything dishonest; and if I wasn’t sincere I wouldn’t be picking what is not going to be any bed of roses.”

That last statement about wanting to “earn some big dough this year,” delivered without any mention of his need to pay off the annuities he’d established for his mother, came off as harshly selfish at a time of national sacrifice, and the Red Sox were not pleased. Tom Yawkey issued a statement the next day saying that Ted’s decision “in all likelihood will affect not only his entire baseball career but his life as well.”
¹⁴
The owner’s clear implication was that he hoped his star would enlist sooner rather than later.

Then Herbert Estrem came forward to make his first public comment about the Williams case and essentially corroborated Ted’s account—except the part about not having discussed the case with him. Estrem said that after the 1A reclassification, Ted and his lawyer came to see him, and that the meeting had taken place at his initiative, not Ted’s. “I am supposed to be a disinterested party seeing that both the government and Uncle Sam get a fair deal. I saw Williams only that one time. It was
on my own initiative. I decided to appeal his case. Williams said he was not eager to enter his own appeal.”
¹⁵

The
Boston Post
sent a reporter to San Diego to try to determine the extent to which May Williams was reliant on her famous son for support. In the resulting March 3 story, which carried no byline, the
Post
reported that while it had been unable to contact May herself, neighbors defended Ted and the decision of the presidential board. They said that Mrs. Williams was, in fact, dependent on Ted for support; that she was in poor health; that she’d had one operation, which Ted paid for, and that she needed another. They said Ted had paid $2,500 to have May’s house remodeled the previous year, that he had bought her $1,000 worth of furniture, and that he was sending her weekly support payments. They also said May had told them that Ted had written her with instructions not to do anything that would result in his being given special consideration, though she’d earlier filed an affidavit with his draft board attesting to his support of her.

Then Colonel Nelson, the Minnesota Selective Service director, weighed in. In a call to the Associated Press “just to set the record straight,” he said he wanted it known that contrary to the impression left by Herbert Estrem, Ted had sought his deferment himself.
¹⁶
Nelson said he had conferred with Williams’s attorney and told him the issue could not be appealed to the president without Ted himself asking for it. The attorney talked to Williams, who confirmed he wanted his case reviewed and then notified Estrem that he wished to appeal.

The conflict between Nelson’s and Estrem’s version of events, if there was one, seemed mostly about emphasis and about the technical, bureaucratic requirement that the man on whose behalf the appeal was being filed, Williams, had to officially request it.

Replying to the AP, Estrem said: “I think the word ‘request’ is too strong, although technically he did request it. That is the only way an appeal would be taken.… Of course the boy wanted to play baseball, but that was just one of the subjects on his mind when he conferred with me.”

The Williams deferment quickly became topic A in Boston and beyond and would remain a major story in the papers for months. It had all the elements: a whiff of favoritism and the shirking of duty at a time of overwhelming national unity and surging patriotism; self-interest versus the national interest—all tempered by the facts of the case, which were undeniably on Williams’s side. He was, in fact, the sole supporter of his mother and had been for some time. The law provided for a deferment
under such circumstances, and thousands upon thousands of them had been duly awarded to anonymous men unburdened by Ted’s brand of lightning-rod celebrity.

Colonel Egan kept up his egalitarian, against-the-grain defense of Ted, noting that in this case, the rule of law had been followed with a “meticulousness that is not present in Hitler’s Germany.” He condemned the reported man-on-the-street view—that Ted was getting special treatment. “It makes no difference that thousands of obscure men previously had been deferred in the same manner and for the same reason,” Egan wrote, satirizing the reasoning of the uninformed unwashed. “This is a professional athlete! This is a demi-God of the diamond! This is an idol of the youth of America! So into the Army with him and to hell with the rights or wrongs of it!”
¹⁷

But Quaker Oats, which had paid Ted $4,000 to endorse its cereal, thought the body politic had concluded that Ted’s position was untenable and thus bad for business, so it canceled their contract. Williams seethed at the slight and would never eat a Quaker Oats product again.

Worried that there was additional money out there to be lost, Ted’s business manager, James A. Silin, sent his client a telegram advising him to throw in the towel and enlist promptly. “Your baseball career as well as your patriotism and your future happiness for many years to come are at stake,” Silin wrote Ted. “If you enlist, you will gladden the hearts and stir the Americanism of thousands of kids to whom you have been and should always remain an idol. Don’t let those kids down, Teddy. If you accept deferment from the Army, you will ruin the greatest baseball career of all time.”
¹⁸
Silin gave a copy of his wire to the papers, a move that may have shortened his tenure in the Kid’s employ.

Then Joe Cronin, concerned about the prevailing winds, wrote his star and suggested he visit Mickey Cochrane, the former Tigers catcher, who had enlisted in the Navy and landed softly at Naval Station Great Lakes, where he was running the athletic program. Ted agreed, flew into Chicago, and drove up to the base, on the shores of Lake Michigan. Cochrane drove Ted around in his new Lincoln Continental “all decked out in his Navy uniform, buttons shining like mad, and he gave me the big pitch,” Williams recalled. “I met a few of the guys, and I’m weakening. I’m about to enlist right now.

“Then he says, ‘Gee, it’s going to be awful tough to play ball. You try to play ball this summer, they’ll boo you out of every park in the big leagues.’ Boy, I saw fire. I said to myself, ‘I don’t give a damn who they
boo or what they do. I’ve heard plenty of boos. I’m going to play ball if I can.’ ”

Then Ted said Tom Yawkey “got into the act” by telling him he did not think it would be smart for him to go to spring training. “That was the first mistake the Red Sox made with me. I made up my mind I was going to go anyway. All I could think about was that big contract, and the very fact that I was entitled to be 3A, and now for the first time in my life I would be able to get my mother out of hock a little.”
¹⁹

After returning to Minnesota, Williams announced on March 5 that he intended to play out the season, after which he would enlist. “While deferred from the draft in a 3A classification, I made certain financial commitments,” he said in a statement issued by the Red Sox. “I must carry through with them. Therefore, despite a strong urge to enter the service now, I have decided to play ball with the Red Sox this summer. That will enable me to fulfill my obligation to my family and make everything right all around.”
²⁰

His statement came the same day that columnist Bill Cunningham cast fundamental doubt on Ted’s 3A claim and warned that he had “better have a challenge-proof excuse, if he wants to hold his head up among men for the rest of his days.”
²¹
A few days later, Cunningham suggested that Tom Yawkey take over payments to Ted’s mother, then fire his left fielder if he refused to go to war.

By March 9, two days after Williams had set out by car from Minnesota, expectations were running high in Sarasota for his expected arrival the next day. Writers from Boston, New York, and Chicago had gathered, along with half a dozen newsreel cameramen.
²²
Also waiting for Ted was a raft of fan mail, including one letter containing two blank sheets of paper that were yellow—the color of cowardice.
²³

He arrived at 6:50 p.m. on March 10, completing a three-day, 1,700-mile drive from Minnesota, which included three hours wasted in Nashville trying to cash a check when no one believed he was the real Ted Williams.

The clubhouse was nearly empty. He picked out one of Dom DiMaggio’s bats and took it out to swing on the field, alone except for Johnny and Vince Orlando. No one else noticed at first, then trainer Win Green spotted him from the hotel. The press was alerted.

Cronin greeted him briefly in the locker room, saying, “Hi, Meat.” Then Williams showered and emerged to face about a dozen writers, with whom he knew he had to speak in detail. “Glad to see you fellows
again,” he began. “I hope the people in Boston will be glad to see me. I realize I’m sitting on the hot seat. I suppose I’m a so-and-so in Boston. But if that’s the case, I’ll have to try and grin and bear it. I think I can too, because I know in my heart I’m entitled to deferment and right in taking the course I’ve chosen. I’m not popping off. Everything I say is honest.”

Ted revealed that he had stayed an extra day in Minnesota in order to speak by phone with American League president William Harridge, who gave Ted his blessing and advised him to keep his chin up. Williams said he’d handled his appeal by the book and described his financial situation in detail, saying he’d spent more than he made in 1939, broke even in 1940, and saved a little last year. With his savings, he’d invested $6,000 in three annuities for his mother, which he said he’d lose if he didn’t keep up payments by playing this year.