Free The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee Jr.

dead,’ I’d say, ‘Good.’ ” 33
    Reflecting back on their time with Ted and the press, Williams’s teammates are virtually all sympathetic with the pressures inflicted on him by celebrity in general and by the Boston reporters in particular.
    All the writers looked for a fresh story on Williams because that’s what their editors thirsted for, the only thing that would satisfy insatiable reader demand for all things Ted. As John Lardner—the humorist, reporter, and critic—once put it: “By the time the press of Boston has completed its daily treatment of Theodore S. Williams, there is no room in the papers for anything but two sticks of agate type about Truman and housing, and one column for the last Boston girl to be murdered on a beach.”
    “When he would sit in the dugout, he’d see them coming, and he’d ask them, ‘What kind of goddamn rumors are you going to start today?’ ” said Tex Clevenger, who pitched for the Red Sox in 1954. 34
    Added outfielder Jimmy Piersall: “One day a writer in KC said both me and Ted were mentally ill, and Ted got up and spat at him. [The writer] was a fuckin’ prick.” 35
    Charlie Maxwell, a substitute outfielder in the early ’50s, had another story: “One time there was a Boston writer who was ragging on Ted. In the clubhouse there were buckets of water and ammonia to keep us cool. The writer said some not-so-nice things to Ted, and Ted asked him to leave. He didn’t, and Ted picked up the bucket and dumped it over his head. The writer just turned and walked away. If he had walked away the first time, it wouldn’t have happened.” 36
    One of the things that struck the
Globe
’s Clif Keane about Williams was his unpredictability. “You never knew what it was going to be from the middle of a sentence,” Keane told Ed Linn. “No idea what to expect.… I might walk in the dressing room. He might say, ‘Did you see the fight last night, Clif? Hell of a fight.’ [Then] he might look at me and say, ‘What the hell smells around here?… Did somebody shit in here? Oh, never mind. It’s only the sportswriters.’ ” 37
    The players seemed to enjoy watching Ted give the writers what for in a manner that most of them would never even have contemplated. When the reporters came into the clubhouse after the game, the players would groan audibly, Ajemian remembered. “When Ted would tear into us, the other players would be amused and enjoy it. It was something they wouldn’t do. Few players would take reporters on. They admired Ted for doing it.”
    Ajemian, like his colleagues, noted that Williams was more approachable if he had a bad game rather than a good game. “Coming around after a good game was easy. He was struck by the fact you’d come after a bad game and ask questions. Even though he’d still give you a bad time, you could read signs of approval. It reflected his personal code of really being demonstrably down on weasels and behaving somewhat differently toward those who would take more of a dare or risk.”
    Ed Linn, who wrote two books about Williams, felt that in dealing with writers, Ted played to his bad-boy stereotype and appeared harsher than he really was. “If you ask a question that shows you know something about him and about baseball, you will get a thoughtful, forthright answer; if you ask a general question, you will get a short answer,” Linn wrote in a 1958
Sport
magazine profile of Ted. “And yet, through it all,there is a sense that Williams is really putting on an act, that he is only doing what he knows is expected of him. A mannerly Ted Williams would be as much of a disappointment to a writer in search of a colorful story as a sober Joe E. Lewis. Williams would deny it indignantly, but he was a great showman.” 38
    That didn’t mean his outbursts were always without justification. Once, Ajemian wrote a piece that was critical of Ted for taking a walk in a key situation when the tying run was at second. When Williams saw him