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

later, he lit into him: “Hey, you bush cocksucker, get over here! What the fuck do you know about the strike zone? What do you know about the discipline of taking a pitch?” Ajemian said he took the heat and said nothing, and on reflection, decided that Ted had a point. “He had an astuteness that became more publicly winning later. People came to see him as someone who thought things through. He always brought some adroitness to his thinking.” But for all the times teammates privately enjoyed the way Ted treated the writers, or watched the show in silent amazement, there was at least one occasion when a player called Ted on his behavior. According to Harold Kaese’s notes, in August of 1948, following a Red Sox victory over the Indians at Fenway Park, Ted popped off at the scribes for no apparent reason. Afterward, shortstop Vern “Junior” Stephens said to Williams: “Why don’t you smarten up?”
    “Oh, you’re Irish, too,” Ted told Stephens, apparently using “Irish” as a synonym for “wiseguy.”
    “And you’re colored,” replied Junior.
    Ted stalked off to the showers. Complimented by the writers on what they considered a snappy comeback, Stephens said: “Somebody’s got to tell him off sometimes.”
    Williams of course expected his teammates and friends to keep his confidences and never dish about him to the press. Pal Jim Carroll, a Boston liquor distributor, got in trouble once for getting too cozy with Huck Finnegan, of the
American.
One day in 1958, Finnegan, trolling for a story, called Carroll and asked him how Ted was feeling. Actually, Carroll said, he had dysentery. Finnegan promptly blew the story up, and Ted called Carroll, furious, demanding to know why he had confided in the reporter. “Now you have it all over Boston that I was shitting my pants the whole month of August!” said Ted. “It almost cost me my friendship,” Carroll said. 39
    Others thought Ted’s distrust of the writers bordered on paranoia. Recuperating in the hospital from a fractured elbow in 1950, Ted was urged to walk over to the window and wave to a flock of kids who weregathered outside hoping to get a glimpse of him, remembered Jim Cleary, another friend, who was in the room at the time. “Ted didn’t want to because he said the press would say he was giving kids the finger,” Cleary said. 40
    Williams considered Curt Gowdy a good friend and once sought his advice on dealing with the press. Gowdy found Williams fundamentally naive about the way the media worked. Ted didn’t understand or accept the premise that the public would be interested in the personal life of a star of his magnitude and that therefore writers would want to ask him about his life off the field. “We’d talk,” Gowdy said. “He asked me, ‘Maybe you can help me—what I don’t understand is why they write about my mother, my brother, my dad. That’s my personal business. It’s my family. If I strike out with the bases loaded or drop a fly ball that costs the game, then hell, they can get on me all they want. I accept that.’ And I’d say, ‘Ted, that’s just the way it is. It may not be fair. But you’re a star, you’re in a goldfish bowl, and it’s the same way with Sinatra and everybody, and they’re going to do it. So you’ve just got to accept it. And he said, ‘I don’t want to accept it.’ You couldn’t convince him. ‘Fuck them!’ he’d say.” *
    As sensitive as Williams was about his own notices, he also paid careful attention to what the press wrote about his teammates and resented it if he was upstaged. That was one reason there was friction between him and Piersall, who, Ted felt, was too much of a publicity hound. And when Mickey McDermott, the hard-throwing and colorful left-handed pitcher, came up in the late ’40s and a newspaper headline proclaimed him a star, Williams called McDermott over and said: “Bush, don’t let that write-up go to your head. You’re not the star here. I am.”