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

Another time, McDermott was given Ted’s uniform pants by mistake and noticed that they had stars embroidered inside the waistband. When Williams discovered the mix-up, he again admonished McDermott: “Come here, Bush. Don’t make me tell you again. Hand over those pants.
I’m
the star.” 41 (McDermott found himself back in Ted’s good graces in 1953, after the pitcher got into a brawl in the clubhouse with
Globe
beat writer Bob Holbrook. Williams applauded and said to him, “Way to go. You’re the first player to pop a writer in 20 years.” 42 )
    Ted would use the press as his all-purpose whipping boy and, rather than take responsibility for his own behavior, blame the writers. In August of 1956, in the aftermath of another spitting episode, Austen Lake called Ted on this point. “Each time this scaramouche foams into one of his copyrighted tantrums he uses a rubber stamp excuse: ‘The Boston sports writers drive me daffy,’ ” Lake wrote. “No blame to himself! He shrugs off responsibility for his hooliganisms by saying the writers are persecuting him maliciously. Nothing is further from fact.… It’s half past time the writers told the stark naked truth about this Johnny-jump-up, who paints himself a martyr to sports page oppression.”
    Then, delving into Ted’s psyche, Lake speculated that Ted had substituted the writers for the adults who had failed him in his childhood. “As a psychotic personality who grew up from a nerve-frazzled childhood, among eccentric adults and an insecure atmosphere, he built a protective wall around himself to shut out what, in his junior sight, was a hostile world run by adult tyrants,” Lake wrote. “It stunted his spiritual development. So he clung to this adolescent obsession and in time, as he became an adult himself, substituted the tyrants of his childhood with a similar set of tyrants, the sportswriters. We stand as carping critics, symbols of censure, the disciplinary eyes, the thought police, antagonists. He had to have a new set of antagonists to replace the old, obsolete set.” 43
    Though there was quite a drop-off in impact after Egan, the two other leading Boston columnists in that era were Lake and Bill Cunningham of the
Post
and later the
Herald.
Together they comprised what was known in local sports circles as the Big Three.
    “Egan was an entertainer, Cunningham a spellbinder, Lake a preacher,” wrote Harold Kaese in an appraisal of the three men following Lake’s death in 1964. 44
    Cunningham, a former All-American football player at Dartmouth, was a tall, extroverted, pompous dandy who usually wore a blue beret and a sleeveless yellow sweater and carried a walking stick. He had famously panned Ted in 1938 after he was sent down to the minors, and the following spring, when Ted was up for good, he had an unpleasant encounter with the columnist. Cunningham or his editors had decided that a make-good column on the rookie he had written off twelve months earlier would be appropriate. Cunningham, however, didn’t seem too enthused about the prospect, and apparently he had had one too many on the day of the encounter.
    “The elevator door opens, and out pops Cunningham wearing aporkpie hat, and it was obvious he had been drinking,” recalled pitcher Elden Auker. “He walks straight over to Ted and interrupts us, saying, ‘C’mon, kid, let’s get this over with. I have to interview you because the people in Boston want to know what this kid coming up from Minneapolis is like.’ Ted just looked at him and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Cunningham, I don’t talk to sportswriters after they’ve been drinking.’ Well, you could see the steam coming out of him as he walked away.” 45 Despite that incident, Cunningham generally liked Williams and would often come to his defense when he was under attack over the years.
    Lake, like Cunningham, had once starred in football—first as a halfback at Lafayette College, in Pennsylvania, and then in Buffalo and