16

A Changed Life

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Heads turn as John Henry Williams, 21, lopes down the steps of Fenway Park's Box 54. And not just because he is six feet, five, movie-star handsome, and coming in as if he owns the place. No, the regulars are staring because the kid looks so much like The Kid, circa 1940, it's scary.

HAROLD J. BAULD, BOSTON, NOVEMBER 1990

The loneliness of the big house on the biggest hill on the Florida peninsula was obvious. Ted Williams came home at the end of the 1993 Atlantic salmon season, pulled down the blinds, and wrapped himself inside. The emotional hurt with the loss of Louise was compounded by a physical hurt. He had fallen down at the Miramichi, broken a couple of ribs. He didn't want to see a lot of people, do a lot of things.

One person he did see was Lewis Watkins. Watkins had something positive to show him.

“The first day he came back, I took him to the construction site,” Watkins says. “We sat outside in his Chevy Suburban. He was amazed. He started crying. He said, ‘Jesus Christ, I never expected anything like this.'”

The building under construction was the Ted Williams Museum, the first museum ever built in the United States for a living athlete. Sam Tamposi donated a prime hunk of Citrus Hills land right on North Citrus Hills Boulevard. The excavating company donated excavating at cost. The construction company donated construction at cost. The groundbreaking had been in July, and work had begun in September, and the opening was scheduled for February. The building was rising in a hurry.

“The museum was Ted's idea,” Watkins says. “Back in 1990, maybe 1991, we were talking about presidents one day. Nixon . . . he loved Nixon. Bush. Somehow we got talking about presidential museums. Ted said he'd like to have his own museum. I said, ‘Really?' He said, ‘Yes.'

“It was so out of character for him, something you'd never expect him to say, that it really hit me. I said, ‘This has to be something that he'd really like.'”

The conversation ultimately led to the construction. Watkins, a man with an active entrepreneurial mind, was in charge of everything. The rise of the museum was therapy for Williams. He talked every day now with Watkins, fighting the sadness of Canada, keeping busy. Watkins knew some of the sadness Williams felt.

“I talked to Louise on the phone in those three days when she was out of the coma,” Watkins says. “Everything seemed fine. She wanted my wife, Mindy, and me to come up. She even had a list of things she wanted me to bring, stuff that was expensive in Canada, baby powder and certain canned goods. That was Louise. She made me smile. I was supposed to lug all this shit up through customs so she could save $20. She and Ted, they both still thought prices were back in the fifties. Ted forever was thinking that something that cost $140 would cost $39.95.

“It was all so strange. She sounded perfectly healthy. Then she was back in the coma, and then she died.”

The museum was a needed positive against the negatives of the summer. Williams would tell people, “This was Lewis's idea. I told him, ‘If you want to do it, do it. Just leave me out of it,'” but the truth was he wanted to know everything that was taking place. Watkins kept him informed.

The graphic artist had been introduced to the famous man by Vince Antonucci. Eventually, Williams and Watkins both were touched by Antonucci's scam. Watkins hadn't even known Williams was a baseball player when he met him. He only knew that Antonucci wanted him to paint a picture of someone.

“The first print I did in color, Ted didn't like the way the uniform hung on him,” Watkins says. “He said it was ‘too baggy.' I said, ‘Well, that's the way it looked in the photograph,' but I did another one in black and white, pen and wash. He didn't like this one either. He said the hands were wrong on the bat, the lips had to be tighter, a bunch of things.”

Watkins refused to do a third print. The hell with that. He waited a couple of weeks and brought the second print back to Williams.

“Jesus Christ, that's perfect,” Williams said. “You got it.”

“I knew he'd say that,” Watkins says. “Because he thought he had some input, he loved it now.”

The opening of the museum on February 9, 1994, was a gala Citrus County event. Watkins induced 37 Hall of Famers to come to the out-of-the-way weekend. He brought in Nashville singers (Lee Greenwood performed), movie actors (Roy Scheider was the biggest name), famous athletes from other sports (Bobby Orr of the hockey Bruins came from Boston), the Marine Corps Band, politicians and high-rollers, and thousands of common folk. The stars of the show, besides Ted, were Joe DiMaggio and Muhammad Ali. Three living legends.

“Muhammad Ali was wonderful,” Watkins says. “I wasn't a big fan before he came, but he was one of the greatest people I've ever met. He came in four days early and did all kinds of advance publicity. News helicopters were following him around. I took him on a tour of the museum. He sat down and cried when he read Ted's induction speech. Ali loved Ted Williams. Ted loved Ali.

“They had dinner together one of those nights at Andre's. Just Ali, Ted, myself, and Howard Bingham, Ali's friend and photographer. Ted had the greatest time. They must have talked for two and a half, three hours. Talked about everything. I remember Ted questioning Ali about Louis Farakhan. Ali said Farakhan was ‘too radical.' Ted had studied up. He had all kinds of questions about boxing. Howard Bingham said, at the end of the night, that this was the most Ali had talked to anyone in the past three years.”

“You know what Muhammad Ali said to me?” Williams said. “He said, ‘Ted, all I want to do for the rest of my life is make people feel good.' That's the nicest thing I ever heard.”

DiMaggio was his prickly self. He refused to share his limousine with any other Hall of Famers for the breakfast on the day of the opening, then sat in the limo with his lawyers and confidants for 40 minutes at the front door of the restaurant deciding whether or not to go in while everyone was forced to walk around the car. When the other Hall of Famers left for the ceremony, he was late, so late that Williams left before him.

“It was all his lawyers,” Watkins says. “They wanted him to have the grand entrance. His limo pulled up as we were getting out. There were 6,000 people in the tent, plus another 15,000 gathered outside. I could hear Joe telling the lawyers, ‘No, this is Ted's day, I've got to go in before him.' He came hurrying up. Ted put his arm around him and said, ‘Joe, let's walk over here.' They went in front of the crowd outside the tent. Ted punched Joe with his elbow and said, ‘Wave at the people. They came here to see us.' They both waved, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams.”

The event went fine. Williams talked, light and easy. (“Dominic DiMaggio is here. We had perfect communication when I played left and he played center. He said, ‘I've got it,' and I said, ‘You take it.' Worked all the time.”) Joe DiMaggio talked. Ali talked. The monies raised and the services donated ensured that the museum already was paid off on the day it was opened.

Ali stayed so long signing autographs that a side of the tent had to be taken down, his car backed right to his seat to take him away. Williams and DiMaggio exited together, guarded by 17 sheriff's deputies, and went back to the house on the hill. They were joined by Stan Musial, and the three of them talked into the night. The Splinter, the Clipper, and the Man. It might have been the longest single stretch of conversation between Williams and DiMaggio in their entire lives. It definitely was the first time one had visited the other's house.

“The ceremony the next year was just as big, maybe bigger,” Watkins says. “George Bush came. We had a flyover, two Harrier jets. We had the secretary of the Navy, the commandant of the Marine Corps. Ted was promoted to colonel . . . should have been made a fucken general, that's what I wanted, but it didn't work out. Willie Mays was there. Ty Cobb's son. Babe Ruth's daughter . . . Bob Costas, Michael Bolton.”

There was one difference.

The star of the show could not see much of what happened at the second ceremony.

Ten days after the opening of the Ted Williams Museum, he suffered a stroke that could have killed him. His life had been changed forever.

   

A woman named Lynette Simon, a contemporary of Louise, had moved into the big house in the months before the museum opened. Williams was almost apologetic about the move. Was this too soon after the death of Louise? Was this inappropriate? He asked Watkins. The artist said that whatever a 75-year-old man did in this situation was just fine. Williams asked if Watkins and his wife would go on double dates with the new couple, the same as they did when Louise was alive. Watkins said sure.

“Ted was almost courtly with Lynette Simon,” Watkins says. “He'd open her car door, pull out her chair. She was the same with him, kind of prissy. It was fun to watch. They were like two high school kids.”

Simon had been around the Islamorada scene, a friend of both Louise and Williams. The courtliness obviously worked. She left her home in Lakeland, Florida, and settled into the big house. She probably saved Williams's life.

“Ted was taking a hot shower,” Watkins says. “He loved hot showers. He had a stroke as he came out. He fell to the floor. If Lynette hadn't been there, he probably would have stayed on that floor for a day, day and a half, until someone—probably me—came to the house. There's no telling what kind of damage could have happened. Lynette found him right away and called me and called 911.”

She also called Rich Eschen, a local friend who had been helping Williams sort out the aftermath from the Vince Antonucci memorabilia business. Eschen and his son hurried to the big house. They found Ted on the floor, conscious, but unable to move.

“I think I can move,” Williams said, “but I just don't want to.”

“Stay right there,” Eschen said. “We'll get an ambulance.”

This was not the first stroke Williams had suffered. In December 1991, while he was having dinner at a Bennigan's in Clearwater, Florida, with his secretary, Stacia Gerow, and Jimmy O'Loughlin and O'Loughlin's wife Beverly, plus their daughter April, he complained of a headache and said that his eyes weren't working right.

“I can see you,” he said to April.

“But I can't see you,” he said to Beverly, who was sitting right next to her daughter.

He passed off the situation as momentary discomfort, part of the irregularities of growing older. Beverly wasn't so sure of the diagnosis. When she went back to the hotel room with her husband, she said, “Something's wrong with Ted.” Jimmy agreed. She called Stacia's house at eight in the morning, looking for Williams.

“He's gone,” Stacia said. “He left at five.”

The trip back to Citrus Hills took about two hours. Williams drove his Suburban through an altered landscape. His peripheral vision was gone. He worried himself when he clipped a traffic cone that he hadn't even seen. The exceptional eyesight that other people said was such a secret to his success—and he always downplayed—was now a subject to be discussed in the past tense.

“He got back and saw his doctor,” Beverly says. “That's when he learned he'd had a stroke. Twenty-five percent of his vision was gone.”

Doctors now determined that he also had suffered a second stroke early in 1992. These first two strokes had given him pause but hardly altered his life. He still was able to travel. Even though he was unsteady and fell on the rocks at the Miramichi, he still fished, read, took walks, was active. A few weeks before the museum opened, at a fund-raiser for a similar museum for Bob Feller, he'd picked a baseball off the ground, thrown it into the air, and hit it with a bat.

This third stroke was a very different business from the previous two. Now he was missing 75 percent of his vision. His peripheral vision was totally gone. He described looking through a tunnel. He could only see people directly in front of him. The blood clot that had traveled from his heart to the right side of his brain had numbed the left side of his body. His balance was affected. Walking was a problem. The baseball that he hit at the Bob Feller fund-raiser was the last baseball he ever would hit.

“I had my tee shirt and my shorts on the bed, and I started to reach for my shorts,” he said in a 1996 issue of Sports Illustrated, describing the moment the stroke hit after he left the hot shower. “Jeez, I got down on my knees, then I'm lying on the bed and I couldn't move. Finally I got my shorts, crawled and got my shirt. But I couldn't do anything else.”

He was taken to Shands Teaching Hospital in Gainesville, Florida. Hospital spokesman Daniel Moore characterized the stroke as “minor,” but the effects were far from minor. The 75-year-old Williams stayed in the hospital for nine days, then was taken to a rehabilitation hospital to learn how to walk again. He would need nursing care for the rest of his life.

Five months after Lynette Simon found him on the floor, he sat down with the Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy. A third- or fourth-generation successor to the columnist seat of Harold Kaese, Shaughnessy had an entirely different relationship with Williams than Kaese ever did. Shaughnessy, 40 years old, never had seen Williams play, certainly never had seen the angry side. Williams was the loud and lovable legend, an aging wonder, a line of jaw-dropping statistics in the record book. A great guy.

In 1993 Shaughnessy's eight-year-old daughter, Kate, had contracted leukemia. The day the diagnosis was made Shaughnessy was supposed to go to a business meeting with Williams's son, John-Henry. Shaughnessy called from the hospital room at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to cancel, explaining why. Ten minutes later the phone in the room rang, and a large voice asked for Kate.

“You're going to beat this thing,” Ted Williams boomed. “You're going to be okay.”

Now the cancer was in remission, doing exactly what Williams had predicted. Williams had his own thing to beat.

“If there was ever a candidate for [a stroke], it was me,” he told Shaughnessy. “That museum was a big project . . . and I had some business things that were preying on me and I was just trying to do too much. They want me to go to so many places.

“I had too much going on and too many stresses and worries and stuff. It was harder as I got older, because no matter what, there were more demands on me.”

His vision probably wasn't going to return. The doctors had told him that. He was adjusting to seeing through the tunnel. He was going to speech therapy, which really was reading therapy. The therapist magnified the daily sports pages, and Williams was learning how to move his head to read the words, not move his eyes. It was pretty certain he never again would drive a car.

Other parts of his body were returning slowly. Therapy was working here. He had gone from a wheelchair to a walker to a cane. The hardest part of walking was that he couldn't see where he was going very well. The left side of his body had improved—his left arm was stronger than ever due to the workouts—but sometimes it would feel “sleepy.” The tips of his fingers often felt strange.

He wasn't complaining.

“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head, “I see people every day . . . Holy Jesus . . . that have it real tough.”

The Red Sox had sent down a 46-inch television, plus a dish for the satellite, so he still could watch games. He knew about the different players, knew swings and pitching strategies, also knew the Red Sox were not doing very well. He hungered for behind-the-scenes stuff. What was going to happen next?

“I hope they don't fire [manager] Butch Hobson,” he said. “But they're really giving him a rough time up there, aren't they?”

“I'm afraid I'm one of the ones giving him the rough time,” Shaughnessy admitted.

Williams laughed.

The sports-page battles could have happened a billion years ago. Shaughnessy was a tough critic of the Boston sports scene and its central figures. He had written a book about the history of Red Sox failure, The Curse of the Bambino, in 1990. The title, suggested by his editor at E. P. Dutton, had jumped into popular culture, a whisper that now accompanied every bouncing ground ball to every Red Sox middle infielder. Long ago, no doubt at all, Shaughnessy and Williams would have tangled. Now they danced lightly.

Williams said, “They say I'm still all there in my brain . . . but I don't know about that.” He laughed again. His spirits were good on this day. He described a recent dream he had—a baseball dream—that was almost mystical.

“I was laying there and I was having a lousy night,” he said. “I was kind of resting and then I started to dream. Randy Johnson was pitching. I said, ‘Jeez, I can't hit him. I just had a stroke and I'm not even seeing very good.' But they kept teasing me and I thought, ‘Aw, Christ.'

“So I started to get up there and he was throwing a couple and I'm saying, ‘Jeez, he's got pretty good stuff.' So I said to myself, ‘I'm not going to try to pull him.' That's the first thing I said in my dream. ‘I'm not going to try to pull him. I'm going to try and hit one hard through the middle.'

“He threw one pitch and it was a ball. I seen his speed. He threw another one for a strike. He threw another one and it was right there and I just punched it through the middle.”

Late in the interview, Shaughnessy asked an obvious question that never had been answered in all the stories, all the words that had been written about Williams: why did the famous man hit lefthanded? He was righthanded in everything else that he did. He fished righthanded, wrote his name righthanded, opened doors righthanded. Why did he change for this one act that, as he would say, “made a little history”?

“I just did,” he said. “Why, I don't know.”

“Nobody ever told you to?” another voice asked.

“No. I just did it by myself.”

The second voice belonged to John-Henry Williams. The interview was held in the office of Grand-Slam Marketing, which now was located in a strip mall on the edge of Citrus Hills. John-Henry was in charge. He was the president of Grand-Slam Marketing, and his girlfriend, Anita Lovely, was the vice president, and all operations now were run out of Hernando, Florida.

This was the biggest poststroke change of all in Ted Williams's life. John-Henry had arrived and was in charge of everything.

   

An anecdote by Armand LaMontagne, an artist from Scituate, Rhode Island, described the relationship between strong and active men and their children.

In 1984 LaMontagne was commissioned by Tom Yawkey's widow, Jean, to carve a life-sized wooden statue of Williams for the Baseball Hall of Fame. He had done a similar statue of Babe Ruth a year earlier for the Hall and Mrs. Yawkey thought Williams should be standing right there with the Babe.

The finished product was unveiled at Cooperstown in 1985. Williams was in attendance, his first trip back since he was enshrined. He was delighted. His likeness had been carved from a single 1,400-pound piece of laminated basswood, everything true to scale, even the tiniest details down to the buttons and folds in Williams's shirt.

LaMontagne followed with similar sculptures of Boston icons Larry Bird, Bobby Orr, and Harry Agganis. He did a second sculpture of Williams the fisherman, waders and vest, fish and all. LaMontagne became known as an artist who captured the strength and spirit of strong men.

One of his commissions was a large oil painting of General George S. Patton for the Patton Museum in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Before the public unveiling, Patton's 80-year-old daughter had a private showing. She never had looked at the work in progress. LaMontagne was worried. What would she think of the final result?

The old woman appeared at the museum at the appointed time. She stood in front of the painting and the large cloth was removed. Her father stood in front of her.

She said nothing.

She didn't move.

She said nothing.

She didn't move.

Finally, after the longest time, she sat down on a nearby bench. Her eyes had never left the painting. She began to talk.

“Now,” she said, eyes never leaving the painting, “you finally have to listen to sme. . . .”

LaMontagne saw similarities with the situation that had developed with his earlier client. The stroke kept Ted Williams in one place. He had to listen to his children now.

   

Williams's relationships with his children—first Bobby-Jo, then John-Henry and Claudia—had been as complicated as his relationships with his wives. He had no patience for the job of fatherhood. An autograph and a few questions about “what position you play” might work for other people's kids but did not work here.

A friend once said, “You don't argue with Ted Williams, he just reads you out.” That was doubled if you were his kid. He played the role of the divorced father well enough, sent the checks and made some big moments and spent more time with his kids than most people thought he did (weeks in the summer, assorted trips), but Williams was not good at the day-to-day combat of normal living. He was strict and foreboding, intractable. If other people—pretty much everyone around him—jumped when he shouted, why wouldn't his own kids jump? He pretty much became disinterested, lost heart for the task, when they didn't.

Bobby-Jo was a first example.

“I always thought Barbara and her father, once we were married, had a relationship of keeping in touch, rather than as a father and daughter,” Steve Tomasco, Bobby-Jo's first husband, says. “Not a family relationship. ‘How's your weight?' ‘How are the kids doing?' Everything was kept at a certain level. Ted and Barbara would never get deep down to the real issues.”

Bobby-Jo's problems had continued. The teenage marriage to Tomasco lasted for five turbulent years. He describes a horror of infidelities, drug abuse, second chances, and mental institutions. Bobby-Jo had come out of the Institute at Pennsylvania Hospital with a liking for prescription medications, Tomasco claims. When upset, she would take the pills. She was upset a lot.

Two daughters, Dawn and Sherri, arriving in quick succession, complicated the situation. Williams had paid for a three-month computer course for Tomasco, and the young husband was in the workforce, trying to start out with his young family. This was not easy. He always had to be worried what his young wife was doing at home.

On more than one occasion, he says, there was another man involved. She ran away to New York with a neighbor, a drug-culture character, came back, ran away again with the neighbor to Florida, then came back when the neighbor became abusive. She fell for the man at the 7-Eleven, for another neighbor, for a succession of someone elses, he says. Tomasco kept trying to restart the family situation. It kept falling apart.

“No matter what she had, it never was enough,” Tomasco says. “Barbara had no patience. She always wanted things right now. She wanted a house, wanted a new car . . . we were just starting out. It takes time to get those things. She'd never understand.”

Her impatience often involved her father, whom she called “Daddy.” She would call Daddy to get things. That was a basic part of their relationship. She would ask; he would give.

“He'd complain about it every time, probably deliver a 20-minute lecture,” Tomasco says. “But in the end, he'd give her what she wanted. That was the way it always went.”

Williams gave her money to have plastic surgery to repair the long scars, wrist to elbow, on the insides of both arms. He gave her money to help buy a car. He set up accounts at Sears, where she could buy at a discount. He was happy about none of it.

The Williams temper was not hidden from his son-in-law. Tomasco saw Williams, upset with a phone ringing in the background while he tried to talk, throw the phone against a wall. He saw Williams destroy an air conditioner in anger. He heard the bad words, “like a movie, some Chevy Chase movie, where they just string together 20 swear words in a row.” Tomasco also saw the anger in his wife. Bobby-Jo also used the words. Bobby-Jo also threw things . . . at her husband.

“Knives, plates, anything,” Tomasco says.

In the late stages of the marriage, the couple lived in an apartment in Devon, outside Philadelphia. Tomasco was starting to succeed in the computer business, working for a firm in nearby King of Prussia. Bobby-Jo, on a particular day, wanted him to come home for lunch. He said he had too much work, couldn't leave. She said if he didn't come she was going to take a fistful of pills and kill herself.

“So I rush to the house,” Tomasco says. “I go in the living room and my daughters are crying and she's knocked out on the floor. I called the hospital and she was committed. She was in the hospital for three or four months, electric shock, the whole treatment.”

Tomasco hadn't brought the couple's troubles to Williams in the past. He didn't know how much Williams knew, didn't know what Bobby-Jo had told him. Had Bobby-Jo told Williams that her husband was at fault? Tomasco didn't know. Just thinking about telling his father-in-law some of the things that had happened, he envisioned “Ted's head just getting redder and redder, blowing up like a balloon.” The son-in-law worried what would happen with the explosion.

This time he called. He explained the situation.

“Ted sent his wife, Dolores, up as an emissary,” Tomasco says. “Her message basically was, ‘Ted can't be responsible for all of the medical bills and all that's going on.' I wound up placing my two daughters in a foster home for the four months. There wasn't anything I could do. I had to work to pay the bills, so I couldn't stay home with the kids.”

When the marriage broke up, according to Tomasco, after one more infidelity, one more guy, Bobby-Jo took the girls to Florida. Tomasco, head spinning, tried to put his life back together. He would hear from Bobby-Jo from time to time, often late at night, wee hours in the morning, drink in her voice. She seemed to move from man to man, place to place. He never could keep track.

“After we were divorced, it's funny, but things got much better for her financially,” Tomasco says. “I understand Ted started giving her $1,800 a month, eventually bumped it up to $2,500–$3,000 before the kids were grown.”

Tomasco's oldest daughter, Dawn, now with two kids of her own, says that Williams was involved with her mother's life and her life and her sister's life as a child in those moving-around years. She remembers calls, no matter where they lived, every Sunday morning at seven o'clock, the two girls and Bobby-Jo waiting around the phone. She remembers vacations in Islamorada, the two girls living with Ted and Louise and a couple of Louise's kids or grandchildren for a month. She remembers Ted Williams's Famous Eggs, cooked for about three seconds, served almost raw, very hard to eat. The kids still would ask for seconds. Her grandfather was a presence.

“He'd walk into a room and he'd command respect,” Dawn says. “It was ‘Yes, sir,' and ‘No, sir.' He'd always be checking our fingernails. When we got older, it was ‘How's your weight?' ‘How long is your hair?' ‘Where'd you get that nose?' I always answered, ‘I got that nose from you, Grandpa.' He'd say, ‘Goddamn it, you sure did.'”

Bobby-Jo eventually remarried in 1976, after meeting ASCAP copyright enforcer Mark Ferrell in a Fort Lauderdale bowling league. They eventually moved to Nashville when her kids were nearly grown. Tomasco eventually remarried. He has had little contact with his daughters since they headed to Florida with Bobby-Jo, but “four or five years ago” met with his youngest daughter, Sherri Mosley, in Nashville.

He asked what her mother had told her about him. Sherri said Bobby-Jo told the girls Tomasco had abandoned them, that he was in and out of mental institutions, and that he was crazy. Tomasco took a deep breath. He told his daughter that was not exactly the way it happened. He told his story.

“Thinking back, I liked Ted Williams,” Tomasco says. “He never said anything bad to me. He didn't like the fact that Barbara and I both smoked. He didn't like the beard I had at the time. But he was all right. Every time one of the girls' birthdays arrived, when the girls were young, a big box from Sears would arrive filled with little dresses. He gave me a nice eight-track player for Christmas one year.

“I had some enjoyable times with Ted Williams. More than I had with his daughter.”

Williams's youngest daughter, Claudia, 25 years younger than Bobby-Jo, younger even than Bobby-Jo's children, Ted's grandchildren, was determined to avoid the pitfalls of her older half-sister. She had heard the stories about Bobby-Jo's troubled teenage years, and by the time she was 16 she was living in France. She didn't want any part of being the famous man's daughter. She wanted a father, not the famous Ted Williams.

“I never heard him say a good thing about Bobby-Jo,” Claudia said in a September 2002 article in Boston magazine by James Burnett and Doug Most. “And that scared me, because I didn't want him to talk about me like that.”

The story Claudia tells often is about applying to Middlebury College. The prestigious Vermont school, which she wanted to attend, rejected her one, two, three times. Williams finally heard about all this. He made a call. The school now was more than ready to accept her. She wouldn't go.

“If I wasn't good enough to be admitted before I was Ted Williams's daughter,” she says, “then why am I suddenly good enough now that I am Ted Williams's daughter? I wouldn't want to go to that kind of place.”

She went to Springfield (Massachusetts) College instead, returning after graduation to Europe, where she eventually taught English in Germany. She was an athlete on her own, a triathlete, tall and muscular, touched by the genes of both her father and her mother. She was anonymous in Europe. Herself.

Claudia's relationship with Williams, at best, was a version of the same superficial dance that Bobby-Jo had experienced. Plus, Claudia had the impediment of her brother, three years older.

The fact was clear to anyone who saw the dynamic in action—Ted with the two children from his third wife, Dolores—that John-Henry was the favored figure. He was the boy. Williams had the old-world, old-time approach to his children. The son was the successor to the family name, front and center, daughters in the background. Everyone knew the rules. Claudia knew the rules. Her full first name could have been “And Claudia.” John-Henry . . . And Claudia.

“I never really knew my father,” Claudia says. “The way I know him best is through John-Henry. My brother's my link. He's the one who knows all the things I want to know. He's the one who can tell me.”

Claudia would come back to the United States in 1996, encouraged by her brother, leaving Germany and settling in St. Petersburg, 60 miles to the south, close enough to see her father, far enough away to be free. Bobby-Jo and Mark would come down in 1999, driving a mobile home, eventually building a house less than a mile from the big house.

As for John-Henry . . . John-Henry was different. He was the boy.

   

The stories about him often said that he looked like his father, an eerie reminder of long-ago glories, but the truth was that John-Henry Williams looked more like his mother. Dolores Williams's modeling career was driven by her resemblance to Jacqueline Kennedy, and her son could have been Jacqueline Kennedy's son. He looked very much like John Kennedy Jr., the ill-fated publisher of George magazine, classically handsome, almost pretty. Both Bobby-Jo and Claudia looked much more like Ted.

“I always would hear about John-Henry's resemblance to Ted, but I told people they should have seen Dolores's brother, John,” Mary Jane Ryan, a Red Sox employee who grew up near the Wettach family in Westminster, Vermont, says. “That man was a hunk. John-Henry looks just like Dolores's brother.”

John-Henry had edged into public perceptions of Ted's life when he was 13 years old. First at the 1982 Old-Timers' Game at Fenway, when he appeared as the batboy and Ted made a shoestring catch off Mike Andrews, then at Red Sox spring training in Winter Haven, Florida, he was an instant curiosity. Ted Williams, 63 years old, had a teenage son? People had forgotten the one-year-old who sometimes had been around the dugout when Ted managed the Washington Senators.

Since the divorce in 1972, when John-Henry was four, Dolores pretty much had kept Claudia and him away from professional baseball and the celebrity life that she found distasteful and false. When he was 13, she finally allowed him to edge into his father's public glow.

The glow was certainly a different existence. People would look at the son almost the same way they looked at the father. What would it be like to be Ted Williams? What would it be like to be his son? Different.

“We asked him one day to come with my family to Epcot Center,” Michelle Orlando MacIntyre says. “He said he wanted to go, but he couldn't. His father wouldn't let him. We asked why. John-Henry said, ‘Because he's afraid I'd be kidnapped.'”

MacIntyre was the granddaughter of clubhouse man Vinnie Orlando and was approximately the same age as John-Henry. She and her cousin, Denise, befriended him early in spring training. They all hung around together, watching the baseball, hitting when the batting cages were open, swimming at the pool . . . going to Epcot Center.

“My grandmother convinced Ted to let John-Henry go,” Michelle says. “I was decided to be all right for John-Henry by Ted. Because I was Vinnie's granddaughter, I was ‘Ted Williams Approved.'”

Michelle and John-Henry wound up with innocent, first-love crushes on each other, a tale she describes in a yet-unpublished children's book. She wondered at his life. He lived on a farm in Vermont, and his mother made clothes for him, and his father, who sometimes bought clothes for him, always bought them too large. He had been places, seen things, had lived with a family in France on an exchange program. He had been to the Amazon River on one of those Outward Bound kind of trips. His mother had thought it was safe because Bill Cosby's son was going too.

“What nationality are you?” Michelle asked.

“I'm a Heinz 57,” John-Henry replied. “I'm a mix.”

He seemed naive sometimes, not knowing a lot of things that most kids knew. He seemed experienced at other times, knowing things that most kids didn't know. He was a practical joker, funny. He was different, coming from a far different life than most kids have.

“I thought he was great,” Michelle Orlando MacIntyre says. “I will love him forever.”

“I remember him being around,” former batboy George Sullivan, the Red Sox PR man at the time, says. “One memory in particular. Ted was in my office for something, and John-Henry came running in with two baseballs. He said a guy outside wanted Ted to sign the balls.

“Ted didn't want to do it. John-Henry pleaded. Ted said, ‘No.' I got involved. I said, ‘How about this? Tell the guy if he writes out a check for $25 for the Jimmy Fund for each ball, your father will sign. Is that all right?' Ted agreed. John-Henry came back with the checks. Ted signed.

“I remember John-Henry was real proud of himself for the deal. He'd made the Jimmy Fund some money. I think now . . . what did I do? Did I get him started in the autograph business?”

Ted Williams's son.

What would it be like to be Ted Williams's son?

   

By the time John-Henry was four, Claudia newly born, his parents had split. Dolores took the kids to the rented house on the other side of Islamorada. Louise eventually moved in with Ted in the house on the bay. The buffer of a stepmother was established.

“Louise was not nice to those kids,” Jack Brothers's son, Frankie, says. “She would be mean to them. She didn't do it when Ted was around, but she did it other times. I felt sad for them. I liked John-Henry when he was young. He was a good kid.”

Both John-Henry and Claudia started their education at Island Christian School in Islamorada, a private school started by Reverend Tony Hammond. John-Henry went through fourth grade in the school. Reverend Hammond, a conch, a native, one of those kids who grew up searching for Ted Williams's trophies in the aftermath of Hurricane Donna, remembers Ted at events. Never at church on Sunday, but at events at the school. And games.

“John-Henry was a good athlete,” Reverend Hammond says. “He was the biggest kid in the class, and he carried himself well. I remember thinking that he was going to be something, that this was what an athlete looked like as a kid.”

After John-Henry finished fourth grade, Dolores moved back to Vermont, taking the kids. They lived on the 60-acre farm in Putney. The farm was at the base of a mountain with a view of another mountain. Dolores's parents lived in the neighboring house, their door open, two grandparents active every day in raising their grandchildren.

Chickens and farm animals roamed the property. Dolores kept her high heels on top of a grand piano in case any of the chickens sneaked into the living room and starting looking for a leather lunch. The house was large and rustic. The portrait of Dolores from Islamorada hung on one end of the wall, a baseball portrait of Ted at the other end.

Ted was still a part of the conversation, even if he was not part of the marriage.

“There was a big brick wall around the house,” Mary Jane Corea says. “Dolores said she had built it herself. I said, ‘You built this wall yourself? How did you ever do it?' Dolores said, ‘It's easy. Anybody could do it if they've ever been married to Ted Williams. It's a Frustration Wall.'”

Corea, her daughter Joanne, and her sister Ruth, Johnny Pesky's wife, visited the farm a couple of times in later years. They had become friends first with John-Henry at spring training, then with Dolores. Corea got a kick out of Dolores. Dolores would stop the car in the middle of the road on the way to a restaurant, open the windows, and say, “I love that smell.” The smell was from a skunk. Dolores would say anything.

“She took Joanne's wallet and opened it,” Mary Jane says. “Joanne said, ‘What are you doing?' Dolores said, ‘I want to see your pictures. Is that all right?' Joanne said, ‘Fine.'”

The first picture showed a young man.

“Who's that?” Dolores asked.

“That's my boyfriend,” Joanne said.

“Lose him,” Dolores said with authority.

Next picture. Another young man.

“Who's that?”

“That's my brother.”

“He's cute.”

Next picture. An older man.

“Who is that! Now we've got something! He's really good-looking!”

“That's my father.”

Dolores looked at Mary Jane, the wife of the good-looking man. Dolores looked hard.

“Are you still married?” Dolores asked.

“Yes, we are,” Mary Jane said.

Dolores shook her head.

“And to think I kept my body so good-looking for Ted Williams,” Dolores said. “And he still left me.”

“She didn't go so far as to call me a fat little bastard, but she just about did,” Mary Jane says. “I laughed. She's right. I am a fat little bastard. My husband laughed when I told him.”

Dolores was protective with her kids. There was no television in the house. She monitored the news from the outside world on the radio, telling John-Henry and Claudia what she thought they should know. They had chores. They had meals served from two antique stoves. They had basic farm life. Dolores wanted them to enjoy the security of an insulated, rural cocoon, the same cocoon she had known as a child.

“You think about it, John-Henry grew up in about as different a life as possible from his father's life,” Mary Jane says. “When John-Henry came out to see his father, he was in this celebrity world. Then he would go back to the mountain. That had to be hard. I think it would be sad to go back to the mountain.”

For high school, he attended Vermont Academy, a blueblood prep school about eight miles from the house. For the first two years, he was one of the 70 day students, commuting from the farm. For the second two years he was one of the 180 boarding students.

“He was a kid who wanted to please,” former headmaster Bob Long says. “He seemed more at ease with the adults in the community than he did with the kids. He wasn't a kid who was in the corner being picked on, but he also wasn't a leader of the pack. He was somewhere in the second half. I remember he did want to be an athlete, but he just didn't have the skills.”

Both his mother and his father were noticed during his four years at the school. Ted mostly would just appear. There was no advance notice. He would show up to visit a couple times a year, usually toward the end of the schoolday, almost an apparition from the great outside of hustle and bustle. He would say little to the people at the school, just appear to visit his son.

“The coach of the JV baseball team was an older man, Francis Parkman, a descendant of the famous Francis Parkman who wrote about the West,” Long says. “Parkie was not really a coach. He mostly knew how to line up nine people without anyone hurting themselves.

“One day, a JV game, Vermont in April, snowing and blowing, nobody watching, Ted shows up. Parkie was just beside himself. Here he's running the baseball team and the Thumper himself is watching. Ted Williams definitely left a lasting impression on Mr. Francis Parkman.”

Dolores made a noisier impression.

“She would fly off the handle periodically about something that bothered her at the school,” Long says. “She said that Claudia never would go to the school (and Claudia didn't), but she did keep John-Henry there for the whole four years. She always seemed troubled to me. There was a look to her face, her eyes. She must have been in her fifties then. I heard she was a beautiful woman once in a time. And you could see it was there. But she was always so tortured. Something always was wrong.”

One visit came when something definitely was wrong. Dolores arrived at Long's office with John-Henry and a large bag of coins. A few days earlier the money box in a first-generation video game had been robbed, an estimated $150 now missing. Theft was a major offense, cause for immediate expulsion. An investigation had found nothing.

Dolores discovered the bag of coins in John-Henry's possession. She quizzed him and brought him and the coins to the office. John-Henry apologized.

“This presented quite a dilemma,” Long says. “The rule was automatic expulsion. Here was John-Henry, though, with the coins and the apology. He's there because his mother made him come, not because he wanted to be there. What do I do? I remember there was considerable debate among the staff. We decided on some form of punishment—I forget what it was—but we let him stay.”

In his senior year, John-Henry was burned badly in an odd accident. A cat had died on the farm, and John-Henry tried to burn the corpse, as he had seen his grandfather do with other dead animals. He put the cat in a 55-gallon metal drum his grandfather used for animal cremations, poured a flammable liquid on top, and lit a match. The fumes ignited instantly, burning him on the arms and chest. He wound up in Boston at the Shriners Burns Institute.

For a number of weeks, recuperating, he lived with Johnny and Ruth Pesky in suburban Lynn. Sherm Feller, the Red Sox public address announcer, would shuttle him back and forth to the hospital for treatments. Michelle Orlando MacIntyre was one of his visitors at the hospital a few days after the accident first happened.

“He was crying,” she says. “He has a voice that sometimes can sound so sad. Like the world's coming to an end, like the whole world is against him, like everybody's abandoning him. He showed me the scars on his chest. Just awful.”

Recovered from the burns, self-conscious about the scars, he returned to Vermont Academy, made up his work, and graduated. Ted and Louise were at the ceremony. John-Henry was off to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

   

Ted and John-Henry had looked at Bowdoin the day before they came here to visit,” Chick Leahy, the former Bates baseball coach, says. “At Bowdoin, there was a big fuss, reporters from the local newspaper, pictures. People here were wondering what to do. I said, ‘Do nothing. Just let them come and look at the college.'”

Ted became involved in the process of selecting a school. His greatest regret was not having a college education. The one place he ever seemed intimidated, almost in awe, was in the presence of a sharp, educated mind. How many times did he lament the fact that Bobby-Jo didn't go to college? Education, that was the ticket for the big ride.

The search for a school for John-Henry had narrowed down to a handful of small, semi-elite New England private colleges. Babson in Wellesley, Massachusetts, had been rejected after Ted spotted some lascivious writings on a bulletin board. Bowdoin . . . Bates . . . they had the extra attraction of being in Maine, where Bud Leavitt and other friends lived, close enough to give help to a college freshman. Close to Vermont and the farm. Bowdoin . . . Bates . . . the low-key approach worked.

The admissions director at Vermont Academy was surprised John-Henry was admitted to Bates, but figured Ted Williams's son was Ted Williams's son. That must have counted for something in the selection process. John-Henry enrolled in September and appeared for baseball tryouts.

“I told Ted and John-Henry during the visit that we have open two-week tryouts in the field house,” Chick Leahy says. “I also told them there would be a cut.”

Leahy had called Vermont Academy after John-Henry was admitted and already knew that he was not getting the Second Coming of Ted Williams. The tryouts reinforced that idea. Bates was a Division III school, low on the NCAA food chain, but neophytes did not play. The kids were still high school standouts, had played three or four years of American Legion baseball, had played on town teams throughout New England. John-Henry had done none of that, and it showed.

A vacation interrupted the two-week tryouts, and Ted came to pick up his son. John-Henry asked if he and his father could use the field house for practice. Leahy fed the pitching machine and watched.

“Ted was very good with his son,” Leahy says. “He didn't shout. He just gave tips. Keep your head up. He wasn't pushy at all.”

“How long have you been the coach here?” Ted asked while John-Henry showered.

“Thirty-four years,” Leahy said.

“Wow.”

The two men talked for a while about hitting theories and about the history of the field house—“We used to hit at a place like this at Harvard when I was with the Red Sox,” Ted said—and then the father collected his son and went home. A few days after vacation, never having left the field house, John-Henry was cut. He wasn't close to making the roster.

“I told him what I tell all the freshmen I cut, that he should go play more baseball and come back and take another crack at it if that was what he really wanted to do,” Leahy says. “I said the seniors would be moving on and spots would open and he should just say, ‘Next year I'll show you some stuff.'

“It never happened. John did not have a good year academically and was gone from Bates.”

The next stop was the University of Maine at Orono. This was the closest facsimile to a college baseball powerhouse in New England, a Division I school that had sent six teams to the College World Series. Again, John-Henry tried out. This time the coach was Ted Williams's friend.

John Winkin had worked for 15 years at the Ted Williams Camp in Lakeville. He had been in charge of the two-week clinic at the end of every year for the best players. He loved Williams. They had talked in the night at the camp about everything, even Williams's failed marriages and his ineffectual attempts at parenthood. They had watched Red Sox games together. He wanted, very much, for Williams's kid to succeed.

This did not happen.

“We had tryouts in September,” Winkin says. “We had two fields. The varsity field and the freshman field. John-Henry showed up with his own bats and a bag of balls and started toward the varsity field. I said, ‘Where are you going?' I told him that the varsity field was for the varsity. The new guys had to go to the other field. He turned around and left.”

Williams called Winkin that night. He asked what happened. Winkin explained about the two fields. Williams said that was fine.

“The next day, the same thing,” Winkin says. “John-Henry showed up with his bats and balls and headed for the varsity field. I said, ‘Didn't you talk to your father?' He turned around and left. And that was it.”

He would hit sometimes in the field house during the rest of his time in college, but never again try out for the team. The players would watch him with curiosity, but never became his friends. “His swing looked like his father's, except it was from the right side and certainly didn't have the same results,” Ted Lovio, one of the players, says. Winkin watched out for him, saw him around, talked with him, but always felt ill at ease.

“You had to watch him like a hawk,” the coach says. “That was the feeling I had. I thought he was a sneaky guy. I sensed that in him. I'm not sure he had a normal growing up.”

He left school in 1989—later said he played semipro baseball in Fresno, California, took a look at acting as a career, tried out for the Toronto Blue Jays, all against his father's guidance—and then came back to school. He drove an expensive car around the Orono campus and seemed to move with confidence. The baseball players mostly thought he was stuck up, a prima donna.

In the summer before his senior year, John-Henry and his father were in Maine to visit President George Bush at his summer retreat in Kennebunkport. Air Force One was scheduled to land at Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire, and John-Henry and his father were part of the welcoming committee. Rodney Nichols, a young Maine state trooper, was part of the motorcade.

“The plane was about three hours late, so everyone was just hanging around,” Nichols says. “Dave McCarthy, with the New Hampshire state police, asked me if I wanted to meet Ted Williams. He took me over and we talked and Ted introduced me to his son. John-Henry and I got talking. He was very interested, for some reason, in law enforcement. We talked for a long time, and when I was leaving—they were staying in York, Maine—I told him a bunch of us were going out that night and I invited him along. I gave him my phone number. I never thought he'd call, but he did. And he came out with us.”

A friendship began. John-Henry lived off campus and didn't seem to have a lot of college friends. Nichols filled a void. John-Henry was trying to market home sites at Citrus Hills at the same time he finished school and almost every weekend was taking a client down to Florida on the Nash-Tamposi airlift from Nashua, New Hampshire. Nichols went along most of the time, staying at the big house, playing golf in the middle of winter, talking with Ted.

“Ted gave me a lot of time,” Nichols says. “He liked me because I was his son's friend. He probably had more in common with me than with John-Henry. We'd play golf a lot. Ted treated me better than he treated John-Henry. If the two of them didn't holler at each other once during a day it was a rare day.”

The golf with John-Henry would be money sport, $100 a hole. The golf with Ted would be for bragging rights, a lot of conversation and yapping. Competitive. Nichols remembers the final hole of one round, all even, his ball and Ted's ball each about 40 yards away from the 18^th green, a pair of sand wedges out of the golf bags. Nichols shot first.

“Ted's really getting on me,” Nichols says. “He's saying, ‘Don't think about that water in front of the green, don't think about the sand traps to the right, don't think about the woods.' Well, I stick it real close to the pin. I start giving it to him. Same thing. And he duffs the shot! Knocks it right in the fucken water. I just started laughing. He was so mad. John-Henry's giving me signs, shaking his head, telling me not to laugh, has the fear of God in him, but I can't stop myself. It was funny.”

Nichols wound up going to the Miramichi, salmon fishing for six hours one day, standing in the river with Ted, just talking, learning everything about the sport. For a few years, he felt he was as friendly with John-Henry as anyone was. He attended John-Henry's graduation at UMaine with Ted, Claudia, Bud Leavitt, and Brian Interland, a family friend from Boston. He saw Ted's pride in having a first member of the immediate family finish college. Ted Williams cried at the ceremony.

“Here's the thing, though,” Nichols says. “You know how proud Ted was? How he always preached education to his kids? John-Henry comes back off the stage, opens the binder or whatever it is that they give you, and there's nothing inside. He tells Ted there must have been a mix-up and he'll straighten it out.

“It turns out that John-Henry didn't really graduate. The school let him go through the ceremony, but he still needed another course. He didn't tell Ted that. He signed up for a summer course at some school in New Hampshire. He never went to class, but before the final exam he went down to New York to the Spy Store and bought some miniature walkie-talkie thing. A kid I know from York sat out in the car and read the answers from the book to John-Henry in the classroom during the test. That's how he got the diploma.”

“He made a big production out of presenting his diploma to Ted at the house,” Rich Eschen says. “He didn't just hand it to him. He put it in a big, elaborate box with pictures and all kinds of stuff. It was definitely a production.”

“I don't think Ted ever knew what happened,” Nichols says.

   

In his senior year, 1991, John-Henry also made a first move into the sports marketing business. This was the 50^th anniversary of the .401 season, and he and Interland, a Boston-area businessman, put out a commemorative T-shirt. The T-shirt was a modest business success.

Finished with college, John-Henry stored his belongings in the basement of the house of Rodney Nichols's father in Eliot, Maine, and started to put his business degree to use. He eventually moved in with Interland outside Boston and began a memorabilia operation called Grand-Slam Marketing. Interland's friend in music promotion, Jerry Brenner, put up the seed money.

Interland had known Ted Williams since 1960. Williams was his idol. Working as an intern at a Boston television station while going to Northeastern University, Interland had finagled a trip to see the famous man in Lakeville at the Ted Williams Camp on an off-day on the Red Sox schedule. The reporter from the station told Williams about “this kid” who knew more stats about Williams than Williams himself knew. Kid and hero met. Hero was impressed. Hero invited kid to see him on a Sunday morning at the Somerset and took him to the game. They had been friends ever since.

“I even bought a condo in Islamorada,” Interland says. “Just because Ted was there. There was a moment . . . I took my kids to meet Ted. He asked them if they'd had lunch. They hadn't. He started making something for them—he's a very good cook—and I was watching, thinking, Ted Williams is buttering my kids' bread. He is my idol and he's buttering my kids' bread.”

Now Interland was involved with Williams's kid.

The Antonucci fiasco was still in the courts, fresh in everyone's minds. Ted was staggering financially from the costs of the lawyers. That was Interland's impression. John-Henry's idea was that he was going to resurrect and improve the family business, bring some money to his father. He also was going to protect his father from future versions of Antonucci. That was also Interland's impression.

“More than anything, I think John-Henry wanted to develop his relationship with his father,” Interland says. “How would it be, if you're a kid, and everybody else knows your father better than you do? I remember getting a call from John-Henry when he was maybe 16 years old. He was crying. He said, ‘I just don't know why my dad doesn't love me.' I said, ‘John-Henry, he talks about you all the time.' I know how much he wanted to be loved by his father. I think in the business he wanted to show his father what he could do.”

Three companies eventually were formed: Grand-Slam Marketing, Major-League Memorabilia, and the Ted Williams Card Company. The goal was to bring some order to the marketplace, to add some more luster to the Williams name. John-Henry charged into the action as if he were rousting money-changers from the temple.

“I think John-Henry was influenced by Ted's reaction to Antonucci,” Interland says. “Ted talked about Antonucci all the time. The veins would be popping out of Ted's neck he was so angry. That's what John-Henry saw. Ted had been very accepting of people and he'd been burned. John-Henry wasn't going to let that happen again.”

The Ted Williams signature was clean and precise, easy to copy. (“The old guys like Ted and DiMaggio they all had much better handwriting than these guys today,” one dealer says.) Besides some forgeries Antonucci had dumped onto the market, besides the many autographs Johnny Orlando had signed for Ted, there were countless other fakes on the scene.

John-Henry was determined to expose these fakes and sell people the real autographs that he, of course, could provide. He said he could determine at a glance whether a ball or bat or picture had been signed by Ted. He was Ted's son! He would know!

“He showed up at an auction I ran at the Kowloon restaurant,” Phil Castinetti, a memorabilia dealer from Everett, Massachusetts, says. “That's the first time I ever saw him. He started saying that all the Ted Williams stuff I had was fake. I asked who he was. He said he was Ted Williams's son. I said, ‘Well, your father did a show up here last month, and I was there when he signed every one of these things.' The kid finally shut up.”

The scene would be repeated at varied shows and card shops. A famous story, later told, was that John-Henry accused one dealer in Atlanta of selling fake autographs and the dealer, like Castinetti, asked John-Henry who he was. John-Henry said his name, and the guy said, “Well, if they're fake, I want my money back. Because you sold them to me three months ago.” John-Henry was not gentle in his approach to people.

“You didn't have to be perspicacious to figure out John-Henry,” Jerry Romolt, a longtime memorabilia dealer from Phoenix, says. “All you had to do was be around him for an hour. He was an open book. There were times he could charm your socks off, but he always had an agenda. You always knew it.”

Castinetti wound up helping both John-Henry and Interland. He hooked them up with the computer whiz who had designed the website for his store, Sportsworld. He talked with John-Henry two or three times per week. He invited Interland to his wedding, arranged for Interland to stay at his father's condo in Florida.

“I felt a little sorry for John-Henry,” Castinetti says. “I went with him to a card show in St. Petersburg, maybe in 1991 or 1992. I'd never really met his father, who seemed like a grouchy old guy to me.

“We're down there and Ted was signing and John-Henry broke through the line. He had a bunch of balls in his hands. He said, ‘Sign these, Dad.' Ted looked at him like he wanted to kill him. He said, ‘John-Henry, you know how much I have invested in you?' Then he spread out his thumb and forefinger on his right hand. ‘That's how much.'”

The approximate length of a penis.

The relationship between father and son still had obvious gaps. Ted could still be tough, and Louise was still alive and she was in control. She did not want Ted working a lot. John-Henry still made her nervous. There was a scene about a missing picture from the mantel in the big house. Louise was not happy.

John-Henry's visits to Florida would last for two or three days of conflict, then he would be gone to the marketplace.

“He'd bring down a stack of pictures for Ted to sign,” Rodney Nichols says. “Ted would sign every single one of them, but he would bitch as he signed every single one of them.”

The businesses, as they evolved, were not skyrockets. The small profits that were made were sent to Ted. There were no profits left for the other parties. Interland had quit his job and was working for $500 a week. He was struggling.

The business the partners had thought would do best, the Ted Williams Card Company (“The cards were beautiful,” Interland says. “If there had been a Pulitzer Prize for baseball cards that year, we would have won it”), was hit by the baseball strike of 1994–95. All of the three businesses were hit. Baseball had dropped off the top shelf of public interest.

Brenner and Interland dropped out of the business.

“What we did, virtually, was give the companies to John-Henry,” Brenner says. “He'd been a good partner. Honest. Worked hard. He had amazing contacts. The White House would call the office. All these top FBI agents would call. We just weren't making money.”

“All kinds of little things hurt,” Interland says. “Like we had great hopes for this print of Ted, Larry Bird, and Bobby Orr. Who in Boston wouldn't want something like that? We took out a full-page ad in the Sunday Boston Globe. Very expensive. Well, the 800 number in the ad was wrong. We got nothing from it. That was the kind of thing that happened.”

John-Henry, now with control of three companies not making a lot of money, also had added a fourth. He opened the Ted Williams Store, retail, in January 1994 at the Atrium Mall in Newton, Massachusetts.

“The store was as dead as dead can be,” Steve Sherman, partner in the enterprise, says. “The Atrium Mall was new. Everything about it was wrong. Number one, it was too high-priced. There were a lot of nice stores, but they were very expensive. Number two, it was on the wrong side of the highway, Route 9, going into Boston instead of out of Boston. People didn't want to make the U-turn to shop.”

The store was on the third floor of the dead mall, behind a large pillar that obscured most of its front window. Sherman still figures that if John-Henry had rented or leased more expensive space downtown at Faneuil Hall, the tourist and shopping mecca in Boston, sales would have skyrocketed. John-Henry took no advice on the matter. He went for the better deal that turned out to be the worst deal.

“He didn't listen to anybody,” Sherman says. “He was ostentatious, obnoxious. Kind of a sleazy individual.”

The biggest moment for the Ted Williams Store came on July 28, 1994. Ted Williams came to the store. This was a look into the future. Louise now was gone. Ted was still recovering from his stroke in February. The visit was only three weeks after he talked with Dan Shaughnessy in his first poststroke comments in Florida. John-Henry had put the day together.

The Globe's John Vellante reported that “The Splendid Splinter looked fatigued and walked with a cane, but his voice was loud and clear. His vision is probably permanently impaired, but his signature was bold and authoritative.” The event was the sale of a lithograph signed by Williams and Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, Bobby Doerr, and Eddie Pellagrini, the Boston College baseball coach, who also had played with Williams. They all were in attendance, along with 600 ticket-holders and customers. The 521 lithographs—for Ted's 521 home runs—were sold for $175 apiece. The Globe did not report that an aide had to place Williams's hand on the proper part of each print to sign his name.

“Dad being here was really his idea,” John-Henry said in the paper. “When I told him what I was doing, he said, ‘What would you think if I joined in? It might be fun to get away from here [Florida] and see some of the guys.' It's the first time he's been out of Florida since suffering the stroke.”

Was that the way it happened?

The first well-tangled questions about love and commerce had arrived. Was this what the famous man really wanted to do less than six months after his stroke? Wouldn't he be better off at a beach somewhere? Was this fun or work? Was John-Henry the loving caregiver? Or was he the mercenary manipulator? Was he a combination of both? He already had hired nurses and a cook for the big house at Citrus Hills. He was flying back and forth to Boston, making plans and decisions. He would be living in Florida by December. The distance between his father and himself would be closed to nothing.

“Now, you finally have to listen to me. . . .”

Steve Sherman remembers that there was no warning to the rest of the staff about the Ted Williams Store closing. One night the store was open. The next morning it was cleaned out of inventory. John-Henry was gone.

He was off to take care of his father.