Ted Williams

Hospitals

Ted Williams, Beantown's ever cranky, but much beloved “Splendid Splinter” and baseball's last .400 hitter, died Friday. The Boston Red Sox treasure, who made good on his goal to be known as the greatest hitter ever, was 83. The Hall of Famer was pronounced dead of cardiac arrest at 8:49 A.M. at Citrus Memorial Hospital in Inverness, spokeswoman Rebecca Martin said. He had suffered a series of strokes and congestive heart failure in recent years.

ASSOCIATED PRESS, JULY 6, 2002

George Carter and Frankie Brothers split the days into two 12-hour shifts while the famous man was in Shands Hospital in Gainesville in the first week of November 2000 to have his pacemaker installed. They told the resident physicians and nurses they weren't there for medical reasons, only for the comfort of Ted Williams. He did not like to be alone.

The first schedule had George working overnight, Frankie during the days. This did not last long. An officious, know-everything nurse worked the night shift. She and George tangled, and George asked Frankie to change shifts because “I'm going to punch her lights out if I stay on nights.” The change was made.

Frankie found the nurse as unbearable as George had described. He, instead, waited to see what would happen.

“Know this about Ted: he doesn't like anyone touching his feet,” Brothers says. “He's peculiar, quirky about certain things. His feet were one of them. I wouldn't even dry his feet after he'd take a shower. I knew. The only one who could touch his feet was Claudia. She'd give him a rub, do a pedicure. She was all right for some reason.”

Brothers explained this and other conditions to the night nurse. She heard, but didn't listen, nodded as if a truck driver were talking about physics. She was the nurse.

On one of the nights before his surgery, Williams awoke and asked Frankie what was on television. Frankie said, “CNN.” The two of them settled back to watch CNN. The nurse came into the room on her rounds.

“She flips up the covers and grabs Ted's feet to take his pulse,” Brothers says. “Ted goes wild. He had his urinal right there, the bedpan. He just throws the urinal at the nurse. Everything goes flying! I looked at her and started laughing. It was the funniest thing I ever saw. The nurse . . . she got off the night shift. They eventually got rid of her.”

This was one of the few moments of actual humor in the next 20 months. Williams was off on a grim climb through the American medical system. He certainly was no stranger to hospitals, his body having been tweaked and repaired in the past to keep him on the ballfield and walking without pain on the city streets, but this was different. He was sleeping most of the time now. He was often disoriented when he was awake. His heart wasn't pumping enough blood to his head. This was a trip for survival.

The decision to insert the pacemaker came after days of discussion. The various heart medications no longer were working. Williams's arteries were clear enough—he'd had both carotid arteries cleaned—but his heart was firing too fast, overworking itself. Perhaps the pacemaker could control that.

“He did great,” Dr. Anne Curtis, the surgeon who performed the operation, said on November 6 in the Boston Globe. “The surgery went very smoothly and quickly. The problem lately is that Mr. Williams has a rapid heartbeat [atrial fibrillation]. That can lead to deterioration in the heart and we had to slow it down. We implanted a single chamber pacemaker.”

Williams's trip to the hospital had brought the first public worries about his possible demise, especially in Boston. He talked with Dan Shaughnessy on the phone the night before the operation and said, “I really don't need it [the pacemaker] but I'll do whatever they want me to do. . . . I'm pretty good. I don't know where everybody's getting the news that I'm near death's door and all that crap.”

“He's very aware of what's going on,” John-Henry said. “I'm just glad it got done and I'm looking forward to Dad getting better and getting on with his life. This had been very stressful.”

Two weeks later, Williams was released from the hospital. He said that he “really felt better” and was looking forward to going back to Citrus Hills to eat a home-cooked breakfast. The truth was much darker than his words.

The pacemaker, alas, was not the answer. The breathing problems continued. The heart problems continued. He was now a candidate for more substantial, life-threatening surgery. Options were discussed for the next two months, John-Henry consulting various heart specialists. The final decision was made to send him to New York Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan to repair the valves in his heart.

It was a risky surgery for anyone, extra risky for someone 82 years old and in ill health. Dr. Jeffery Borer, a famous New York cardiologist who had repaired the hearts of TV talk-show stars David Letterman and Jack Paar, would do the job. Williams's heart would be removed from his body. A leak on the mitral valve on the left side of the heart would be repaired with tissue from a pig. The tricuspid valve on the right side would be tightened with sutures. Everything would be put back together, and he hopefully would be better than he had been at the start.

The prospects were laid out for Williams at Shands. He had a 50–50 chance of survival.

“I was in the room when Dr. [Rick] Kerensky told him,” Frankie Brothers says. “Dr. Kerensky said, ‘Till now we've been treating you with medication and we've put in the pacemaker, but it's just not working. Your only option now is open-heart surgery.' Ted said, ‘Well, what chance do I have?' Dr. Kerensky said, ‘To tell the truth, it's about 50–50.' Ted said. ‘You know what? I've had a hell of a life. I have no regrets. If I have to die on an operating table, so be it.' That's a direct quote.”

Williams was flown to New York by private jet on January 14, 2001, and the surgery was performed the next day. A team of 14 doctors, nurses, and technicians worked on him for nine and a half hours. He came out of the operating room attached to six IV lines. A tracheotomy tube had been inserted to control his respiration. Dr. Borer told John-Henry that his father would have been dead within five days without surgery.

For the next five weeks Williams stayed in the New York hospital. Rumors that he was near death began to circulate again, but were squelched. He was an old man, a sick man. That was the reply. This would take time. Not included in the reply was the fact that he had another problem now—his kidneys were failing.

“The operation was a success,” Frankie Brothers says. “George and I couldn't see Ted until five or six days later, but when we did he looked and sounded good. The next day, though, he started running a fever. He never looked or sounded good again.

“A staph infection had set in. To stop the staph infection they had to give him vancomycin, the strongest antibiotic there is. The problem with vancomycin . . . it gets rid of the infection, but it kills your kidneys in the process. They wound up giving Ted vancomycin twice. Ted wound up on dialysis.”

“He opens his eyes in response to his name being called, mouths words from time to time and shakes his head appropriately in response to certain questions—all of which represent high-level responses and things he wasn't able to do two weeks ago,” Dr. Borer said optimistically on February 6 in the Globe. “We've now shifted into a phase of chronic recovery, of rehabilitation. That's an interval during which progress can be expected to be slower. It's not that good things aren't happening. It's just that they happen at a far slower rate than during the first couple of weeks.”

On February 19, Williams was transferred to Sharp Hospital in San Diego for continued rehabilitation. There were other options, notably Shands in Gainesville and the Spaulding Hospital in Boston, but the transfer to San Diego, to a hospital no more than five miles from Utah Street and the North Park playground, was facilitated by Bob Breitbard. He arranged for two condos, one for John-Henry, another for Frankie and George, and set up the hospital. He wanted to see his friend come back to the old hometown.

The visit would last for four months. Williams would spend most of his time listed in either intensive or critical care. Another staph infection brought a final round of vancomycin. The dialysis would wear him down. It was news when he simply could talk.

“How is he?” were his reported first words since the surgery in New York.

John-Henry was telling him on March 15 that John Glenn had called. Williams interrupted with his question. John-Henry was heartened by the cognitive process that had to take place: listening to the conversation, knowing who John Glenn was, forming the question, asking the question.

A second question—a request for red wine—also was noteworthy. On April 29, he talked with Dr. Borer on the phone, the first time Borer had heard him speak. Williams remembered that the doctor had promised him a glass of red wine if all went well. Where was the red wine? This also seemed encouraging, “the sign of a functioning intellect,” Borer said.

The time in San Diego was strange. The nurses, Carter and Brothers, say that John-Henry mostly was absent from the scene. The first thing he did was install five computers in the condo. He played his games for days and traveled the Net and did business. He seldom visited the hospital, often disappearing altogether on weekends. Where did he go? Frankie and George found the public comments about John-Henry and his concern for his father laughable. Where was he?

John-Henry, on the other side, complained to friends that the nurses on the West Coast took liberties, weren't around as much as they should have been. They thought they were on some kind of paid vacation instead of taking care of his father.

Who was right?

The nurses complained about the people who had access to Ted. John-Henry turned away most visitors. He kept telling Bobby-Jo's daughter Dawn, who lived in Anaheim, that Ted was “too tired” or too something for a visit every time she called. Old friends like Joe Villarino from San Diego were refused. Tommy Lasorda was allowed. Bobby Knight was allowed.

“Dolores showed up,” George Carter says. “She was allowed to visit. She tried to feed Ted some homemade remedy from a jar. All the monitors went crazy. She could have killed him. They threw her out of the hospital.”

The split between the famous man's son and the famous man's caregivers grew larger and larger, ever more obvious, and finally became a total rupture. On “May 18 or May 19,” Brothers says, “John-Henry came in, threw a couple of plane tickets at George and me, and said, ‘You guys are going home.'” The nurses felt terrible, as if they were leaving a best friend in peril.

“We went to the hospital that night. Ted cried like a baby when we told him,” Brothers says. “Ted was crying, George was crying, George's wife, Barbara, was crying, I was crying. I felt so bad for Ted. At the time, I wished I was a man of means, so I could say to John-Henry, ‘Screw you, you don't have to pay me. I'm staying here with your father.' George felt the same way.”

The nurses returned to Florida. A month later, Williams followed. John-Henry brought him back to Shands in Gainesville. He would stay there for two months, then return to the big house in Citrus Hills on August 30, 2001, his 83^rd birthday. Frankie and George were not rehired. New nurses were brought into the house.

“I'm feeling pretty good,” Williams would report in a whisper to Dan Shaughnessy in the Globe. “But my whole life has been knocked out of joint. Oh, boy, I've never been through years like I've been through in the last four years. There's nothing I can compare it to in my life. I really have been through hell.”

“It's still taking some time for Dad to kind of wake up,” John-Henry said. “But I can only imagine what it's like to be under the weather for eight months. He's definitely not as strong as before the surgery, but he's getting stronger every day. This is so different from what happened to poor Joe DiMaggio. Joe went home to die. Dad hasn't come home to die. He's come home to live and get better.”

Despite the sweet, hopeful words of a dutiful son, the picture of John-Henry had not changed for many people around him. While Dr. Kerensky praised John-Henry, remarked on his caring, other staffers at Shands were not so sure. They didn't like the way he dealt with them or with his father. They noticed a strange instruction on his father's chart: nothing was to be done to possibly impair range of motion of his right arm. No IVs were to be inserted into the right extremity. The right extremity was off-limits.

“Why is that?” they wondered.

“So he'll be able to sign autographs again,” they were told.

On September 11, the day of the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York, Jacques Prudhomme went to the big house to visit Williams. John-Henry had asked the cook to remain available for Williams's return, but when the time came, he offered a salary half as large as Prudhomme had been making. Prudhomme refused.

He visited now as a friend, bringing along half of a Reuben sandwich for Williams for lunch. He sat in amazement in the kitchen he had redesigned, watching the news on the television, the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. He also stared in amazement at what was in front of him.

Williams was undergoing physical therapy. All of the exercises, all of the work, were being done to restore strength and mobility to his right arm, his right hand.

“Just for the autographs,” Prudhomme says. “It disgusted me. I went into my car and cried. I said I would never come back to this place again. It was all too sad.”

The mystery of where John-Henry was during those missing weekends in San Diego was solved. He had been doing research, looking into a future medical procedure for his father. He called Bobby-Jo with the results while Ted was at Shands. He was excited.

“Have you ever heard of cryonics?” he asked.

The question struck her as odd. She had indeed heard of the speculative science of freezing bodies for a possible space age cure and afterlife. News about medicine was one of her hobbies. She had seen a television report about cryonics somewhere. She thought the concept was bizarre.

“Yes,” she replied. “I've heard about cryonics.”

He asked her what she knew. She answered and he was impressed.

“What do you think about it?” he asked.

“I think it sucks,” she replied.

“Well, let me ask you something. What do you think if we did that with Dad?”

“You're not serious about this, are you? You have to be kidding.”

“No, I'm not.”

“That's insane. It's totally off-base. It's not going to happen.”

“Why not?”

Bobby-Jo repeated the dialogue—her version—in a story two years later by Peter Kerasotis in Florida Today. She said she started taking notes about the time John-Henry said he wanted to have their father frozen. She continued through the part where he said, “We don't have to take Dad's whole body. We can just take the head.” She said he talked about the possibilities of making money from Williams's DNA, with “all these little Ted Williams's running around.” The idea made her sick. She thought John-Henry was sick.

He asked her to go to Scottsdale, Arizona, to a company called Alcor, which processed, froze, and stored the bodies. He had been fascinated by what he saw. She refused.

Could this really happen? Could her father's body be frozen when he died?

“I didn't know what to say,” Bobby-Jo says now. “We were flabbergasted. We wanted to say something, but we didn't know how. We're asked, ‘Why didn't you call reporters in June when John-Henry first contacted you about all this shit?' If we did, people would have said, ‘Oh, my God, she's gone off the deep end.'”

The relationship between Bobby-Jo and her two half-siblings never had been close. Since she had arrived at Citrus Hills in 1999 with Mark, the two generations of children had looked at each other with great suspicion. Each side thought the other had mercenary motives.

“I told John-Henry once, ‘You know why everything you touch turns to shit?' Mark Ferrell says. “‘It's because you're full of shit.'”

Ferrell and Bobby-Jo were aware of John-Henry's stranglehold on her father's financial situation before they even moved. They had visited him in Citrus Hills and knew the nurses who had worked for him, had heard all the stories about the autographs. They knew about Hitter.net and the worries about where all the money was going. That was one of the reasons they moved.

“My mom never had the courage to confront John-Henry,” Bobby-Jo's daughter, Dawn Hebding, says. “I think she was afraid of him. Everyone told her, ‘This is your father. Why are you allowing all this to take place? Pack your shit up and get down there. Have people see what's going on.'

“My grandfather eventually asked her to move down. That's why she and Mark did. I also think it was a last-ditch effort on their part to possibly get a piece of the pie.”

When they first arrived, living in their RV next to the Crystal River while their house was constructed on one of the three Citrus Hills lots Williams had distributed to his children, they had some access to the big house. Mark, a man with his own bluster, would do the verbal dances with Williams, telling him that the great athletes were the NASCAR drivers, not the baseball players. Williams would dance back. Everyone said Williams had a respect for Mark for straightening out Bobby-Jo's life. Williams, Ferrell says, was interested in the construction of the house, interested in what it was like to live in a trailer, interested in his daughter.

There was never a doubt, though, that John-Henry was in charge. There also never was a doubt that John-Henry was not happy that she and Mark had arrived.

“He didn't want Bobby-Jo to see her father,” George Carter says. “Ted loved Bobby-Jo. He said so many times. John-Henry just didn't want her around. We finally got her and Mark up to the house for dinner one night. It was very nice. Ted was happy. I went to the window once, though, and looked out. I could see John-Henry on the porch of this neighbor's house, a doctor. John-Henry was watching everything with binoculars.”

“We went up there one Thanksgiving, my wife and I and Bobby-Jo and Mark, for Thanksgiving,” Jack Gard says. “My wife made a dish, turkey stuffed with oysters, that Ted really liked. We invited everyone. Claudia stayed down in St. Petersburg. John-Henry said he was going back to Massachusetts with Anita to her parents for the holiday.

“Halfway through the meal, John-Henry showed up. Out of nowhere. Hadn't gone to Massachusetts. Killed everything. He just had to know what was going on.”

Dawn Hebding visited the house once with her son and daughter, Ted's great-grandchildren. She says she was surprised, seeing pictures everywhere in the house, that there were no pictures of the great-grandchildren. She had been sending them for years. Her thought was that John-Henry had grabbed the pictures, never shown them to his father.

Other things also bothered her. Anita arrived at almost the same time she did, and stayed and seemed to monitor the conversation. And then there were the cameras. Hebding had been warned about the cameras by John Sullivan, the nurse. She found them intrusive.

“The cameras were on in Grandpa's bedroom,” she says. “They were trained right on the bed, and the picture was shown on the television in the living room. There's Grandpa in his underwear. All this construction was going on in the house, remodeling the kitchen, all these people working, and Grandpa didn't have any privacy at all. I really didn't think that was right. Everybody deserves some privacy.”

Eric Abel, the lawyer for both Williams and John-Henry, also the lawyer for Citrus Hills, disagrees with the notion that John-Henry kept Bobby-Jo and her father apart. Abel says Ted Williams was the one who wanted the distance. He wanted nothing to do with Bobby-Jo.

“I bet I talked to Ted ten times about Bobby-Jo,” Abel says. “Every time, he'd call her ‘that fucken syphilitic cunt.' I wondered what she had done to make him feel that way. The final straw, I know, was when he had the problem with his granddaughter.”

Bobby-Jo's youngest daughter, Sherri, was a pharmacist's assistant. Dawn Hebding says Sherri told Williams that she wanted to go to pharmacy school to become a registered pharmacist. He agreed to send her. At the start of every semester, she requested money. He provided it.

Hebding says John-Henry was suspicious. He checked with the pharmacy school where Sherri was supposed to be a student. There was no record of her enrollment. She simply was spending the money. He told Ted.

“My grandfather was enraged, he disowned my sister,” Dawn Hebding says. “My mother and my sister and Mark, they all blamed John-Henry. I said, ‘Well, wait a minute here. He wasn't the one who wasn't enrolled in pharmacy college.' All I saw, to tell the truth, was my grandfather surrounded by money-scrounging weasels. My family included.

“That's why I moved to California, just to get out of there. California was as far away as I could get.”

Williams dropped Bobby-Jo from his will. Eric Abel says Williams wanted her to be completely shut out, all past provisions and trusts changed. Abel says he salvaged one trust for Bobby-Jo in the end. Williams was not happy, but agreed with the move.

Abel now told Williams that he, the father, would have to meet with his daughter to tell her the news. Williams did not want to do this. Abel persisted, and finally Bobby-Jo and Mark came up to the big house for a breakfast meeting.

Abel says he did most of the talking at the meeting. He tried to put everything in a positive light. “Ted felt he had contributed more to Bobby-Jo throughout her life than he had for his other two younger children, blah-blah.” “There still was one 1986 irrevocable trust in her name, blah-blah, so you're still going to get something.” He asked Bobby-Jo at the end of his presentation if all of this was all right.

“She said, ‘That's fine with me, but Daddy, I want to hear it from you,'” Abel says. “Ted looked at her and said, ‘It's what I fucken want.' He said it just that way. I felt bad for her. That was a bad day.”

Bobby-Jo says her refusal to accept John-Henry's cryonics proposition was what ended her contact with her father. She had seen Williams at Shands four days before his birthday return to Citrus Hills, but when she called and asked John-Henry when she could come to the house with a cake and balloons, John-Henry said her visiting days were done. If she appeared at the house, he would have her arrested.

“Why would you do this?” she says she asked.

“Because you're not a team player,” she says John-Henry replied.

In the following months, she would hire three different lawyers in attempts to see her father. Nothing would work. She felt her father was too ill to know what was happening to him and around him. John-Henry now not only had power of attorney but had moved into the big house after Williams's pacemaker surgery. He said he had moved to be closer in case something happened. His critics said he had moved to establish legal residence so that he'd be able to claim the contents of the house, including the many pieces of memorabilia, when his father died.

Bobby-Jo felt that John-Henry not only had control but was planning a terrible thing. The idea of cryonics, her father's body frozen, ate at her. She told some friends, but no one else. Who would believe her? Would John-Henry really do this?

Eric Abel, John-Henry's lawyer, again tells a different story. Again, he says Ted did not want to see her. Again, he says he told Ted it would be good to see her. Again, Ted declined with bad words. This time Abel says Williams called his daughter “that dried-up cunt.”

“It's sad,” Abel, who at the time lived next door to Bobby-Jo, says. “She fancies herself his great champion, and he could give a shit about her.”

In the late fall of 2001, there was a sweet interlude. The happy past intruded, just for three days, on the grinding present. Dominic DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky appeared at Citrus Hills. David Halberstam would tell the story of their visit in his short book called The Teammates.

“For many years, the glue that held them together as friends was Williams; someone that great, one of the very best ever at what they all did, had rare peer power,” Halberstam wrote. “‘It was,' Pesky once said of him, ‘like there was a star on top of his head, pulling everyone toward him like a beacon, and letting everyone around him know that he was different and that he was special in some marvelous way and that we were much more special because we had played with him.'”

The winner in the business game after baseball had been Dominic. After leaving the Red Sox prematurely in 1953, he started a fabricating company that made padding for dashboards and car doors. For a long time, it was virtually the only company that made padding for dashboards and car doors. He also added a company that made rugs for cars.

He had an entire second career in business and did very well. He is a wealthy man, retired now, but still spends most of his days in his den watching the scrolling CNBC fluctuations of the stock market across the bottom of his big-screen television.

He never tried very hard to bring Williams into his business, figuring Ted had advisers and opportunities and was living in Florida, but he did offer Pesky a chance. Pesky declined.

“Dominic,” Pesky said, “I'm a jock. I was born a jock and will die a jock. They'll cut the uniform off me.”

(Pesky, coaching with the Red Sox, once appeared on talk radio with Dr. Joy Browne, a psychologist whose show was on the station that broadcast the Sox games. Pesky was asked how the interview went. “Great,” he said. “She doesn't know a fucken thing about baseball and I don't know a fucken thing about anything else. We had a wonderful conversation.”)

DiMaggio and Pesky both wound up staying in the Boston area. Pesky lived in Lynn and married Ruth, a local girl—Mickey McDermott lived with them for a year as a rookie and said “it was like living with your father”—and then bought a ranch house in Swampscott. He has been with the Red Sox for pieces of seven decades as player, manager, broadcaster, and coach. He still puts on the suit, 84 years old, and hits fungoes to young outfielders. He is a local treasure, a friendly and perpetually kind man.

DiMaggio, troubled with assorted ailments, including the rare Paget's disease, which left him walking in a hunched-over position, raised his kids in his wife Emily's hometown of Wellesley Hills, and then they moved to Marion, on the water, next to Cape Cod. They also bought a home in Ocean Ridge, Florida, near Palm Beach.

In late September, early October, the weather growing cold, DiMaggio was making plans to go from Marion to Ocean Ridge for the winter. Emily was flying down early, Dominic to follow on a flight a few days later, but now he had second thoughts. The 9/11 disaster a few weeks earlier had made air travel a hassle. He said he didn't need the hassle.

“I'm going to drive down,” he said one night over cocktails. “I'll stop off and see Ted.”

“Dominic, you can't drive down,” Emily reminded him with great logic. “You're 84 years old.”

A third participant in the conversation was 64-year-old Dick Flavin. A former local Boston television commentator, Flavin now is a toastmaster and after-dinner speaker and producer of a play on the life of Boston politician Tip O'Neill. DiMaggio was Flavin's boyhood idol—the nice tale of a fourth-grade kid with glasses finding inspiration in a major leaguer with glasses—and the two men have been friends for over 30 years. Flavin was into his third glass of chardonnay when Dominic proposed driving and Emily proposed not driving.

“I can drive!” Flavin said, surprising even himself. “I'll go with you!”

The plan quickly was finalized and expanded over more chardonnay. It became a nice little adventure, maybe not a trip down the Amazon, but a challenge. Drive down to see Ted! Pesky was called and was an instant addition. DiMaggio was scheduled to appear at a reunion for members of the Philadelphia Athletics Historical Society. There would be a stop in Philadelphia for that, another stop in Virginia for rest, then a flat-out push to Florida. This would be an old men's road trip. They would travel in Dominic's steel-gray Jaguar.

“We go to Philadelphia and it's wonderful,” Flavin says. “The reunion is held in some function room of a Best Western, and there's all these old ballplayers and fans. Packed. Maybe 500 people. Johnny and Dom both talk and the people love it. They sign a million autographs. A guy gets up and says, ‘If we'd had crowds like this for the Philadelphia Athletics when they played here, they'd still be the Philadelphia Athletics.'”

“Eddie Joost was there and he looked terrific,” Pesky says. “I thought I was doing okay, but he was terrific. He was a good-looking guy, of course, when he played. And he was still good-looking now.”

“Bobby Shantz was there,” DiMaggio says. “I could never hit that little bastard.”

Back on the road the next day, Flavin and DiMaggio shared the driving. Pesky sat in the backseat. His contribution was that he wouldn't smoke any of his cigars for the entire trip. The miles passed with good conversation and laughter. DiMaggio and Flavin did most of the talking. Pesky did a lot of the laughing, looking from the window in some place, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, perhaps, and saying, “I think I used to manage in this fucken town!” More laughter. The language deconstructed as the miles passed, the bad words of the clubhouse and baseball brought back and savored.

“Dominic and I thought we were the funniest guys on the planet the way we made Johnny laugh,” Flavin says. “We were really proud of ourselves. Then in Florida, Johnny and I share a room and he walks in, sits down, and clicks on The Golden Girls. He laughs just as hard as he did at Dominic and me.”

The travelers never had turned on the radio during the entire trip, just talking, but in the last stages DiMaggio slipped in a Pavarotti CD. He sang along with the famous singer. Opera. His brother, Vince, it was noted during the conversation, used to sing opera in the outfield between pitches.

The three men pulled into Hernando early on a Monday evening, then went to Ted's house in the morning. Dominic had seen Ted during Ted's recent decline, visiting him in San Diego, waiting two days just to get a reaction. Flavin recently had buried his mother and was steeled a bit to the effects of disease and age. Pesky was unprepared for what would come next, Williams's weight now down around 130 pounds.

“We go in the house and the first thing we can see is Ted,” Flavin says. “He was at the end of the long living room, next to the window, in profile, that famous face, but he was sort of huddled over in his wheelchair. He heard us coming, but couldn't see. Dominic shouted, ‘Teddie, it's Dommie.' He started running on his bad legs. He went over close so Ted could see him. ‘Hello, Dommie,' Ted said. His eyes welled up. They hugged. Pesky, who wasn't ready for this, just started bawling. It was a scene. Dominic is running as fast as he can on those old legs. Pesky is holding back.”

For the better part of the next three days, the three old ballplayers, old friends, told stories, told lies, rolled through the events that had happened as young men. Flavin watched it all, part of it and not part of it, entranced.

“They'd talk about who was the toughest pitcher for each of them,” Flavin says. “Pesky said it was Spud Chandler. Dominic said it was Early Wynn. Williams said it was Ted Lyons, said he never could figure Ted Lyons out.”

Dominic would ask Williams how he ever could stand as close to the plate as he did. Williams would ask Dominic how he never could figure out what pitch struck him out. Remember that?

Dialogue after DiMaggio struck out:

WILLIAMS: What did he get you on?

DIMAGGIO: I don't know.

WILLIAMS: What do you mean you don't know?

DIMAGGIO: I don't know.

WILLIAMS: You stupid son of a bitch.

Williams told the story—again—of his first trip to spring training, about the flood in Los Angeles and meeting Bobby Doerr in El Paso and arriving in Sarasota. There was talk about obscure names, about pitchers like Frank Baumann, “who could have been great if he hadn't been hurt.” Ted posed the question, who was the most underrated clutch hitter they ever had played against. Mickey Vernon? Larry Doby? No, Eddie Robinson. That's the guy!

There was conversation about everything, all the funny moments of a shared time, a shared experience long ago that shaped all three men's lives forever. The Red Sox. Teddy. Dommie. Johnny. Kids' names on old men. There was singing.

“I sang Ted an Italian song,” DiMaggio says. “Then I told him the story behind the song. It was about two best friends who loved the same girl. Then we sang, ‘That Old Pal of Mine'—‘The pal that I love, stole the gal that I love'—and the Ted Lewis song, ‘Me and My Shadow.' We even sang ‘When You're Smiling.' Then Flavin sang some Irish songs and did his poem.”

For years, starting when he was in college at Georgetown, performing in bars for free drinks, Flavin had done a dramatic rendition of “Casey at the Bat.” Before the trip, with appropriate apologies to Ernest Lawrence Thayer, he had reworked the poem into “Teddy at the Bat.” He performed it now for the subject, moving close to be inside Ted's restricted tunnel vision, doing all the elaborate windups and swings and grimaces:

The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Red Sox nine that day,

The score stood four to two with but one inning left to play.

So when Stephens died at first and Tebbetts did the same,

A pallor wreathed the features of the patrons of the game.

A straggling few got up to go, leaving there the rest

With the hope that springs eternal within the human breast.

They thought if only Teddy could get a whack at that—

They'd put even money now with Teddy at the bat.

But Dom preceded Teddy and Pesky was on deck.

The first of them was in a slump. The other was a wreck.

So on that stricken multitude a deathlike silence sat,

For there seemed but little chance of Teddy's getting to the bat.

But Dom let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,

And Pesky, of all people, tore the cover off the ball.

When the dust had lifted, and they saw what had occurred,

There was Johnny safe on second and Dominic on third.

Then from that gladdened multitude went up a joyous yell,

It rumbled in the mountains and rattled in the dell.

It struck upon the hillside and rebounded on the flat,

For Teddy, Teddy Ballgame, was advancing to the bat.

There was ease in Teddy's manner as he stepped into his place,

There was pride in Teddy's bearing and a smile on Teddy's face.

And when, responding to the cheers he lightly doffed his hat,

(I'm making that part up)

No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Teddy at the bat.

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he wiped his hands with dirt,

Five thousand tongues applauded as he wiped them on his shirt.

Then when the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,

Defiance gleamed in Teddy's eyes, a sneer curled Teddy's lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,

And Teddy stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.

Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped.

“That ain't my style,” said Teddy. “Strike one!” the umpire said.

From the benches black with people went up a muffled roar,

Like the beating of the storm waves on the stern and distant shore.

“Kill him! Kill the umpire!” someone shouted on the stand,

And it's likely they'd have killed him had not Teddy raised his hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Teddy's visage shone.

He stilled the rising tumult and bade the game go on.

He signaled the pitcher, and once more the spheroid flew.

But Teddy still ignored it, and the umpire said, “Strike two!”

“Fraud!” cried the maddened thousands, and the echo answered “Fraud.”

But one scornful look from Teddy and the audience was awed.

They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,

And they knew that Teddy wouldn't let that ball go by again.

The sneer is gone from Teddy's lip; his teeth are clenched in hate.

He pounds with cruel vengeance his bat upon the plate.

And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,

And now the air is shattered by the force of Teddy's blow.

Oh, somewhere in this land of ours the sun is shining bright,

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,

And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout.

And they're going wild at Fenway Park 'cause Teddy hit one out!

Everybody cheered at the end. Williams loved the poem. During the three days, Flavin performed it five times. Every time, there was the same reaction. The days developed a pattern. The three visitors would arrive for breakfast, stay through the morning, then leave so Williams could rest. They would be back at 4:30, the customary early dinner hour, then stay till Williams was tired again. Pesky left a day early, flying back to Boston, and Flavin and DiMaggio came back for one more dinner and one more breakfast.

DiMaggio had become closer and closer to Williams through the years, closer at the end than he was to his brother Joe. The death of his brother on March 8, 1999, was actually a final bond between Dominic and Ted. Williams had called virtually every day while Joe hung in a coma. How's Joe? Is he any better? Joe's death hit Williams on a personal level, a family kind of death, the loss of an odd and remote brother, the one man who knew the complications of Williams's life better than any other man on the planet. Never close, friendly enough, but never friends, the two superstars had been forced to deal with the same adulation, the same attention, the same artificial sainthood. They were the two lead characters in the same myth. Could anyone else understand what that had been like? Joe and Ted, they understood best the demands of each other's lives.

Dominic, as much as anyone else, understood what those demands had done. He was familiar with the insecurities underneath both halos.

“I remember we were at a barbecue once at Al Cassidy's,” Dominic says. “Teddy said to me, ‘Dommie, I admire what you've done. You're successful in business. You married well. You're a clean-cut guy. You've lived a wonderful life.'

“I said to him, ‘Well, what about you? You've done great.' Ted said, ‘Aw, if it hadn't been for Sears Roebucks, I'd be flat on my fanny.' He was really down. I said, ‘Teddy, you've done better than 99 percent of the chief executives of the corporations in this country. If anyone should argue that with you, you should just spit in their eye. You've done as much as any man can do in this life.'”

Williams, he remembered, nodded. But didn't seem convinced.

The three days done, DiMaggio and Flavin drove off toward Ocean Ridge. Ted stayed where he was, captive to the machines and to the parts of his body that were clogged up, shutting down, and turning off.

The last time Williams appeared in public was on February 17, 2002. The occasion was the Ninth Annual Hitters Hall of Fame induction ceremonies at the Ted Williams Museum. John-Henry was the promotional hand behind the production.

A year earlier, Williams had missed the event for the first time because he was in the hospital in San Diego. The few people who had seen him since his return, his bedroom now resembling a hospital room, dialysis every day, were almost certain he would not appear this year. John-Henry was noncommittal.

“We'll see what kind of a day he's having,” the son said. “We'll see how he's feeling.”

For high-rollers, who paid $1,000 a head, there was a weekend of activity featuring a golf tournament and a fishing tournament on Saturday, followed by a country club banquet at night. The rollers mainly were longtime associates of Williams's, friends, or longtime fans or collectors who specialized in Williams memorabilia. The induction ceremony on Sunday was held in a white rent-a-tent outside the museum and was open to the public.

A number of former recipients of awards, plus former teammates and baseball friends, including DiMaggio and Pesky, McDermott, Enos Slaughter, and 91-year-old Elden Auker, were in attendance. Honorees for this year included Cal Ripken Jr., recently retired from the Baltimore Orioles, and Jason Giambi, Don Mattingly, and the late Roger Maris from the Yankees. The master of ceremonies was former Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda.

Lasorda was halfway through the program, rolling out his usual jokes about Italian men and long-suffering wives, when there was sudden activity at the side of the white tent. A flap was pulled back and a blue van could be seen, engine running, side door open, something happening. The something was the arrival of Ted.

He was in a wheelchair and was lowered from the van by one of those hydraulic lifts. He was wearing a blue sports coat and a blue cardigan sweater and a red hunting shirt and had a blue blanket with a Red Sox logo on the front tucked up to his chest. John-Henry directed the unloading, then took charge of the wheelchair. He pushed his father up a ramp onto the back of the stage. Claudia joined them.

“We have a special guest,” Lasorda said, interrupting his patter. “Let's wait a few seconds until he gets here.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest hitter that God ever put on earth, Ted Williams,” Lasorda finally announced.

The crowd rose, applauded, but not with the type of reaction that might have been expected. A large number of Baltimore fans were there to see Ripken, another large group of Yankee fans to see Giambi and Mattingly. Ripken, Giambi, and Mattingly all would receive larger ovations during the afternoon.

This was far from the scene of 1999 at Fenway at the All-Star Game. The face of the man in the wheelchair hardly resembled the face on the lids from the Dixie Cups, the covers of the Life magazines, the special edition lithographs all the collectors owned. The drawn skin was almost transparent. The gray hair was a lifeless winter grass. The eyes were unfocused. A tracheotomy tube was stuck in Ted Williams's throat.

The high-rollers were shocked. Some of the former ballplayers and friends cried. Enos Slaughter, who would be dead within the year, blubbered. The rest of the crowd—the Orioles fans and the Yankees fans and the drive-by curious off the Florida highways—simply stared at the sadness as if it were a traffic accident.

Lasorda helped Williams, now at the front of the stage, make a brief two-fingered wave. John-Henry dropped to one knee at one side of his father. Claudia went to the other side.

“We knew this day was coming for a few weeks,” John-Henry said to the crowd. “We never clearly realized what it would mean to be on the same stage here with my dad and my sister, breathing the same air everyone else is breathing, and knowing how valuable life is and what love is, from a daughter to a father and from a son to a father.

“I don't think there are two children luckier in the whole wide world than my sister and I. All I want him to know is that I know the hell that he and I have gone through in the last year and a half, and I and my sister could not have done it without him. Dad, we love you.”

The words, normal enough on the printed page, had a surreal quality in the situation. What was the point? Why had John-Henry brought Williams here? To tell him something he could have told him in private 100 times per day? Was this a show of love, togetherness, what? Was this a photo op, a marketing idea? What? It clearly wasn't a show of returned health or vigor. Was it supposed to be a sentimental good-bye? Wouldn't the words have been different? What? What was the point? Again, this was the mystery with John-Henry.

Bobby-Jo wasn't in the crowd, even though she lived close enough to walk to the ceremony. Mark Ferrell said he and his wife were watching the Daytona 500 on television instead. He said they wanted nothing to do with John-Henry's “exploitation” of her father.

“Ted can hardly talk,” Elden Auker, who had visited Williams in the morning with Lasorda and another friend, told the Boston Globe. “He's got this thing on his throat, he's on dialysis every night, and now he's lost his appetite and is losing weight. His face is very pale. They're just keeping him alive. It just isn't right. He's in a wheelchair, he can't take care of himself, he's got someone around him 24 hours a day. It's just sad to see.

“It's like he's on display. Of course people were thrilled to see him, but to see him in that condition, to see him like that? I've known him since 1939. We've been friends all these years. To see what he's going through, just keeping him alive . . . it just doesn't seem right. But I guess that's life. I guess there's nothing you can do about it.”

Williams said nothing during the entire ceremony. Lasorda tried to prod him, saying, “What about all those pictures, perfect swing, ball always going out of the park . . . didn't you ever hit a ground ball? Didn't you ever hit into a double play?” Nothing. Never had a joke fallen so flat. Lasorda peeled away, realizing the impropriety. Nothing.

The one thing Williams did was chew gum. He chewed while John-Henry brought him out. He chewed while John-Henry talked. He chewed while John-Henry wheeled him back, down the ramp, back into the van, and back to the big house on the biggest hill on the Florida peninsula. He chewed with a ferocity, as if chewing was the one outlet for expression left after all the other outlets had been dimmed to subsistence levels. He chewed and chewed and chewed.

George Carter, the nurse, said that Williams had a habit of grinding his teeth when agitated. He had ground them down so low that they had been bonded so he wouldn't grind them to nothing.

The van pulled out. The ceremony continued. Less than five months later, Ted Williams was dead.

John Butcher came to work at two o'clock in the morning on July 5, 2002. That was how the night shift ran now at Ted Williams's house. The dialysis nurses would work until two, running Williams's blood through the machine in his bedroom, and then the night nurse would arrive and work until ten in the morning. A nurse's aide and a sleeping nurse-practitioner also were in the house.

The easy, ad hoc camaraderie of Frankie and George, George half-sleeping on a big chair in the living room, Williams creeping out at 3:00 A.M. to try to scare him, George jumping up to say “Boo,” was gone. These were more professional nurses hired to take care of a very sick man. No less compassionate than Frankie or George or John Sullivan or Jack Gard, they simply did not know their patient as well. He had been a very sick man from the moment they were hired.

“We didn't talk much,” John Butcher says. “He was tired and sick most of the time. If you would ask questions, sometimes he would answer, depending on how he felt. I don't know much about baseball, so we couldn't talk about that. The only thing I could talk about with him was fishing.”

The life of Ted Williams had become more and more quiet. The goals had become smaller and smaller. A good day had been when he could walk a few steps, and then it was when he could stand up, and then it was when he could sit up, and now, what next? He went in and out of the present. There was little doubt that he was wearing down.

Dominic DiMaggio called every morning.

“I'd gone up to see him again in April, on the way back north,” DiMaggio says. “Ted wasn't in the best condition. It was apparent to me that he was surrounded by a lot of people who didn't know anything about baseball. I thought he needed baseball. That's why I started calling every day. I'd fill him in on what was happening. Sometimes we'd talk for a while, he'd seem alert. Sometimes not.”

If talk of baseball was lacking, the sound of the game was still around. The background noise to Williams's days in the past months, oddly enough, had been the whack of a bat hitting a baseball. John-Henry, at age 33, was giving the sport one more try.

A batting cage now sat next to the big house. John-Henry had purchased a high-technology, $100,000 pitching machine, the most advanced pitching machine on the market. Some major league teams didn't have such a high-tech machine. Videos of the best pitchers in the game—Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, whoever—could be projected on a screen in the background. The machine could be programmed to throw the pitches that the individual pitchers threw: sliders, sinkers, big sweeping curves, 100 mph fastballs.

John-Henry had bulked up, filled with the food supplements of modern athletes. He had hired a personal batting coach. Every day, he swung against the virtual Cy Young Award winners, sending baseballs into the virtual seats in the nets.

“I went out to see Ted in the spring,” Rich Eschen, the former employee at Grand-Slam Marketing, says. “Before I got to the house, I ran into John-Henry outside the batting cage. We talked, and he asked if I wanted to hit a few. I said I didn't know. I'd played college baseball, but I was 50 years old. He said, ‘Give it a try.'

“I went into the cage and I'm wearing, you know, a pair of Docksiders, and he cranked up the machine, and pretty soon I was swinging at 100-mile-an-hour fastballs. I'd never seen 100-mile-an-hour fastballs in my life. I hit for a while, then went in to see Ted. He was in his bed, connected to the machines. He was not good. I don't think he really recognized me.”

Rumors abounded about John-Henry's reasons for swinging in the cage. What was he trying to do? Maybe he was getting ready to play Ted in a movie. Maybe he was getting ready to actually try baseball. (“He thinks he can do anything,” Arthur “Buzz” Hamon, a former director of the Ted Williams Museum, a critic, said. “He can drive a fucken race car. He can climb Mount Everest. He can play baseball. He's fucken delusional.”)

On June 20, he signed a contract with the Gulf Coast League Red Sox in Fort Myers, Florida, for $850 per month. On June 26, he made his professional baseball debut by going 0-for-3. He definitely was trying to play. The sportswriters and sportscasters at the game, mostly from Boston, outnumbered the fans.

“He has to get it out of his system,” his sister Claudia said. “Good for him. Wasn't there that movie, The Rookie? If that guy could do it, why couldn't my brother? I know he wants to do this.”

Other opinions were uniformly negative. This was crazy! The only reason this kid—no, this man—was being given a chance at his age and with his nonbaseball background was that he was Ted Williams's son. This was a free pass. No one walks into baseball at 33 and plays.

“It's a total embarrassment,” a “high-ranking Red Sox official” said in the Boston Globe. “He couldn't make a good high school team. We let him hit against two of our lower-level Gulf Coast League pitchers, and in 16 at bats he only managed five foul balls.”

“I have one thing that's a total unknown,” John-Henry replied in the same article. “And that's the blood rushing through my veins and it's from a guy that did do it.”

The argument was soon moot. On June 27, John-Henry broke a rib crashing into the stands while chasing a foul pop-up. Two games into his career, still hitless, he was on the injured list, out for five or six weeks. He decided to stay with the team in Fort Myers, getting treatment for his injury.

That left his father home alone, pretty much on his own, with the new nurses. He lived in his own private nursing home.

“He would tell us sometimes how he appreciated us,” Virginia Hiley-Self, one of the nurses, says. “Then sometimes, when he'd get mad at us, he'd tell us otherwise.”

Hiley-Self had worked at the big house pretty much since Williams returned from Shands. She had grown to love him through the months, hearing his stories about a trophy fish caught off the coast of Peru, about a crash landing in Korea, about baseball in Boston. She had pushed him outside in his wheelchair on good days, laughed when Dominic and Johnny and Flavin brought life to the house, smiled when Tricia Miranti, Williams's teenage friend from rehab, brought a smile to his face.

“He was just so articulate,” she says. “He was so comfortable in what he said.”

A Christian, she directed some conversations toward religion. The last time he had been rushed to Shands with flu-like symptoms in January he had shouted in the emergency room, “You know who did this to me? Jesus Christ did this to me!,” but she says he was receptive to what she said. Her message was that God forgives and can provide eternal life. She says Williams eventually accepted that.

“He prayed,” Hiley-Self says. “He knew that Christ was his savior.”

In June, on Father's Day, just before John-Henry left for baseball, Williams talked to Bobby-Jo for the first time in ten months. Claudia called her and said, “Dad wants to talk to you.” Bobby-Jo, who still hasn't figured out how or why the call was made, told her father in a rush how much she loved him, how much he meant to her, how much she missed him.

“Where are we going to meet?” a strained voice asked.

“Daddy, where do you want to meet?”

“At the park.”

“Where at the park?”

“At the damn gate at the park, where we always meet.”

The park he meant was Fenway Park. He was the famous baseball player. She was the little Barbie doll girl. Time was frozen, long ago. This was the last time she ever talked to him. The door was closed again.

“He was out of it,” Bobby-Jo says. “He'd been out of it since the operation. John-Henry would say these things in the press about him that would make you laugh. Daddy didn't even know where he was most of the time.”

In the first week of July, his condition quietly worsened. Virginia Hiley-Self worked on Tuesday, July 2, and thought, “It won't be long.” Williams was very weak. The dialysis knocked him out. He was breathing all the time through the tracheotomy tube and respirator. All of the nurses knew his situation.

On July 4, DiMaggio made his daily call. Hello, Dommie. Hello, Teddy. The rest was silence. Williams had fallen asleep. A nurse came on to the line and said, “Ted is having a tough day.”

In the middle of that night, the early hours of July 5, John Butcher sat and watched while Williams had a restless sleep. When the famous man was conscious, there was no conversation because of the tube in his throat. As the night passed, he simply seemed to get weaker and weaker. There was no precipitating event that caused a change in his condition. Around 7:00 A.M. his oxygen reading decreased to a worrisome level. Butcher, 30 years a paramedic, called 911, then awakened the nurse supervisor and the nurse's aide. He rode with Williams in the ambulance.

No one else close to the famous man came with him to the hospital. John-Henry was in Fort Myers with the Gulf Coast Red Sox. Claudia was in St. Petersburg, getting ready to fly to Boston. Bobby-Jo was home, less than a mile away. The hundreds, thousands, millions of people who had put the picture of number 9, leftfielder, Boston Red Sox, on their walls and in their imaginations, worshiping and wondering, entranced by his abilities, now awakened or slept in various time zones and went about their daily business.

At 8:49 A.M., July 5, 2002, after an eventful 83 years and 300 days, Ted Williams died in the emergency room at Citrus Memorial Hospital in Inverness, Florida. John Butcher, who did not like baseball, was with him.

“I would say he passed a natural death,” Butcher says.

Ted Williams, easy with words, massaged, surrounded, assaulted, built up, and taken down by words, had no final deathbed words. He died quietly.

Then the words began again.