|
|
|
|
 |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
Voice of experience Gowdy recalls call of last HR By John Powers, Globe Staff, 7/23/2002
''There were 200,000 people at that game,'' Gowdy recalled. ''At least that's how many people have told me they were there.'' Yet barely 10,000 paid their way into the park on Sept. 28, 1960 to watch the seventh-place Sox face Baltimore on a weekday afternoon. ''Gowdy, Gowdy, come here,'' clubhouse man Johnny Orlando beckoned. ''This is The Kid's last game,'' he confided. ''What do you mean, his last game?,'' Gowdy wondered. ''What about the weekend series?'' ''Well, Ted's got a chest cold and Mr. Yawkey has given him permission to not go to New York,'' Orlando told him. ''But don't say anything to anybody.'' ''I promise you I won't,'' Gowdy said. There was always the chance that Williams could change his mind, especially if he ended the day with an 0-fer. Williams was headed for one when he stepped into the box in the eighth, with the day darkening and the skies drizzling and the fans rising to urge him toward immortality. When Williams dumped Jack Fisher's rising fastball on top of the Sox bullpen, Gowdy knew a climax when he saw one. ''Ladies and gentlemen,'' he told the listening audience, ''Ted Williams has just hit a home run in his last at-bat in the major leagues.'' Gowdy already had delivered his valedictory during a brief farewell ceremony (`It was simple ... too simple.') before the game, when Williams received a silver Paul Revere bowl. ''What set Ted Williams apart was his incredible pride,'' Gowdy told the fans that day. ''Every day he played, he tried to make himself better. He wanted to become the greatest hitter who ever lived - and I believe he did. Pride is what made him great.'' It was pride that made Williams insist on playing the full doubleheader in Philadelphia on the final day of the 1941 season after manager Joe Cronin offered to sit him and let the league mathematician round his .3995 up to .400. It was pride that prompted Williams to tell owner Tom Yawkey to cut his $125,000 salary by $35,000 after he'd hit .254 with only 10 homers in 1959. And pride that drove him to play one final season at 41, even though Yawkey had hoped he'd retire. ''Old T.S.W. doesn't have bad years,'' Williams once had boasted. He would be damned if he would retire on one. Pride was fueled by a boundless curiosity and a fanatical attention to detail. When Williams returned to Fenway after the Korean War, Gowdy recalled, he told Cronin, then the general manager, that home plate was out of line by a fraction of an inch. Cronin had it measured and found that Williams was right. ''Ted was a perfectionist in everything he did,'' Gowdy said. ''That's why he was unhappy a lot of the time. He was mad at himself, mostly.'' Williams insisted on going to Louisville during the winter to pick out the wood for his bats. He insisted on tying his own flies. When his plane caught fire over Korea, Williams insisted upon landing it instead of bailing out. ''He was the most competent man I ever met,'' Gowdy said. ''Whatever he did, he learned all about it and practiced it endlessly. Ted could have taken up needlepoint and perfected it.'' Observing Williams agonizing over the smallest details of his craft made Gowdy resolve to do the same. ''We had dinner one night and I said, `Ted, I want to thank you for helping make me a better broadcaster,''' Gowdy remembered. ''He said, `What the hell are you talking about? I don't know anything about broadcasting.' `Well, I've been watching you,' I told him. And I thought, `as good as he is, he still works at it.''' The bigger the challenge, the more Williams relished it, whether it was an Allie Reynolds fastball or an elusive game fish. Gowdy, who did several shows with Williams on ''American Sportsman,'' remembered spending time with him in Mexico, searching for a permit, a tropical trophy fish. After two days, they hadn't hooked any and the head cameraman was getting nervous. ''I'll bet you a thousand dollars I get a permit by 2 o'clock,'' Williams declared at noon. By 1:30, he had one. The best hitter who ever lived was also the best fisherman, Gowdy testifies. Marlin, salmon, bass, bonefish - Williams was the most versatile angler he'd ever seen. After he'd read ''The Old Man and the Sea,'' Williams told Gowdy that he never would have sat in the rowboat as long as Hemingway's fisherman did. He would have caught his marlin, Williams boasted, in 25 minutes. ''Theodore, I know somebody who caught more fish in one minute than you have in your whole life,'' Gowdy remembered Jack Fadden, the Sox trainer/Kid needler, telling Williams. ''Yeah, who?'' ''Our Lord Jesus Christ,'' Fadden said. ''Aww, I'll give you that one,'' Williams grumbled. ''But name me another.'' Williams was a thoroughbred, Gowdy told the crowd in 1960, a champion of sports. ''After I got through speaking, I went back to the dugout and Ted grabbed me and hugged me,'' Gowdy recalled. ''`Jeezus,' he said, `that's the nicest thing anybody's ever said about me. I want a copy.' There is no copy, I told him. It was all ad-libbed.'' Gowdy had no copy last night. And he didn't need a teleprompter to reprise his most famous call. The color footage on the big screen in center field, shot by a fan and never shown publicly until last night, brought it all back. ''A long drive to right field,'' Gowdy intoned again. ''The ball is going ... going ... '' And then Williams was gone, too, into the dugout and out of the game he'd banged around for more than two decades. Gowdy stayed in frequent touch, last chatting with him by phone a month before he died. ''I could barely hear his voice, it had grown so weak,'' he said. Four decades ago, The Kid's braggadocious voice carried all the way to Cooperstown: ''Who's the best goddamn hitter you ever saw?'' Theodore Samuel Williams. ''A misunderstood man,'' Curt Gowdy concluded. ''A proud man. A great man.''
This story ran on page F5 of the Boston Globe on 7/23/2002.
| |||||||
|
|
orty-two years ago, he sat in the broadcast booth at Fenway Park and gave Teddy Ballgame a sendoff for the ages. Last night Curt Gowdy, the voice of the Red Sox during Ted Williams's final decade at the lyric bandbox, returned to give his old friend a final hail and farewell, recreating a gray yet golden day from memory.