Quotes of the Day

In this, Dad, a fourth generation New Englander, was hardly unusual, but growing up when he did and where he did, he made sure to take my brother and I to a ballgame at Fenway before Ted Williams retired. I was six, my brother Kevin was eight in 1960 when Dad drove us down Route 3, (which, I see, they're finally widening to three lanes all these many years later, because the Boston commute extends so much further north these days). Artie — Dad — would drive down 3 from Chelmsford, then onto what he considered the terrifying Route 2, thence to the even more harrowing Storrow Drive and a backstreets parking space that wasn't tough to find since (you can look it up) not more than seven or eight or ten thousand fans were showing up daily to see the Bosox play back then. Bleacher seats were a quarter; field boxes less than five bucks, but still you couldn't give them away. Teddy Ballgame's twilight notwithstanding, no one was showing — or next to no one.

Dad took Kevin and me to the game. This was all about tradition and legacies — beans, cod, Boston, swanboats, the Bosox — and not at all about winning, which was a good thing because the team, Ted excepted, well and truly stunk. "You've got to see this guy play," Dad said. "He won't be playing much longer." With that game in 1960 Dad secured something for himself, too: He saw Williams play in each of four decades. He had caught Ted coming up as a brash phenom in '39. Then both men had gone off to the war. Then Dad had gotten a GI Bill deal after his discharge to attend Suffolk Law at night while working in Lowell days. (Back then you could go to law school without ever landing a B.A., and the New World Order said you had to be ed-u-cated. Dad found these night courses at Suffolk, though he never intended to be a lawyer, and so he would drive to Boston after work in pursuit of his L.L.D, while Mom, who had loved him since 1938 but had waited until the hostilities were over — they're romantic, but prudent, in Lowell — enrolled in Fanny Farmer's cooking school so she could keep Artie company each evening in the Mercury. The year was 1946 and — you can look it up — because of what the Splinter was up to, Artie and Lu didn't log a lot of class time. They would park the car, hasten to the Fens and take in the Sox. The family joke would long be that their courtship was carried out largely in the presence of Ted Williams. Perhaps it was all for the good. Their kids would turn out to be pretty fair at cramming for tests, too, and would all become diehard Bosox fans in the measure.)

I digress.

But then, I guess this whole thing is a digression.

I've wound up writing about my dad a little, Ted a little, the Sox a fair bit and others in my family a fair bit through the years. I really cannot say what has been interesting and what has been self-indulgent and — in the case of Ted and the Sox — what has been economic (in order to write off a trip to Boston on my expenses or taxes). What I do know is that I loved my Dad, Boston, Ted, the Red Sox — and I still do, in about that order — and so with the weirdness of recent weeks, I find myself compelled to type some more on these topics and the recent intersection thereof.

First, in a digression on a digression, a tangent to these tangents, I extend thanks on behalf of the family to Tom Brady and Drew Bledsoe. I live in Westchester County now and have been New York-centered for two decades, but have never wavered in my devotion to, principally, the Bosox, with the Pats second, the Celts third and, then, the Bruins. Last year, when a particularly ugly Red Sox team came apart like an old Rawlings in early autumn, it was hard on my dad, who was then 85. The Pats gave us something to talk about, week in and week out, last fall and winter. Here was an overachieving team with a classy vet and a young lion and, well, it was all you could have hoped for. I am in this journalism racket and, therefore, can score tickets or credentials (I'm not rubbing it in, I'm just saying). But I didn't chase opportunities to see the Patsies play. I was content to sit before the tube, suck down a Sam Adams and call Artie every quarter on the quarter to compare notes. I was not at the Snow Bowl or the Super Bowl, but I was there with my dad. My wife, Luci, and I have twins who just turned two, plus a four-year-old, and therefore I was alone by the tube on those two late nights, even the Super one. Luci just can't put in those kind of hours for football. So I was alone, but hardly alone. I was with Dad. Mom (my mom) was hopelessly asleep in Chelmsford, and so Dad and I would sit with our cell phones on our laps and watch the action.

"How about that!"

"In the snow!"

"Gee-zus!"

"Bledsoe!"

"Brady's really something!"

Those are excerpts.

After the season, Dad clipped a full page ad that Bledsoe had placed in the Globe. In it, Bledsoe thanked the fans of New England for all their support, and said he would never forget them, even as he led Buffalo into whatever future awaited. "Always a classy guy," was Dad's scribbled note to me. That was the key thing for Dad. Such as Bledsoe, Plunkett and Parilli; Nomar, Tiant and Lonborg; Bird, Cousy and Russell; Bourque, Bucyk and Orr: Classy guys. The Carl Everetts and Terry Glenns of the world he had little use for, even if they wore our uniforms.

Ted Williams was, of course, a classy guy. "You know how much money he raised for the little kids with cancer?" Dad would ask me if I teased him about the Kid spitting at fans. "Millions. You know how many wars he fought in? Two. Two wars, and he really fought. A Marine. None of this USO stuff."

Dad died three weeks ago. It came pretty quickly — too quickly for the family — as lung cancer claimed him at 86. My mom, sister, brother and I had noticed him getting skinnier, but had probably been in the same denial that he had existed in before receiving the X-Ray results from the Lahey Clinic in May. At the time we were told he had six months to live if he did nothing. He was too old for surgery or chemo, but radiation might help. We started researching like mad and learned about a new drug that made things more comfortable, and perhaps even shrank tumors, in elderly lung cancer patients. We found a doctor at Lahey who was one of those prescribing the drug. He confirmed that Dad might be a proper candidate. But by then Dad was scheduled for several weeks of radiation, and it was decided to finish that, then see.

Dad, a two-pack-a-day guy since before the war, had done everything he could to fight mortality in his later years, including giving up cigarettes a decade ago after a mild stroke. His kids had married late and, therefore, his five grandchildren had come into his life late. He loved them dearly and wanted to see them grow a bit. He wanted to see them throw and catch a baseball. Now, he wanted one more summer. He was sure the four-year-old cousins, Caroline and Callie, would be swimming by September. That, he wanted to see. He sent five pair of his best short pants to the tailor and had the waist taken in on each. He was getting ready for the hot weather.

It was not to be. The radiation knocked the stuffing out of him. I sensed this a bit when last I saw him, in Massachusetts, over Memorial Day weekend. My mom and siblings were seeing him every day and so changes weren't so apparent to them. But as we sat in chairs on the lawn of my sister's place in Wellesley, sipping drinks and watching the kids play, the Sox game on the radio and discussion continually circling around to how well they were doing this year, Dad looked frail. My sister and I talked about discussing with Artie's radiation doc a switch in protocols — maybe that drug's an answer? — and, then, Artie plunged into four tough days and was dead. Suddenly. Just like that. A bolt to our consciousness. My brother wound up in the hospital himself with a bleeding ulcer, and the rest of us wound up bereft. (As is always the case with each and every family, I do realize.)

Just before Dad died I had attended a semi-annual lunch of the BLOHARDS club in New York City. The Benevolent Loyal Order of Honorable and Ancient Red Sox Die Hard Sufferers of New York is not an organization to which a card carrying member of the Fifth Estate should belong, because it is hardly impartial or objective. But I'm a BLOHARD, so sue me. Anyway, at this luncheon, held before the first Yankee Stadium Bosox-Yanks set-to of '02 (won by us, by the way), I hung out for a while with the Sox broadcaster Jerry Troupiano, met the young reserve second baseman Bryant Nelson and, then, enjoyed the company of my tablemate, Bill Nowlin, and his son. Bill is the founder and head honcho of Rounder Records in Cambridge, Mass, and a Red Sox nutcase of the first water, not to mention a Ted Williams fanatic. He knew the Kid, actually knew him. Nowlin had visited him in Florida last winter and had recently contributed a piece to the Globe Sunday magazine about Williams' Spanish heritage.

I asked Nowlin how Ted was doing and, only then, realized that Ted and my dad were in the same straits. Nowlin said Williams had had heart surgery in early 2001 and had been, essentially, day-to-day ever since.

"What's Williams like?"

"Oh, he's terrific," Nowlin said.

"A classy guy?"

"Absolutely."

When someone whom you know dies, you learn some secrets. Even if you figured you knew everything, there are secrets. "Artie was very proud of that," my brother told me about Dad's war service. This happened during the week of the funeral in Chelmsford.

"Really?"

"Absolutely."

He had been a Master Sergeant in the Army, assigned to regiments that tailed the first wave on D-Day and into the Bulge. He had done well, I always assumed, but I assumed further that it hadn't meant much to a guy who was extremely modest and unforthcoming about himself. I knew he had been awarded the Bronze Star, but the medal had been lost in a house fire back in the late 1950s and he had never sought a replacement through the Veterans Administration. So, I figured, how much could it have meant to him?

As I've indicated a few times above: Well before Ted Williams became a lovable figure, my dad defended him. I assume now that this had something to do with their shared duty in World War II. I'll never know. What I do know was that much of Boston reviled the Splendid Splinter for much of his and my lifetime, but in our family, Ted was not to be reviled. Dad felt or sensed that Ted had the critical things — the things having to do with class — in proper order. And so he deserved our support.

Dad's intense fanship of Williams must have dated to that magic summer of '46, when Lu and Artie fell deeply in love. The ex Army sergeant would drive Route 3 each evening with his soon-to-be fiancee, then would cut class to watch the ex Marine pilot lead a rare and wonderful Red Sox team to the pennant, if not to the championship. Life must have looked just about perfect to Artie that summer, and Ted Williams must have looked like perfection personified. The noted nature writer Bob Boyle once told me, "I'm not amazed that the greatest hitter who ever lived was such a good fisherman, I'm amazed that the greatest salmon fisherman who ever lived could hit a curve ball 500 feet!" That's how good Williams was. The day Boyle told me that, I couldn't wait to call Dad and share the reflection.

Ted did nothing on the day my dad took Kevin and I, ages eight and six, to see him play. Oh-for-something, maybe a couple of putouts in left, but, in sum, zippo. Still, I had seen him play. Dad had done his job. He had got us started.

And then life went on. I recall Dad leaning close to the radio one evening when Kevin and I came back from fishing down by the Red House in West Chelmsford. Earl Wilson was finishing his no-hitter, a one-nothing job that he had to win himself with a homer because the Sox were such bad hitters. "Listen to this," Dad said as we came in through the screen door. "Wilson's got a no-hitter going."

I remember August and September of 1967 as if they were yesterday, I remember '75 and '78 just as vividly. I remember a game in the early '80s when Dad and I were finally in role-reversal: I took him to Fenway. It was a midweek afternoon game in April, back in the days — not so long ago — when the Sox wouldn't schedule a night game until a little later in the season, when New England warmed up a bit. Anyway, on this particular Tuesday or Wednesday, electrical power had been knocked out in Kenmore Square and, therefore, throughout Fenway Park. The ballgame that day was all hollow sounds and cheers — bat on ball, "Steeee-rike One!" "Hot peanuts!" Fist thwacking glove. Sherm Feller opened the ceremonies by leaning out of the press box window and singing the National Anthem through a bullhorn. It was wonderful, magical. I was probably 26 or 27 years old and had just landed an entry-level edit job with Sports Illustrated. I subsequently wrote an account of the special day and submitted it to our Scorecard editor. He was kind enough to run it.

Last Saturday in Chelmsford, Mom gave me something she had found in Dad's very small pile of saved possessions. It was a blown-up, framed version of the Scorecard item, headlined POWER FAILURE. "You'll want this," she told me. "This is when you took Artie to Fenway for his birthday." I hadn't remembered it had been his birthday.

I was in Chelmsford because I had taken my family up to Massachusetts for the Fourth of July; we're planning to get up there as often as we can this summer. It surprised me not at all when I learned on Friday that Ted Williams had died. "Makes sense we're up in Beantown," I said to my sister. "I can't believe, though, what's happened since Dad died. Rosie Clooney with the lung cancer. Now Ted Williams. All of Dad's favorites."

My sister had earlier expressed the opinion that if the Red Sox did win it all this year, she would hate them forever since Artie would miss it. But now we joked with one another. Let's say that all of our younger notions of Faith were correct, I suggested. Let's assume that the way we envisioned the hereafter, back when Faith could be taken on faith, was precisely the way it was. Then, certainly, in the precinct of Heaven reserved for Boston-centric, war veteran Bosox fanatics, two recent arrivals, Dad and Ted, were looking down, watching the action. Ted would certainly have enough bravado to approach Babe Ruth and tell him to cut the crap with this Curse of the Bambino stuff. "Maybe if they win it this year," Gail suggested finally, "it's actually because Dad's up there. Dad and Ted."

Yeah, maybe. But the facts are, the Bosox played like dogs last weekend and lost twice to Detroit.

To reiterate: Detroit.

Maybe Ted was having trouble getting by St. Peter. There was that divorce business on his resume, after all, and he did spit at the fans. His favorite adjective, constantly deployed during waking hours, was "Goddamned!".

I can see Dad wandering shyly out to the Pearly Gate with his good word: "You know how much he raised for the kids with cancer? Millions. You know how many wars. . . ."

Precisely a year ago in this electronic space I wrote a long, digressive, personal account of my daughter's first baseball game, a very carefully chosen minor-league contest in Lowell, Mass., between a Bosox Single-A affiliate and a Yankee counterpart. I didn't realize until re-reading it just now how much Dad was part of that story. I wrote in that piece about Dad's considered selection of the Ted Williams game for his sons, and also about how pleased he was that Caroline was coming "home" for her first game. Caroline got hit with a foul ball during that game. She was knocked out cold (everything turned out okay; read "Caroline's First Game" here). Dad, upon learning of this later in the night, expressed the opinion that he was too old for this kind of drama.

"There are a few things I wish he hadn't lived to see," I said to my sister last weekend. "I wish he hadn't seen Caroline get whacked a year ago. I wish he hadn't seen September 11. I wish he hadn't seen the church scandal.

"I guess I'm glad he didn't seen Ted Williams die. That would have made him feel even older."

We were on our way to church when I shared that notion. My sister's parish in Wellesley is St. John and St. Mary's, the now famous one where the laity has risen up to challenge Cardinal Law. That is and isn't beside the point. Dad was pleased that Gail attended a church that saw things clearly. And he would have appreciated a priest who was not shy about beginning his homily with words concerning Ted Williams.

The sermon was about perfection — apparent perfection versus the real thing — and after applauding Williams not only for his .344 lifetime average and his service in two wars but for his tireless work on behalf of kids with cancer, the priest quickly changed the subject to Jesus. In Greater Boston last weekend, that was no great journey from Teddy Ballgame to Christ. It was a perfectly sensible segue, a New England metaphor the congregation easily understood and fully appreciated. There were smiles throughout the church, and knowing nods.

"Who died?" Caroline asked me on our way to the parking lot. She's four and a half now, and has just had a month of learning far too much about death.

"Ted Williams. He was a baseball player."

"With a B hat?"

"Yes. He was the best B-hat player ever."

"Did he know Papa?"

"No. But Papa knew him."

"Maybe he'll meet Papa now."

"I certainly hope so," I said as I gave my daughter a hug. "He'd like Papa."

• Robert Sullivan
• Robert Sullivan on baseball, New England and his father's lifelong connection to Ted Williams