Ted Williams: Throw the Heat; Hold the Tortillas!

by J.A. Marzán (November 2014)

Of Ted Williams, the last .400 hitter, there is no debate over his status among baseball gods and genuine American heroes. Still, in life he invited detractors by carrying the arrogance of the greatness he knew he had since he was a kid. A Youtube video describes him as “overrated,” its author not forgiving the two times that Williams spat at fans. This attitude problem put off the press so that when he had planned to retire, on the advice of a fan, he reconsidered and kept playing to pump up his numbers to surpass the impressive 500 home-run mark and thereby pressure those journalists not disposed to voting him into the Hall of Fame in the first round.

Ironically that first-round vote was in jeopardy at the Hall of Fame for the very reason that today adds lumens to his heroic glow: because he had taken off five years to serve as pilot in the Marines. Despite a deferment, he enlisted, motivated to sign up by a secret pressure on him that other deferred baseball stars were spared. For in addition to his less-than-endearing cocky attitude’s endangering his immortality at the end of his career, another detriment incited in him an incentive to prove that he was 100% American: not the fear of being singled out with accusations of his being yellow but to vindicate himself despite any chance of his being denied recognition if it was discovered that he was really brown, that his mother was Mexican and that he grew up in a Mexican family. He had trained to fly in WWII but the war was over when he was ready, so his training was later put into service in Korea.

 In Bob Knowlin’s The Kid: Ted Williams in San Diego (2005), Williams’ Aunt Sarah complains that “they been bringing up his being Mexican,” a fact that appeared to have surfaced only with the publication of Knowlin’s biography. Until then that background was little known. One has to ask how long “they” have been “always bringing up his being Mexican” and also covering it up from wider broadcasting and if his being Mexican had anything to do with his not getting along with sportswriters and with his feeling pressured to make extra patriotic efforts.

It is curious that Williams should believe that Venzer should mean anything in particular to elicit hostility as much as curiosity and the complication of having to explain or cover up, which he does in his reference to her being part French. Except for indigenous Americans and those of African descent, in mutt criollo Americas everybody is a composite of European strains. Marzán is French Catalan and the Marzáns comprise a municipal ward of now disconnected families descending from the same lineage in Puerto Rico. A convention of ethnically self-conscious rhetorical finessing invokes those European strains over less prestigious linguistic riffraff, such as plain Mexican.

Ted’s Anglo father of English-Welsh extraction was a drunk nonentity. From that Anglo American half Williams received his surname and his complexion fairer than his brother’s  two shields from prejudice – and not much else. No evidence exists of Williams’ having any significant contact – any contact at all with his father’s family. In fact, given that his mother too was a dysfunctional parent, for reasons to be discussed ahead Williams grew up raised by his mother’s family.

Nowlin described Williams as the “first Latino” voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, also noting that when he first wrote of that background in articles before publishing his book: “they elicited quite a surprised response.” He didn’t say if those were expressions of pleasant surprise. Nowlin’s book was released in February 2005, then in August 26, 2005 The New York Times published Richard Sandomir’s piece on Latino Hall of Famers, inquiring “Who’s a Latino Baseball Legend?”: “When Major League Baseball unveiled its ballot for the Latino Legends team Tuesday, the 60 nominees excluded two of the greatest Hispanic players ever: Ted Williams and Reggie Jackson.” 

Bobby-Jo lacked the funds to continue the legal battle and frozen won. Both options are pregnant with metaphorical possibilities. Williams’ desire to have his ashes scattered over an interjurisdictional body of water evokes the disconnect between his historical person, really from nowhere, and the icon that remains immortal in the American Story. Meanwhile his body preserved frozen is the perfect metaphor of how he is remembered in American tribute, a bloodless figure of fame and baseball greatness.

Efforts to write the story of Williams “the man” come up short because all we have is the curated album of simple, glowing public relations images: the baseball star, the fisherman, the hunter, the Marine pilot. Those who know him best customarily introduce anecdotes that supposedly contradict what impressions one might have of Williams as someone locked in himself and full of himself – anecdotes that don’t leave us changing greatly our original impression. One awaits some unguarded moment of confession, of self-reflection on his life as father, husband, son, or teammate but no such sound bite is forthcoming. His single conversation is baseball. In a 2012 Washington Post story, Williams’ good friend and co-author of My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life, John Underwood, is said to have written a movie script that is now looking for a producer. One wonders what that biopic is going to produce.

Ted’s Aunt Sarah tells of her father’s, Ted’s grandfather’s, crossing the border when the first of his four children was one year old. The other three, including Sarah herself and Ted’s mother May were born in the U.S. Hostility, one gathered although Sarah does not mention it, encouraged the Venzer family to assimilate and gain acceptance. In fact, the entire family’s testimonial reads as if they had been assimilated for many generations when they were barely second generation.

When in the seventies I first read Chicano writings, I learned of a generational rebellion not just against Anglos but as well critical of earlier Mexican American  generations that caved into cultural shame and conformed to the Anglo standard, looking to find acceptance as Anglos rather than defend their ethnic uniqueness. The Venzer clan, part Basque, meaning some were white and some were Indian brown, seems to be a paradigm target of that anger. They were, in other words, of their time as immigrants, in the tradition of finding a place in The American Story by shedding the past and embracing Anglo Protestant culture.

Aunt Sarah  the siblings appear to all have Anglicized names  inserts in passing that she married a border crosser and that they ran a tortilla stand. It is evident that this cultural theme had both social and family ramifications but judging from Aunt Sarah’s conversation one doesn’t get a sense. The rest of her interview with Nowlin proceeds as if she and her husband had said they sold hotdogs. One finished the interview, then looks at the family snapshots that Nowlin provides and one is reminded, having forgotten: these people are unmistakably Mexican of native American origin.

Mystifying indeed that the Mexican-looking kid should grow up angry and incorrigible, criminal and always fighting authority, in a household where the non-Mexican-looking people, his mother and his brother, found acceptance away from their Mexican family, who would have held them back in a hostile society. In contrast, Knowlin reflects, if “Danny broke away from authority, Ted walked toward it. Authority controlled the bats and balls, the games. He played baseball at Garfield Elementary, starting out as normal recess and after-school activity, but by the age of 12 he was into his obsessive mode, swinging the bat in backyard, imagining a late-game situation at the faraway Polo Ground in New York, runners on base, Williams at the plate.” In baseball the young Ted found order in his life where in that same society Danny did not.

Baseball was America’s game (even more so back then), making its acceptance for Ted more than membership in a team. “Ted was all baseball when we were kids,” Joe Villarino told Knowlin. “The rest of us would play other sports. Ted only cared about baseball. That’s all he talked about. He never talked about girls, never had a date that I know of. Just baseball. I had a nice little girl, shared my locker at school. Not Ted. Just baseball.” Girls and dating, of course, are the crossroads of ethnic identity – and possible stigmatization.

Uncle Saul was “very respected as a baseball player in Santa Barbara,” according to Manuel Herrera, whom Nowlin cites: “Everyone knew he could pitch and he finally got a chance to show his stuff against the barn-storming major leaguers. He pitched a great game and struck out ole Babe Ruth and a bunch of the other so-called heroes of the diamond! The game was played in Santa Barbara about 1935 and I know a few people who remember the game. They were more impressed with Saul Venzer than with the major league all-stars.”

Nowlin wrote that at one semi-pro game, Ted was impressed by his uncle after an incident that he related to his cousin Dee, Saul’s daughter, and her husband David Allen. Saul had filled up the bases with nobody out. He asked the umpires for a time-out and went over to the opposing bench and took bets on his claim that they were not going to score. The team took him up on the bet and he collected their money, went back out on the mound and, according to David Allen, “either struck out two more or got a double play, Ted didn’t remember. But he won the bet.” Not only the skill of identifying pitches, then, the confidence and swagger that would define Williams’ star personality, for good or ill, obviously came from the influence of his Uncle Saul.

But while that other life brought increasing fame, he personally sought out isolation. Not driven by team spirit, his obsession was with “the science of hitting” and standing alone as the best. His two other favorite sports allowed him to pursue solitude, fishing and hunting. He sought little intimacy even with the new world in which he had reinvented himself: instructions to one of his wives, “no funerals, no weddings.”

Kahn also cites another cousin, Manuel Herrera, who once allowed John Henry to stay three months at his house, where phone bills ran up rampantly. Manuel was also turned off by the spoiled rotten kid who bragged that his father gave him anything but that he “was waiting until his father died” so that he could inherit “all the money.” Fed up with the phone bills, “Herrera eventually asked John Henry to leave and never saw him again.” Surely no family ties were broken that never really existed.

In sum, in those days when the nation more sharply or more explicitly identified itself as Anglo Protestant, Ted Williams did the American thing, and survives as a great symbol of that ceremony. In exchange for shedding an ethnic past, he attained the status of American Icon. Unfortunately, his American visage was also a mask of solitude. Surely his solitude also came from excelling and being alone at the top. Then there was that disdain of the public, which almost cost him baseball immortality. As Linn asked where Williams got his baseball knowledge, one might also inquire on the source of this hostility toward the American public that he gave up his other memory to embrace.

Ironically, Williams’ transformation into that solitary mainstream American personage makes one think of the model of the Mexican psyche that poet Octavio Paz described as the Mexican “labyrinth of solitude,” a self-defensive mask that never reveals the true inner self. Carlos Fuentes also wrote of the Mexican psyche’s way of confronting reality with a mask, a mask that becomes permanent  the Williams we see in videos and read about in websites and the books that celebrate the great ballplayer.

Baseball itself, of course, had already been integrated, and been enriched by the dissolution of the old Negro League just as it was discovering the newer waves of players from Latin America, with whom Williams did not publically or privately identify. The great irony, of course, is that today baseball sends scouts out to retrieve what natural talent is to be found throughout the Caribbean Basin of Spanish-speaking America, and that if Williams were a kid today his family might not have felt the pressure to inculcate in Ted a disconnect from their own roots in order to be true Americans.

Americans can haggle over his ethnicity and over whether he should be recognized as a “Latino” player, since he never acknowledged himself as one, and if the Latino Hall of Fame should continue to exclude him. What is truly American in this controversy is that the feud is really over to which Story he rightly belongs, the mythic or historical America. Baseball will forever be grateful that Ted Williams existed, but at some point will have to come to acknowledge without controversy its gratitude to May and the great pitching gifts of her brother Saul. At some point the country must acknowledge that Williams was a gift to the culture not from the story that begins with the Puritans but from the alternate, multicultural American Story.

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J.A. Marzán a poet, as Julio Marzán, with poems in several college textbooks, a fiction writer, and as well author of the landmark The Spanish-American Roots of William Carlos Williams. His latest book, as J.A. Marzán, is the 2014 paperback reissue of my novel-in-stories The Bonjour Gene, which was submitted by the U. of Wisconsin Press to the 2004 Pulitzer Prize.

 

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