Williams, Padres Talk About Dismissal a Year Later

One by one, the Padre players left their team bus Monday and trudged onto the playing field here. And then they saw him--No. 23 for the Seattle Mariners.

Dick Williams.

One by one, they went up to greet him. Pitcher Craig Lefferts said “Hi, Dick.” Infielder Tim Flannery said, “How you doing?”

Then Harry Dunlop, Padre coach, walked up, said hello and stuck out his hand for a shake. Williams shook Dunlap’s hand, but not tightly. Williams said nothing. And then he turned his back.

So, one year later, the former Padre manager still has the same enemies and the same grudge.

He thinks Dunlap used to be a spy for Jack McKeon, the Padre general manger. He thinks Dunlap used to report to McKeon every day to let McKeon know what was going on in the clubhouse.

He says McKeon is a liar, and he says Ballard Smith, the Padre president, is a liar.

“Both of them are liars,” Williams said Monday before the Padres beat the Mariners in an exhibition, 7-5. “If you want to use it in capital letters, you can use it. They’re both liars.”

One year later, Dick Williams is free to speak his mind. Last February, when owner Joan Kroc fired him--that’s right, he was fired, sources revealed Monday--Kroc’s attorney (Beth Benes) drew up contracts mandating that Dick and his wife, Norma, and third base coach Ozzie Virgil and his wife, Stella, not speak to the media for a year regarding his dismissal.

The year is up, and Williams is talking.

His version of the incident, however, is different from the Padres.

Williams said Smith--in a meeting with McKeon and Williams in early November of 1985--told Williams he could either return as manager the last year of his contract or be bought out of the contract.

Smith and McKeon say that Smith told Williams at the beginning of their conversation that day, “We’re not going to extend your contract, Dick. But you’re going to get paid whether you manage or you don’t manage.”

As far as Smith and McKeon were concerned that was not an offer for a buy out.

And at the end of the conversation, Smith asked Williams: “Dick, do you want to manage the club this year or don’t you?”

McKeon says Williams answered: “Yes, I want to manage the club.” And then Smith said, “Fine, then you’re the manager.”

According to McKeon and Smith, Williams interpreted that conversation as an offer for a buy-out.

Williams called McKeon the next day and asked: “Did Ballard say I was going to get paid if I managed the club or if I didn’t manage the club?”

McKeon says now: “I said yes to him. But Dick interpreted it as if he (Smith) was saying, ‘Hey, if you don’t manage we’ll pay you.’ You could interpret it that way or you could interpret it: ‘Dick, if we don’t rehire you, you’re fired and you get paid anyhow.’ He was never offered a buy-out.”

Williams then told McKeon: “I don’t want to manage. I don’t want want to put up with the players or the press anymore.”

McKeon says he then suggested that Williams call Smith and tell him the same thing. Williams was about to leave on a cruise, but he reached Smith and said he wanted to leave the Padres (thinking he’d be paid for the year). Smith told Williams to think it over while he was on his cruise, and to get back to him later.

Williams left on the cruise.

“He wanted to resign, but he wanted to be paid,” Smith says. “That’s how he works. That’s his history. He always wants to get paid for a year without working . . . He’d obviously like to believe one thing (that the Padres would buy him out), and that’s fine. He wanted to believe that. I let him talk. I listened. I told him to think about what he was saying while he was on the cruise. I never told him I’d do it. He told me what he wanted to do. I said, ‘Dick, think about it and we’ll talk about it when you get back.’ He wanted to interpret that as meaning we’d do it. And thus, our problem. He wanted the money.”

When Williams returned, he found out that Virgil, his third base coach and good friend, had been fired by McKeon. McKeon figured that Williams had already resigned, and because a new manager would want his own third base coach, he’d just let Virgil go.

But Williams, meanwhile, thought Virgil’s firing was another message from McKeon and Smith that they didn’t want him back. He said he was dismayed. Eventually, word of Virgil’s firing leaked to reporters, and Kroc heard something was going on.

Smith said there’s no way he would have offered Williams a buy-out without telling Kroc.

“I never told Dick Williams I would buy out his contract,” Smith says. “That is something I would never have done without talking to Joan. Unfortunately, Dick hears what he wants to hear. There’s no question I wanted him gone, but it was not anything I could’ve done without talking to her.”

Williams says: “Ballard said he was willing to pay me off, and then he claims he didn’t (say it). But we know. My wife was on the other line. She heard it, too.”

Anyway, Kroc was upset that she hadn’t been told about Virgils’ firing, and when she heard rumors that Smith was trying to buy out Williams, she swore there would be no such buy-out. She told people close to Williams that Smith might be fired as team president.

So Kroc brought everyone together in her La Jolla home in December of 1985--Williams, Smith, McKeon and herself. She asked Williams if he wanted to return as manager, and he said yes--as long as Virgil returned with him and Dunlop was let go. Kroc agreed.

Later that day, Smith held a one-man press conference to say Williams was returning as manager.

“I thought everything was ironed out,” Williams says. “Here again, I must have been pretty naive. We were all willing to go to the press conference, but Ballard just wanted to do it by himself. We were all ready to go.

“But he was president of the club, and he said, ‘No, I’ll handle it.’ But it didn’t come out the way it should have.”

New Years Day, 1986, came and went. Things calmed down. However, Kroc did a question-and-answer interview and a reporter told her that Williams was a heavy drinker. Kroc, who has donated her time to fight alcoholism, was dumbfounded, sources said.

She was unavailable for comment, but sources close to her say she began thinking twice about Williams.

Two weeks before spring training, Williams visited Yuma (where the Padres train) to make sure his living quarters were ready to go. He still was expecting to manage.

But, one week before camp opened, he received a call from Kroc. She wanted him to come to her condo in Palm Springs to talk.

She fired him, sources say.

Norma broke into tears.

“Yes, I had gone down there (to Yuma) two weeks ahead of spring training,” Williams says. “My wife and I drove down there, and we all got situated. But (there was) a turn of events . . . Things wouldn’t have been good if I’d stayed. It was for the betterment of everybody concerned.

“(But) I love the lady (Kroc). She’s just tremendous. A lovely lady, a lovely lady. We had some real good conversations, and we’ve had some since.”

Kroc paid Williams and Virgil for 1986 in full, even after Williams accepted the Mariner job in May. But Kroc apparently grew wary of Williams as time went on. On the day of the Palm Springs meeting, Kroc put Williams in touch with Smith, who was in Australia for a McDonalds board meeting. Smith says Williams gave him a difficult time over the phone, not knowing that Kroc was listening in.

“He did say some things that obviously were not true,” Smith says. “And she (Kroc) started to get the full picture.”

Looking back at it all, Williams says: “I think we (him and Virgil) were both hurt. He (Virgil) was really hurt, and you can’t blame him. He’s an honest man, a very honest man. And I’m honest, too . . . I’ll have a book eventually that comes out, and I’ll have two or three chapters on that one guy (McKeon) . . . But we brought in a winner (in 1984, the World Series) that they’d never had before, and we’re proud of that.”

Looking back at it all, Smith says: “Dick Williams made a fine contribution to the club for three years. I’m grateful. (But) a very fine, fine man who owns a major league ballclub and who used to employ Dick told me, ‘You’ll regret the day you hired him.’ And I have since had a conversation with that gentleman and I’ve told him, ‘You were right.’

“The problem is, as fine a job as he did for three years, he was so disruptive that he really hurt what we were trying to do. He hurt the continuity of the long term program. But that’s his history. He eventually wears out his welcome.”

Everyone is still a little bitter. Williams’ family, for instance, refers to McKeon as “Traitor Jack” instead of “Trader Jack.” Jerry Coleman, the pleasant Padre broadcaster, asked Williams to do an interview Monday, and Williams turned him down.

Williams told Coleman: “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”