MISHAP AND MISUNDERSTANDING : Now Free to Talk, Seattle Skipper Dick Williams Discusses the Turmoil That Led to His Firing by the Padres

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

Dick Williams.

One by one, they went 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, then turned his back.

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

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

He says that McKeon is a liar. He also says that Ballard Smith, the Padre president, is a liar.

“Both of them are liars,” Williams said recently before a Padre-Mariner exhibition game. “If you want to use it in capital letters, you can use it. They’re both liars.”

A year later, Dick Williams is free to speak his mind. In February of 1986, when owner Joan Kroc fired him--that’s right, he was fired--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 reporters for a year regarding his dismissal.

The year is up, and Williams is talking.

His version of the developments, not surprisingly, is different from the Padres’.

Williams said that 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, McKeon says 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 reportedly said, “Fine, then you’re the manager.”

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

Williams says he 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 (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 says he told McKeon: “I don’t want to manage. I don’t 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, apparently 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 likes 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. McKeon says he figured that Williams had already resigned, and because a new manager would want his own third-base coach, he’d just let Virgil go.

Williams took Virgil’s firing as a 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 learned that 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 Virgil’s firing, and when she heard rumors that Smith, her son-in-law, was trying to buy out Williams, she swore that 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, saying that Williams was returning as manager.

“I thought everything was ironed out,” Williams said. “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.”

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 a week before camp opened, he got a call from Kroc. She wanted him to come to her condominium in Palm Springs to talk.

On the day of that meeting, according to Smith, Kroc put Williams on the phone with Smith, who was in Australia for a McDonald’s 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 (Kroc) started to get the full picture.”

Later in the day, she fired Williams, sources said.

“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.”

Looking back at it all, Smith says: “Dick Williams made a fine contribution to the club for three years. 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, apparently, is still a little bitter. Williams’ family, for instance, refers to McKeon as “traitor Jack” instead of “trader Jack.”

Jerry Coleman, the Padre broadcaster, recently asked Williams to do an interview but Williams turned him down.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” Williams said to Coleman.