NOT RETIRING SORT : Unlike Ted Williams, Spahn Didn’t Go Gracefully, He Had to Be Knocked Out

EDITOR’S NOTE

Laker center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will retire after this season at 42, ending a remarkable career in the National Basketball Assn. He was planning to retire at 40 but changed his mind and returned for two more seasons.

Those two seasons have generated a great deal of comment, positive and negative, on his decision, an indication that fans are deeply interested in when, and how, great athletes retire.

In this story, Bob Oates explores how some famous athletes feel about it.

As his Oklahoma friends observed the other day, cattle rancher Warren Spahn was a National League diamond star when he bought this place, the Diamond Star ranch here in Pittsburg County, 40 years ago.

A left-handed pitcher, he was then in the midst of a Hall of Fame career.

Along the way, Spahn, whose home base in the southeastern corner of the state is a spread of 2,800 acres, pitched 363 winning games in the big leagues, most of them for the old Milwaukee Braves.

No other southpaw has ever been that successful.

In fact, no other pitcher alive today won that often.

And when his career was winding down, no other player was more reluctant to leave.

“If you’re still playing baseball in your 40s, you feel like the whole world is pressuring you to quit,” said Spahn, who in 1968 pitched his last game--a minor league game--at the age of 47.

He had been displaced in the majors three years earlier.

Recalling that traumatic period, Spahn, a 20-game winner 13 times in his 21 major league seasons, said: “The news people and everyone else kept asking: ‘Isn’t it time for you to go?’

“My attitude was, ‘Drop dead, this is my life.’

“I’ve always been my own person--and every season I felt like I could still pitch. I wouldn’t let anyone tell me that I couldn’t. I had to be convinced in my own mind’s eye--and that time never came.”

It was his extraordinary consistency that gave Spahn that kind of confidence. He’s the only pitcher who has had league-leading earned-run averages in three different decades--2.33 in 1947, 2.10 in 1953, and 3.02 in 1961.

And at 68, Spahn swears that if any team would have him now, he would still get a few hitters out.

“I loved the life of a ballplayer,” he said. “The only thing I disliked--the only thing I’ve ever regretted--was the end of the baseball season, any season. Even today, I wouldn’t (voluntarily) retire.”

ONE LAST SWING

The case of Hall of Famer Ted Williams could hardly be more different. The game’s last .400 hitter announced his retirement at age 42 and then went out and walloped a home run in his last time at bat.

He and Spahn were contemporary major leaguers in 1960--a big year for both--when Williams, a Boston Red Sox outfielder, decided to go out at the top.

From his home in north central Florida recently, called to the telephone between tennis matches, Williams, 70, said: “The (1960) Sox weren’t that good a club, (but) I wasn’t getting any encouragement to stay.

“I kept reading in the papers that old guys like me were keeping the youngsters from coming up.

“So I told myself, ‘I’ll make it easy for them. I’ll go.’ ”

After one last swing.

“To be honest with you, I was getting fed up with everything but hitting,” said Williams, a player who batted left and threw right. “(Although) I’d always had great enthusiasm for baseball, I didn’t have that old zing anymore.

“I’d still love to have hit. But the (game) and other things, the (travel), were getting harder for me.

“That very fall, the (New York) Yankees wanted me as a pinch-hitter. I knew I’d only have to pinch hit. It didn’t interest me.”

Williams, who played 19 years in the majors, has been called baseball’s best hitter since Babe Ruth.

With 514 home runs and a lifetime batting average of .344, Williams is in the top 10 on both lists. He’s the only player who is, except Ruth, who had 714 home runs and a .342 lifetime average.

And, like Spahn, Williams has no regrets about the way it all ended.

“These days, I might have played one more year for the money,” Williams said. “(In 1960) I was getting the best salary in the league, but there’s a difference between $125,000 and $2.2 million.

“For 2.2, I think I’d have put it together once more. But only once.”

‘I COULD STILL PITCH’

In the post-baseball world they share in different regions of the country, Spahn and Williams are similar in one or two respects. Both are distinguished senior citizens who are much in demand for personal appearances. And both have put on a few pounds.

In other respects, they’re as different now as they were then, when Williams was a tall, thin hitter, 6-foot-3 and 200 pounds, and Spahn was slight for a heavy-duty pitcher, standing under 6 feet and weighing about 170 pounds.

Otherwise, Spahn is still an outgoing sort whose number is in the Hartshorne telephone book. Williams, as introverted as he seemed in his American League days, can be traced sometimes now, but not easily.

Nothing about them, however, is as different as the way they left baseball--Spahn lingering, Williams leaping.

Strangely, each celebrated his 42nd year with a career-best before suddenly, and unexpectedly, plummeting.

The log:

--Spahn, at 42, led the league in complete games in 1963 and matched his best record, 23-7. Then at 43, he tumbled to 6-13. At 44, with the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants, he was 7-16. And at 45, he was in the minors.

--Williams, at 42, batted .316 in 1960 and hit more home runs--29--than he had at any time in the 1950s except 1951, when he had 30, and 1957, when he had 38. As he said: “I had more home runs per times at bat (in 1960) than I hit in any other year.” Even so, after one last big swing, Williams was gone.

Spahn’s exit seems the more painful. In 1964 he was still basking in the glow of his 23-7 the year before when, all of a sudden, he couldn’t win for losing.

Those were times when the Braves were either changing or getting ready to change owners, managers, everyday players, pitchers and even communities, and, needing money, they unloaded the stars who made Milwaukee famous--Del Crandall, Johnny Logan, Bob Buhl, Lew Burdette and others.

After Spahn lost a few with the club’s cheap new cast, the Braves exiled him to the bullpen--a 20-game winner only a few months before, the greatest pitcher they ever had.

The average 43-year-old player with a Hall of Fame warrant, his place in history secure, would have taken the hint and retired.

Not Spahn.

“It was a miserable time--for all of us--with all the changes,” he said. “But I felt like I could still pitch.”

His life got more miserable a year later when the Braves traded him to the last-place Mets, one of the worst sports teams of all time.

The average old Hall of Fame pitcher would have taken that hint.

Not Spahn.

“You won’t believe this, but I told myself, ‘I can win with the Mets,’ ” he said. “I felt like I could still pitch.”

When his record fell to 4-12, Met General Manager George Weiss called him in, and, Spahn said, advised him: “Retire, boy.”

“Not me,” Spahn said.

“Then you’re gone,” said Weiss, who traded him to San Francisco.

That was in the summer of 1965, when, as a relief pitcher for the Giants, he finished 3-4. The next spring, the Giants wouldn’t even give him a contract.

In the minors in 1966, ’67 and ‘68, as a pitching coach and manager, Spahn took the mound himself just often enough to delay his Hall of Fame eligibility for three years.

Three years.

That was Spahn’s way.

This was Williams’ way:

One damp, windy afternoon at Fenway Park in the early fall of 1960, Williams, facing Baltimore right-hander Jack Fisher, demonstrated his continuing mastery of his difficult specialty with three left-handed shots to the same place in deepest right center, the last of which went out after the wind had stopped the first two.

Then he walked into the clubhouse, stripped off his uniform for the last time, and said, “That’s all.”

A PAIR OF OPTIONS

For both Spahn and Williams, World War II ended in 1946. Each lost three baseball seasons to military service, Spahn in the Army and Williams as a Marine flyer. Williams also missed parts of two seasons in the Korean War.

The Braves were still a Boston team in July, when Spahn reported in mint condition and won four games, then asked for permission to get married.

He told the team that he met an Oklahoma girl while stationed there.

“You’re pitching Friday,” the Braves said. “You can have Saturday off, but be back Sunday.”

Compliantly, Spahn won his fifth straight start on Friday, took the next day off to be wed and returned in time to throw a home run ball Sunday, losing in relief.

“All in all, it was a great weekend,” he said.

As a ballplayer, Spahn, to hear him tell it, never knew anything but great weekends. Thus at the end, he hung on with steadily depleting skills.

By contrast, Williams had a lot left when he left.

Which is the better way to go, on top, or sliding?

Good athletes have only those two options.

Is one way better than the other?

Many commentators think so. The fading superstar is a ripe subject for criticism and often ridicule by sports fans and media people.

These groups had a field day with, for instance, Willie Mays, another Hall of Famer who slipped noticeably in the early ‘70s, but kept hanging on.

One result of such criticism is that it breeds anxiety in other athletes, who tend to overvalue the fault-finding and dogmatic opinions of total strangers.

Mike Schmidt of Philadelphia, the peerless but aging third baseman, is among the latest to be so plagued.

Worrying more about what other people might think than about his own enchantment with the game, Schmidt, who at 39 finished on the injury list a year ago, dreads overstaying his time in baseball.

“(Fans) look back and remember Willie Mays dying on the vine for the Mets,” Schmidt said the other day.

“It took them 10 years to get over that and remember that he was one of the greatest to ever play the game.

“I will not want people to look back on me and think I was dying on the vine.”

That seems to be the sentiment of most superstars--of Bjorn Borg, for instance. The Swedish tennis champion retired rich but prematurely several years ago.

And, clearly, it was Williams’ sentiment.

But there’s another one.

As Mays and Spahn both suggest, a case can be made for playing a professional sport for as many years--or as many months, or days--”as any employer will have you,” in Spahn’s phrase.

The reasoning:

--Playing big league games is simply more fun than anything else you’re likely to do the rest your life.

--In your 40s, you have the option of playing or retiring. In your 50s, when you may desperately wish to come back, you can’t.

--Never quit when there’s any doubt.

Mays summed it up one day when he confessed: “All I ever wanted was to play baseball forever.”

BILLIE JEAN’S WAY

Billie Jean King, the tennis champion who not long ago was winning a record 20 Wimbledon titles, put another spin on the topic.

She asked: “What’s good enough? If you’re the fifth- or eighth- or 10th-best brain surgeon in the world, should you quit? I don’t think so.”

In a baseball context, should Schmidt quit when he slips from No. 1 to become the fifth-or eighth- or 10th-best third baseman in the world?

King, speaking from her home in Chicago, said: “My point is just that Mike should do what he wants to do. Every person should listen to herself or himself (on retirement) and nobody else.

“If you want to play (competitively), and think you can handle it, I say why not? If you don’t want it, don’t do it--but you be the judge of that.”

The only other judges who count, King said, are the sports promoters and executives who have the last word.

“Obviously, if nobody wants you, you’re out,” she said.

“But it’s only a myth that champions have to go out on top. That’s just other people trying to make up your mind for you.”

In 1980s competitive tennis, King held her own against younger players until she was 40, when she took over as commissioner and then chief executive officer of Domino’s TeamTennis, whose season resumes July 12.

“Tennis is the sport of a lifetime,” King said. “But in competition, older players always have to pay a (physical) price to keep up with kids. It’s worth it, if you love the game.”

Warmly approving Spahn’s approach to retirement, King is also uniquely able to understand Williams’. For she left competitive sports herself after winning at Wimbledon in 1975.

Before it was too late, she came back to revel in a competitive career that lasted until 1983, when, at 39, she reached the semifinals at Wimbledon one last time.

“(In 1976) I could still have won Wimbledon,” King said. “I made a mistake when I quit (in 1975). I was listening to other people, trying to make them happy, instead of myself.

“Be sure to read (Sen.) Bill Bradley’s book (on life in the (National Basketball Assn.) on how to age gracefully on the job. You only have a complete career when you feel how it is to go all the way up, and all the way down.”

Spahn, the 363-game winner who embarrassingly lost 16 in his final year in the majors, knows exactly how it feels, King said. For Spahn also won seven times that last year.

He tasted the last drop, won the last game that was in him, struck out the last man he could. He got the last thrill--not the next-to-last nor the 50th-from-last, but the last.

If Spahn’s longing to stay in baseball cost him three years in the Hall of Fame, King said, “I’ve heard him say: ‘You can’t pitch in the Hall of Fame.’ ”

THE OLD COWHAND

Thirty years ago on the Diamond Star Ranch, a norther swept down on Oklahoma one February day--as often happens--and turned the landscape into a frigid wasteland.

That morning, in other words, it was even colder and more bleak and melancholy out there than usual.

But Spahn’s cattle still had to be fed, and as the only adult male on the premises, Spahn was elected.

He got up, went out, and did it.

Now, feeding 400 or 500 head on an Oklahoma cattle ranch isn’t like feeding the cat. You don’t just set out a few saucers of milk. You lift 50-pound sacks of corn and 68-pound bales of hay into a truck and ferry them down a rutty road to the cows’ wind-swept cafeteria.

There, either before or after cleaving the stiff wire that holds the bags together, you lift one out at a time, throw the feed around, and say, “Come and get it, girls.”

In the 1950s, that is, you did. Today they have fork lifts and other labor-saving equipment. But in the days when Spahn was winning 20 games a year for the Braves, year after year, he spent the off-season throwing 50-pound sacks and 68-pound bales in and out of a truck.

There was just one good thing about it, Spahn said: “I stayed in perfect physical condition.

“I was so ready that in 21 years (in the majors), I never had a sore arm.”

Nothing is more discomfiting to a pitcher than that. Nothing, in fact, is more discouraging to professional athletes than injuries, which happen more often to out-of-condition men and women than to others.

Spahn was continually upbeat because he was continually in shape. And it was his good health, his physical well-being, he said, that prompted his enthusiasm for baseball--which was so much a part of him that he could never bear to retire.

In the beginning, there had been less reason for optimism. His father was a Buffalo wallpaper salesman who in the Great Depression supported four daughters and two sons on $27 a week.

During high school, Spahn preferred the swimming team to baseball, but gave it up when he found that Class D baseball paid $50 a week and the Olympics nothing.

Overtaken by World War II, he rose to staff sergeant in the Army and then to second and first lieutenant when commissioned on the battlefield in Europe.

His only child, Gregory, is a Tulsa realtor with two daughters. Spahn has a second home there in the suburb of Broken Arrow, about 100 miles north of Hartshorne.

Father and son belong to two country clubs, and “sometimes play golf all week,” one Oklahoma friend said.

Jointly, father and son own the corporation that owns the Diamond Star ranch, which was so named by Spahn’s wife, LoRene, who died in 1978. She persuaded him to buy his first 60 acres here in her home county.

The ranch now rolls for 3 1/2 miles along a graveled old wagon trail--grandly renamed Savage Highway--and extends picturesquely into the distant foothills. Today a foreman is responsible for Spahn’s 500 cows.

His rambling ranch house has every modern convenience, including an indoor swimming pool. The largest oil painting in the living room is an artist’s interpretation of Milwaukee County Stadium, where he won so many of his 363 games.

That brought up a discussion about Spahn’s stamina, as demonstrated there and elsewhere. He held a big league peak for two decades. His 13 years as a 20-game winner are second only to Cy Young’s 16.

In an incredible streak at the end of his career, from age 36 to 42, Spahn led the National League in complete games for seven straight years.

How could an arm go through all that--after all the pitches it made in earlier years--without falling off? “No pitcher can hurt himself if he uses the proper mechanics,” Spahn said. “The arm is the last to go, if you treat it right.”

He considers hyper-extension the worst threat.

“You’ve got to keep the elbow bent at all times, on the hardest throws,” he said.

“Most guys today don’t pitch properly, and one problem is the speed gun, which is the worst invention of all time. They think all they have to do is throw it 95 m.p.h.

“The guys with the good mechanics are (Dwight) Gooden, (Roger) Clemens, (Nolan) Ryan and (Orel) Hershiser. There are possibly a few others, but most of the pitchers you see today won’t have very long careers.”

He said proper mechanics means, first, using both arms as the ball is pitched. Second, it means keeping the elbow in front of the body and above the shoulder.

“Pitching is a front-handed game, like golf or tennis or hitting,” he said.

Finally, good mechanics means pulling down on the ball to release it. “Don’t cast it,” he said. “Pitching is like cracking a whip. You get leverage from your other arm.”

Between seasons, ranch work also helps.

And the Diamond Star is an idyllic place to sit out the off-season, he said. If you have to sit it out somewhere.

Provided you don’t have to feed the cattle.

THE PERFECTIONIST

Ted Williams agrees with Billie Jean King today on one thing--that tennis is, at the least, one of the two best games in the world.

“I have no regrets about leaving baseball when I did,” Williams said from his home in Hernando, Florida. “But I deeply regret not playing tennis as a young man, particularly as a ballplayer. It’s a great second sport for a (pro athlete). I’m playing two or three times a week now--singles, mostly. I’d rather play singles than doubles. And I hit at least 100 (tennis) balls every day.”

At 70, Williams said he has lost some of his zest for fishing. Instead he plays both golf and tennis regularly with his son, John Henry, a student at the University of Maine, or with friends at the Florida residential development with which he is associated.

“Everyone loves to play golf with Ted,” one Florida friend said, requesting that her name be withheld. “This is a golf development, you know. And Ted is just a wonderful man. The strange thing is that he attacks tennis the way he attacked baseball--but when he gets on a golf course, he relaxes totally. He’ll do anything to make it pleasant for his (golf) foursome. In tennis, he’ll do anything to win.”

His closest friend, Bud Leavit of Bangor, Me., is a veteran newspaperman who said that what Williams likes about golf, tennis or fishing is simply being outdoors.

“I can’t see Ted making a (baseball) living in one of those domes,” he said.

Leavit, who has become a national authority on fishing since first associating with Williams, was with him 30 years ago when, unbeknown to most people, the only .400 hitter of his era was beginning to think seriously of retirement.

“We’d be fishing in Alaska or somewhere, and Ted would be silent for a long time,” Leavit said. “Then out of the blue, he’d say, ‘Hell, it’s about time I hung it up.’

“He never said why, but if you know him, you don’t have to ask. You know why he left: Ted is a perfectionist who just can’t stand mediocrity. He’s that way about fishing, too.

“He’d just never let himself be remembered as an old ballplayer who hung around after his time.”

Leavit was Williams’ guest in Boston on the day of the last home run.

“I’d told him about a young fellow who broke his neck playing football,” the writer said. “And Ted said, ‘Bring him down for a game next week.’ Four of us drove down, and he got us seats in a box behind the dugout. He ripped three that day, you know. He should have had three home runs. He came over and told us to meet him immediately afterward at his hotel, the Somerset Hotel. So Ted spent his last day in baseball with three guys from Bangor and a paraplegic.”

The Red Sox superstar who hit .388 in 1957--after having hit .406 in 1941--had spent his first day in baseball in San Diego, where his father was a professional photographer with a shop on Fifth Avenue, near the water.

“I was a good high school pitcher,” Williams said. “I could pitch.

“And I could hit.”

Could he hit!