By Richard Sisk
The War Report

It takes a legend to know one.

Ted Williams, the baseball Hall of Famer and last of the .400 hitters, saw greatness in John Glenn long before the Marine fighter pilot and astronaut became a national icon as the first American to orbit Earth in 1962. Williams saw it even though he first knew Glenn as “ole’ leadass” in the Korean War.

I know this because Williams told me so in a 1998 interview as Glenn prepared to go back into space on the shuttle Discovery at age 77. The memory of it came back as the nation marked the 50th anniversary this week of Glenn’s historic flight aboard the Friendship 7 orbiter that made Americans believe we could go to the moon.

I went scrambling for my old notebooks. So, here’s another story of tribute to Glenn on the 50^th anniversary from the perspective of an odd-couple friendship forged in war — the edgy loner who turned his skill with a bat into poetry, and the small-town Ohio boy bound for over-the-horizon glory.

Those of us staked out at Cape Canaveral for the Discovery flight had heard that Glenn had invited Williams to the liftoff but nobody knew if he would show up. Williams was 80 years old then and had been ailing.

We were told he wasn’t doing interviews but I tried anyway with the guy who was working for Williams at the “Ted Williams Hitters Hall of Fame” in Hernando, Fla.

No dice.

I was working for the New York Daily News at the time and called back to New York to Bill Gallo, the greatest sports cartoonist of them all and an Iwo Jima  Marine. Bill knew Williams and maybe he could put in a word.

“Nah,” Bill said. “You’re a Marine. Call the guy back. No matter what he says, tell him you’re a Marine and you want to talk about John Glenn, the Marine. Tell him to tell Ted that.” It worked.

Williams had lost five years from baseball to World War II and Korea, but he seemed more proud of being Capt. Theodore S. Williams of the Marine Corps than he was of being the guy Joe Dimaggio called “the best hitter I ever saw.”

We were only supposed to talk on the phone for 10 minutes. It was more like 45, but it began badly. Bill had warned me that Williams was loud, and tended to be even louder on the phone. He told me to hold the phone away from my ear but I forgot in the excitement of talking to one of my idols. The decibel level just about knocked the phone out of my hand.

Williams growled “What the hell’s the matter with you? Can’t you hear?”  I didn’t think it was possible but he got even louder. I groveled and we went on from there.

“Okay, well lemme’ tell ya’ something, that guy is absolutely one gung-ho Marine. There’s nobody I admire more than John Glenn,” Williams said.

He recalled the first time he saw Glenn. They both had served as Marine pilots in World War II, Williams stateside and Glenn in the Pacific. They met in 1952 in Korea, flying F9 Panther jets for Marine Fighter Squadron 311.

At the time, it was Williams who was the national hero. In his last at-bat for the Boston Red Sox before going to war, Williams knocked one out of the park. But of course.

“So I get into K-3, which was our base over there, and we’re having a big squadron meeting, you know,” Williams said. “And there’s two guys standing over there, maybe 60 to 70 feet. And I look and I say, `That looks like the right stuff to me.’ ”

He didn’t remember who the other fellow was, but “one of them was John Glenn,” Williams said.

Glenn was the operations officer for the squadron, known as “ole’ leadass” and “magnet ass” for getting the belly of his plane shot up as he flew lower than anybody else to support troops on the ground.

I chased Glenn down a Senate hallway once to ask about the nicknames. He laughed as the elevator door closed and said “Well, you had to get down low to dig ‘em out.”

Williams often flew as Glenn’s wingman, and he marveled at Glenn’s skills in the cockpit. “Man, that guy could fly a plane,” Williams said. He said he came away from one mission thinking “The man is mad.” In fighter-jock speak, that’s the highest compliment.

On one mission, Williams’ plane took heavy hits. His hydraulics were gone, his radio was out, the plane was on fire. Glenn flew to his wingtip and pointed up. They went up into thinner air and the fire went out.

They flew back over the base. Now the problem was getting down. Other pilots gestured for Williams to bail out but he wouldn’t do it. He was 6-foot-4 and thought his knees would catch in the ejection and that would be the end of baseball.

He dropped down to the runway, skidded into a belly landing, leaped from the cockpit and ran as the plane caught fire again. I asked Williams if a story I had heard about the incident was true.

Jerry Coleman, the Yankees’ second baseman at the time, and another ballplayer were also members of the squadron. They had come to the runway, praying that Williams would make it, but they faked nonchalance as Williams ran from the plane. “Hey Ted,” they said, “that’s a lot faster than you ever ran around the bases.”

Williams said it was so. “Yeah, those guys,’ he said. “What the hell do they know?. They never got on base.”

After Williams died in 2002, Glenn spoke of Williams’ close call in an interview for Major League Baseball.  ”Well, obviously that shakes anybody up,” Glenn said. “But he went right back to flying again. He wasn’t going to chicken out on something like that.”

“We flew together quite a lot and got to know each other very well,” said Glenn. “Ted was an excellent pilot and not shy about getting in there and mixing it up. Ted may have batted .400 for the Red Sox, but he hit a thousand as a U.S. Marine.”

Before our phone conversation ended, Williams confided that Glenn had come to see him when he arrived in Florida to get ready for the launch of Discovery.

“We just started talking, you know, about the weight of the thing [the shuttle] and the pressure and all,” Williams said. “I’ve seen him excited and enthusiastic [before], but he was really excited about this trip.”

He said of Glenn, “There’s a real American hero, that guy. He’s a great man. In fact, he’s my idol.”

I asked if he thought Glenn was up to the rigors of the flight at age 77. Williams shot back: “Listen to me now – if John Glenn tells you he can do something, he can do it.”

Glenn did it. He flew 134 orbits on the nine-day mission, compared to the three on Friendship 7, and Williams made it to the liftoff and the landing of his friend.

I kicked myself after hanging up the phone. I had forgotten to ask the greatest hitter ever the obvious question. Williams’ gift was his unsurpassed hand-eye coordination, and I had been told that hand-eye was the skill that made for a great instinctive pilot.

I had wanted to ask Williams what he thought Glenn would have hit as a ballplayer. I like to think he would have said .400.

(Photo: John Glenn and Ted Williams in 1998 after Glenn’s flight aboard the Discovery space shuttle. NASA photo.)