Historic film of Williams found
Colour video of slugger’s final game was sitting in a drawer for decades
Bill Murphy, a 19-year-old student at an art college in Boston, skipped class on Sept. 28, 1960, and bought a $2 (U.S.) ticket to Fenway Park. Ted Williams was playing his last game in the major leagues.
Even more auspiciously, Murphy brought his eight-millimetre colour film camera with him.
“I wasn’t a rabid fan, but something told me to go,” Murphy said last month. “I took my camera to the front row and shot scenes as I roamed freely around the park all afternoon.”
A few days after the game, Murphy developed the film. There was Williams, one of the best hitters to ever play the game, clouting the last of his 521 home runs for the Boston Red Sox in his fabled final at-bat. Murphy showed the film to his father and a few friends then tossed it into a desk drawer where it has remained since, all but hidden.
“At one point, the film was in the attic,” Murphy said.
For the past 58 years, Williams’ last game has been seen in grainy, black-and-white, newsreel-like footage. But this year, on the 100th anniversary of Williams’ birth, Murphy’s homemade movie, like a buried treasure, has finally been unearthed.
The vibrant colour footage will make its broadcast premiere Monday in a new PBS documentary made in partnership with Major League Baseball.
Murphy’s film captured each of Williams’ four plate appearances, and also shows the famous closing chapter of Williams’ long-running feud with Boston’s newspaper writers and fans when he refused, in any way, to acknowledge a roaring standing ovation that enveloped Fenway Park after the final home run.
The journey of the film, from Murphy’s desk drawer to a nostalgic baseball audience eager for new images of the epic baseball farewell, is a tale that wends through the vicissitudes of everyday life and ends with serendipitous opportunity.
Murphy, who went on to have a long career as an art director at three Boston advertising agencies, always believed his 1960 film was, as he said, “pretty good.” Still, he did not consider it potentially historic.
“I knew it was a significant occasion, and just once many years ago, I did talk to a memorabilia expert who told me it was valuable,” Murphy, now 77 and retired, said.
“But I didn’t do anything with it. It was an unknown thing — just part of my stuff that went with me for all those years.”
Experienced at editing film, he had reduced the original film to about four minutes, to include the best, most revealing scenes and sequences. He had the film transferred to Beta videotape and eventually digitized.
Several years ago, Murphy said he telephoned ESPN, but an associate producer showed little interest.
Murphy also initiated a cordial conversation with the Red Sox, but the team did not request to see the film either.
Then, one day early this year, he read about the coming PBS documentary. Murphy wrote an email to the production company that found its way to Nick Davis, the director of the film.
Davis, who had been working on the Williams project since late 2015, had scoured film archives and baseball research repositories for additional footage of Williams’ last day, which he considered crucial to the narrative of Williams’ life. “I’d given up,” Davis said. Davis set a March 2 deadline to cut the last version of the documentary. At 9:32 a.m. on the day before that deadline, Murphy’s email appeared in his inbox, describing what he had.
“I don’t know if you’re interested,” Murphy wrote. “No one but my family and a few friends has ever seen it.”
Davis’ first thought was that someone was playing a joke on him. Although he also admitted: “I nearly fell out of my chair.”
In short order, Davis was viewing the footage.
“It was just stunning — the colour, the intimacy and how Bill Murphy, God bless him, walked around to get different vantage points for each at-bat,” Davis said. “It was the Holy Grail.”
Nick Trotta, MLB’s senior director of media programing and licensing, immediately verified what was contained in Murphy’s footage, shocked by the quality of the film itself.
Trotta would not disclose what MLB paid Murphy for the rights to his film.
Murphy’s film provided Davis new perspectives for some scenes.
In the fifth inning, for example, when Williams swung and lofted a deep fly ball, Murphy was standing behind the first base dugout and caught the fans seated near home plate leaping to their feet in anticipation of a home run.
The ball was caught just in front of the right-field wall.
“Now, you could feel the excitement building during the course of the game,” Davis said. As Murphy’s camera work showed, the fans were standing throughout Williams’ threepitch final at-bat in the eighth inning.
The view of the last swing by one of baseball’s greatest hitters did not disappoint, capturing Williams’ fluid but powerful swing for all its might and gracefulness.