In a family renowned for its athletic pursuits, Teddy was probably the most gifted

IN WHAT may have been the most public of his final round of public appearances, Sen Edward M Kennedy threw out the ceremonial first ball prior to the Red Sox’ home opener in April, continuing a tradition that began 97 years earlier when his maternal grandfather, the Boston mayor John Francis Fitzgerald, performed the honour at Fenway Park’s opening day, in 1912.

On that afternoon in April, Kennedy emerged in a golf cart piloted by Jim Rice, who had been elected to the baseball hall of fame. The Senator was clutching a cane, and waved with his free arm to the crowd as Rice delivered him near the infield. Everyone, himself included, knew they were watching a dying man, but the smile never left his face. The standing ovation lasted several minutes.

Upon reaching the dugout, Kennedy dispensed with the cane and was escorted to the mound by Rice and Boston manager Terry Francona. Rice took a place in the infield, setting up 25 feet away. The pitch was low and inside, but Rice managed to come up with it. Mission accomplished.

In a family renowned for its athletic pursuits, Teddy was probably the most gifted. His older brothers Joe and Jack played football at Harvard, but neither won a varsity letter. Bobby did get his coveted “H”, rather by default. (He was in the starting line-up for the first game of the 1947 season but broke his leg; a sympathetic coach put him in for one play of the season-ending Yale game, ensuring letterman status.)

Teddy Kennedy was a 6ft 2in, 200-pound end for the 1955 team, and caught the only touchdown pass in a 21-7 loss to Yale that year. His gridiron prowess attracted the attention of Lisle Blackbourne, then the coach of the Green Bay Packers, who sounded the future senator out in a letter prior to the NFL draft.

Teddy replied that while he was flattered by the interest, the Packers should probably not bother wasting a draft choice, since he intended to enter law school and then engage in “another contact sport – politics.”

The relationship between the Kennedy family and the Packers, initiated by that exchange, would manifest itself a few years later. In 1960, Vince Lombardi had assumed the coaching reins at Green Bay, and endorsed John F Kennedy’s candidacy for the presidency. When the Packers reached the NFL Championship Game a year later, the Berlin Wall crisis had resulted in the full-scale mobilisation of several army reserve units, and Green Bay stars Paul Hornung, Ray Nietschke, and Boyd Dowler had been called to active duty. President Kennedy intervened to see that all three were given weekend passes to participate. The Packers beat the New York Giants 37-0.

Although football had been his game, Teddy couldn’t even participate in the legendary touch games in Hyannisport after 1964. That was the year he was campaigning for his first full term in the US Senate when his plane crashed. He survived the accident, but broke his back. The injuries left him in pain for life.

He plunged headlong into sailing. Two years after the airplane crash he won his first championship in Hyannisport Regatta, and repeated the feat in 1978. Skippering his boat, he also won trophies at most of the major races on the Cape-and-Islands circuit. Ironically, it was his entry in the Edgartown Regatta that brought him to Chappaquiddick in 1969, setting the scene for the tragic death of Mary Jo Kopechne.

As a young college student, I had an autographed picture of Teddy Kennedy on my desk before I’d ever met him. When his brother Jack was elected to the presidency in 1960, Teddy had not yet reached the requisite age – 30 – to serve in the senate. JFK persuaded the Massachusetts Governor, Foster Furculo, to appoint longtime family friend Benjamin Smith II to the seat, and a special election to fill the remainder of the six-year term was deferred until 1962, by which time Teddy was 30. He faced a tougher fight in the primary against Eddie McCormack than he did in the general election, in which he swamped Republican George Cabot Lodge II.

My cousin Diane had worked for Kennedy in the ’62 campaign, and was rewarded with a position operating his Boston office thereafter, which is how I’d come by the signed photograph. In the fall of 1963 I was taking night courses at Harvard and by day working at a patronage job the senator’s office had steered me to.

One evening that fall, I’d just left my tiny flat on Beacon Hill to go to the store for a pack of cigarettes. I was walking past the Massachusetts State House when, in the gathering darkness, I ran into Ted Kennedy. I stopped and introduced myself. We’d been chatting for a few minutes when a quick pat-down of my shirt pocket reminded me of my original mission. So I asked the Senator if he happened to have a cigarette.

“Would you settle for a cigar?” he laughed. So that night the two of us smoked our cigars and talked for a while, and by the time he came up for re-election the next year I’d volunteered to work in the campaign. I was pretty young and inexperienced, so I can’t claim much credit for an election Teddy won, literally, flat on his back. But on the front page of the Boston Record-American the morning after the election was a picture taken of the celebration at the Kennedy campaign headquarters, and in the one they used there I was, right next to Joan Kennedy. My cousin phoned me up and asked “How the hell did that happen?”

I’d been back in Boston for almost a decade in 1979, working at the Boston Phoenix, when Teddy decided to run for president against the incumbent, Jimmy Carter. Within days I’d resigned my job and signed on.

Within a month I’d moved into what would be my home for the next 10 years at 122 Bowdoin Street. Downstairs Teddy’s nephew, Joe, was operating his Citizens Energy Corporation out of the same apartment that had been in the family since Jack Kennedy needed an address in the district when he ran for Congress in 1946. When JFK was killed the address on his driving licence said 122 Bowdoin Street, Boston. And, Joan Kennedy once informed me, she and Teddy had used it as their love nest in their college days.

The 1980 campaign was disastrous. The Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Iranians seized hostages, and Carter suddenly appeared “presidential” in the eyes of even previously disaffected voters. Teddy won the New York and Massachusetts primaries, but he lost those of three other New England states, and the handwriting was on the wall.

By February I signed on as a columnist with the Boston Herald, which necessarily ended any official connection with the campaign. By the time Teddy officially ended it, I was in Detroit with the Red Sox, watching on a television set in the press room at Tiger Stadium.

The brain cancer that killed him had been discovered over a year earlier, and had severely limited his presence in the senate.

At no time could his presence have been more critical than in the past few months, when his leadership and fence-building abilities were so badly needed in President Obama’s rocky battle for health-care reform.

Ironically, he probably would have stepped down to make room for a like-minded surrogate, the way Ben Smith had done for him almost half a century ago, but five years ago Massachusetts Democrats pushed through a measure that foreclosed that opportunity.

Amid fears that the then-Republican governor would appoint a conservative to John Kerry’s senate seat should he be elected president in 2004, the law was amended to ban interim appointments, instead requiring a special election to fill a senate vacancy. So Teddy hung on to the bitter end in case he was needed one more time for one more vote. As they sometimes say in football, he didn’t lose. He just ran out of time.