Williams Ted - The kid: the immortal life of Ted Williams

W hen I was a boy growing up in the mid-1950s outside Boston, Ted Williams was my hero. My bedroom was plastered with pictures of the Kid clipped from Sports Illustrated or Sport magazines, and I especially liked a large, framed, pen-and-ink drawing done by the artist Robert Riger in 1955 showing Williams in baseball repose, leaning on two bats, presumably waiting his turn to hit.

Like thousands of kids my age, I was captivated by Teds peerless batting skill and by the way he always seized and held the spotlight. He was the only reason to follow the abysmal Red Sox teams of that era. When I went to games, I was struck by the way the atmosphere at Fenway Park changed each time he came to bat. There would be an anticipatory murmur from the crowd when Ted stepped into the box. Hed knock some real or imagined dirt from his spikes, dig in, wiggle his hips, grind his hands on the handle of the bat, and hold it tight against his body, ready to face the pitcher. People never even considered leaving their seats when Williams was hitting. His at bats were events, and he himself was the main event in Boston sports from 1939 to 1960 and well into his retirement.

With his dramatic, tempestuous persona, Ted made as much news off the field as on: always feuding with newspapermen, outraged over perceived slights, spitting or gesturing at hostile fans, going off not just to one war but to two as a Marine Corps fighter pilot, getting married and divorced three times. He even made news fishing, once catching a 1,235-pound black marlin off the coast of Peru and putting on annual fly-casting exhibitions in the off-season.

I got Teds autograph once, waiting outside the players parking lot at Fenway Park with scores of other kids. Williams stopped to sign that day, which he didnt always do. He insisted on imposing some order on the unruly scene before him, and he made us take turns. I still have the ball he signed for me, on the sweet spot, of course, the ink on the signature now fading badly with the passage of more than fifty years.

And I happened to be at the ballpark on Sunday, September 21, 1958, when Ted, enraged by a rare strikeout, flung his bat in disgust, only to have it sail into the box seats near the Red Sox dugout and strike an elderly woman in the head. Mortified, Williams rushed to the first-aid room to apologize to the bloodied lady, explaining that he had lost control of the bat because the handle had sticky resin on it. The woman, a Ted fan, saw how anguished he was and consoled him, saying she knew it had been an accident.

Melodrama of that sort always seemed to attend Williams. He knew how to make an entranceand an exit, as when he took his leave from baseball by hitting a majestic home run on his last time at bat on September 28, 1960.

I kept following Ted in his retirement, with interest. He took a visible job with Sears, Roebuck, advising the chain on a line of sports and outdoor equipment. He had a syndicated column. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame the first time he was eligible, in 1966. He published his autobiography in 1969, which I remember devouring. He made a surprise return to baseball as manager of the lowly Washington Senators that same year. He wasnt particularly good at managing, but the game was better for having him back. He stayed engaged in baseball as a fan, and signed on with the Red Sox as a hitting coach. In that capacity, Williams would make godlike annual appearances at spring training, where he would hold court before worshipful young playersand the writers, whom he had outlasted and bent to his will.

Being Ted Williams seemed like a full-time job. He plied the memorabilia circuit, but not aggressively. He returned to Fenway Park for Old-Timers Games and to be honored on various occasions. He had highways and tunnels named after him. And in 1991, on the fiftieth anniversary of his signature achievementbatting .406President George H. W. Bush feted him at the White House along with Joe DiMaggio, whose fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941 was also recalled with awe. Then Ted returned solo later in the year to receive the Medal of Freedom from Bush. Those celebrations, however poignant, paled in comparison to the nationally televised spectacle of Williams, eighty and frail, returning to Fenway Park for the 1999 All-Star Game and what everyone understood would be his farewell to Boston. Living members of baseballs All-Century Team joined that years All-Stars in one of the games most memorable tableaux, swarming around Williams in adulation and refusing to leave the field despite appeals to do so by the public-address announcer.

So it seemed Ted never really left the sporting scene. When he died in 2002, I read the obituaries, the special sections, and the tributes and was struck by how much interest there still was in his life, by how many different people he had touched in different ways, and by what a rich, extraordinary life he had led. I was familiar with the Williams genrethe dozen or so previous books on the Kid, the vast majority of which had been written by adoring sportswriters who had concentrated almost exclusively on his baseball exploits. Id read most of them as a boy when they came outshort books like