Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero
By Leigh Montville
Doubleday, 513 pages, $26.95
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Leigh Montville was one of the country’s most accomplished sports journalists during his lengthy career as a Boston Globe columnist and in a shorter stint as a senior writer for Sports Illustrated magazine. In “Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero,” Montville proves himself the ideal choice to tell the story of one of the most compelling figures of America’s 20th Century.
“Ted Williams” is an engrossing and enlightening work, a must-read for anyone who subscribes to philosopher Jacques Barzun’s theory that anyone who would endeavor to understand America must first understand baseball.
There haven’t been many ballplayers like Williams, and even fewer characters.
A lifelong New Englander, Montville grew up an ardent and unabashed fan of the Boston Red Sox slugger, but rather than dilute his work, his strong feelings for “Teddy Ballgame” seem to inspire it. He wants to get to the source of his fascination, which men by the thousands from Montville’s generation shared. Intense curiosity drives his reporting and takes the reader on a voyage of discovery that sails smartly through a full spectrum of emotions.
There is, literally, never a dull moment in 493 pages of Williams’ amazingly complex life: His unsurpassed talent for hitting a baseball and the fury that drove him to perfect it. His distinguished military service in two wars. His volcanic rages, offset by a lifelong commitment to charity and social justice. His uncompromising disdain for the “Knights of the Keyboard”–Boston’s vitriolic press corps. His mercurial relationship with Red Sox fans, best exemplified by his refusal to tip his cap to acknowledge their cheers when he closed the show with a memorable home run in the final at-bat of his career in 1960. His passion for fishing. His determination to be his own man, unrelenting even in the face of disastrous relationships with his three wives and three children.
It’s not that Williams’ life hasn’t been examined before; 15 other books with Williams as the primary subject are listed in Montville’s bibliography. That total has Williams approaching Mickey Mantle as a treasure-trove of sports “literature.”
No less a presence than John Updike chronicled Williams’ final Fenway Park appearance with a 1960 New Yorker piece (“Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”), which Montville nominates for best American sports story ever written. And some writers with credentials similar to Montville’s have offered worthy magazine profiles, most notably Richard Ben Cramer for Esquire in 1986 and S.L. Price for Sports Illustrated 10 years later.
But Montville’s book is the definitive statement, exhaustively researched, skillfully written, packed with insight. Montville knows his man, and he captures him, much in the manner of David Maraniss’ “When Pride Still Mattered,” a 1999 biography of the late Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi that’s one of the best sports books ever written.
Williams was something of an accidental war hero: He initially resisted the World War II draft, claiming he was his divorced mother’s sole financial support. Scorned, as Muhammad Ali would be 26 years later for refusing induction into the Vietnam-era army, Williams decided to fight the battle on his own terms, enlisting in the Marines rather than waiting to see if the Army would draft him and embracing military aviation as vigorously as he embraced hitting.
He became a great pilot, but that didn’t stop him from grumbling when a shortage of experienced jet pilots led to his being recalled to duty for the Korean War. Flying in a squadron with future astronaut and U.S. Sen. John Glenn, Williams survived a hairy crash landing on his first mission, then flew 39 successful ones before being discharged for medical reasons.
Returning to baseball, he re-established himself as the game’s most feared hitter.
Williams had batted .406 as a 23-year-old in 1941, a figure no one else has reached in 63 subsequent seasons. He got there by going 6-for-8 in a doubleheader on the final day of the season, after his manager suggested he sit out the games to keep his average at an even .400.
Williams finished his 19-year career with a .344 batting average, 521 home runs and 1,839 runs batted in, despite losing the better part of five seasons to military service in two wars. He had a .482 on-base percentage, a .634 slugging percentage and walked three times as often as he struck out. If he didn’t achieve his oft-stated goal of being universally recognized as the greatest hitter who ever lived, he made the team picture.
And he was so much more than those staggering numbers.
In “The Teammates,” published a year after Williams’ death in 2002, David Halberstam touchingly assessed the unique, almost lifelong friendship between Williams and longtime Red Sox teammates Bobby Doerr, Dominic DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky. Citing his war-hero stature, his rugged good looks and his gruff, outspoken nature, Halberstam came to view Williams as “more John Wayne than John Wayne.”
It’s a valid comparison, but the John Wayne whom Halberstam references is a celluloid character, a cinematic creation. Montville’s parallel is Bob Knight, the volatile, all-too-real basketball coach: two outsize characters with not only a love of hunting and fishing in common, but an obsession with excellence, a tempestuous personality and a boisterous determination to live life on his own terms.
No wonder they were good friends.
Williams, born in 1918, had independence thrust upon him growing up in San Diego. His father, Sam Williams, was an itinerant photographer and a drinker who wasn’t around the modest house on Utah Avenue much. His Mexican-American mother, May Venzor Williams, was well-meaning but indifferent and somewhat overmatched as a parent, devoting all her time and energy to her work with the Salvation Army. Theodore Samuel Williams developed a similar single-mindedness for hitting a baseball, helped along by a succession of playground instructors and coaches who recognized his talent and his appreciation of male influence.
The talent was precocious: Williams was a pro at 17, signing with the Pacific Coast League’s San Diego Padres before he’d graduated from Hoover High School, and in the big leagues to stay as a 20-year-old in 1939. But the absence of a nurturing, supportive family upbringing may well have scarred him for life. Montville’s Williams seems incapable of genuine love, at odds with and occasionally overwhelmed by the world unless he had a bat or a fishing rod in his hands.
He was married and divorced three times. He had distant, difficult relationships with his three children, painfully illustrated by their roles in the grotesque cryogenics drama that had his remains committed to a so-called life-extension laboratory in Arizona rather than scattered over the waters of his favorite fishing spots in the Florida Keys following his death in July 2002.
It’s all here, and some of it ain’t pretty, most notably his ill-fated, late-in-life attempts to reconnect with his kids, to right old wrongs. But they were too far gone. As Montville tells it, they were interested only in his money and in his capacity to keep making money as he lived out his final years.
The account of John-Henry Williams, the only son, prodding his father to autograph an endless stream of memorabilia even as he battled the aftereffects of a debilitating stroke is brutal reading. John-Henry sullied Ted’s triumphant return to Fenway for the 2001 All-Star Game by outfitting him in a cheesy cap and shirt touting a failing dot-com venture in which he had an interest. And John-Henry’s scheme to freeze Ted’s remains and peddle his DNA to future batting champions reads like some bizarre science fiction.
But the book ends on an upbeat note, with Montville’s reflections and some from Williams’ associates.
” ‘The later sportswriters have him all wrong,’ ” Boston TV commentator Clark Booth says. ” ‘They never saw him play. They saw him as some kindly old father figure telling stories and saying bad words. Lovable. Ted Williams wasn’t lovable. He was interesting, fascinating, the same way Napoleon or Charlemagne or Winston Churchill was interesting, fascinating. He did great things despite great flaws. That’s the beauty of Ted Williams.’ “
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Montville’s own conclusion:
“Tromping through the woods, flying his fighter plane into the night, refusing to tip his hat, he was a caricature of the manly man who inhabited the pulp magazines of his time. His obligations never kept him from adventure. If there was no time for the give-and-take dynamics of family, no patience for his children, well, there was more time for fishing.
“His weakness was his anger, and his anger was his strength. He made the hard and damnable trade of conformity for greatness that most very successful men seem to make. . . .
“He did not hesitate often on his walk across this American landscape.
“He was Ted Williams.”
And Leigh Montville nails him.