Read an Excerpt
EVEN IN THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE-even as
America and the sub-nation of baseball hungrily re-embraced
him-I knew I could provoke surprise (and
more than a few arguments) when I said that Ted
Williams was not just a great ballplayer, he was a
great man.
Reputation dies hard in the baseball nation, and in
the larger industry of American iconography. Even at the
close of the century, forty years after he'd left the field,
there still attached to Ted a lingering whiff of bile from
the days when he spat toward booing Fenway fans. And
there were heartbroken hundreds who'd freshen that
scent with their stories: how he was rude to them when
they tried to interrupt him for an autograph or a grip-and-
grin photo. (The thousands who got their signa-tures
or snapshots found that unremarkable.)
In the northeast corner of the nation, there were still
thousands who blamed Ted for never hauling the Red
Sox to World Series triumph. (Someone must bear
blame for decades of disappointment when their own
rooting love was so piquant and pure.) . . . Around New
York more thousands still resented Ted-and had to re-duce
him-for contesting with Joe DiMaggio for the title
of Greatest of the Golden Age. They insisted that Ted
never won anything (and reviled him, in short, for never
being a Yankee). . . . And westward through the baseball
nation-even where the game, not a team, was the pas-sion-
historians huffed about his merit (or lack thereof)
in left field; the stat-priests essayed talmudic arguments
about how many runs he failed to drive in (because he'd
never swing at a pitch out of the strike zone); and mil-lions
of kindly, casual fans (even those who'd agree Ted
was the greatest hitter) seemed comfortable if they
could tuck him into some pigeonhole-most often as a
minor freak of nature: "Wasn't it true his eyes were twice as
good as a normal man's?" ...
They missed the point. It wasn't his eyes, it was the
avid mind behind them, and the great heart below. Ted
was the greatest hitter because he knew more about
that job than anyone else. He studied it relentlessly. If
you knew anything about it, he wanted to know it-
and RIGHT NOW! He ripped the art into knowable
shards, which he then could teach with clarity, with
conviction (something he was never short on), and
with surprising patience and generosity. That's how
he was about anything he loved. It was the love that
drove him.
Fans couldn't take their eyes off Ted because they
could feel his heart yearning with theirs. His want-in
his guilelessness he never could hide it-was ratification
for theirs. If the coin of his love flipped, and all they
could see was rage-still, it was honest currency, for
there was no counterfeit in him. Love and rage make a
warrior . . . and in the inarticulate gush of words that
attended his death in 2002, the particularity of our
loss was lost. There were endless rehearsals of his stats,
and comparisons to Ruth, Cobb, Gehrig, DiMaggio (of
course), Hornsby, Wagner, Mays, Aaron, Barry Bonds
. . . there was solemn reference to his service as a pilot in
two wars, and speculation on where Ted might have pro-truded
from the great number-pile if he hadn't lost those
five prime years . . . there were interviews that seemed
intent on reassuring fans that Ted was a nice guy. But he
wasn't a nice guy. He was an impossibly high-wide-and-handsome,
outsized, obstreperous major-league over-load
of a man who dominated dugouts and made grand
any ground he played on-because his great warrior
heart could fill ten ballparks. And latterly (here was
our loss writ large), he was our link to that time before
baseball became just another arm of the entertainment
cartel.