The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Read Online Free Page A

1957, at age thirty-nine, was nearly as remarkable as his .406 year. Though injured, he won the batting title, then promptly did it again in 1958, at the age of forty. “If in the end I didn’t make it as the greatest hitter who ever lived—that long ago boyhood dream—I kind of enjoy thinking I might have become in those lastyears the greatest old hitter who ever lived,” Ted wrote in his autobiography,
My Turn at Bat.
    During each Williams at bat, something between a hush and a buzz suddenly filled the air as the crowd shifted from autopilot engagement to edge-of-the-seat anticipation. “I was looking around for a story one day, and someone said there was this blind guy on the first-base line,” remembered Tim Horgan, who covered the Red Sox for the
Boston Herald
and then the
Boston Evening Traveler
in the 1950s. “I went up to the man and said, ‘Pardon me for asking, but why do you come to the park? Why not listen to the game on the radio?’ He said, ‘I love the sounds of the game when Ted comes up.’ ” 7
    Red Sox fans and the rabid press corps that covered the team seemed as captivated by Ted’s personality as they were by his slugging. He was a prickly prima donna whose much-chronicled “rabbit ears” had an unerring ability to zero in on even a few scattered boos amid all the cheers. He seemed immune to receiving praise but generally couldn’t tolerate criticism. On the field, his moods ranged from sheer joy and exuberance during his rookie year in 1939 to rage and petulance later in his career.
    Williams reasoned that he was an expert at what he did, was trying his best to do even better, and thus resented any criticism. From 1940 to his last game in 1960, he swore off the time-honored baseball convention of tipping his hat to the fans. Once, after a spring training game in Miami in 1947, Ted appeared to doff his cap as he crossed home plate after hitting a home run. So alert was the press to Williams’s every move that the
Boston Globe
’s beat writer at the time, Hy Hurwitz, rushed to the clubhouse after the game and asked Ted if he had, in fact, tipped his hat. He denied that he had and said he was merely mopping his brow. Whereupon Hurwitz famously wrote: “It was the heat, not the humility.” 8
    The self-made, intellectually curious Williams was ahead of his time in regarding hitting as a science worthy of study, experimentation, and technical analysis. He coddled the blunt instruments of his success: his bats. He boned them. He cleaned them with alcohol every night. He weighed them meticulously on small scales to make sure they hadn’t gotten slightly heavier through condensation. And, acting on the improbable suggestion of a teenage boy from Chelsea, Massachusetts, he even heated his bats to keep their moisture content low.
    If anyone could get under Ted’s skin, it was reporters, a group he contemptuously called the Knights of the Keyboard. For most of Ted’s career, Boston had between seven and nine daily newspapers, plusanother half dozen or so from the surrounding communities, not to mention the New York and national press. It was the post–
Front Page
era, but Ted was still prime fodder for intense tabloid and circulation wars in Boston, his every move dissected, debated, analyzed, second-guessed, and, of course, photographed.
    A voracious consumer of his own press, Ted ignored all the positive coverage and focused only on the negative. “There were 49 million newspapers in Boston, from the
Globe
to the Brookline Something-or-Other, all ready to jump us,” he whined in
My Turn at Bat.
9 He was particularly sensitive about any stories that he felt delved unnecessarily into his private life, accused him of failing to hit in the clutch, or suggested that he was more interested in his own performance than that of the team.
    It was natural for writers to despise Williams and fear him, because he treated them like dirt. But they also knew Ted was great copy, and if they could get him