Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero (2024)

(Written in 2004)
There are few names in baseball that evoke reverence (and perhaps disgust) like the name Ted Williams. Teddy Ballgame was truly one of the game’s greats. Depending on who you ask, he was easily one of the three or four greatest to play the game. There have been a lot of books about or even by Williams, and this is one of the best.

Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero vividly captures the complex, combative Williams from his rough childhood all the way to his death and the resultant controversy and battle over his remains. Author Leigh Montville, whose experience includes time with the Boston Globe and Sports Illustrated, had done a remarkable job of telling us about Ted Williams, The Man, which includes Ted Williams, the ballplayer, Ted Williams, the Marine pilot, Ted Williams, the fisherman, Ted Williams, the vulgar, distant father.

The most amazing aspect of this book is that you almost feel like his baseball career is a minor element of the story, a footnote to Ted’s life. The book is 493 pages long (not counting the “Acknowledgements” and index), and by Page 236, Ted is already done playing baseball. Montville clearly shows that baseball was just one part of Ted’s life.

As a kid, Ted wanted nothing more than to be the greatest hitter in baseball who ever lived. Some (like me) would say he reached that goal. (Aside: One has to wonder if Barry Bond’s recent superhuman seasons will help him eclipse Williams. Then there’s this kid named Pujols in St. Louis who is making a name for himself, too…I happen to be a die-hard Cardinals fan). Ted attacked everything he did in life, striving for perfection, and hitting a baseball was only the most visible example of that. Ted’s only failures were in his marital and parental relations, but then again he didn’t have the best examples growing up.

Troubled Childhood
Anyone who has read about Williams knows all about his upbringing in San Diego. Ted was born into “the cold climate of a bad marriage” (as Montville describes it) of Sam and May Veznor Williams. Sam wasn’t around much. He drank. Ted and his brother, Danny, were not a priority for May, either. Instead, the Salvation Army was all she cared about.

The interesting thing about May is that she was Mexican (or, at least, both of her parents were Mexican). Ted Williams was half Latino…probably Major League Baseball’s first Latino star, and no one knew it.

Anyways, Ted and Danny were often left to their own devices. “The boys went for the two traditional dramatic enticements: Ted went for sports, for baseball, and Danny, two years younger, went for trouble.”

And of course, Ted had the physical gifts: big, strong, the “legendary” eye-sight. And once he put his mind to something, as mentioned above, he excelled. The early pages of the book talk about Ted’s love-affair with baseball, or, more specifically, hitting. Then came the mentors who would mean so much in Ted’s baseball life: Rod Luscomb, a San Diego playground director who “became Ted’s batting practice pitcher and confidant.” Montville quotes Williams from Ted Williams: My Life in Pictures: “I can’t give [Luscomb] enough credit for making me a ballplayer.”

It’s interesting to note that Ted, for all his shortcomings, got along well with authority in his life, including managers and umpires. Certainly Luscomb filled a void where Ted’s own father should have been. Other adult men were also surrogate fathers of a sort. Montville describes the relationship between Ted and Les Cassie, the father of a friend. One almost gets the impression that Ted did more with Les Cassie Senior than he did with Les Cassie Jr.

Another critical figure in Ted’s life was Wos Caldwell, the coach of the Hoover High School baseball team. At Hoover High, Ted was also a very good pitcher. And, before Ted had graduated from high school, “Ted had already played half of the 1936 minor league season.” He was playing for the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League.

A Glorious Career that Could Have Been More
Even if, as I stated above, Ted’s career feels like a minor element of the book, Montville doesn’t leave out any of the standard stories that have become a part of baseball lore. We read about Ted’s budding talents with the Padres, including a .291 batting average and 23 home runs in the season after he graduated from high school.

There’s Ted’s 1938 season with the Minnesota Millers before reaching Fenway. I guess hitting .366, with 46 homers and 142 RBI was reason enough for Ted Williams to make it to the majors in 1939.

There’s his rookie season: .327, 31 homers, and leading the league with 145 RBI. And then came the second season and Ted’s infamous feud with the Boston press. Ted said a few things that he shouldn’t have. The press reported it…and piled on.

“No headline would jump sales any faster than a headline involving Ted and controversy. A story on Ted was the ultimate good business,” Montville writes.

“There were writers who liked Williams, writers who despised him, writers who bounced back and forth. The ground troops were the baseball writers, appearing at the ballpark every day, chronicling what they saw in front of them. They were the irritants, buzzing around his head. The writers who move inside his head were the columnists.”

It’s hard to imagine a player who contributed to the Red Sox so much being degraded and ridiculed the way Williams was in his time. Perhaps a useful parallel is Barry Bonds. Bonds obviously elicits strong emotions and carries a lot of baggage. The press has often challenged his attitude, but never his talent, never his contributions to his team. For 20 years, the Red Sox failures were always laid squarely at the feet of Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived. It’s hard to fathom.

In 1951, Dave “The Colonel” Egan, the “ringleader” of the Anti-Williams crowed, wrote “I am on record stating, with some heat, that the Red Sox never will win the pennant so long as TWmsEsq. is around to throw sand and monkey wrenches into gears and machinery.” It boggles the mind.

As a player, Ted never liked the press, or what he called the “Knights of the keyboard.” He softened a little in his later years, but never forgot the poison from his playing time.

There is of course the magical 1941 season when Ted hit .406, the last major leaguer to hit .400. 1941 gets its own chapter, 19 pages in all, five pages devoted to the final, deciding weekend. Countless writers have detailed Ted’s .406 season, and yet Montville cover’s new ground and captures the tension, the drama of the closing days. Montville even quotes Fred Caligiuri, who started the last game of the season, the game in which Ted Williams was 2-3 and finished the season at .406.

There are the interruptions of World War II and Korea, with Ted sticking to what he thought were legitimate complaints about serving his country, and yet serving well nonetheless. As always, Ted wanted to be the best at what he did, that included being a pilot. Montville quotes Captain D.D. Gurney of the Bunker Hill Naval Air Station, “His flight instruction was completed more than two weeks ahead of schedule, and he was right up with his class in ground school subjects. He has an inquiring mind, and that is a splendid piece of flying equipment.”

There's the '46 season, when Ted returned from his time in the Marines. The Red Sox were red hot and made it to the World Series. Ted was the MVP that season. But the Cardinals won the series in seven games. The Cards used a shift when Williams batted and Ted hit just .200, just five singles, a miserable series for the game’s best hitter.

Then there’s Ted, on a fishing trip when his first child, Bobby-Jo was born. Definitely not a good PR move.

Throughout, Montville catalogs Williams’ idiosyncrasies. In his quest to be the best hitter, Ted assumed a super-human discipline at the plate, never swinging at balls out of the strike zone. A good rule in the abstract, but in the heat of the game, not always wise or practical. Montville recounts a story where, while playing the Tigers, Williams crushed a pitch and launched it into the bleachers at Fenway.

“The slugger ran the bases, didn’t shake hands with the next batter Vern Stephens at the plate, and came into the dugout in a huff. He yelled at himself even as his teammates came to congratulate him. ‘G****mn it,’ he said. ‘I never should have swung at that son of a b____.’

“‘It wasn’t a strike,’ he said.

‘’’Never should have swung.’”

“The Red Sox were in the middle of a pennant race. Williams was mad at himself because he had swung at a bad ball and hit it 14 rows back into the bleachers? He was more worried about his own little code than the pennant race?”

Then of course there’s Williams’ petulance. It’s not easy to admire Williams as a hitter and acknowledge his shortcomings as a person. There were spitting incidents. There was horrible, vile language that would shock the saltiest sailer. After one spitting incident, Ted ripped a drinking fountain off a wall in the tunnel leading to the clubhouse, flooding the tunnel.

But the very next day, after 17 years in Boston, Ted “’realized that people were for me. The writers had written that the fans should show me they didn’t want me. And I got the greatest ovation ever.’”

One fan, Phil Resnick, wrote to the Boston Globe, “A nonunderstanding, cruel press has gone the limit in crucifying a brave man and I want to reply to their viciousness. Ted had two hitches on combat missions. Ted had marital trouble. Ted had several severe injuries. Ted received a continuous barrage of abuse in the papers. Ted was booed while hitting .372” (emphasis added). Finally, the members of the press had to defend themselves. “In the noisy court of public opinion, this was a showdown Williams pretty much figured he had won.”

Then there’s 1957, “his late-career masterpiece.” At the end of that season, Ted had a .388 average and was 39. Montville tells us the key to that season was a heavier bat, 34 � ounces. Ted liked it in spring training and started the season with it. As a result, Ted wasn’t pulling the ball as much. Teams stopped shifting on him. “After the first two weeks of the season, he was hitting .474 with nine home runs. This was the best start of his career.”

Then Williams went back to his lighter bat, started pulling more pitches. “’This was the beginning of the breakthrough for me,’” Williams said. “’This was the real secret of this year.’”

If Ted could have had eight more hits, he would have hit over .400 again. At age 39!. And again, Montville paints the picture for us amazingly well.

Then of course there’s his final season, his final homer in his final at-bat, and quotes from John Updike’s famous article for The New Yorker. “Gods do not answer letters.”

Life After Baseball
After baseball, Ted could be Ted for a living, basically a paraphrase of Montville. He was a spokesman for Sears sporting goods. He could fish, visit trade shows, hunt, play for a living.

Anyway, I feel like I’m dragging this review much too long. After baseball, there were two more marriages. A son, John-Henry (more on him later) and a daughter, Claudia, were born Ted missed those, too. He started the Ted Williams Baseball Camp. Ted managed the Washington Senators (later the Texas Rangers) for four seasons, but despite some incremental improvements in team hitting, couldn’t lift them from mediocrity.

In 1966, Ted was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and Montville reprints the full text of Ted’s speech…at least I think it’s the full text. In it, Ted says he hoped “some day the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given a chance.” I love Ted Williams for that.

Montville writes, “No one ever had said this from the podium. The major leagues were seen as ‘real’ baseball, anything else inferior. Negro League players never had been on the ballot. This was a first crack in the door that ultimately would open and include Paige and Gibson and other Negro League stars in the shrine.”

There were troubles with his daughter, including drugs and supposed suicide attempts. There was foul language, and cruelty, and fishing in Florida, and Canada…all kinds of stuff.

And then there was John-Henry Williams. Montville paints a most unflattering portrait of John-Henry and I have to say I don’t doubt a word of it. John-Henry used Ted’s stature in the world of baseball collectibles to write his own meal ticket. John-Henry basically kept Ted as a slave in his own home.

Regarding the controversy over Ted’s remains, there is no doubt in my mind that Ted’s so-called agreement to be cryogenically frozen was either coerced or is an outright fabrication. The whole situation smells bad. I don’t want to recap it all, because there’s a lot to it. If you want to know why I’m so sure John-Henry is a conniving, no-good, bloodsucker, read the book for yourself. It’s a sad way to end a great book, but it is, of course, the final chapter of Ted’s life.

Well, you’re probably bored to tears right now. Sorry for going on so long. Perhaps I’ve given you an idea of how rich and vivid this book is.

I read the book in May, so I should had written this review back then. Like Peter Gammons, I do know this is the best “baseball” book since Richard Ben Cramer’s Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life. If you are a Red Sox fan, a Ted Williams fan, or a baseball fan of any devotion, you will certainly enjoy this book.

Reading this book is like watching an Indy race car roar into the lead for most of the race -- and then completely run out of fuel before the finish line.

I was all set to give it five stars based on Montville's recounting of this baseball legend's best years. In the first 200 pages, the stuff about Williams's minor-league swagger, his successes with the Red Sox, his service in World War II, his battles with the media, his near-death experience as Korean war pilot, etc., is just brilliant.

Unlike Williams's own very informative but highly sanitized autobiography of the 1970s ("My Turn at Bat"), this book gives a full picture of a genius in his prime. We get not just the building blocks of his Hall of Fame career (the MVP awards; the last man to hit .400, etc.) but also Williams's favorite swear words, his eccentric but touching choices of friends, the ups and downs of his marriage and romances during his playing career, etc.

What's more, Montville writes with wit and confidence about baseball's larger role in American society back then, too. His periodic asides to the reader are hilarious! His riffs on Williams's favorite swear words got me howling, too.

Alas, everything becomes a totally different book once Williams retires. We'd have been well-served with about 50 pages of Williams in his varied roles as a recreational fisherman, the briefly successful manager of the Washington Senators, the star pitchman for Sears, and then as a legend getting old. (Plus a few grisly pages about the people who decided (good God!) to preserve Williams's severed head in a cryogenic center after his death, instead of giving his body the simple cremation he wanted.

Unfortunately, Montville does not believe in the power of brevity. The more that Williams fades away, the fiercer Montville's reporting skills kick in. We get way too much detail about the Canadian family operators of a New Brunswick fishing hole that an aging Williams liked. We get even more pathos about Williams's estranged children and the family harmony that they did not find. And near the end, we're on a first-name basis with just about all the home-health attendants that got him in and out of wheelchairs.

I'm reminded of Peter Guralnick's biography of Sam Phillips, the record-industry dude who "discovered" Elvis and a lot of other 1950s music legends. The first 150 pages were astonishingly good. And then, once the essence of Phillips's career was over, the narrative did not get us to the finish line in a brisk and tidy way. Guralnick suffered from the grotesque curse of having gained too much access to Phillips in his dotage -- paired with a desire to make something of all those long conversations with a stroke-afflicted man who couldn't remember much.

Same thing here. Montville (ex-Sports Illustrated) embarked on this project in earnest when he was assigned to gather material a couple years ahead of time for the magazine's eventual obituary. So, inevitably, his reporting led him to the places where Williams's traces were freshest. That's why we get so much about the fishing hole, and the night nurses, and all the stuff that's both painful and tedious.

I ended up savoring every word of the book's first half, while skimming the later sections with increasing speed and frustration. My guess is that you'll do the same.