Boys of Summer Reading: Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero

Even the most diehard non-baseball fan can usually identify a few baseball
players. Ted Williams is one of them. As such, Williams has had
more than his share of biographies. By my count, Leigh Montville’s Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero is at
least the sixth.

Montville’s book, however, is very different from the others. Montville’s is an actual biography, not a re-telling
of Ted’s baseball career – and it’s one that some people aren’t
going to like. That’s not a judgment of the book, but a fact of what it
is. People buying this book to read about Ted’s baseball career are going
to want their money back. The book does cover his career, but it does so mostly
to tell another story of Ted. This book is about Ted’s life – and
it isn’t a pretty story.

As a warning, Montville writes what was actually said. The cursing in Ted Williams’
life was evidently a constant and so it is when Montville quotes everyone. I
haven’t seen the f-word in print this much since I read Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas. I take that back – Fear and Loathing has it
less often. Some of the language is going to offend all but the heartiest of
sailors.

Like previous biographies, Montville covers the same ground of Ted’s childhood
in San Diego, though unlike the others he makes it clear that Ted was half-Mexican,
as well Ted’s first few years of professional baseball. Where this book
diverges from the others is in the details of his life outside of baseball:
his military career, his fishing, and his battles with the Boston press and
the post-baseball life. Montville details Ted’s experiences in World War
II and spends more time describing his Korean experience.

Much of Montville’s book comes from interviews with people that knew Ted:
childhood friends, fellow war veterans, people whom Ted knew during baseball’s
off-season, and teammates. Montville is clearly aware of how the memory works
and how stories change over time, and he couches the stories by clarifying that
these quotes are anecdotal and so the tales must be read with the understanding
of how things remembered from the past aren’t always perfectly recalled.


Montville says he interviewed over 400 people for the book, and he uses the
quotes continuously. That makes this book a very enjoyable read. It doesn’t
overly involve Montville’s opinion of Ted, outside of which quotes he
chose to print. It covers the unusual areas of Ted’s life that aren’t
common knowledge.

Will that make it interesting for most readers? Many of the anecdotes support
the fiery, angry baseball persona. What they reveal is how much of Ted the ballplayer
was also Ted the person.

Some of the quotes from the Boston papers were interesting. While many of us
mock the gossipy garbage about today’s players from the likes of Skip
Bayless, Rick Reilly and Phil Rogers, they are simply an un-evolved life form,
still wallowing in the primordial ooze from which good sports columnists escape.
The Boston media typed regular anti-Ted columns much in the manner, and in nearly
identical wording, to that we read about Barry Bonds today. Montville quotes
plenty of writing from the daily Boston papers from the era, including The
Boston Record, The Boston Post, The Boston American, and The Boston
Globe.


They wrote that Ted was selfish, that he “threw in the towel,” that
he was a crybaby, that he was arrogant. (However, at no point did they ask him
to pee in a cup.)

Over half of the book is devoted to Ted’s life after he retired. There
are chapters on Ted’s marriages (three of them), a lot of fishing,
women that took care of him, and his life with John Henry – much of which
started after his big stroke in 1993.

The sections involving John Henry are very unflattering to John Henry. The lengthy
coverage of John Henry’s “use” of his father and the subsequent
cryonics are covered in a clearly biased fashion, but I can’t say it isn’t
what I expected in the descriptions. The last chapter covering the last part
of Ted’s life really lays into John Henry.

All in all, the book is very interesting and I found it enjoyable. On the other
hand, if you aren’t a Ted Williams enthusiast, you probably won’t
like it – and since most people aren’t intensely interested in Ted
Williams the man, I think most people will be disappointed.