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maxelson · Jul 5, 2002, 01:21 PM

<a href="http://www.boston.com/sports/redsox/news/williams_obit.htm" target="_blank">http://www.boston.com/sports/redsox/news/williams_obit.htm</a> <img border="0" title="" alt="[Frown]" src="frown.gif" />

scottiB · Jul 5, 2002, 01:25 PM

I second the

.

Mister T · Jul 5, 2002, 02:01 PM

the game of baseball has seen some truly gifted players but ted williams was a man of heart. he took part in the army...sacrificing his years of basebal prime.

he may have been the best to ever play the game.

i pity the fools who dont realize what type of human being we lost today

CaseCom · Jul 5, 2002, 02:05 PM

<img src="http://espn.go.com/media/mlb/2000/1104/photo/a_williams_vt.jpg" alt=" - " />

The greatest hitter of all time.

I never saw him play, but my best memory is of him was being introduced at the All-Star Game at Fenway a few years back and being surrounded by Tony Gwynn and all those other stars. What a touching moment.

A tip o' the cap to you, Ted.

CaseCom · Jul 5, 2002, 02:22 PM

In 1960, at age 42, Williams hit a home run in the last at-bat of his career:

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs -- hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.<hr /></blockquote>-- John Updike, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu"
The New Yorker, 1960

maxelson · Jul 5, 2002, 02:47 PM

Case- you quote one HELL of an essay. I recall updike describing the day. A less than full Fenway in a lame duck season ending game. Cold, ugly day. And to have that juxtaposed with the scene you describe.
Jeez, that was one hell of an essay.
Thanks!

CaseCom · Jul 5, 2002, 02:57 PM

Yep, it's the same one that begins with the famous line "Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ball park." Some people call it the greatest piece of sportswriting ever. I have it in a collection called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0395945143/qid=1025898901/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-6165341-3537511" target="_blank">"The Best American Sports Writing of the Century,"</a> edited by David Halberstam. Highly recommend it.

AKcrab · Jul 5, 2002, 03:19 PM

We're talking about a baseball player, right? For a minute, I thought somebody who had "changed the world" had died. Sounds to me like he didn't even like his fans, so why all this adoration?

davidflas · Jul 5, 2002, 03:44 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by AKcrab:
We're talking about a baseball player, right? For a minute, I thought somebody who had "changed the world" had died. Sounds to me like he didn't even like his fans, so why all this adoration?<hr /></blockquote>Alas, another example of the unrelented passing of a true savant. Like Mozart, he wasn't appreciated in his time because he wasn't good at handling the general public's reaction to his talent.

OldManMac · Jul 5, 2002, 04:04 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by AKcrab:
We're talking about a baseball player, right? For a minute, I thought somebody who had "changed the world" had died. Sounds to me like he didn't even like his fans, so why all this adoration?<hr /></blockquote>Because he was one of the best ever at what he did!! An infinitessimaly small percentage of people can be counted as being at the top of their craft, and they deserve recognition for that!

CaseCom · Jul 5, 2002, 06:46 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by AKcrab:
We're talking about a baseball player, right? For a minute, I thought somebody who had "changed the world" had died. Sounds to me like he didn't even like his fans, so why all this adoration?<hr /></blockquote>I could give you the benefit of the doubt, AKcrab, and assume you genuinely wanted to know why we were mourning the passing of Ted Williams. Yet somehow <a href="http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=45;t=006525#000005" target="_blank">I think not</a>. You're more interested in passing judgment on who we should and should not mourn.

But for the sake of civility, I'll pretend. A lot of people get emotional about sports. They invest a part of themselves in their favorite team, their favorite players. And even after they players have long retired, they honor them for what they did. And in the case of Williams, there was a lot of mending fences in his later years. The All-Star Game scene I mentioned above? An 80-year-old man standing, barely able to stand, in front of 35,000 cheering, adoring fans in Boston, embracing them -- and they embracing him -- as they never did before. It was a scene that made grown men cry.

You don't have to get it. You don't have to care. But don't knock us for caring.

AKcrab · Jul 5, 2002, 07:19 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by CaseCom:
You're more interested in passing judgment on who we should and should not mourn.<hr /></blockquote>Passing judgement was not the plan. I do appologize, offense was not intended (in this thread). I thought perhaps a discussion about role models could ensue, but i didn't mean to offend.
<blockquote>quote:<hr />But for the sake of civility, I'll pretend. A lot of people get emotional about sports. They invest a part of themselves in their favorite team, their favorite players. And even after they players have long retired, they honor them for what they did. And in the case of Williams, there was a lot of mending fences in his later years. The All-Star Game scene I mentioned above? An 80-year-old man standing, barely able to stand, in front of 35,000 cheering, adoring fans in Boston, embracing them -- and they embracing him -- as they never did before. It was a scene that made grown men cry.

You don't have to get it. You don't have to care. But don't knock us for caring.<hr /></blockquote>Thank you for civility. I enjoy watching sports, but that's the limit of my fascination. I truly don't understand athletes on pedestals. For some reason, I just can't see them as heroes, but we are all entitled to heroes of our own choosing, are we not?

Once again. My appologies.
edit: darn quotes..

[ 07-05-2002, 08:21 PM: Message edited by: AKcrab ]

CaseCom · Jul 5, 2002, 08:56 PM

Well, my apologies if I read too much sarcasm into your above post based on the previous thread.

The issue of role models and sports is certainly a legitimate one. I follow sports a fair amount, especially baseball, but I guess I've never considered any athlete, or any other famous person for that matter, a "role model" as far as how to live my own life. Most of my personal role models are people I have known personally, my grandfather for example. I find it hard to look up to someone I've never met as a role model.

My sports "hero" as a youngster was Rod Carew, who played baseball for the Minnesota Twins (1967-78). When he came to the plate I was on the edge of my seat, whether that seat was in the stadium or at home. I followed his statistics obsessively in the newspaper. I went to Jersey Day at Metropolitan Stadium just so I could get one of the T-shirts that bore his number 29, which I proudly wore until it was threadbare.

Was he a great guy? Beats me. I never met the man. But I loved to watch that man play baseball. When he dies (many years from now, I hope), a part of my childhood will go with him.

Anyway, back to Williams. I've always been sort of a baseball history nut. I have all kinds of baseball books. The game and the people who have played the game just fascinate me. Somewhere in a box I have "My Turn At Bat," a book Williams wrote (or had someone else ghost-write) back around 1970. He's an interesting guy, from his childhood in San Diego to serving in two wars, which someone else alluded to. And the wars between him and the media and the fans. Why did he do that? What made him so angry? I find that interesting. The best baseball books are the ones where you find out about the people, what makes them tick. Not because they're perfect, but because they're colorful -- like people anywhere.

Ty Cobb is another guy. A reprehensible human being according to every account I've read. Racist. Vindictive. But still a fascinating person, if you read the story of his life. And one of the best baseball players who ever lived.

Anyway, when one of the "greats" (in a baseball sense) passes from the scene, I know they're not the equivalent of Mahatma Gandhi or whoever. But I still feel the need to doff my cap and bow my head for a moment of silence.

zigzag · Jul 5, 2002, 10:22 PM

Idolatry is a funny thing. There's no rational basis for getting excited about something as inconsequential as sports, much less idolizing an athlete. But not everything in life has to have a rational basis. I think it was Woody Allen who said that there's more real human drama in a typical NBA playoff game than in any literary play.

Mickey Mantle was my boyhood idol, and I'm still capable of getting choked up about him. As a boy, I just saw him as an incredibly exciting athlete and a charismatic figure - I had no knowledge of his personal problems (such things didn't make the papers in those days). He wasn't a role model - he was larger than life, like a rock star or movie star. But even after I learned about his personal problems, my feelings didn't change. Along with his crippling injuries, they only made him seem more tragic, which I could relate to as an adult. Indeed, they made his achievements seem all the more remarkable - I still regard him as, at his peak, the best ever, although I'm obviously biased and don't follow the contemporary players as closely (I'm sure this will attract plenty of arguments, but that's part of the fun).

Not every great athlete can be charismatic - Ted Williams wasn't, Roger Maris wasn't (talk about tragic figures . . . ), Reggie Jackson wasn't. But they sure as hell made things happen on the field.

R.I.P. Ted.

(P.S. A funny Mickey Mantle story: When he opened his chain of chicken restaurants, as all famous athletes did in the 60's, they were trying to come up with a catchy slogan. Mick's proposal: "To get better chicken, you'd have to be a rooster".)

roger_ramjet · Jul 5, 2002, 10:59 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by CaseCom:

... Somewhere in a box I have "My Turn At Bat," a book Williams wrote (or had someone else ghost-write) back around 1970...<hr /></blockquote>"My name is Ted f*cking Williams and I'm the greatest hitter in baseball. (WHACK)" I've always loved that story he told about growing up in San Diego and hitting rocks with a broomstick - psyching himself all the while...

Friday, July 5, 2002
<a href="http://espn.go.com/classic/obit/williams_ted_obit.html" target="_blank">'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived'</a>
By Mike Meserole
Special to ESPN.com

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Ted Williams, the last major league player to hit .400 for an entire season, who was also Joe DiMaggio's archrival, John Glenn's wing man, and Boston's preeminent athlete of the 20th century, died Friday in Crystal River, Fla.

He was 83...

Williams was the second-youngest player to ever lead the majors in runs batted in (only Ty Cobb was younger) and the oldest to win a batting title. He drove in 145 runs as a 21-year-old rookie in 1939 and was 40 in 1958 when he hit .328 for the last of his six American League batting championships.

In a playing career that spanned four decades with the Red Sox and was interrupted by two military tours of duty that cost him nearly five full seasons, the 6-foot-3, 205-pound "Splendid Splinter" hit .344 with 521 home runs, 1,839 RBI, 2,019 walks, a slugging percentage of .634 that remains second to only Babe Ruth's .690, and an on-base percentage of .483 that is second to no one.

"All I want out of life," Williams once told a friend, "is that when I walk down the street folks will say, 'There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.'"

In his 1969 autobiography, "My Turn at Bat," he added, "It was the center of my heart, hitting a baseball. (Boston general manager) Eddie Collins used to say I lived for my next at bat, and that's the way it was. If there was ever a man born to be a hitter it was me."

In 1941, The Kid hit .406 in just his third season in the big leagues, but his feat was overshadowed by DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak that captivated the nation through mid-July. During the streak, Williams was able to grab the spotlight away from Joe D for just one afternoon, the All-Star Game in Detroit on July 8. In the bottom of the ninth inning with two on and two out, the American League trailing by two runs, and a full house at Briggs Stadium clamoring for a three-run homer, Williams leaned into a belt-high fastball from Claude Passeau of the Chicago Cubs and drove the ball off the right-field parapet to win the game. He would later call it, "the most thrilling hit of my career" and never was Teddy Ballgame more of a kid as he bounded around the bases, clapping his hands in childish glee.

Twelve weeks later, on Sept. 28, Williams delivered the most telling six hits of his career in a season-ending doubleheader at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Unfazed by a 3-for-15 slump and not interested in going into the record books as a .400 hitter who actually hit .39955, Ted refused manager Joe Cronin's offer to sit out the twin bill...<hr /></blockquote>Role model? Dunno. This story shows something about his character. Hitting .400 is an immense thing to do. That he�d risk that achievement in order to appease his own integrity gives a us an idea as to what kind of man he was.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />... He then took the field and went 4-for-5 in the first game and 2-for-3 in the nightcap to finish the year at a more respectable .406.

DiMaggio won the Most Valuable Player award in a close vote (291 points to 254), but the margin might have been thinner if the Yankees hadn't won the pennant by 17 games over the second place Sox. Nevertheless, the summer of '41 belonged to both players, as evidenced by the fact that in the 60 years since then no one has come within 12 games of Joe D's streak or 12 points of The Kid's average.

Unlike the imperturbable DiMaggio, who was the older of the two Californians by four years, Williams was given to tantrums when things didn't go his way. Joe said little to an adoring New York press and was revered. Ted said plenty to the less doting Boston scribes and was often reviled.

In 1940, after a sensational rookie year that saw him tip his cap regularly to appreciative crowds at Fenway Park, Williams' run production fell off despite the new bullpens in right field that moved the fences 23 feet closer to home plate. When some writers and fans started getting on him, Williams reacted by bad mouthing them right back. He complained about the criticism, groused about his salary, yearned to be traded, refused to tip his cap anymore at home, and after one frustrating game in Cleveland let off steam by whining: "Nuts to this baseball, I'd sooner be a fireman."

If he was looking for sympathy from his teammates, he didn't get it.

"Teddy is a spoiled boy," said Jimmie Foxx. "How long it will take him to grow up remains to be seen. But he'll have to grow up the hard way now."

Led by antagonistic Boston Record columnist Dave Egan, who wrote that "Williams is the prize heel ever to wear a Boston uniform," the press landed on Williams with both feet.

"Between Ted and the Boston baseball writers there existed what was perhaps the most protracted and bitter athlete-writer feud of all time," said Fred Corcoran, the legendary golf promoter and Boston native who was also Williams' business manager. "When Ted came with the Sox there were no less than nine daily newspapers on Boston. The sportswriters, always fishing for an exclusive or scrambling for a fresh angle, would seize on any scrap of gossip or conjecture and blow it up into a headline.

"They fanned the flames of controversy without malice, but without rest, and they had no qualms about investigating an athlete's private life if it sold newspapers. Turn this crew loose on a guy like Williams, who stubbornly insisted on his right to privacy, and you had all the elements of a political battle."

The mutual loathing didn't seem to affect Williams hitting in 1941 or the following year when he won his first Triple Crown by leading the majors in batting, home runs, and RBI. But it probably cost him the 1942 MVP award which the baseball writers gave to Yankee second baseman Joe Gordon by a 21-point margin. Gordon had a career year and New York finished nine games ahead of Boston, but his offensive numbers paled next to those of Williams.

During the '42 season, the first since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II, some writers accused Ted of dodging the draft when he refused to give up his exempt III-A status as sole provider for his mother. Hardly any of baseball's front line talent enlisted during that season, but Williams got most of the heat because he got hottest under the collar about it.

Yet Williams turned out to be baseball's longest-serving military warrior, missing three full seasons (1943-45) during World War II and most of the 1952 and '53 seasons when the Korean War was going on. Trained as a Navy fighter pilot and slated for combat in the South Pacific in '45, Japan surrendered before he could see action. Seven years later, at age 33, his reserve unit was recalled to active duty with the Marines and he flew 39 missions over the Korean mainland.

On Feb. 19, 1953, flying low on a bombing run far above the 38th parallel, Williams' F-9 Panther was hit by small arms fire and started leaking hydraulic fluid. With his plane shaking badly (he didn't know it was also on fire), his control panel lit up with warning lights, and his radio dead, Williams followed a fellow pilot back to base, flying without hydraulics and wrestling his stick all the way.

Approaching the landing field, an on-board explosion blew off one of the wheel doors and Williams was forced to land his crippled jet at 225 miles-an-hour and on one wheel. When the F-9 finally came to a stop at the end of the runway after skidding over 2,000 feet, Williams walked away from the burning wreck as firemen hosed it down with foam. Fortunate but enraged, he reacted to nearly auguring in as if he had just popped out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth -- he yanked off his helmet and slammed it to the ground.

"Ted Williams was what John Wayne would have liked us to think he was," said sportswriter Robert Lipsyte. "Williams was so big, and handsome, and laconic, and direct, and unafraid in that uniquely American cowboy way. To me he epitomized the sense of the athlete as gunslinger."<hr /></blockquote>About that Updike essay:

<blockquote>quote:<hr />... A 28-year-old John Updike immortalized the moment in his famous New Yorker essay "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: "Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters."

Said Williams in "My Turn at Bat:" "You can't imagine the warm feeling I had, for the very fact that I had done what every ballplayer would want to do on his last time up, having wanted to do it so badly, and knowing how the fans really felt, how happy they were for me. Maybe I should have let them know I knew, but I couldn't. It just wouldn't have been me."

One way Williams did show his true feelings for Boston and New England was by quietly devoting himself to the Jimmy Fund for children with cancer. His brother Danny had died of leukemia and for over 50 years Ted was willing to go anywhere and do anything the Jimmy Fund asked him to do as long as there were no cameras around to record him doing it...<hr /></blockquote>

CaseCom · Jul 5, 2002, 11:12 PM

Thanks for the link Roger. Great stories. That last doubleheader in '41 ... amazing!

roger_ramjet · Jul 5, 2002, 11:23 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by CaseCom:

Thanks for the link Roger. Great stories. That last doubleheader in '41 ... amazing!<hr /></blockquote>Yeah, he had it in the bag after the first game but he still insisted on going out and playing the nightcap. That's respect for the game. Guys like that I just love.

Lordx_ · Jul 5, 2002, 11:47 PM

I don't think I can really develop words to say how sad I am to lose a legend..

This should sum it up

Rest in Peace Ted Williams.