A giant life, lived like no other

To a new generation, the name “Ted Williams” summons up little more than jokes by Jay Leno and David Letterman about cryonics. But to the previous two generations, Ted Williams was a giant -- in an era of American sports when baseball players transcended the game. Everything about him was big: his height, his batting average, his ego, the scope of his achievement, the size of his tantrums, the legend he left in his wake.

At last, a ballplayer who merits a big biography! And in “Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero,” Leigh Montville has given him one. He was, Montville writes, “closer to a figure from mythology or fiction, to a comic strip character, to Spider-Man, Superman, Popeye the Sailor Man, or more.”

Or more? Think of him as baseball’s John Wayne. If Joe DiMaggio was, as many said, baseball’s Cary Grant, surely Ted Williams was its John Wayne. In later years, said his friends, he developed a public persona using a voice that seemed to be styled on Wayne’s. It should have been the other way around; Williams was closer to the genuine article. Wayne played characters larger than life, while Williams lived a life larger than any characters. John Wayne preached patriotism while playing Marines in movies; Ted Williams saw the Korean War from the cockpit of a Marine fighter-bomber.

“Hyperbole,” says Montville, “trailed Ted Williams like a faithful hound”; one of Ted’s friends noted that he “talked in italics.” He also swore like an Irish drill sergeant, in a manner “that made his outbursts special,” Montville says. (According to a man who knew them both, General Patton “did not swear as well as Ted.”) Williams “strung the words together to make elaborate, rococo, profane poetry. There was a cadence, a rhythm to his swearing. There was a blasphemous direction too, much of the anger addressed upward toward a syphilitic Supreme Being who had let humanity down just one more time.”

Williams’ beef with God began with his mother, May Venzor Williams, who was a Mexican Baptist (thus Ted could well have claimed to be the first Latino superstar). A Salvation Army fanatic, she was so zealous that she would stoop (literally) to collecting quarters for the Lord off barroom floors. Her fervor alienated Ted’s father, Sam, who made no impression on his son’s life other than by his absence.

Neglected and resentful, Ted was left to wander the streets of his native San Diego alone, and he learned baseball on the city’s sandlots at an early age. Or rather, he learned to hit a baseball; in the manner of the man he was named for, Teddy Roosevelt, he carried a big stick. He was the last player to hit over .400 and -- most experts would still concede -- became exactly what he said he always wanted to be: the greatest hitter who ever lived.

Aside from fly-fishing, which he picked up later in life, Williams wasn’t good at much else. He was a disaster as a businessman, husband and father. Too absorbed to interrupt his vacation, he was fishing in Florida when his daughter was born in a Boston hospital. His immaturity was breathtaking. For three consecutive days, President Kennedy called to invite him to a gathering at Hyannis Port, Mass. Williams tossed the messages in the wastebasket. “Shouldn’t you tell ‘em something?” asked a friend. “Tell ‘em I’m a Nixon fan,” Williams replied. He did, however, extend a dinner invitation to former President George H. W. Bush: “You’ve got to get your butt down here! We’ve got some of the best ... sausage you ever ate!”

Unlike Richard Ben Cramer, author of “Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life,” Montville is refreshingly nonjudgmental about his superstar subject. He’s willing to present both sides of Williams’ often contradictory personality and let the reader decide which one reveals the real Ted Williams. The neglectful father and selfish husband “[carried] an entire charity for sick children, the Jimmy Fund, on his back” for years. “He not only visited but befriended.” The professed atheist was, said one of his best friends, “one of the most spiritual people I’ve ever met.”

“Ted Williams” is a first-rate biography, as far as it goes. The problem is that it goes only about halfway -- the point in the book at which Williams is out of baseball. After that, it rapidly turns into a chronicle of Williams’ tortuous relationships with his son and daughter, which resulted in the former’s incredible scheme to freeze his father’s corpse and market the DNA. (“We don’t have to take Dad’s whole body,” he reportedly said. “We can just take the head.”) John-Henry, Williams’ son, himself a failed ballplayer, conceived a plan to have “all these little Ted Williams’s running around” -- surely a thought that would cause the bravest of pitchers to wake up in a cold sweat. John-Henry, who recently died of leukemia, had no visible means of support outside of his father’s memorabilia. So mercenary was he that when his father was in the hospital for surgery shortly before his death, John-Henry forbade them to put an IV into Ted’s right arm. It would keep him from signing autographs, the nurses were told.

In the end, Ted Williams, both as a man and a ballplayer, is almost buried beneath a mountain of gossip and stories, most of them so bizarre that were they not true they would have been rejected by the supermarket tabloids. If a picture of the real Ted Williams survives, it is because he was one of a kind. DNA or no DNA, even the God he quarreled with would have trouble creating another just like him. *