Ben Bradlee Jr.’s <i>The Kid</i> (2013): The Most Important Sport History Book I Have Ever Read

I have long been fascinated by the way individuals have “moved” history. Therefore, biographies of great (and not-so-great) men and women have appealed to me the most, especially those accounts elaborately researched and intellectually presented. Regarding this assignment and the broad genre of sport history, readers born and raised in New England have been drawn for more than a century and a half to the historic accounts of the region's baseball heroes, sterling practitioners of the national pastime. Foremost have been the literary excursions into the affairs of New England's greatest sport preoccupation, the Boston Red Sox. Thus, my journey into revealing the most important sport history book I have “ever read” begins and ends in the surrounds of historic Fenway Park.As a third grader in 1939, in the two-room elementary school of the Atlantic coastal village of Westport, Massachusetts, sandwiched between Narraganset Bay to the south in nearby Rhode Island and Buzzards Bay to the north in equally nearby New Bedford, Massachusetts, my twin brother David and I began two cherished lifetime pursuits: (1) reading books (and often having them read to us by our maternal great-grandmother Sabins) and (2) becoming conscious of baseball, which, in most of greater New England at least, meant following the fortunes (and misfortunes) of the Boston Red Sox. Nineteen thirty-nine, of course, was the rookie year of Theodore Samuel Williams (1918–2002), soon to be known as “The Splendid Splinter,” generally acclaimed as the greatest hitter in the now 125-year history of the Red Sox franchise. But, in 1939, neither David nor I were cognizant of Williams's rookie presence in Fenway Park. Instead, the Red Sox stars we glorified were slugger Jimmy Foxx and pitcher Lefty Grove, both Baseball Hall of Fame-bound figures, well past their prime at that time in history. Over our lifetime, which continues as we find ourselves in our ninety-fourth year, we have celebrated Williams as no other Red Sox player, in fact, as no other major leaguer! For instance, the message embossed on the Ontario license plates of my battered 2004 Ford Ranger pickup (“Ole Blue”) reads: Bosox-9.In 2013, Ben Bradlee Jr.’s book The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams was published by the noted Boston publishing firm Little, Brown and Company. Bradlee Jr., born of a Boston Brahmin family in 1940, spent twenty-five years (1979–2004) as an investigative reporter and editor for the venerable Boston Globe. His extraordinary account unfolds the life and times of “Teddy Ballgame” (as members of the press often referred to Williams), revealing the Kid's high and low moments, his shining lights as well as disturbing warts. Williams's youthful San Diego, California, life, dominated as it was in the 1920s and early 1930s by a lack of parental supervision due largely to the almost daily absence of his mother, a zealous Salvation Army mission worker, and his father, a silent man of “removed” demeanor, left the Kid mostly on his own to habituate local playgrounds and the streets. The result was a youth and an adult who moved through life under his own authority, a character trait often at odds with those most caught up in his celebrity, including many of the nation's sports scribes.Arriving in the Red Sox lineup in 1939, and retiring in 1960, Williams played nineteen major league seasons. He batted 7,706 times, compiled a .344 lifetime batting average, and hit a startling .406 in 1941. No player in Major League Baseball history has hit over .400 since. Over his major league career, Williams accumulated 2,654 hits, blasted 521 home runs, batted in 1,839 runs, walked a record 2,019 times, made nineteen American League All-Star teams, and fashioned a remarkable lifetime on-base percentage of .482, the highest of any player in the recorded history of baseball. He did all this while missing the entire seasons of 1942, 1943, and 1944 and the greater part of the 1952 and 1953 seasons, periods when he served in the United States Navy and Marine Air Force as a fighter pilot instructor during World War II and as a combat fighter pilot during the Korean War, in which I myself served in the United States Air Force as an atomic armorer (1951–1955). It is, of course, awe inspiring to speculate on what Williams's lifetime career statistics might have been if he had not spent years of his baseball prime serving his country in time of need. Fittingly, Ted Williams was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1966.Williams had a Jekyll-and-Hyde persona. The owner of an often-explosive temper, at times he clashed with fans, teammates, and sportswriters. He spat and hurled obscenities at spectators, once seriously injuring an elderly woman in the head with a carelessly tossed bat. In stoic fashion time after time, year after year, he was notorious for refusing to “tip his hat” in acknowledgement of the thunderous applause from the fans for his exploits. On the other hand, Williams comforted ailing youngsters in the hospital and became a booster and donator, indeed a central figurehead, in the still-in-place Red Sox-sponsored “Jimmy Fund” for sick children. He was also one of the most strident activists in forcing the National Baseball Hall of Fame to integrate at a time when few others had the courage to take a stand.Ted Williams died on July 5, 2002. Today, in bizarre circumstances, his remains are interred in Scottsdale, Arizona, under the custody of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. His head is arranged in a steel container filled with liquid nitrogen, his body upright in a nine-foot-tall cylindrical steel tank, also filled with liquid nitrogen. Will there be yet another life for the Splendid Splinter? Stay tuned!What is it about Bradlee's The Kid that ranks it at the top of my list of important sport history books? The highest acclaims I have for any book on history, regardless of the subject, are reserved for the depth and breadth of the evidence supporting an argument or point of view and, as well, due attention paid to the old historical axiom: “context is everything.” I consider myself an empiricist rather than a theoretician. Thus, I depend on evidence and context in reporting and interpreting history, evidence of the most primary and binding quality, context to the nth degree. These two factors in historical inquiry inspire me most when they are well executed, and by Bradlee's book I am inspired to the utmost. Bradlee spent more than a decade researching and writing The Kid, the end result of which is an 855-page example of magisterial scholarship and storytelling. Consider these facts. The Kid has thirty-four chapters and an epilogue, 1,430 endnotes, twenty-five pages of comprehensive index notations, sixty-three photographic illustrations, and an appendix presenting a record of over six hundred interviews with luminary and common folks alike who knew and interacted with Williams during his lifetime. Finally, following the great slugger's passing in 2002, Bradlee's research journey was aided considerably by being granted exclusive access to Williams's private papers. There is no doubt: of the literally hundreds upon hundreds of “sports books” that I have read over the past eighty-six years, I have never read one that equals Ben Bradlee Jr.’s masterpiece.

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