This column by Dave Kindred appeared in the July 15, 2002, issue of The Sporting News, in the wake of Hall of Famer and Boston icon Ted Williams' death at 83.
Late one night years ago in Bob Knight's home, we talked about baseball. “Tell me what you know about Ted Williams,” the basketball coach said.
Well, what does a kid sportswriter know? So I said, “I'll send you a copy of the best sports story I've ever read. By John Updike, on Williams' last game.”
Because they loved baseball and fishing, because they were swaggering patriots, because they shared a disdain for fools and the media, because they worked at their crafts with a passion bordering on obsession, because they said out loud smart and inflammatory things that others could not/dared not say, Knight saw in Williams a kindred spirit.
TSN Archives: Ted Williams, 22, hits .406 for Red Sox (Nov. 20, 1941)
“I'd love to talk to him," Knight said that night, and soon enough it happened.
“He called and said, 'Knight, this is Ted Williams. What length rod did you use on those rivers in Montana? What weight line? What kind of leader did you use? How big are the flies?’"
Here Knight laughed.
“I know what this is. I got to answer these questions correctly or he's going to hang up the telephone."
There began a friendship that endured to the time of Williams' death. I. thought about it the day the great man died because, maybe, Knight made possible a day I treasure.
Jimmy Cannon, 1A to Red Smith as the best sports columnist ever, told Jerry Holtzman in the oral history “No Cheering in the Press Box,” “I've been the luckiest guy on earth. I've had a great life. I sat, most of my life, at glad events, as a sportswriter, amid friendly multitudes gathered for the purpose of pleasure.”
Many a day I've shared Cannon's wonder at the privileges that come with this work, chief among them the chance to be in the company of greatness. Such a day came in the fall of 1994 when I sat, not amid multitudes, but with one man, Ted Williams.
TSN Archives: Ted Williams, a hitter first, a hitter always (Nov. 14, 1994)
He'd had a stroke not long before, and he'd fallen after that, banging up a shoulder, and yet, as he stepped out of a car after a morning at a physical rehabilitation clinic, there was something about him. He was 76 years old, old enough, as Casey Stengel once said of himself around that age, to be dead. But that something about Ted Williams spoke of life.
I'd traveled to Williams' home in central Florida for The Sporting News because he wanted the magazine to be part of an annual awards presentation for baseball's best hitters. Williams had done some scouting as well. As we took seats by the pool at his home's back door, he said, “Knight tells me you're OK."
He said it loudly. He said everything loudly.
He was 76 years old, and his voice was a happy kid's, a high pitch to it, every word spun in italics, even explosions of italics followed by forests of exclamation points.
He'd spoken to the basketball coach the day before. "Next time you see him,” Williams said with a sparkle in his eye, “tell him he's playing too much damned golf! He's gonna lose his casting touch!!”
Such a sparkle. Old enough to be dead, loud, funny, profane, enthusiastic, passionate, burning with life, he talked about hitting for almost two hours.
An imagined bat in his hands, those hands twisting against the handle, his eyes narrowed, he talked about waiting for a pitch from the knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm.
"I was always looking for Wilhelm's knuckleball because, geez, you were going to get it. I never will forget this one day. It was in Baltimore. The ball got halfway to the plate. And I said ..."
Here the kid's eyes popped wide open. “‘Fastball!’”
Lamb chop before a wolf.
“BOOM!! LINE DRIVE TO RIGHT FIELD!!!”
A smile of contentment here.
"I don't think I ever saw another fastball from Hoyt Wilhelm."
History isn't dust. It's life. To sit with Ted Williams at age 76 is to know the Williams who 53 years earlier hit .406. It is to know the Williams of John Updike's story who hits a home run in his last at-bat, on a September day in 1960, and ignores the Fenway Park crowd's roar, circling the bases “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.”
Players and umpires tried to persuade Williams to come out of the dugout and acknowledge the beseeching fans. But he had never done that and he didn't do it then. Updike wrote, “Gods do not answer letters."
All he ever wanted, Ted Williams said, was to walk down the street and hear people say he was the greatest hitter who ever lived. Maybe he was. Give him back the four-plus seasons he gave us during World War II and as a fighter pilot in Korea, maybe he leaves Babe Ruth behind.
We told him so in his old age. There came a day of celebration in 1991 at Fenway Park. As he walked to a microphone, he carried a Red Sox cap. With that kid's smile, he tugged the cap on. “They say there's one thing I never did," he said. Then he lifted high the cap. Gods do answer letters.