Hence his refusal to tip his cap to the crowd or turn the other cheek to newsmen. Seeking a perfectionist’s vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it.
His basic offense against the fans has been to wish that they weren’t there. Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams’ case the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. The spitting incidents of 19 and the similar dockside courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the grandstand should be judged against this background: the left-field stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a large number of customers who have bought their way in primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams. Thus began the long exchange of backbiting, hat-flipping, booing, and spitting that has distinguished Williams’ public relations.
It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.įirst, there was the by now legendary epoch when the young bridegroom came out of the West, announced “All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say ‘There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.’ ” The dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to their horror were themselves rebuked. The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. Between our heads and the lowering clouds a frenzied organ was thundering through, with an appositeness perhaps accidental, “You maaaade me love you, I didn’t wanna do it, I didn’t wanna do it . . .” I wondered who had invited them to the party. The day before, they had spitefully smothered the Red Sox, 17–4, and neither their faces nor their drab gray visiting-team uniforms seemed very gracious. The Orioles were hitting fungos on the field. This was not necessarily his last game the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a-considering his advanced age-fine one. Williams’ retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. “ WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK” ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox’s last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MIST ER W ONDERFUL, would play in Boston. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. Photograph from Gettyįenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.
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