Daily Archives: September 27, 2018

Allen Barra’s Boston Globe Review: ‘The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams’ by Ben Bradlee Jr.

If they ever decide to make a movie on Ted Williams’s life based on Ben Bradlee Jr.’s “The Kid,’’ I’d suggest this for the opening scene: Williams, wearing only a jock strap, a sweatshirt, and shower clogs, standing in front of a full-length mirror in a baseball clubhouse swinging a bat and repeating over and over, “My name is Ted F — in’ Williams and I’m the greatest hitter in baseball.”

“That was his mantra,” said a Detroit Tigers bat boy who ran errands for Williams when the Red Sox were in town. “He did that before every game.”

He was named for Teddy Roosevelt, and like his namesake, he carried a big stick (not literally: he preferred lighter whip-handled bats). Unlike TR, Theodore Samuel Williams never spoke softly, particularly to sportswriters, with whom he quarreled his entire life.

At his Hall of Fame induction in 1966, he was heard cursing the memory of Dave Egan, a sportswriter with whom he had feuded for nearly two decades. (Egan had died about eight years earlier.) He never forgot or forgave what he regarded as a slight from a writer or a fan. In 1956 he was fined for spitting in the direction of fans who were booing him. “I’m going to continue to give it to those characters,” he said. “Nobody’s going to make me stop spitting.”

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This is the second time that Mark Fainaru-Wada has joined The Luncheon Society. A couple of years ago, Mark and his co-author Lance Williams wrote the well-regarded “Game of Shadows,” which detailed the rise of anabolic steroids, BALCO, and the athletes whose careers were—at first-helped by these drugs—but then ultimately humiliated as their records were removed and their medal were stricken.

Back then–when the denials came steadfast and furious–Mark was convinced that Lance Armstrong was using a cocktail of performance enhancing steroids.  He was right.  In the end, Armstrong has been exposed as a fraud by his teammates and relegated to a special place where fallen heroes spend their lives in ignominy.

For these athletes, both in the Olympics and within America professional sports, it showed just how plentiful these drugs were for player use.  Most perniciously, it showed how American sports fans were more than willing to look the other way as baseball players like Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, and Sammy Sosa magically bulked up to pound an unbelievable number of baseballs out of American and National League ballparks.

Now Mark Fainaru-Wada joins his brother, Steve Fainaru, to  look at another darker area of American sports—the relationship between football and long term chronic illnesses as a result of sustained head injuries.

League of Denial. The story begins in 2002 with the death of Mike Webster, the rugged Hall of Fame Center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who went from a crowd favorite to being rendered homeless only a few years after his retirement. By the age of 50 he was dead and his the story of downward cognitive spiral became national news.

This book was central to the PBS Frontline documentary, also titled “League of Denial.”

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