The Luncheon Society

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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