Ted Williams

Williams broke his elbow in the 1950 All-Star Game going up for a Ralph Kiner fly ball. Everybody thought he was done. He was back in two months. In 1954, his first full season back from Korea, he broke his collarbone in the first 10 minutes of spring training. He missed six weeks after getting a pin put in his shoulder. According to Updike, he forever looked like "a Calder mobile with one thread cut" after this. When Williams returned to the lineup against Detroit, he hit two homers, a double and four singles in a doubleheader. Yankees manager Casey Stengel said, "I'm going to have all my players put pins in their shoulders."

Through the late '50s, he battled injuries, but the real problem was his mind-set. Even though he kept up his hitting feats (.388 in 1957!), the old man grew increasingly disappointed. His team, after all, was one of the worst in baseball. In 1959, he had his worst year ever, hitting .254, the first time he had ever gone below .300. Owner Tom Yawkey asked the paunching Splinter if he wanted to hang 'em up, but Williams couldn't go out that way. Not only did he not quit, he asked for a huge salary slash -- from $125,000 to $95,000 -- possibly the first and last time that's happened in professional sports.

The 1960 season, his last, ended up being a decent year: He batted .316, drove in 72 runs and hit 29 homers. The last of those homers came in his final at-bat in Boston. While the crowd heaped huzzahs on him, he decided by second base that he couldn't tip his cap. It just wasn't his style. He ran right into the dugout and out of baseball and wouldn't come out again. His teammates prodded him to go take a bow. The umpires waved at him to get his 40-year-old ass back on the field. And the fans howled for him. But he couldn't do it. He just sat in the corner of the dugout with a huge smile on his face and said, "Fuck 'em."

Which is pretty much what he said in the ensuing years: He fished, hunted and cooked (another love) to his heart's content. He married and divorced two more women. One was a socialite model from Chicago, Lee Howard, who thought she was marrying a celebrity and instead got a dedicated fisherman who got up at 4 a.m. and disappeared for the day. The other was a former Miss Vermont, Delores Wettach, who had never heard of Ted Williams. They had two children: John Henry, born in 1968, who handles most of his father's business dealings these days and runs Hitter.net, and Claudia, who was born in 1971.

In 1966, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. He went up to Cooperstown, N.Y., gave his speech, took his plaque and went home. He didn't even go inside.

He made a splashy reappearance in the majors in 1969, managing the Washington Senators. He earned manager of the year that first season, but those good times were short-lived. "I could see it was the kind of job you suffer through," he wrote in "My Turn at Bat." And suffer he did through three more seasons as the team moved from D.C. and became the Texas Rangers. Still, they lost. He finished out his contract and moved on.

Since then, he has started his Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame in Hernando, Fla., a pilgrimage destination for young players. He met another woman, Louise Kaufman, whom he never married (he's not the marrying kind anymore), but she stayed with him longer than the rest, at least 20 years. She died three years ago. Williams isn't in the greatest shape, either. Since 1994, he's had two strokes and a broken hip, and his once-stellar vision is eroding rapidly. These days, he stays at home and receives visits from his family and close friends. And, of course, he still follows the Sox. He can't get them out of his system.

But it's not the ailing Ted Williams that America will remember. We'll remember his smooth, sweet swing flickering in sharp black and white; his long, thin figure turning with his lethally lightweight bat; that unsmiling, "just doing my job, ma'am" way he put his head down and took off for first base after he slapped another one over the wall. It's all been permanently tattooed onto the American sports consciousness. We'll remember him yelling, "Goddamn, what the hell stinks in here?" (even though we never witnessed it). And we'll remember him for his absolute passion for a boy's game.

In 1991, 50 years after Williams had hit .406, Fenway Park hosted Ted Williams Day. He got up and gave a little speech that started with the following: "I realized about 42 years ago I was playing for super-great fans. I had a love affair with them, but I never showed it. When I finally consented to do this, I started to think, 'What am I gonna say?' Then I thought it might be nice to tip my hat." And he did just that.

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