Read Online The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee Jr. - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Ben Bradlee Jr.
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beat, and sheer repetition was no longer an option. Moreover, the number of suburban dailies that covered the team proliferated. Soon the Boston chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America was the largest in the country, after New York’s.
By far the leading Boston sports journalist of the day—the most widely read, the most outrageous, and the most brilliant, even in the nonsports realm—was Dave Egan, a columnist for the
Record
whose nom de plume (chosen for reasons unknown) was the Colonel. And this leading light had a vendetta against Ted, to whom he referred as “T. Williams Esquire.”
Egan was about five foot seven, 150 pounds, and dapper. He alwayswore a suit and tie topped off with a stylish fedora. An elegant writer, he was a provocateur, a contrarian who delighted in cutting against the grain seven days a week. If Ted was the darling of Boston, Egan decided he had to knock him down. He was a populist rabble-rouser who targeted the haves on behalf of—he liked to think—the have-nots. And in addition to all that, he was a drunk. (When the Colonel was hors de combat, writers at the other papers would hear about it, and press-box parlor games ensued to guess who the ghostwriter of the column would be that day.)
Egan was far more educated than his brethren on the sports pages. Born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1901, the son of a milkman who fathered sixteen other children, Egan won a scholarship to Harvard, sailed through in three years, cum laude, and went on to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1925. He practiced law for a year and then went to work as a sportswriter for the
Globe,
where he had been a night office boy and had done some writing while in college.
Egan ranged widely and colorfully. When a dog wandered onto the floor of the Boston Garden once during a Celtics game, the Colonel linked the moment to his antagonism toward referees, writing that the refs had “whistled him in off the street.” He referred to New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia as “the Little Flower with the Big Pot.” In 1943, when a cabdriver struck Boston Braves manager Casey Stengel one rainy night in Kenmore Square and broke his leg, Egan suggested that the cabbie should be hailed as Man of the Year. 30 Yet Egan was far from without moral compass and dignity. His concern for racial justice and equality placed him well ahead of his time. In 1942, five years before Jackie Robinson broke the color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Egan called on Major League Baseball to integrate, and he continued to pressure the Red Sox until his death in 1958. The following year, Boston became the last team in baseball to have a black player. For his efforts, Egan was honored by the Boston chapter of the NAACP in 1948.
The core of the Egan indictment against Ted was that he was the consummate greedy individualist, “just not suited for a bicycle built for nine,” a man whose boorish on-field behavior set a poor example for young people. But his harshest charge, the one that frosted Williams the most, was that he failed in the clutch. The ultimate evidence for this, the Colonel would later claim, was that in the ten most important games of Ted’s career—the seven World Series games of 1946, the playoff game for the pennant against the Cleveland Indians in 1948, and the final two games of the 1949 season against the New York Yankees, in which theflag was on the line—he hit just .205. Williams’s defense, of course, was that it was unfair to cherry-pick ten games and ignore the countless other times when he
did
come through. Egan couldn’t have cared less.
A chronic beef of Ted’s, and of other players who were the target of Egan’s slashing prose, was that the Colonel rarely showed up in the clubhouse to allow the players he had ripped to confront him—unlike the beat writers, who were there every day. Still, Ted always read Egan carefully. At Fenway, it would be one of the jobs of Larry Corea, a clubhouse boy who
By far the leading Boston sports journalist of the day—the most widely read, the most outrageous, and the most brilliant, even in the nonsports realm—was Dave Egan, a columnist for the
Record
whose nom de plume (chosen for reasons unknown) was the Colonel. And this leading light had a vendetta against Ted, to whom he referred as “T. Williams Esquire.”
Egan was about five foot seven, 150 pounds, and dapper. He alwayswore a suit and tie topped off with a stylish fedora. An elegant writer, he was a provocateur, a contrarian who delighted in cutting against the grain seven days a week. If Ted was the darling of Boston, Egan decided he had to knock him down. He was a populist rabble-rouser who targeted the haves on behalf of—he liked to think—the have-nots. And in addition to all that, he was a drunk. (When the Colonel was hors de combat, writers at the other papers would hear about it, and press-box parlor games ensued to guess who the ghostwriter of the column would be that day.)
Egan was far more educated than his brethren on the sports pages. Born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1901, the son of a milkman who fathered sixteen other children, Egan won a scholarship to Harvard, sailed through in three years, cum laude, and went on to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1925. He practiced law for a year and then went to work as a sportswriter for the
Globe,
where he had been a night office boy and had done some writing while in college.
Egan ranged widely and colorfully. When a dog wandered onto the floor of the Boston Garden once during a Celtics game, the Colonel linked the moment to his antagonism toward referees, writing that the refs had “whistled him in off the street.” He referred to New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia as “the Little Flower with the Big Pot.” In 1943, when a cabdriver struck Boston Braves manager Casey Stengel one rainy night in Kenmore Square and broke his leg, Egan suggested that the cabbie should be hailed as Man of the Year. 30 Yet Egan was far from without moral compass and dignity. His concern for racial justice and equality placed him well ahead of his time. In 1942, five years before Jackie Robinson broke the color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Egan called on Major League Baseball to integrate, and he continued to pressure the Red Sox until his death in 1958. The following year, Boston became the last team in baseball to have a black player. For his efforts, Egan was honored by the Boston chapter of the NAACP in 1948.
The core of the Egan indictment against Ted was that he was the consummate greedy individualist, “just not suited for a bicycle built for nine,” a man whose boorish on-field behavior set a poor example for young people. But his harshest charge, the one that frosted Williams the most, was that he failed in the clutch. The ultimate evidence for this, the Colonel would later claim, was that in the ten most important games of Ted’s career—the seven World Series games of 1946, the playoff game for the pennant against the Cleveland Indians in 1948, and the final two games of the 1949 season against the New York Yankees, in which theflag was on the line—he hit just .205. Williams’s defense, of course, was that it was unfair to cherry-pick ten games and ignore the countless other times when he
did
come through. Egan couldn’t have cared less.
A chronic beef of Ted’s, and of other players who were the target of Egan’s slashing prose, was that the Colonel rarely showed up in the clubhouse to allow the players he had ripped to confront him—unlike the beat writers, who were there every day. Still, Ted always read Egan carefully. At Fenway, it would be one of the jobs of Larry Corea, a clubhouse boy who
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