PriorBlog

One of the things that I know without looking up is that Ted Williams had a .344 lifetime batting average with 521 home runs. I know this because Ted Williams was my dad’s favorite baseball player to the point where there was more than one occasion during my childhood that my dad and I traveled to far away baseball card shows to get The Splendid Splinter’s autograph. In fact, the last time my dad visited, which was maybe two weeks ago, I remember having a conversation about Ted Williams’ teenage years in San Diego. Any part of Teddy Ballgame’s biography is open to us like that. It doesn’t have to be his childhood, it could be his time in the service, his stint managing the Washington Senators, his apartment at the Somerset Hotel in Kenmore square, you name it.

And you can name it because Ted Williams is such an icon. Now I don’t want to get into some sort of contest in which I try to convince you that Ted Williams is more important to my family than he is to yours, that’s not the point. I just want to make it clear that he was my father’s boyhood hero and that I consequently grew up knowing all about Williams.

Now, we all know what happened to Ted Williams after he died. Ted’s son had his father’s head cut off and frozen so that he could live forever. Does this taint a legacy? Who knows? Is it something to talk about? Absolutely.

I think it’s also worth pointing out that in a culture where celebrity supplants deity, this head freezing episode was, in it’s own way, a mini-Easter of sorts.

Which brings us to this morning. It was raining and when I locked up my bike at work I was soaking wet. I have a special shower at work, so it’s no big deal, although walking to the special shower, all wet and soaking through the building with people already dressed for work can be awkward. I used to sneak into the building through a back door, but they’ve since clamped down on security, and now I have to get in through the main entrance.

Today when I got to the front desk all soaked and muddied, I had to wait to show my badge because there was a visitor there ahead of me, an older guy with a folder full of Red Sox pictures. As the guy behind the front desk searched the computer for the phone number of whoever the guy had an appointment with, the two of them talked about Ted Williams.

“It’s too bad he’s dead now,” the visitor said.

“Well, he’s only half-dead,” I joked.

The visitor gave me a quick but nasty look as if to say that he had heard what I had said, but was going to pretend he hadn’t.

I began to qualify my previous statement by reminding them of Ted Williams’ frozen head, but the conversation between them was now sealed off from me, so I ended up mumbling something about the lab in Florida while both of them ignored me. I would have liked nothing more at this point than to have walked away, but I had not yet gotten the green light, that is, the security guy behind the desk, engrossed in Ted Williams talk as he was with the man I offended, had yet to give me the standard half wave seal of approval which allows me to officially migrate to my desk each morning.

So I stood there wet and waiting, as the conversation between these two went on.

“He was a real crackerjack. I used to see him at all of those sporting goods conventions they used to have in town,” said the man behind the desk.

“Well you know something,” replied the visitor. “When he would go fishing, and he went all around the world, he would never sign his own name. Do you know whose he signed?”

“No.”

“Mine. I was his driver. I took care of him. All the time. You remember the all star game at Fenway even, in 1999? When he came out in the golf cart? That was me driving the cart.”

Since Ted Williams died in 2002 I think I have heard people make frozen head jokes about a thousand times, and never once have I heard any of these jokers reprimanded for saying something out of line, and this makes perfect sense, since having your son insist on a post-mortem decapitation so that you will live forever is, when taken at face value, instant fodder for jokes.

It’s funny to everyone except of course your son and those closest to you. And wouldn’t it be just my luck, to accidentally make this joke in front of the guy who used to drive Ted Williams around, whose name was his surrogate nobody when he just wanted to be left alone to fish?

Apparently.

I couldn’t find a youtube of the 1999 all star game, but I do have the Boston Red Sox 100 Years of Baseball History DVD, which has highlights of Williams being driven to the pitcher’s mound to meet all of the all stars before the game. The guy driving the golf cart, and then telling Williams which players’ hands he was shaking was, you guessed it.

Well there’s one guy I’ll never get any baseball stories out of. If it’s any consolation, I am sure he was there for an interview with a certain Red Sox history obsessed at the big newspaper where I work. No doubt the reporter in question is seasoned enough to dance around the touchy topics unlike the muddy bum in the lobby.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.