TedWilliams RedSox LittleBrown - Blog Posts

Ted Williams was quite the cutey as a kid, no?

Ted was candid to a fault

An exclusive excerpt from Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”:  Williams was high strung, filled with nervous energy, always biting his fingernails. Ted’s friends found him candid to a fault, unvarnished. If he didn’t like someone, he would tell him so, to his face, rather than gossip behind his back. “I don’t care for you, fellah,” he might say. 

(PHOTO: Young Ted Williams. May Williams Collection.)

Ted loved to cruise around

An exclusive excerpt from Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”:

Ted couldn’t afford his own car as a kid, but loved to cruise around San Diego with those who did have wheels. Bill Skelley, a teammate of Ted’s on the 1937 Padres, had a 1929 maroon Chrysler roadster, and they’d glide down Broadway with the top down, or zip through Balboa Park. When they passed a golf course, and someone was getting ready to tee off, Ted would reach over and honk the horn to try and disrupt the golfer. “Just fooling around,” Skelley says.

Girls? Forget it. “I never went out with girls, never had any dates, not until I was much more mature-looking,” Ted wrote in his autobiography. “A girl looked at me twice, I’d run the other way.” 

(Photo:  Ted Williams tipping his hat at the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park.)

Ted Williams had great aim off the field 

An exclusive excerpt from Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”:  On Saturday mornings as a boy, Ted [Williams] and one of his best friends, Joe Villarino, would hike up into the hills outside of San Diego and go rabbit hunting, swim and look for Huck Finn-like adventure. “One day,” Villarino remembers, “we was walking around this trail and a rattlesnake come out and Ted shot it with a .45 he had. We laid it aside, and when we came back, he wrapped him around his neck and shoulders and carried it home.  Another time, at Dobie’s Pond, there was a kid in trouble. He was about eight or nine. We was about fourteen or fifteen. The kid was kinda splashing around. Ted went in and got him. He didn’t make a big deal of it. He didn’t like to be in the limelight too much.”

(PHOTO: Ted Williams hauling in his kill in Minnesota, 1939. Ted Williams Family Enterprises.)

A great look at Ted Williams's swing.

From Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”:  Each Williams at bat was an event. Something between a hush and a buzz suddenly filled the air as the crowd shifted from a sort of auto-pilot engagement to edge-of-the-seat anticipation. “I was looking around for a story one day and someone said there was this blind guy on the first base line,” remembered Tim Horgan, who covered the Red Sox for the Boston Herald and then the Boston Evening Traveler in the 1950s. “I went up to the man and said, ‘Pardon me for asking but why do you come to the park? Why not listen to the game on the radio?’ He said, ‘I love the sounds of the game when Ted comes up.’”

(Photo: Ted Williams swinging in 1939, his rookie year with Red Sox. National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.)

Great shot of "The Kid". The definitive biography of Ted Williams is coming from Little, Brown this December from author Ben Bradlee Jr. 

Ted Williams

Spring Training

1971

Photo: Ozzie Sweet/ Sport Magazine

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