The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

Heard an interview with Ben Bradlee Jr. yesterday on NPR's Fresh Air. He was discussing his new book The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams.

Such an interesting and complicated guy. (Much like his peer, Joe DiMaggio.) So much to admire about him, and so much to not like too.

Full audio and transcript of the interview is here: http://n.pr/1dPJVXj

Book excerpt here: http://n.pr/1eVGcop

 

What is different about this book as compared to Leigh Montville's exhaustive bio from five or six years ago?

 

Based on the excerpts published in the Globe, Bradlee had more cooperation from Ted's kids than Leigh did. Whether that makes his account better or worse I don't know. But really, this book falls into the ever popular "Here's a present you kids can get Granddad" genre.

 

800-plus pages on a baseball player. That would take quite a commitment.

 

Yeah, I questioned why we needed another Mickey Mantle book until I read Jane Leavy's "The Last Boy," which was freakin' awesome.

 

That's what I'm wondering.

The NPR interview sure didn't make me want to rush out and read this book. How much damn time are we going to spend on cryogenics again?

 

Haven't read the book of course, but at this point the whole cryogenics deal is just a bizarre little footnote to an estate squabble between stepsiblings.

At this point what difference does it really make if Ted Williams' body, or any part of it, is rotting in a coffin six feet under, is granules of dissolved ash at the bottom of the ocean, or frozen in a freezer?

In some ways the whole cryogenics thing is the complete rejection of faith-based concepts of the afterlife, but what's more far-fetched, to believe in a supreme being who will someday reunite your body and soul and restore it to life, or to believe that over a span of hundreds (or thousands) of years, your frozen corpse pieces will be maintained in a facility which never ever loses power, never goes bankrupt, never gets hit by an earthquake, never gets sold off to some company hundreds of years from now who never heard of you and certainly never saw any of the money you or your heirs paid to be frozen?

Right now I would put money on the premise that the ultimate fate of Ted Williams' head will be to be fed into an incinerator along with a bunch of other thawed-out bodies nobody in the year 2213 wants to fool around with.

 

One of the requirements of new health care plan is covering reattachment.

 

The excerpt in The Globe about Ted and how he ushered in a new era of media (in a way) is worth reading.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/2013/12/01/feud-with-sportswriters-helped-ted-williams-hit-harder/6354oT35Slld0eybr2QfpJ/story.html

 

Talk about a different world, huh:

 

The Globe had separate staffs and circulations for its morning and evening editions? That blows me away.

 

That lasted until the mid-'70s.