PBS steps up to plate with ‘Ted Williams’
Ted Williams often asserted that “the hardest thing to do in baseball is hit a round ball with a round bat squarely.”
He should know.
He did it arguably better than anyone else.
The last major leaguer to hit .400, the man known as “Teddy Ballgame” was so obsessive about hitting that he put it ahead of everything else in his life, often to his own detriment, and even insisted he be introduced as “the greatest hitter who ever lived.”
His story is told in the new “American Masters” documentary titled appropriately enough “Ted Williams: ‘The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived,’ ” premiering tomorrow at 9 p.m. on PBS. Through archival footage, interviews with family, friends, sportswriters and broadcasters and past and current players, the hourlong film paints a portrait of the man behind the Hall of Famer, who channeled an unhappy early life in San Diego into an obsessive pursuit to be the best at what he did.
“When you read about the lives of great artists,” said Nick Davis, the film’s director, “they are just obsessed and totally single-minded in their pursuit of their craft or their art or, in his case, hitting, and to the exclusion of all else. And given his family, childhood background, it’s certainly understandable he kind of took refuge on the baseball field from the lack of attention and sort of expected paternal love and maternal love. And he found that on the baseball field.”
The documentary goes into his life on and off the diamond. He was an instant sensation after joining the Boston Red Sox in 1939, batting .406 in 1941 and winning the Triple Crown the following year. But Williams was proficient in other areas as well. A crack pilot who fought in two wars, he was once referred to by John Glenn as the best fighter pilot he’d ever seen. And as a fisherman, he was world-class, a member of two fishing halls of fame who had a line of fishing gear named for him by a major retailer.
But as a husband and father, he was lacking.
Divorced three times, he admitted he wasn’t the best parent to his three kids (one declined to be interviewed for the film). But in later years, he made an effort to get back into their lives. In fact, Claudia Williams talks about her dad here.
And he had an outsized ego and a prickly personality, but Davis says that Williams — who died in 2002 — at least knew of his own shortcomings.
“He was a self-aware jerk and didn’t try to pretend to be something he wasn’t,” Davis said. “I came to really have such affection for Ted in working on this project. I feel like he was so guileless and so what-you-see-is-what-you-get. You know, he was a kid, he was a big, overgrown kid and he was also so largerthan-life, such a hero with definite flaws.”