[ExI] Alcor and Ted Williams

[John Clark]

In today’s New Your Times is a review of a new biography of Ted Williams,
his "wacky and pathetic” death is mentioned and so is "an outfit called
Alcor” who cut off his head:
======

So the hero gets his head cut off on Page 11. Some baseball book!

Ted Williams, the Red Sox’s midcentury slugger famed for his sweet
left-handed swing as well as for his tempestuous nature, was already
something of a mythic colossus (especially in Boston) before the macabre
events surrounding his death. A sporting god, irascible yet beloved, he was
a vivid and imposing figure, loudmouthed, foul-mouthed, bullying and almost
pathologically self-centered, but with a deep and tender charitable streak
that made him hard to fathom. When he died at 83 on July 5, 2002, after a
decade of declining health, his son arranged to have his head and body
separated, frozen and preserved against the possibility of their revival in
a future age, and the Bunyan-esque Williams legend had its fittingly
sizable, if wacky and pathetic, conclusion.

Beginning and ending “The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams,” his new,
cinderblock-size biography, with strikingly precise and colorful reporting
on this far-fetched episode, Ben Bradlee Jr. gains an arch strain of
meaning for the book’s subtitle, which is otherwise meant, I think, not
literally but sincerely. A work of obvious journalistic muscle and
diligence, “The Kid” provides documentary evidence on every page to bolster
the book’s presumption that Williams was, to use the cliché, larger than
life.

Maybe he was. But Mr. Bradlee is hampered by the incontrovertible fact that
Williams was a significant personage because of his batting feats. And
though he hardly ignores Williams’s years as a player, Mr. Bradlee is not
an especially astute baseball writer. He makes the point again and again —
and quotes others saying it — that Williams was arguably the greatest
hitter ever, a student of hitting with a beautiful swing, but provides,
over 800 pages, no satisfying analysis of Williams at bat.

Williams had a career full of astonishing achievements — he batted .406 in
1941, a figure that hasn’t been approached since, hit 521 home runs in
spite of missing almost five full seasons for military service — and
moments of thrilling drama. Mr. Bradlee writes about them all, but often by
relying on the newspaper coverage and Williams’s reaction to it, a strategy
that underscores one of Mr. Bradlee’s subjects — Williams’s stormy
relationship with the press  and the fans — but that robs his narrative of
its own drama.

The best baseball chapter is a patient recounting of Williams’s
melodramatic and bittersweet final game, in which he homered in his last
time at bat. Even there, though, Mr. Bradlee gives the last word to someone
else, John Updike, who wrote about the game for The New Yorker in a famous
essay, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.”

Mr. Bradlee acknowledges that he focused away from baseball, on the
elements of Williams’s life that other writers — and there have been many —
have left relatively unplumbed. And so we have extended  examinations of
Williams’s childhood in San Diego, where he was the largely neglected child
of an often-absent father and a Mexican mother whose devotion to the
Salvation Army trumped her devotion to young Ted and his brother, Danny
(“Ted was always ashamed of his upbringing,” Chapter 1 portentously
begins); of his war service as a Marine pilot (Mr. Bradlee provides a
riveting reconstruction of Williams’s first combat flight in Korea in 1953,
during which his plane was hit, and he  made a belly landing, skidding
nearly the length of the runway); of his fishing expertise; of his
charitable acts, large and small, public and under the radar, often to
benefit sick children; and, most relentlessly, of his troubled relations
with sportswriters, women — his three marriages were scarred by his
philandering and the abuse, verbal and possibly physical, of his wives —
and his three children.

Mr. Bradlee, who was a reporter and editor for The Boston Globe for 25
years (and whose journalistic pedigree descends from his father, the former
executive editor of The Washington Post), writes a graceful sentence and
crafts a cogent paragraph. His authorial attitude is one of restraint,
generally letting the flood of his facts and quotations from interviews
speak for themselves. “The Kid” has neither the hagiographic sheen of
recent biographies of Yogi Berra and Willie Mays, nor the gleeful
legend-puncturing of Richard Ben Cramer’s celebrated portrait of Joe
DiMaggio.

But Mr. Bradlee’s evenhanded thoroughness ultimately does his subject — who
was ostentatiously thin-skinned and constitutionally unable, it seems, to
contain his anger — no favors. Yes, Williams is shown to be intellectually
curious, often quick-minded and sometimes acutely self-aware; he was a
supporter of Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby and other black players, but
wondered, when his career was over, whether he had done enough to further
their cause, especially in Boston, where the Red Sox were the last major
league team to integrate. But of the many tantrums thrown by Williams in
his lifetime, and the many harsh words uttered by him, Mr. Bradlee seems to
have recorded them all.

During his playing career, his battles with sportswriters, whom he referred
to disdainfully as the “knights of the keyboard,” resulted in some
remarkable outbursts, but they were also often amusing, the effusions of a
passionate, immature egomaniac. Later, however, he simply grows ugly. The
casual vileness of his remarks to and about his children and to and about
women, including but not restricted to his wives, is breathtaking.

In “The Kid,” Williams retires as a ballplayer with more than 300 pages to
go. He has a mostly unsuccessful four-year stint as manager of the
Washington Senators and, when the team migrated south, the Texas Rangers,
and there are various business enterprises, awards and fishing trips to be
recounted.

But until Mr. Bradlee returns to the galloping science fiction story of
Williams’s last day — which begins at his home in Citrus Hills, Fla., and
ends in Scottsdale, Ariz., where his body was transported by private plane
and the technicians at an outfit called Alcor cut off his head — we mostly
find ourselves in the presence of a swaggering, insecure celebrity, aging
unpleasantly, swinging from neediness to self-aggrandizement to high
dudgeon.

It’s difficult company to keep, though it helps, I imagine, if you’re a Red
Sox fan.

A version of this review appears in print on December 5, 2013, on page C9
of the New York edition with the headline: That Splendid Swing, and Yet So
Many Errors.
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