Documentary Portrays Williams as Captivating, If Not Always Splendid

It's a scene burned deep in my personal memory bank: that night in the summer of 1970 when I happened to be riding in a sluggish RFK Stadium press box elevator with the great Ted Williams, his third wife, Dolores, and their toddler son, John Henry.

Williams was in his second season as Washington Senators manager; I was a cub reporter at the time, assigned to do a short story off the game that evening. I can't recall who won or lost, the players I interviewed, or even what I wrote. But almost 40 years later, I will never forget the angry, profane words that came streaming out of Williams potty mouth, a diatribe of world-class curses directed mostly at the soon-to-be-ex-Mrs. Williams and obviously unfit to repeat in a family newspaper (or even a 2009 Web site).

I also remember cowering in a back corner of the elevator, and being thoroughly relieved when the doors opened, allowing me to escape after what seemed like an eternity as an uneasy and somewhat rattled eyewitness to the Wrath of Teddy Ballgame. In short, I had never heard anything quite like it in all my 23 years.

And so, watching HBO's new and thoroughly riveting documentary on Williams's remarkable life and controversial death (it debuts Wednesday night at 9:30 p.m. with numerous repeats over the next month), I had to laugh when former Boston Globe columnist and biographer Leigh Montville said of Williams, "He could be very antagonistic to the poor souls who covered the team every day. He could be very profane and question their ancestries and their mothers. He was the best curser in the history of the human race . . . It wasn't just like a little paprika in his speech."

Even in a near-death experience, with the fighter plane he was piloting during one of his 39 combat missions in the Korean War spewing smoke after being hit by enemy flak, Williams couldn't help himself. In one of several sound bites used in the documentary, Williams said he recalled thinking as his plane plunged toward the ground, "If there is a goddamned Christ, this is the time Teddy Ballgame really needs you."

Someone must have been listening, because Williams got his plane down and survived, then went back to a twice war-shortened baseball career that ended with his first-ballot induction into the Hall of Fame and the distinction of being the greatest hitter who ever played the game.

He was the last man to hit over .400 in a season, at the age of 22 in 1941. He had a career batting average of .344. He won two triple crowns, a feat that hasn't been accomplished since 1967. He hit 521 home runs in a career that was shortened by the five years he served as a pilot during World War II and the Korean conflict. He was on base an astounding 48.2 percent of his plate appearances, with all the above done naturally, no chemicals necessary for a man whose body type was best described by one of several monikers, "The Splendid Splinter."

Clearly, all those numbers did not make this incredibly complicated man, the son of a mostly absentee father and a Salvation Army volunteer. Williams grew up on the sandlots of San Diego and decided early that his goal in life was to become the best baseball hitter of all time. That mission clearly was fulfilled, with countless contradictions along the way.

"The Kid" was an athlete with a love-hate relationship with the fans, and a pure hate-hate relationship with the newspaper guys who covered him, even though he was far more accessible than most of the megastars of the modern era. He, too, was a mostly absentee father, and, in fact, was out of town fishing when his daughter Bobbi-Jo was born. And yet, he also was a tireless fundraiser for many good causes, helping to raise millions for cancer research and constantly visiting patients, mostly children, in local hospitals, calling them on the phone or inviting them out to the ballpark.

The HBO show pulls no punches, showing Williams warts and all from cradle to grave -- or, more precisely, from cradle to the Arizona cryonics facility where his body is still preserved in a nitrogen haze. That was and remains a controversial decision his son, the late John Henry, said his father had approved before he died in 2002 at the age of 84.

Williams was a hero to countless generations of baseball fans, including a young ballplayer who also grew up in Southern California and pulled for the Red Sox, because his parents were New England natives. That would be the actor Robert Redford, who appears in the documentary and said he wore Williams No. 9 in the film "The Natural" in honor of his boyhood hero, whose swing he also tried to emulate in the film as the fictional Roy Hobbs.

"I had him in my head as the perfect character to pattern myself after," Redford said on camera. "In terms of hitting and determination and the ability to block things out and focus on just what you were there for . . . ["The Natural"] was an homage to someone I had respected and idolized much of my life, and it was a chance to really bring that to a close. I wanted him to come on the set so I could just shake his hand, but he was too busy fishing."