Unexpected tear shed on Ted Williams’ death

I didn’t sob, didn’t actually cry, nor was I overcome by any true sense of actual grief, but as I sat in a darkened home office reading line after line about the legendary Splendid Splinter on my computer and watching choppy images of his exploits on television, a tear rolled down my cheek – washing away another connection to the past.

Sadness I expected. A tear I did not.

Sure, I was a baseball fanatic. Growing up in the Long Island fishing village of Frenchboro in the 1970s, I lived and breathed the Boston Red Sox. I spent hours listening to games and sports talk radio on static-filled Boston stations as I bounced a rubber ball off the side of my house or stood on the shores of Lunt Harbor batting rocks into Blue Hill Bay.

Although I haven’t played the game in a decade now, I kept that passion through Little League in Tremont, high school and American Legion baseball in Bar Harbor and on fields at Syracuse University.

This is not to imply that Williams was a major influence. I never met the man (although he was one of precious few “stars” in this world I actually cared to meet) and he never directly touched my life. In large part especially as time went on, he existed as a towering figure.

“The Kid” retired in 1960 as The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived. He was also a war hero, a Hall of Fame fisherman, and a leader in the fight against childhood cancer. Some say John Wayne spent his life trying to emulate Williams on film. With movie star good looks, a swagger, a passion, and a presence, Williams possessed a larger-than-life personality amplified by his flaws and his unsurpassed gifts. He stands undeniably as the most legendary sports figure in the history of New England. And at times, at least to many of us, he seemingly stood alone – a brash, individualistic underdog against the slicker, richer corporate machine known as the New York Yankees.

It was usually in vain. During his career, he was denied the championships of rival Joe DiMaggio, but, it could easily be argued, he eventually won – dying a beloved icon who was happy and at peace with himself compared to the reclusive and bitter fate that befell Joltin’ Joe. It is the type of denied victory, personal struggle and ultimate triumph that often appeals to literary New England.

Most importantly to me, I guess, Williams embodied an era. He stood as undisputed king in a black and white era of exaggerated heroes and in a game that transcends generations.

My grandfather, stubborn and iconic in his own right, died in 1999. I kissed his wrinkled and pained forehead one October evening and he mercifully slipped away in the night. Much like seeing Williams slumped in a wheelchair, seeing my grandfather’s suddenly gaunt 89-year-old body confined to a hospital bed seemed cruel and unjust. My grandmother left the family home almost immediately after his death. And no more do I sit in their wiltingly hot kitchen eating Nilla wafers and sipping ginger ale from a Dixie cup. In a world of tumult, I now can’t imagine ever finding a safer place. My grandfather was a Red Sox fan – Teddy Ballgame once his favorite player and games blared from the radio in his fishhouse summer afternoons. He often fell asleep watching night games on television. It is now cliche, but for a certain period we had little in common save for those “damn Red Sox.”

My father, whom I respect as much as any man, suffered a major stroke the following September. In less than one year, I was swept from being the youngest grandson to a bona fide adult standing dangerously close to becoming part of the eldest male generation. Thankfully, my father has largely recovered, but the pain and fear from those chilled autumn days and sleepless nights were jolting and tore away what remained of any childhood innocence.

Ted Williams was my father’s favorite player during that adolescent period when baseball really matters to a kid, before life and responsibility relegate the game to a mere interest. In the attic, I can lay my hands on his scrapbooks filled with yellowing Boston Post game stories from the 1940s – and stories about Ted Williams.

Granted, it seems obvious when you stand back and view it unemotionally to say that Ted Williams was mostly a ballplayer.

And in the light of day it is safe to say that, God willing, many great memories lay ahead with my family at Frenchboro, my wife and two beautiful daughters and my close friends now scattered about the countryside.

Yet, undeniably with the death of Ted Williams something has been lost, another thread to the past has frayed and broken. My grandfather and his flickering black and white generation recede further into memory, a part of my father’s childhood is gone, and we all take one more step into an unknown future without the likes of a swaggering Ted Williams to somehow comfort us and bind us. I only hope in an age of dwindling heroes that a similar figure will someday wrap me and my daughters in the warm embrace of shared memory.

Theodore Samuel Williams is dead. And I, for a moment, wept.

Dean Lawrence Lunt, a free-lance writer and former newspaper reporter, is the author of “Hauling by Hand: The Life and Times of a Maine Island” and “Here for Generations: The Story of a Maine Bank and its City.”