He was The Kid. The Splendid Splinter. Teddy Ballgame. One of the greatest figures of his generation, and arguably the greatest baseball hitter of all time. But what made Ted Williams a legend and a lightning rod for controversy in life and in death? What motivated him to interrupt his Hall of Fame career twice to serve his country as a fighter pilot; to embrace his fans while tangling with the media; to retreat from the limelight whenever possible into his solitary love of fishing; and to become the most famous man ever to have his body cryogenically frozen after his death? New York Times bestselling author Leigh Montville, who wrote the celebrated Sports Illustrated obituary of Ted Williams, now delivers an intimate, riveting account of this extraordinary life.

Still a gangly teenager when he stepped into a Boston Red Sox uniform in 1939, Williams s boisterous personality and penchant for towering home runs earned him adoring admirers--the fans--and venomous critics--the sportswriters. In 1941, the entire country followed Williams's stunning .406 season, a record that has not been touched in over six decades. At the pinnacle of his prime, Williams left Boston to train and serve as a fighter pilot in World War II, missing three full years of baseball. He was back in 1946, dominating the sport alongside teammates Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr. But Williams left baseball again in 1952 to fight in Korea, where he flew thirty-nine combat missions crash-landing his flaming, smoke-filled plane, in one famous episode.

Ted Willams's personal life was equally colorful. His attraction to women (and their attraction to him) was a constant. He was married and divorced three times and he fathered two daughters and a son. He was one of corporate America's first modern spokesmen, and he remained, nearly into his eighties, a fiercely devoted fisherman. With his son, John Henry Williams, he devoted his final years to the sports memorabilia business, even as illness overtook him. And in death, controversy and public outcry followed Williams and the disagreements between his children over the decision to have his body preserved for future resuscitation in a cryonics facility--a fate, many argue, Williams never wanted.

With unmatched verve and passion, and drawing upon hundreds of interviews, acclaimed best-selling author Leigh Montville brings to life Ted Williams's superb triumphs, lonely tragedies, and intensely colorful personality, in a biography that is fitting of an American hero and legend.

By general if not entirely unanimous consent, Theodore Samuel Williams was the greatest pure hitter in the history of baseball. As a teenager beginning his career in the minor leagues in the late 1930s, he was taught patience at the plate -- "Get a good ball to hit," was how his coach, Rogers Hornsby, another Hall of Famer, put it -- and he practiced it for the rest of his long, incredibly accomplished career. Beginning with the Boston Red Sox in 1939 and ending with that same club in 1960, he had a lifetime batting average of .344, hit 521 home runs and batted in 1,839 runs -- all this despite missing nearly five full seasons because of military service in World War II and Korea -- and had an astonishing slugging average of .634.

All these numbers are well known to baseball fans, indeed are totemic, like Babe Ruth's 714 home runs and Nolan Ryan's 5,668 strikeouts. So too is .406: Williams's batting average in 1941, the last time any major-league ballplayer hit above .400, a feat that is beginning to look just about as impossible as running a mile in 3:30 or high-jumping 10 feet. Williams rolled up a lot of numbers and took great pride in them, to the extent that the Boston sportswriters who so reviled him took it as an article of faith that he put himself above his team, an accusation that the record simply does not support.

It certainly is true, though, that Williams was an extraordinarily difficult human being. The child of a classically dysfunctional family -- inattentive mother obsessed with religious proselytizing, drunken father rarely on the scene -- he had nothing approximating a normal upbringing and exhibited the consequences throughout his long adult life. There were plenty of them. He was immature, self-centered, crass, profane, rude, satyric, bombastic, loutish. He had a soft spot for children and was celebrated in New England for his work on behalf of the Jimmy Fund, which sponsors research into children's cancer, but he had precious little time for his own three children, his two daughters most particularly.

Williams's life fell into three divisions: before baseball, baseball and after baseball. Leigh Montville gives only passing attention to the first, about the right space to the second, and far, far too much to the third. At more than 500 pages, Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero is just about as long as Richard Ben Cramer's Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (2000) and just about as bad. The press-box profundities with which Montville's prose is riddled are ludicrous on their face -- "The landscape of the past lies somewhere under the landscape of the present. That is a fact. An erector set of change might have been constructed to obscure the gridwork of memory . . . but the past is still down there at the bottom" -- and so, too, are his feeble attempts at psychological insight. The book would be twice as good at half the length, and it would be even better if someone else -- almost anyone else -- had written it.

This is a pity, because Montville did a vast amount of work and assembled a vast amount of raw material. Unfortunately, he does not seem to have had the foggiest idea how to digest it, how to discriminate between what is important and what is not. Rather than absorb the most revealing information from his hundreds of interviews into his own narrative voice, he allows people to rattle on in direct quotation for paragraph after paragraph, sometimes page after page. The transcript of an interview (conducted by someone else) of Williams's third wife, Dolores, runs 14 full pages, though Montville could have boiled the insights it provides into a couple of paragraphs.

All this undigested verbiage might be bearable if it yielded fresh information about Williams's life and career, if it helped us toward a keener understanding of this tempestuous, troubled man, but almost everything here is familiar, in essence if not in every detail. We know that Williams had exceptional powers of concentration, sharp eyesight (though not abnormally so) and was endlessly curious about the craft, or art, or science (as he called it) of hitting. We know that he feuded noisily and obscenely with the Boston sportswriters -- "the Knights of the Keyboard," as he called them -- most of whom seem to have been every bit as loutish as he was. We know that he visited sick children in hospitals, but also that he spat at the press box and the fans in Fenway Park.

We know that he refused to wear a necktie or tip his cap. We know that he flew 39 combat missions in Korea and walked away from a 200-miles-per-hour crash landing. We know that he failed miserably in the 1946 World Series, the only one in which he played, though we don't really know why. We know that in the 1957 season, at the end of which he was 39 years old, he led the league with two breathtaking statistics -- a .388 batting average and a .731 slugging average -- and threw in 38 home runs for good measure. We know that to universal astonishment he agreed to manage the Washington Senators in 1969, and led this famously inept crew -- first in war, first in peace, last in the American League -- to an 86-76 record and a fourth-place finish, for which he was named Manager of the Year. We also know that in the three subsequent seasons -- in the last of which the Senators metamorphosed into the Texas Rangers -- he managed on automatic pilot, with drearier results each year.

We know that with the expert assistance of John Underwood he wrote several books, the best of which is his autobiography, My Turn at Bat. We know that he spent much of his interminable post-baseball years in the Florida Keys, where he fished expertly and obsessively. We know that each of his three marriages ended messily. We know that he was victimized by a scam artist, who got him into the memorabilia and autograph businesses and eventually bilked him of somewhere between $1.5 and $3 million. We know, finally, that immediately after his death in 2002, his body was shipped off to Arizona by his son, the late John Henry Williams, to be frozen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, a bizarre conclusion to what was in many ways a bizarre life.

To these bare bones of Williams's story Montville adds the occasional amusing or interesting fillip. In 1961, for example, Williams repeatedly ignored pleas from the White House that he attend a function at the Kennedy family compound on Cape Cod. "I've seen that message every day for three or four days," a friend told him. "They really want you. Shouldn't you tell 'em something?" To which Williams replied, "Tell 'em I'm a Nixon fan." It is useful to be reminded that though Williams served willingly and even proudly in World War II, he was "livid" about being recalled to Korea. Later he excoriated "gutless politicians," and said: "They picked on me because I was a ballplayer and widely known. I was at the height of my earning power. I had already served three years. My career was short enough without having it interrupted twice." He was right on all counts.

He was many things, but he was not a "hero." Montville acknowledges (which is more than Cramer did in his biography of DiMaggio) that an "athletic hero . . . is an artificial hero," but insists that the crash landing in Korea put him in "a separate category of folk hero." Sorry about that, but it won't wash. Saving one's own life can be brave, resourceful or just about anything you want to call it except heroic. Heroic acts rise above and beyond the self. One would be hard pressed indeed to find any such acts in Ted Williams's life.

One final note. In an "Author's Addendum," Montville publishes, in full, the obituary of Williams that he wrote for Sports Illustrated. Somehow I missed it at the time. It is an appalling piece of work, execrably written, far more about Montville than about Williams. From first word to last it is an embarrassment -- to the reader, but obviously not to the author. It is difficult to explain its inclusion in this book as anything except shameless narcissism.

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