‘The Kid: The Immortal Life Of Ted Williams,’ By Ben Bradlee Jr.

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Ted always had his trademark yelps

An exclusive excerpt from Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”: Ted’s booming voice could be heard above any din. And he used it to good effect as a boy, often to shout out an odd greeting cry—“TA-TA-WEEDO”—when he saw a friend, say 100 feet away. No one knew what this meant—it was just a colorful eccentricity. A variation that Ted liked to use in his junior high school Metal Shop class was: “POW-HO-WE-HAH! My muscles are bulging!” according to friend Jerry Allen. “Everyone laughed at that and thought it was funny,” Allen says.

Such yelps were precursors to another odd scream Ted would use when he reached the minor leagues, and into his first year with the Red Sox in 1939, before his early ebullience started to fade. To amuse himself during bouts of boredom in the field as he waited to bat again, when a fly ball was hit his way, Ted would slap his behind and yell, “Hi-ho Silver!” as he took off to run for it. 

A great look at Ted Williams's swing.

From Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”:  Each Williams at bat was an event. Something between a hush and a buzz suddenly filled the air as the crowd shifted from a sort of auto-pilot engagement to edge-of-the-seat anticipation. “I was looking around for a story one day and someone said there was this blind guy on the first base line,” remembered Tim Horgan, who covered the Red Sox for the Boston Herald and then the Boston Evening Traveler in the 1950s. “I went up to the man and said, ‘Pardon me for asking but why do you come to the park? Why not listen to the game on the radio?’ He said, ‘I love the sounds of the game when Ted comes up.’”

(Photo: Ted Williams swinging in 1939, his rookie year with Red Sox. National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.)

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