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His year Ted Williams was synonymous with 1941Posted: Wednesday July 10, 2002 12:23 PM
Of all the things that made Ted Williams unique, one was that he was indelibly associated with a calendar year. Since 1941, he's been the last man to hit .400. The Last Man. Not very often any longer in sports do we hear "the last man to do such-and-such." Records fall so often now that instead we are more likely to hear "The First Man." Of course, in hindsight, it helps that Williams chose 1941 to hit .406, for it would be such a memorable year in all respects. Right now, 61 summers ago, Joe DiMaggio was well along to hitting in 56 straight games. A little horse named Whirlaway had won the Triple Crown, and a light heavyweight named Billy Conn had Joe Louis beaten until he got cocky and went for the knockout and got knocked out himself in the 13th round. "What's the sense of being Irish if you can't be dumb?" Conn opined afterwards. We could laugh at such inappropriate things then. But in a very real way sports telescopes time because, at least through the prism of our reverie, sports never changes all that much. It's still 1-2-3 strikes you're out at the old ballgame in 2002 as sure as it was in 1941. In comparison, the other stuff from that year seems so long ago. Bombs away over London every night. The Nazis invading the Soviet Union. And, during that baseball season, Admiral Yamamoto was stepping up his maneuvers for the real thing come December 7th. All of that. So far away. But because athletes come to prominence when they're so young, they keep the past alive longer for us -- as long as they stay alive. Now Williams is gone, and in a sense, the last vividly living link with that incredible year is gone. Oh, Bob Feller, the great pitcher who won 25 games with the Indians that season, is still alive. So's Dame Vera Lynn, whose songs such as Now is the Hour and A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square lilted over the carnage. Strom Thurmond was already a circuit judge in South Carolina. But none of them were identified with the year the way Williams was. In a sense, he dies, he takes 1941 with him. Perhaps things do change in sports more than we imagine. In 1941, probably the highest paid athlete in the world was Whirlaway's jockey, Eddie Arcaro. After all, except for baseball, horse racing and boxing were the two biggest sports then. Hardly any American could have identified a basketball player anymore than they could have told you where Pearl Harbor was. Minnesota was football champion -- the Gophers, not the Vikings. Pro football was a sideshow then. Professional tennis barnstormed. NASCAR didn't exist. It was hard to find a black athlete anywhere except for Louis, The Brown Bomber. Athletes pretty much looked like everybody else, too. Conn weighed 169 pounds when he fought for the heavyweight championship. A typical basketball center was, maybe, 6-foot-3. Football linemen sometimes weighed 200 pounds. Williams was also the home run champion in 1941. He was The Splendid Splinter, all of 170 pounds. Stan Musial, who came up from the minors late in 1941, topped out at 175. That was Stan The Man, 6-foot, 175. The best hockey players couldn't reach six feet in skates. Nobody lifted weights. Drugs were aspirin. No player had sold his body to the devil. We believed what we saw on the field. So sports really were different. And now that Ted Williams is gone, his year, 1941, is gone, too. It's just history now. Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. His new novel, The Other Adonis (Sourcebooks Landmark), is available now at bookstores everywhere. |
