Worth the Fighting For by John McCain

Author:John McCain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781588362582
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Ted Williams. Corbis

BEST EVER

No one was ever more determined to be his own man than Ted Williams, or so I thought when I first saw him strike out at Griffith Stadium, then raise his head and spit from the plate toward the fans who booed him and the sportswriters who harassed him. That’s how I remember the moment, anyway, the moment when Ted Williams became my hero. I saw him spit even if he didn’t at that game, and the legend that is Ted Williams began to seep so far into my subconscious that in my memory I am physically present at some of its more colorful highlights. God knows he could spit (the way the sportswriters told it, you would think he made a career of it at times) and give the finger to his tormentors, and cuss so much that he could have made my grandfather, no piker when it came to swearing, blush like a young girl. It sure looked as if he spit at them that day, and I was thrilled to witness it, even if the papers didn’t write it up, even if my cousin Peter Andrews, who was sitting next to me, wasn’t sure he did.

Baseball isn’t my favorite sport. The game takes so long to play, and the action is too sporadic to someone who loves the fights and football and basketball. I liked the sport more when I was a kid, but that’s because of Ted Williams. I was a Ted Williams fan, which made me a Boston Red Sox fan, which made me hate the Yankees, which made me disparage the Washington Senators on the several occasions when I watched Ted play against them.

My cousin Peter is several years older than me. I looked up to him, even though he was a Washington fan, and spent as much time in his company as I could. He lived in Washington with his parents, my uncle Bert and my aunt Nadine, when my family lived across the Potomac River in the northern Virginia suburbs. Uncle Bert was the Washington bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune. He and Lawrence Spivak had started on the radio the political talk show Meet the Press. He was also friends with Richard Nixon and Whittaker Chambers and had been involved some way in the Alger Hiss case. I liked him very much and thought him to be a pretty important man in town. And I loved my aunt Nadine, who was as colorful and interesting as her younger sister, my mother. They would often invite me to stay the weekend with them in their apartment in the city.

On one of those weekends, when I was eleven or twelve years old, Peter took me by streetcar to Griffith Stadium to see the Senators play the Red Sox. He would take me to many other games, but that first game was one of the great events of my childhood simply because I got to see Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter, the best hitter in baseball, for the first time.

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