As a native New Yorker (who came around a while after Ted retired), I always had a rhetorical 'hatred' for Ted Williams, and I laugh at that now. This inborn bias is hard to explain to other people who've never lived there, but the Mets, and to a lesser extent the Yanks, were everything to me, so their historical enemies were my enemies. And I always thought his nickname of 'The Splendid Splinter' referred to him being a jerk--like how a splinter in your finger annoys the living h_ll out of you.
With age comes wisdom, and many years ago it took my dad talking about Ted's service in the Korean conflict (my dad was a Korean war veteran, too) that really flipped a switch in me. I started looking beyond how NY hated Boston and all that junk, and realized what a tremendous player and human being this guy was. Yowza!
Thanks for your stories, Ted Z. Great stuff!
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