Unreconstructed Individual

A sportswriter for the Harvard Crimson—a prematurely surly young man addicted to scotch, scatology and unpunctuated prose—once wrote that while there were not many people who came to Harvard just to watch Ted Williams play baseball, nevertheless there were some.

Because the surly young man was so unsavory, and no valentine, and didn’t chop out his words with a heart-shaped cookie cutter, people by and large ignored him. But this didn’t stop him from finessing the Metaphysical Poets on spring Sunday afternoons, committing his corpse to the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and squatting for a couple of hours in the center-field bleachers at Fenway Park—a glorified bowling alley where Ted Williams played baseball and the Boston Red Sox played American League doormat. The young man was a brooder, and he came away from those Sunday sessions with a furrowed brow. It seemed to him—it seems to me— that if I, Harvard, and/or America can be saved, we will all need Ted Williams.

JL

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John Leonard

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A sportswriter for the Harvard Crimson—a prematurely surly young man addicted to scotch, scatology and unpunctuated prose—once wrote that while there were not many people who came to Harvard just to watch Ted Williams play baseball, nevertheless there were some.

Because the surly young man was so unsavory, and no valentine, and didn’t chop out his words with a heart-shaped cookie cutter, people by and large ignored him. But this didn’t stop him from finessing the Metaphysical Poets on spring Sunday afternoons, committing his corpse to the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and squatting for a couple of hours in the center-field bleachers at Fenway Park—a glorified bowling alley where Ted Williams played baseball and the Boston Red Sox played American League doormat. The young man was a brooder, and he came away from those Sunday sessions with a furrowed brow. It seemed to him—it seems to me— that if I, Harvard, and/or America can be saved, we will all need Ted Williams.