{"id":17278,"date":"2020-01-09T10:11:03","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T15:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=17278"},"modified":"2020-04-30T10:05:30","modified_gmt":"2020-04-30T14:05:30","slug":"foresight-ted-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/foresight-ted-williams\/","title":{"rendered":"Foresight: Ted Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border: none; width: 100%; height: 326px;\" src=\"\/\/e.issuu.com\/embed.html?d=wg20_flipbook_for_issuu.com&amp;pageNumber=10&amp;u=portlandmagazine\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">W<\/span><span class=\"s1\">elcome to our Visions 2020 issue!<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Legend has it, <strong>Ted Williams<\/strong> could read the label of a 78-rpm record while it was spinning. He could pick out the spin of a pitcher\u2019s curve or breaking ball and know just how to take a swing at it. Flight surgeons tested his eyes when he became a World War II fighter pilot. The Red Sox star had the vision of one in 100,000.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Williams also had an eye for beauty. That\u2019s why he loved Maine.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">\u201cDad would always take my brother John Henry and me through Maine to his fishing camp on the Miramichi River, just over the Maine border in New Brunswick,\u201d says Claudia Williams, Ted\u2019s daughter. \u201cMaine always felt like a second home to me. Dad was once a pitchman for Moxie. We\u2019d always stop and visit Dad\u2019s friend, sportswriter Bud Leavitt. Dad would stop at tie shops and admire the artistry of his favorite lures. He fished all over Maine\u2014at camps and places like Chemquasabamticook Lake. We were in Maine with Dad when he did the Nissen Bread commercials. I think the first ones were shot with Bud in a cafe in Bangor. One was with Yogi Berra.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><em><span class=\"s1\">Where were your favorite haunts with your dad up here? I hear he went a number of times to the Griffin Club in South Portland, where no doubt everybody knew his name.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/em><span class=\"s1\">\u201cIf it was a bar, my father probably kept my brother and me far away from it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><em><span class=\"s1\">Did fans always bring up his eyesight?<br \/>\n<\/span><\/em><span class=\"s1\">\u201cMy dad, if he were alive, would really want me to defend him about this. Daddy had 20\/20 vision in his left eye and 20\/15 in his right. His eyesight was given far more credit than his deeper vision and focus into the sport.\u201d In other words, he worked at it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">\u201cYou just don\u2019t see people who have the foresight at 16 to want to grow up to be the kind of person where people would say, \u2018That\u2019s the greatest hitter who ever lived.\u2019 Daddy never wore glasses. He could put that fly anywhere on that river he wanted. But it wasn\u2019t about seeing; it was about focus. He got to know how a pitcher was throwing. The way the arm moved, the way the body moved. In reality, he couldn\u2019t see the stitches on the ball. He could envision the way the stitches were spinning because sometimes he knew long before the ball left the pitcher\u2019s hand what was going to happen.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Fun fact about Ted Williams. He wasn\u2019t just a great pilot during World War II. He was re-drafted to serve in the Korean War. His wingman? Future astronaut John Glenn. Talk about a high sky.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/category\/editor\/\">Click here to\u00a0view past\u00a0<strong>Letters from the Editor.<\/strong><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Winterguide 2020<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[635,634],"class_list":["post-17278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editor","tag-john-glenn","tag-ted-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17278"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18436,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17278\/revisions\/18436"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}