The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship

Amazon.com Price: $8.99 (as of 10/10/2019 23:49 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , ,

Description

More than 6 years after his death David Halberstam remains one of this country’s most respected journalists and revered authorities on American life and history in the years since WWII. A Pulitzer Prize-winner for his ground-breaking reporting on the Vietnam War, Halberstam wrote more than 20 books, almost all of them bestsellers. His work has stood the test of time and has become the standard by which all journalists measure themselves.

The Teammates is the profoundly moving story of four great baseball players who have made the passage from sports icons–when they were young and seemingly indestructible–to men dealing with the vulnerabilities of growing older. At the core of the book is the friendship of these four very different men–Boston Red Sox teammates Bobby Doerr, Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Ted Williams–who remained close for more than sixty years.

The book starts out in early October 2001, when Dominic DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky begin a 1,300-mile go back and forth by car to visit their beloved friend Ted Williams, whom they know is dying. Bobby Doerr, the fourth member of this close group–“my guys,” Williams used to call them–is unable to enroll in them.This is a book–filled with historical details and first-hand accounts–about baseball and about something more: the richness of friendship.
As baseball legend Ted Williams lay dying in Florida, his old Boston Red Sox teammates Johnny Pesky and Dom DiMaggio piled into a car and drove 1,300 miles to see their friend. Another member of the close-knit group, Bobby Doerr, remained in Oregon to tend to his wife who had suffered a stroke. But even so providing a poignant travelogue of the elderly Pesky and DiMaggio’s go back and forth, David Halberstam’s The Teammates goes back in time to profile the men as young ballplayers. Even if it is enlightening to learn about Doerr, Pesky, and DiMaggio, the leader of the group and star of the book is Williams. Halberstam portrays the notoriously moody and difficult Williams as a complex man: driven by a rough childhood and a fiercely competitive nature to become perhaps the greatest pure hitter of all time Whilst also being a magnetic personality and loving friend. Whilst there is nothing exceptionally strange about old men who have stayed friends (plenty of people stay friends, in the end), baseball gives this particular relationship a unique makeup. Unlike most friendships, that of Williams, Doerr, Pesky, and DiMaggio was viewed all summer long by hooting, hollering Red Sox fans. As such, their bond is forged both of individual accomplishment, win-loss records, a lot of road trips, and, since they played for the Red Sox, annual doses of disappointment. Halberstam, writer of Summer of ’49 and October 1964 is the ideal author to tell two equally intriguing stories, both rich in America’s pastime. Even if he infrequently drops himself into the narrative, one expects that of Halberstam and gladly accepts it in exchange for the highly readable exposition infused with poetic majesty that has become his trademark. –John Moe

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship

Recent Products