The Teammates: A Portrait of Friendship | David Halberstam

The Teammates: A Portrait of Friendship | David Halberstam | founding brothers

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The Teammates: A P...

	The Teammates: A Portrait of Friendship David Halberstam Hyperion, 2004 - 217 pages average customer review:based on 80 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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. Besides providing a poignant travelogue of the elderly Pesky and DiMaggio's trip, David Halberstam's The Teammates goes back in time to profile the men as young ballplayers. Although 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 while also being a magnetic personality and loving friend. While there is nothing exceptionally unusual about old men who have stayed friends (plenty of people stay friends, after all), 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, numerous road trips, and, since they played for the Red Sox, annual doses of disappointment. Halberstam, author of Summer of '49 and October 1964 is the ideal writer to tell two equally intriguing stories, both rich in America's pastime. Although he occasionally 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

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Baseball, Friendship and Life

This brief but excellent book covers a lot of ground. It is a fine baseball book that follows the lives of its four main characters from their humble roots through their shared baseball careers and into their post baseball lives. Along the way, the reader learns a lot about how baseball worked during simpler times both at the minor and major league levels.

But it is much more. Among other things, Halberstam examines immigrant culture in America, friendship, success, love and aging. He also tells a lot of really entertaining stories including the Williams lunch with Tip o'Neil, the infamous tarpon fishing trip and the Red Sox/Cardinals World Series. The parallels between Williams and Joe Dimaggio were also interesting.

Ted Williams' "cantankerous" personality is a featured element of this story. As the book progresses, Pesky, Dimaggio and Doerr are presented as truly wonderful human beings (and there is no reason to believe that they are not). It is difficult to imagine what attracted them to Williams, but they clearly were all great friends with Williams as the glue. Despite his well known personality flaws, Williams clearly had some excellent qualities. Halberstam chronicles both sides of the Williams personality and leaves the reader with an overall positive feeling toward him.

This is an entertaining and meaningful story that is more about life and friendship than baseball. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and hated to see it end.

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founding brothers

The late David Halberstam's insightful baseball writing has been a boon for fans with long memories. There are more of them attached to this odd American sport than any other. A penchant for statistics and scars that never heal are practically the calling card of those of us who are drawn, inexorably, to the diamonds with every new Spring.

This 2003 tribute to four skinny kids on the 1946 Boston Red Sox is not so much about the game as about the uncommon friendship that linked four of its iconic players. Halberstam has helped us to understand the grace that made Bobby Doer a lifetime interpreter of the gifted, irascible, and troubled Ted Williams; about the fealty to the sports unwritten rules that moved Johnny Pesky to accept the blame for a ball he never held (at least according to Halberstam's reconstruction) until ten years after the true culprit had gone to his grave; and about the tragedy of a season that came so close to glory but ended up heralding a generation (these are short in baseball time) of mediocrity in the precursor of what we have come to know as Red Sox Nation.

Halberstam tells the story with an instinct for the game's heroic rhythms, most of which pass unnoticed by all but the most committed observers. He skirts the edge of hagiography by taking Doerr's, Dimaggio's, and Pesky's 'lite' version of the book's dying, central figure as accurate description. This is what friends do for friends. Halberstam almost does it too, but pulls out before falling prey to the understandable urge to see whether a porcelain saint might just be constructed from Williams' legacy.

Alas, it cannot.

That friends, sometimes, stick together in the way these four teammates did--and do, those who survive--is a larger story than baseball. Yet in the telling of it, Halberstam has illuminated the game as well.

We are the better for it on both counts.

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Insight into a different era...

I read this book on the recommendation of a client and was impressed! Halberstam does an excellent job of weaving the tale of four teammates forever bound by baseball, Boston, and their friendship. Each has his own story and personality from the larger-than-life Ted Williams to the reserved Bobby Doerr all revealed with masterful writing. A must read for any Red Sox or baseball fan. Because of the masterful writing I will be reading more of David Halberstam.
October 1964
Summer of '49 (P.S.)
The Best and the Brightest

A Remarkable Bond Like No Other

Admittedly, I'm a huge Yankee fan. But beyond that, I'm a baseball fan, and Halberstam does a great job of getting me to feel in my heart for this great group of guys and the relationships they had with each other. He takes you through the major milestones of their careers and relationships and makes you feel like you're one of the boys and share in their joys and hardships. If you're not a fan of baseball and brotherhood, then you won't enjoy this book. But if you are, you won't be able to put it down.

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