The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship - Hardcover

David Halberstam

4.04

5,667 ratings by Goodreads

9781587244643: The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1587244640 ISBN 13: 9781587244643

Publisher: Wheeler Publishing, 2003

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A New York Times Bestseller

The Teammates is the profoundly human story of Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, Bobby Doerr and Ted Williams, four great ballplayers who have made the passage from sports icons -- when they were young and seemingly indestructible -- to men dealing with the vulnerabilities of growing older. It is also the story of two trips: one to see a beloved teammate who is dying and the other a flight back in time. At the core of the book is the friendship of these four very different but extraordinary men, key players in a remarkable Boston Red Sox team, who stayed close to each other for more than sixty years.

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Review:

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

About the Author:

David Halberstam was one of America's most distinguished journalists and historians. After graduating from Harvard in 1955, he covered the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement, then was sent overseas by the New York Times to report on the war in Vietnam. The author of fifteen bestsellers, including The Best and the Brightest, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam reporting at the age of thirty. He was killed in a car accident on April 23, 2007, while on his way to an interview for what was to be his next book.

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