Ted Williams once interrupted his own Hall of Fame career to go to war. He did this twice. He said a man shouldn’t hit home runs while others were dying.
He was 24 and at his peak when the Marines called in 1942. Williams was baseball’s greatest hitter, the last man to finish a season batting over .400, a living legend in cleats. But instead of pleading for deferment, he enlisted as a Navy aviator.
The public thought it was a publicity stunt. That changed when he finished flight school near the top of his class. Then, he started flying fighter planes across the Pacific.
He came home three years later to cheering crowds. He immediately led the league in home runs, as if war had been a long spring training.
But when the Korean War broke out, he was called again. He was 34, with a family and a fortune. His body was built for stadium lights, not dogfights. He went without complaint.
In Korea, he flew 39 combat missions, some alongside future astronaut John Glenn.
“I had been a baseball fan since I was a boy, and meeting Ted was a thrill,” Glenn recalled in his autobiography, John Glenn: A Memoir. “He was tall, genial, and easy to like, and he developed a voracious taste for the chocolate fudge (my wife’s) sister, Jane, would send from home. … He was a fine pilot, and I liked to fly with him.”
“Ted got hit on one of his first missions,” Glenn noted. “He was streaming smoke and fire from around the engine, which in a Panther usually signaled an explosion that would blow the tail off.”
Williams’ radio was out, so the other pilots flew close and signaled for him to eject. But Williams decided to attempt a return to Seoul instead. It was a shaky trip. It was even shakier because Williams’ plane had no landing flaps. Additionally, its landing gear wouldn’t come down.
“He bellied in at 150 miles an hour or more, slid up the runway for two thousand feet, came to a stop, jumped out of the cockpit and off the wing, and ran until he was out of danger,” Glenn wrote. “Then he turned around and stood there watching the plane burn on the runway.”
On one run, his plane was hit by enemy fire, the cockpit filled with smoke, and flames licked his legs.
Instead of ejecting, he managed to crash-land the burning jet — and walked away.
“I’ve never seen a cooler head,” Glenn said later.
Back in the majors, Williams never bragged about his service. He rarely mentioned it at all. When reporters pressed him, he said, “A lot of guys did more than me. I just did my job.”
Behind the arrogance that fans saw was the perfectionist who argued with umpires. He cursed his own swing. Beneath this, he was a man who carried guilt and discipline from the cockpit to the batter’s box.
Ted Williams didn’t just chase greatness; he paused it, twice, to answer something bigger. In an age of easy hero worship, he proved that true legends aren’t made by numbers. They are made by the moments they choose to leave the spotlight and step into the fire.
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wonderful story!
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Thank you for sharing this good report!
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Great post with John Glenn’s reflections! I didn’t know Williams served in the military for two wars as a pilot. Growing up, I loved baseball and collected baseball cards. In the 1960s, Fleer sold cards for baseball greats and Hall of Famers like Ted Williams. I won many of them playing mumbly peg and marbles.
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