Teddy baseball. (Here Below).

DEATH DID NOT TAKE A holiday this summer. At least not in sport. Look at the kind of necrology that was inflicted upon us during the months of June and July: Whizzer White, Hank Greenberg, Jay Berwanger, and Ted Williams.

Every one of those fabulous athletes had a special significance for us, but it was the last name that hit the hardest. Not because Ted Williams had been one our favorite ballplayers. That never happened. It was simply the magnitude of the man: the awesome talent, the bigger than life presence, the irrationality, arid the astonishing way he turned his life around long after the cheering was over.

He was a textbook case in the sociology of sport. In football and basketball, the great athletes almost always go to college where a lot of good things rub off on them: They live in the company of bright people in a vernal culture climate, they learn how to speak, and they acquire values.

In baseball, too many of the players get caught up in the pro game and lose out in their cultural growth. It is shocking to look at such famous athletes as Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, and Ted Williams and learn that only one of them managed to squeeze out a high school diploma.

We believe that the lack of education deeply affected all of them and that DiMaggio and Mantle led defective lives because of it.

Ted Williams was different. His transformation from volatile and irrational athlete to champion of worthy causes was truly astonishing. He became a permanent administrator of the Jimmy (Children's Cancer) Fund, a vigorous advocate of Black Athlete causes; a standing member of the Baseball Hall of Fame Committee, and a proud spokesman for the U.S. Marines, in which his two hitches as a wartime fighter pilot cost him five prime years of his baseball career.

Every story about Ted Williams dwells on his reputation as the greatest hitter in baseball and the last player to have batted over .400 in a season.

We prefer to memorialize him not as a boy of summer but as a man who, in some mysterious transmutation of the human spirit, matured into a wondrous man for all seasons.