The co-author of one of the best selling baseball books ever — The Science of Hitting — has died at the age of 88.
Underwood collaborated with Ted Williams for this classic, which was first published more than 50 years ago. It has appeared on my Baseball Best Seller entries just about every week since I’ve been doing these things.
Before that, he served as the “as told to” for Williams’ memoir, My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life (1969), as well as Alvin Dark‘s When in Doubt, Fire the Manager: My Life and Times in Baseball (1980).
Underwood also published It’s Only Me: The Ted Williams We Hardly Knew in 2005, a few years after Williams died.
Here’s Underwood’s obituary by Richard Sandomir in The New York Times which read, in part, “He specialized in covering college football, including its shady side, but he also wrote about boxing, golf, baseball and professional football, as well as the impact of gambling on sports, players and fans.”
Here he is in a fascinating interview for Ted Williams: “The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived,“ which aired on PBS’ American Masters in 2017.
And to think the Williams-Underwood connection all started with a fishing trip. From SI.com, “In honor of Sports Illustrated‘s 60th anniversary, SI.com is republishing, in full, 60 of the best stories ever to appear in the magazine. Today’s selection is “Going Fishing With The Kid,” by John Underwood, which appeared in the Aug. 21, 1967 issue. It ran again in 1994 as one of the best stories of SI‘s first 40 years.”
is available on Amazon.com,
Comments on this entry are closed.