01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, May 30, 2004

When Leigh Montville was 10 he sent away for an autograph, using a penny postcard you filled out and sent to your favorite player. He was just a kid in New Haven, Conn., then, a Red Sox fan in the middle of Yankee country, and the person whose autograph he wanted was Ted Williams, and the place he sent the postcard was Fenway Park.

It was 1953, Teddy Ballgame was 35, at the height of his fame, Montville just a kid who idolized him, no different really than the innumerable other kids who thought Williams spoke only to God in those lost years in the '50s when baseball towered over the American sports landscape like Olympus once did over Ancient Greece.

Now it's a half century later and Montville has written Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero, the most extensive biography yet of the mercurial Williams, who dreamed of being a king and then became one, and who paid a price for his obsession too.

Strange game, baseball.

And being a writer, too.

Because this is not so much about the book, it's a New York Times bestseller, but about how the book came to be written. About the strange world of writing and publishing, and the irony of a 10-year-old kid who grew up to write a biography of his childhood hero, and found him to be infinitely more flawed and complicated than he ever could have imagined back then.

In a sense, the story begins when Montville was just a kid delivering papers for the New Haven Courier-Journal. Many was the morning, after he was done, that he and another kid would sit on the steps of the library and read the paper. Montville always went to the sports section, particulary the columns of a man named Frank Birmingham who had his picture in the paper.

Even at a young age, Montville had figured out he probably never was going to play center field for the Yankees, or turn on a fastball the way Williams could. But as he read Birmingham's columns, how he wrote about the Yankees and Yale football and went to magical places that might as well have been Oz to a kid delivering the paper, he thought Birmingham had the greatest job in the world.

Roughly a dozen years later Montville came back to New Haven after his four years at the University of Connecticut to work for the same newspaper he once had delivered as a kid.

"I was the guy with the picture in the paper," he says.

Soon after, he was writing sports columns for the Boston Globe, and suffice it to say that few people on the planet have ever written a sports column any better than Leigh Montville did. Twenty five years ago, back before I was in this business, back when I was trying to learn this craft, Montville was one of the guide dogs. No one ever had a better touch, able to move people and events through a personal prism and turn a sports column into something very close to art.

He was at the Globe for 21 years, before he says he began to feel like the guy sitting in the corner everyone has come to take for granted. So he made the jump to Sports Illustrated in 1989, and also began doing books. He did one on Manute Bol that sank like a stone. He did one with Jim Calhoun, which did very well in Connecticut, but "died once you crossed over into Westerly."

Then he wanted to do a book on Dale Earnhardt, someone he had met while doing a Sports Illustrated article. But there was no interest by the publisher, and he wasn't sure what he was going to do. Then Earnhardt died, and the publisher wanted the book. It made the Times' list, and Montville made some money.

"Can I do this all the time?" he asked his agent.

"You can do better than this," she said.

So he left Sports Illustrated in 2001. He had been there 12 years, he was 57, and now he was going to out on the high wire that is writing books for a living, a world where there is no net underneath you.

But what to do next?

He gave his publisher eight ideas. They didn't like any of them.

"Think big," one of the editors said.

Who was any bigger than Williams?

No matter that his editors knew little about the specifics of Williams' life. No matter that there have been several previous books on Williams.

"All the other Ted books stopped at the end of his baseball," Montville says, "and all stopped at the end of the baseball field."

So Montville set out to tell the rest of the Ted Williams story. His three failed marriages. The complicated relationships with his three children. His Mexican heritage on his mother's side, which existed in the shadows throughout much of his life. The legacy of his childhood, the wounds of which he carried with him throughout his life. The price he paid for wanting to be the greatest hitter that ever lived. The unfortunate circus that surrounded his death. And maybe, most of all, the magnitude of Ted Williams, a man who Montville says, "was a superstar before the word was invented."

All of that is part of Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero, right there alongside Williams' baseball career and his war record and his evolution into an American icon, a real-life John Wayne. To Montville, it's all part of who Williams was, warts and all, a man as big and brash and flawed and complicated as the country that both created him and turned him into a hero.

"Sports writers were always the villain," Montville says. "Here, Ted is the villain."

Montville had spent some time around Williams in his job as a Globe columnist. Many times he was part of a pack of sports writers who would sit with Williams in spring training, listening to Williams talk about hitting and baseball, all in his larger-than-life, profanity-spewed way. That was Ted at his best, loud and charismatic, authoritative. Teddy Ballgame.

The last time they were together was on the occasion of Williams' 80th birthday, when Montville was sent to Hernando, Fla., by Sports Illustrated.

"Ted came into the den on a walker, had had a couple of strokes, and I feared the worst," Montville says, "but as soon as he started to talk he was Ted. My little questions no longer mattered. He just started talking about what he wanted to talk about."

Afterwards, Williams told Montville that the next time he wanted some remuneration for an interview, a scene described in the book.

"Maybe we could send you a hat," Montville suggested.

"You know where you could put that hat," Williams said.

The book took two years to write, a year longer than Montville thought it was going to take. But it's the towering monument to his career.

And it comes, of course, with a certain irony.

For Williams, in that long ago summer of 1953, sent Montville another post card, this one with a photo of the slugger and an autograph. The photo shows Williams looking young and strong, an American archetype. It came to Montville's apartment in New Haven, direct from Fenway Park, and it was received as if it were a treasure. Montville always kept it.

When he began the book his wife framed the postcard and put it on his desk. So through all the phone calls, all the writing, the picture of Williams stared back at him, "Ted looking at me as I punched out the bad words that he sometimes spoke and the troubles that he sometimes had."

Montville goes on about how the photo showed Williams finishing a swing, looking upward at the certain home run he had just hit.

"He is still young and perfect and indomitable, able to do anything he wants to do," writes Leigh Montville, "and I am still 10 years old."