A man has to have goals — for a day, for a lifetime — and that was mine, to have people say, 'There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.'
Attributed toTed Williams1918–2002 · American baseball player — Boston Red Sox, 1939–1960
This is Williams’s own line, and the reference works agree on where it lives: his 1969 autobiography My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life, written with the Sports Illustrated writer John Underwood. Wikiquote’s sourced entry ↗ gives this exact wording at page 7. We stop short of “verified” for one reason: the book is a lending-only scan ↗, so we could not read page 7 ourselves — and Wikipedia cites the same page 7 ↗ for a different wording of the same ambition. The attribution is not in doubt; the sentence-level match to the page is.
“A man has to have goals — for a day, for a lifetime — and that was mine, to have people say, 'There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.'” Attributed to Ted Williams, My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969); page locator given as 7 but not confirmed against the page
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In context
Evoking the world of Ted Williams — American baseball player — the last man to bat .400 over a full season. Theme: "A man has to have goals — for a day, for a lifetime — and that was mine, to have people say, 'There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.'". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "A man has to have goals — for a day, for a lifetime — and that was mine, to have people say, 'There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.'". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The source
Book
My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life
Authors
Ted Williams with John Underwood
Publication
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969
Cited at
Page 7 — by Wikiquote for this wording, by Wikipedia for the older one
A man has to have goals — for a day, for a lifetime — and that was mine, to have people say, “There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.”
1969
Quoted as Wikiquote ↗ prints it, from My Turn at Bat, page 7. We have not seen the page. The older, spoken form of the same thought is reported differently: “All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, ‘There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.’”
Wikiquote’s Ted Williams page ↗ carries this wording verbatim and sources it to My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life, page 7. It lists the “All I want out of life…” sentence beneath it as an unsourced variant — two forms of one ambition, not two quotes.
The book is real and the authorship is joint: the Internet Archive’s catalogue record ↗ gives “My turn at Bat: the story of my life,” creators “Williams, Ted, 1918–” and “Underwood, John, 1934–,” New York, Simon and Schuster, 1969, ISBN 0671202286. The scan is marked access-restricted, which is why page 7 stayed shut to us.
Wikipedia ↗ quotes the ambition in its other form — “All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street, folks will say, ‘There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived’” — and footnotes it to Williams & Underwood, page 7. Same book, same page, different sentence. We report the conflict rather than choosing a side.
The older form looks like speech, not prose. Mike Meserole’s ESPN Classic obituary ↗ of 8 July 2002 introduces it as something “Williams once told a friend,” and then quotes the 1969 book separately for a different passage — which reads as a spoken remark first, and Williams’s written restatement of it decades later.
In copyright.My Turn at Bat was first published in 1969, well after the 1931 United States public-domain cutoff, and the Internet Archive’s copy is marked access-restricted for that reason. quotle.info makes no public-domain claim.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What the sources do not settle
The name is not in question here. Two smaller things are, and both get repeated as though they were settled.
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The genuine variant“All I want out of life…” Different words, not a different claim
The same ambition circulates in two sentences. Wikiquote ↗ treats “All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, ‘There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived’” as a variant of this one. ESPN’s 2002 obituary ↗ presents that form as something Williams “once told a friend” — speech, quoted separately from the book.
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The page number“p. 7” Mis-cited by one of them
Wikiquote ↗ cites page 7 of My Turn at Bat for the wording on this page; Wikipedia ↗ cites page 7 of the same book for the other wording. One of the two is off, and we could not open the access-restricted scan ↗ to say which.
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The genuine edition date“1970” Different year, not a different book
Wikiquote ↗ dates the book 1970. The Internet Archive catalogue ↗ records the Simon and Schuster first edition as 1969, with a 1970 Pocket paperback among later printings. We cite 1969 and note that a page locator may belong to whichever edition was in the citer’s hand.
✓The honest version: Ted Williams said and wrote this, in two closely related forms, and the book that records it is My Turn at Bat (1969). The page number attached to it is not yet nailed down, and this page does not pretend otherwise.
Context
Why it mattered
Most athletes describe their ambition after the fact, sized to what they achieved. Williams had stated his before he had done anything — and stated it as a sentence other people would one day say about him, which is a strange and very specific thing to want. He then spent nineteen seasons making it the likeliest verdict in baseball: a .344 career average ↗, 521 home runs, six batting titles, two Triple Crowns, and .406 in 1941 ↗, a mark nobody has reached over a full season in the eighty-five years since.
The first half of the line is the part that gets quoted in offices rather than dugouts. “A man has to have goals — for a day, for a lifetime” is a claim about how attention works, from someone whose entire method was attention: Williams studied pitchers, bats, wind and his own swing with a seriousness his contemporaries found faintly ridiculous.
He was exactly what he set out to be.
Read the full story
The obituaries agreed he had pulled it off. ESPN’s ↗ was headlined with the sentence itself — “There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived” — when he died on 5 July 2002, aged 83. Wikiquote ↗ also records the sportswriter’s version of the same verdict: “He was what few of us ever become; he was exactly what he set out to be.”
Williams kept writing about hitting long after he stopped doing it. The Science of Hitting ↗, published in 1971 with the same co-author, is, in Wikipedia’s words, “still read by many baseball players” — the book-length version of the ambition this sentence states in one line.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1918–2002 · American baseball player — the last man to bat .400 over a full season
Theodore Samuel Williams — Teddy Ballgame, the Kid, the Splendid Splinter — played nineteen seasons for the Boston Red Sox between 1939 and 1960, interrupted twice by military service as a Marine pilot in the Second World War and Korea. He finished at .344 with 521 home runs, won six American League batting titles and two Triple Crowns, and in 1941 hit .406, which no one has matched over a full season since. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1966 on the first ballot with 93.4% of the vote. He was also, by his own account, the most deliberate student of hitting who ever played — which is the point of this quote.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Best available citation
Ted Williams with John Underwood, My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 7 — page locator as given by Wikiquote; not confirmed against the page, and Wikipedia cites the same page for a different wording.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A man has to have goals — for a day, for a lifetime — and that was mine, to have people say, ‘There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.’’?” Last verified 26 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-man-has-to-have-goals-for-a-day-for-a-lifetime-and-that/