Hawk Harrelson? He’s just a shy guy.

This week I got caught up on all the wonderful television I missed while I was in New York.

There actually wasn’t much. It’s that time of the year. But I was anxious to see MLB Network’s documentary about Ken “Hawk” Harrelson, and I wasn’t really disappointed. Of course it’s impossible to tell the story of a 50-odd year career in 44 minutes, and some important subjects are skipped right over, some necessarily and some perhaps not. I enjoyed it, though, and especially this bit from an interview with the man himself:

Ken Harrelson is a different guy than Hawk. Ken is a guy who is ... very shy. Introverted. And people who know me know this. Hawk, on the other side of the page, is the guy who’s protected me, all my life. It was a way to handle my fear; it was a way to handle my insecurity. Because I’m, I was afraid. Hawk wasn’t.

An introvert? Are we talking about the same man who opened his 1969 memoir with the words, “You handsome sonofagun, don’t you ever die!”? The same man who had his nickname “embroidered, embossed, engraved, embedded, impressed, or printed on practically everything I own”?

I met Harrelson back in 1996 or ‘97, and he was just Ken. Could not have been nicer to me, seemed perfectly happy to talk about the old days with some snot-nosed kid who’d read his book. He said he hadn’t allowed the book to be reprinted, because he didn’t want his kids reading that stuff.

You just never know. That’s why I try to resist the temptation to read the minds of other men, especially through my TV screen.