Wallace in the
New York Times wrote, "Williams was no gee whiz worshipper. With a pithy, trenchant style, he was one of the first to view sports in a realistic, cynical fashion." His credo, Wallace added, "was 'inform and then entertain,'" and "Time and again, he supported 'Gus H. Fan' against dubious promotions and deftly lanced the pompous traditionalists."
Joseph Peter Williams was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on 12 December 1889, his family says, although at times he claimed 1890, 1891, and 1893 as a birth date. His parents were cotton broker Edward Metcalfe and Anne Elizabeth (Connolly) Williams. Young Williams attended the Market Street and Mosby Street schools in Memphis and Christian Brothers College, also in Memphis. According to his son Peter Williams in The Joe Williams Baseball Reader (1989), Joe spent his boyhood with his brother Bill swimming in the Wolf River and vending at the Red Elm Park, until their grandmother forced the boys to quit because she thought ballplayers to be "drunkards or worse." The sharp-tongued, witty Williams loved sports. After an attempt at boxing at the Phoenix Athletic Club in Memphis, he began to prefer covering athletics to participating in them.
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