A cryonic shame

Sporting News, The, July 29, 2002 by Dave Kindred

A year ago, Ted Williams seemed a breath away from death. After heart surgery in New York, he was flown to a San Diego hospital for recovery. That's when his son, John Henry Williams, first asked friends and family, "Have you heard of cryonics?"

In the small circle of friends and family privy to John Henry Williams' thinking, the mention of cryonics was ignored as the latest in a series of wrong-headed schemes. "Another of John Henry's passing fancies," says Arthur "Buzz" Hamon, who operated Ted Williams' museum from 1994 to 1999, traveled with him and last spoke to Williams 17 days before his death.

By now, we know about cryonics and Ted Williams. We know cryonics is the nutcase science of hyperfreezing cadavers in hopes that someday there will be a way to bring the dead to life. But when John Henry Williams first mentioned cryonics, friends and family knew little beyond what the son told them.

His pitch included the word "neat." Freezing Ted Williams for possible resuscitation was a "neat" idea. Beyond bringing the great man to life, there also was the DNA thing. If Ted Williams' DNA were preserved, wouldn't it be something to sell the DNA for cloning? One friend remembers John Henry Williams saying, "There'd be all these little Ted Williamses running around."

Maybe the world would be a better place with dozens of Ted Williamses, hundreds even, thousands. But these sci-fi genetic manipulations bring to mind George Bernard Shaw chatting with Isadora Duncan. The story goes the dancer proposed marriage to the writer on the grounds their child would be beautiful and brilliant. "But what, my dear," Shaw said, "if the poor thing should have my body and your brain?"

Or, as one man said to Sonny Dearest about cryonics, "John Henry, have you lost your mind?"

What we have here is a loss of dignity. In Kathmandu, on the way to the first tee, my friend Tom Callahan and I once paused to let pass a procession of Nepalese carrying on their shoulders a shrouded body to be burned on an open pyre by a river. In the moment there was a great solemnity and dignity.

No honor attends Ted Williams frozen. Though freezing a body certainly gives comedians fodder for their stand-ups, it's not necessarily any less dignified than cremation; besides, cryonics may someday work, who knows? The loss of dignity comes because Williams specifically and repeatedly made known his wishes to be cremated. He wanted his ashes spread over fishing waters. Instead, by his daughter Bobby-Jo Ferrell's description, Williams' body is at minus-320 degrees and hangs upside-down in some Arizona hightech meat locker.

Bob Breitbard is aghast. "You don't go against your father's wishes," says Ted Williams' oldest friend, a high school buddy from San Diego's Hoover High School class of 1937, so close they double-dated at the senior prom.

Now 83, a retired businessman who once owned the NBNs San Diego Rockets, Breitbard says, "Many times Ted talked about being cremated and said, `I'd like to go where I fished,' off Islamorada where he lived and fished so many years."

As Williams' children contest the issue--Bobby-Jo arguing for cremation, John Henry and his sister, Claudia, for cryonics--even a document as seemingly plain as a will is up for debate. Williams' will requests cremation, but the estate executor has said Williams, after making the will, chose to be frozen. No written proof has been produced, and Buzz Hamon suggests John Henry Williams is the only source of such information.

"Yes, I heard the executor say that," Hamon says. "But the executor was careful not to say he'd heard it himself. He never said how he knew it."

Hamon also mentions a moment of mystery. He says that on June 18, just 17 days before Williams' death, he spoke to Williams by telephone about a book on the last 20 years of his life to be written by John Underwood, the collaborator on an earlier autobiography.

"Ted was for it, but John Henry said no," Hamon says. "Then Ted told me, `I need a lawyer, I've made a mistake.' After that he went silent, like somebody had walked into the room. Our conversation ended."

Hamon's conjecture: "Maybe Ted thought it was a mistake to give John Henry power of attorney."

It's also possible--all things being possible--that Williams had decided cremation was a mistake, that he didn't really want his ashes spread on waters he considered as near heaven as he would ever get. Maybe he really had decided to provide DNA for cloning. Maybe he really wanted to be frozen for thawing in a hundred years when he could be made young again, The Kid reborn.

Maybe. But no one who knew Williams has said such a thing publicly. "I can't imagine Ted wanting to be frozen," says Hamon, who remembers a private-jet flight to Florida from the 1999 All-Star Game in Boston: "As we flew in over the Atlantic, Ted said, `That's where I want my ashes taken, off Key West, in deep waters.'"

The great man's oldest friend, Bob Breitbard, has the last word here. He says, "Ted was an American icon. It's terrible, this talk. You don't put an icon on ice."