E-Mail This Article to a Friend T’anks for nothin’: There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

Back in 1996, legendary Red Sox slugger Ted Williams was recounting one of his legendary battles to Sports Illustrated baseball scribe S.L. Price. It wasn’t a fight with Bob Feller, the Germans, or even the North Koreans. This battle was with a fish. A fish, I say. In that SI piece, titled "Rounding Third," #9 recalled, "I had hooked him on this big, dry single hook, and I was just pulling him too hard! I tried the hard pull and he didn’t break, so with a good bend I dragged him right up, and the hook pulled out just as he came out of the water." In recalling that salmon, which remarkably made it back into the Cascapedia River in Quebec, Williams exulted in the memory of that magical place: "The closest place to heaven I’ll be. I know that."

Little did he know how portentous that statement would prove to be. Less than six years after that story was published, the last .400 hitter was called out for the final time, and his July 5, 2002, death should have marked the dignified end to a remarkably memorable and rich life. But while Ted’s soul may indeed be in heaven, particularly in light of his unstinting devotion to the fight against children’s cancer, the rest of him is undoubtedly in hell. In this week’s edition of SI, respected baseball writer Tom Verducci, along with Lester Munson, outlines the gruesome details of what allegedly happened to Williams’s body immediately upon his death. The Splendid Splinter’s remains were shipped off to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation of Scottsdale, Arizona, for cryogenic freezing, and the details that have emerged from Verducci’s piece are downright horrifying. According to the story, Williams’s body has not been carefully frozen and stored upside down in one of Alcor’s suspension tanks. Rather, it has been separated from its head, which was removed in the hours after his death in Florida. The head then reportedly had two burr holes drilled into it and was moved to a separate freezer tank, where it reportedly sustained "cracks" because of temperature-fluctuation problems in the container. It’s since been moved at least three times — eventually to a chamber where the head was "hard frozen" in liquid nitrogen. There is also talk of some missing DNA samples.

Grisly? Macabre? Horrifying? Yes, yes, and you better believe it.

If the situation could be chalked up solely to subpar or negligent care, all this would be disconcerting enough. But the many other twists and turns to this tale make it doubly sad that Ted’s remains ended up this way. To wit:

• Ted never should have ended up at Alcor in the first place. Williams’s will, signed in 1996, clearly stated that he wished to be cremated and have his ashes strewn over the Florida Keys, where he loved to fish. This will was reportedly superseded by an oil-stained piece of paper, supposedly signed by Williams’s son, John Henry, and daughter Claudia, dated November 2, 2000, that simply stated, "JHW, Claudia, and Dad all agree to be put into bio-statis after we die. This is what we want, to be able to be together in the future, even if it is only a chance."

What’s particularly bothersome about this situation is that, according to the SI article, Ted was in the hospital on the reported date that the note was signed — a day after being admitted for breathing difficulties. In addition, Claudia Williams was not even aware that her father was in the hospital until days later, and complained to Ted’s caretakers about not being informed. If that was the case, how could she have signed the note on November 2? And if this supposedly important document was legit, why were these changes not incorporated into Ted’s will, and why was the note left haphazardly in the trunk of John Henry’s car rather than with his dad’s other legal documents? Finally, it has been reported that the elder Williams always signed important docs with his formal signature, Theodore S. Williams. Why, then, was this 2000 scrap of paper signed "Ted Williams" — the same autograph that he would affix to the thousands of pieces of memorabilia he signed over the years? And one more thing: how come none of Ted’s friends or caretakers knew of his intention to be frozen, and — okay, two things — why wasn’t Ted’s signature on the consent form? Probably because he was incapacitated in his later years, but John Henry signed the consent form only after his father’s death, when John Henry’s power-of-attorney privileges had expired (as they do legally upon the assignor’s death). Something’s very fishy here, no pun intended.

• Why is Ted destined to be alone there? Because despite their oil- (and no doubt, tear-) stained claim that they wanted to join their father in the medically enhanced future, John Henry and Claudia have yet to sign their own release forms designating a similar post-death treatment for themselves at Alcor. That’s not surprising, based on the SI article. Still, if their plans to join their father and "be together in the future" were genuine, why haven’t they put their John Hancocks on the paperwork? After all, it’s probably their only hope of joining him down the road, since the pair sure as hell won’t see him in the hereafter — let’s just say that Ted took the high road, and they’ll presumably take the low road.

• Why is there an outstanding $111,000 bill from Alcor, as yet unpaid by the Williams offspring? When the details emerged last summer of the Williams family’s wishes to be cryogenically frozen, it was routinely assumed that Alcor would take in Ted Williams’s body for free, since having the baseball legend on the premises would be a marketing boon for the fledgling facility. Turns out that John Henry paid only a $25,000 deposit on the original $136,000 bill three weeks after his dad’s death, and reportedly hasn’t paid a dime since. Now the Alcor folks are starting to wonder about their money, and, according to the Verducci article, have been making jokes about "throwing [Williams’s] body away, posting it on eBay or sending it in a frosted cardboard box C.O.D. to John Henry’s doorstep, to persuade him to pay the bill." Not surprisingly, neither John Henry nor his sister Claudia is talking, and the one child who would love to — their half-sister, Bobby-Jo Ferrell — cannot because of a gag order implemented when she accepted her portion of Williams’s disputed estate.

From the moment when John Henry re-entered Ted’s life in 1991, after a long estrangement, he brought nothing but controversy to his dad’s remaining years and legacy. He took over his father’s affairs and got him in over his head in a quest to make a killing in the burgeoning baseball-memorabilia market. It has been widely reported that John Henry coaxed his aging father into signing hundreds of items on a weekly basis, a situation that continued even after Ted suffered his third stroke, in 1994. John Henry’s business dealings have been a constant source of contention. He’s left a steady string of unpaid bills in his wake, and several of his ill-advised ventures went bankrupt, including the Hitter.net Internet scheme he created. No Red Sox fan will ever forgive John Henry for forcing Ted into wearing the ugly white Hitter.net hat instead of a Sox cap when he rode in from the bullpen on the night of the 1999 Major League All-Star Game at Fenway Park. John Henry’s financial difficulties did not prevent him from buying himself a fully loaded BMW and a souped-up Porsche in his dad’s waning years, along with a top-of-the-line batting machine that he was going to use to prepare for his own entry into the world of professional baseball. That much-maligned effort, which originally began last summer in the lower echelons of the Red Sox system (as a favor to Ted by the Sox brass), has not even come close to bearing fruit. The 34-year-old Williams fils has batted .190 for the Baton Rouge River Bats, an entry in the independent "Southeastern League of Professional Baseball" — i.e., baseball’s hinterlands, lowest of the low. He probably thought that his genes alone would get him at least to the lower echelons of the major leagues. Perhaps his failures thus far have driven him to look for an added injection of his dad’s DNA — hmmm, maybe that’s where the missing samples went?

All that’s really known is that John Henry Williams has emerged as a most loathsome character in this despicable turn of events. It’s bad enough that he managed to tarnish his famous father’s legacy in the twilight years of his life, but what he has done to desecrate that image in the past 13 months is beyond repugnant. His sister Claudia, who ran this past April’s Boston Marathon on behalf of her dad’s beloved charity, the Jimmy Fund (the fundraising arm of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute), is emerging as a hapless co-conspirator in all this nonsense; it seems that she was unwittingly drawn into this farce by misplaced trust in her older brother. Nonetheless, she must share some of the blame, and one can only hope that she will ultimately come around and support the efforts by many of Ted’s friends and fans to dispose of his remains in accordance with his original wishes.

During much of Ted Williams’s life, if you heard his name, you thought of his many accomplishments: his Hall of Fame baseball career, his service in the Armed Forces in two wars, his support of the Jimmy Fund, perhaps even his obsession with fishing. Now when you hear Ted Williams’s name, you think of the fiasco that has enveloped and forever tainted his legacy. Eighty-three years of living an admirable life have been tarnished by the actions of one man — one greedy, self-serving, ruthless, and shameless individual who unashamedly bears the once-proud surname of his father.

One can only hope that Alcor’s dubious efforts one day pay off, and that Ted Williams can come back to life and give his wretched son the good ass-kicking that he so richly deserves.

In the meantime, the only other hope is that John Henry Williams occasionally gets a visit from his late dad in the middle of the night. That ghostly image could enter his son’s room, head in hand, waking his offspring from a tortured sleep.

"John Henry," he would say, "you said you wanted to be together forever with me. Well, let’s go."

"Sporting Eye" runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com. Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com