Chillin' with the Splinter

Trying to track down Ted Williams

Hung out with Ted Williams the other day. Pretty cool.

He's spending his time in a one-story cement building in a warehouse district next to the Scottsdale, Ariz., airport, frozen, upside down, waiting for science to bring him back from the dead.

"Uh, we don't say 'dead,'" says the voluptuous redhead giving the tour here at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, America's largest cryonics company. "We say 'the end of his first life cycle.'"

On the wall are photos of people hoping for a mulligan, with little plaques underneath that read, for example, FIRST LIFE CYCLE: 1925-1997. SECOND LIFE CYCLE: 1997-___. But there are no pictures of Teddy Ballgame hitting for any cycle.

"We cannot verify if Mr. Williams is with us or not," says a little bearded doctor named Jerry Lemler, a former Tennessee psychiatrist who is the head of Alcor and looks exactly like the late poet Allen Ginsberg. "We protect the anonymity of all patients."

O.K., the greatest hitter who ever lived is here, according to his daughter, Bobby-Jo Ferrell, and the former curator of the Ted Williams Museum, Buzz Hamon. They're still upset that when Williams didn't die of heart failure a year ago next week, at 83, he was packed in a crate of ice and flown to Alcor, where Lemler and his staff drilled holes in his skull to insert temperature probes (that's gonna hurt later on) and started freezing him—

"Not 'freezing,'" interjects Lemler. "We put you in a glasslike matrix." O.K., they put him in "a glasslike matrix," meaning they replaced more than 60% of the water in his cells with a kind of human antifreeze so his tissue became as rigid as glass (but didn't actually freeze) while they gradually dropped his body temperature to -196° C. Some old sportswriters will tell you that is just a little warmer than Williams was with them. From there, they carted him into a kind of stainless-steel morgue—

"Please," says Lemler, "we call it the 'patient care bay.' We house 58 residents in our patient care bay." O.K., into the "patient care bay" with the rest of the "residents," who were having another in a string of very quiet days. Anyway, they tucked him in a waterproof sleeping bag, opened up one of the 10-foot-tall stainless-steel cylindrical tanks filled with liquid nitrogen and lowered him in. There are seven of these babies, and they look like giant thermoses, except they burp and hiss with the liquid nitrogen, which keeps Williams a Boston Blue Sox. Friends and relatives lay flowers at the base of the tanks, which makes the whole place look like a cemetery built by KitchenAid.

What's even creepier is that they hang the bodies upside down -- "in case there's ever a leak, the brain would be the last exposed," explains Lemler. How's that for irony? Williams, one of the greatest big-game fishermen ever, is hanging upside down until his next life cycle begins. Somewhere a whole lot of marlin are giggling.

Worse, the Hall of Famer shares his tank here at Coolerstown with at least two other bodies and probably eight severed heads—

"Not severed heads," interrupts Lemler. "Neuros."

All right, he shares his tank with eight "neuros," which are bodiless people who hope science will be able to grow back everything below the neck, hopefully in the shape of Pamela Anderson or Tyrese. Either way, it's going to be a bit of a shock to Williams if he suddenly wakes up in there.

Is this what Williams wanted, to be the most famous "cryonaut" in history, living with eight or 10 tankmates in an overgrown martini shaker? Doesn't matter now. Ferrell sued her brother, John Henry Williams, to get her father's body back and cremate it (talk about a climate change!) but settled for $215,000. So Ted Williams will live in suspense until either a) science thaws him out or b) Lemler runs out of cash and sells the whole shop to some unwitting buyer.

Honey, are you sure there's Creamsicles in these things?

And what happens if Williams pulls a Lazarus—

"Reanimates," says the redhead.

Oh, God. O.K., what happens when the poor bastard "reanimates" and finds that all his friends are dead and Eminem's grandkid is president and all his stuff has been auctioned off on eBay? And who's going to be the one to tell him that the Red Sox still haven't won a World Series?

Plus, what's he going to do for money? True, Alcor stores the stuff the "residents" want for the second time around in a one-cubic-foot box one mile under a Hutchinson, Kans., salt mine. You know: CDs, photos, stuff like that. No cash, though, so the undead better have some Microsoft stock hidden in there with their Billy Joel CDs.

Still, if in, say, the year 2500 scientists could reanimate Williams (hey, they already do it with embryos and sperm), reverse the aging process and get him back to, say, 20, his age during his first year in Boston, then a world we can't imagine would suddenly have a gift from us: one of the greatest athletes of our time. Now that would be a comeback—

"Well, not really a comeback in the sense—"

Oh, shut up.

Issue date: June 30, 2003

Rick Reilly, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, has been voted National Sportswriter of the Year eight times. His latest book, Who's Your Caddy?, his misadventures caddying for tour pros like Jack Nicklaus and David Duval, hit bookstores in May. He is also the author of the best-selling compliation The Life of Reilly, and the cult classic golf novel, Missing Links, as well as five other books.

 

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