The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (112 page)

After the film, John-Henry started telling Jenna about cryonics. “I’m
from a nursing background,” she recalled. “I’m thinking, ‘Dead meat doesn’t beat.’ I watch people die every day. But in John-Henry’s mind, cryonics meant you’d never be apart and still be together someday. He said he wanted to do it for himself, that his father was very interested in it, and they’d talked about it. He said Ted didn’t believe in God. John-Henry didn’t, either, so the only thing they could believe in was science. His philosophy was: ‘I’m not going to heaven—I’m going to Alcor.’ ”

John-Henry later took Jenna to meet Saul Kent and Bill Faloon, the leading cryonicists and Alcor figures. And after that, she met Jerry Lemler, the Alcor CEO.
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Meanwhile, Alcor was shifting into high-alert mode for Ted’s death. John-Henry had told officials at the company that it was a done deal: they were getting the Kid. So Alcor hired a public relations strategist to deal with the anticipated flood of media attention when the news broke. The company also began to make logistical arrangements for a team of specialists to race to Citrus Hills when the time came to pack Ted’s body in ice.

The PR man was Bill Haworth from Los Angeles. Haworth had worked on the 1992 and 1996 Clinton presidential campaigns before easing into the cryo milieu by working with Saul Kent on his project to build Timeship, a cryonics megafacility.

“It was a closely held secret that Ted was coming to Alcor,” Haworth said. “Board members and some of the key staff knew. What I’d been told by Jerry Lemler and Saul Kent and John-Henry was that under the right circumstances and at the proper time, there would be a news conference in Boston to announce that Alcor had Ted Williams. I knew Ted was the man of the hour, that everyone thought he could change Alcor’s fate. I’d get reports in the spring of 2002 that Williams’s health was failing. There was discussion that we could make hay with this. That this was an ideal opportunity if it was handled right.”

Haworth drafted a five-page statement for Lemler to read at the anticipated Boston press conference. “Jerry Lemler was the most ardent baseball fan I’ve ever met,” Haworth said. “I can’t describe how clearly delighted Jerry was at the prospect of Alcor attracting not only a true celebrity but a celebrity from
his
pastime. Jerry was a PR man’s dream. He wanted to do anything and everything to promote the case for cryonics. I was given a blank check to do whatever I needed to do to bring the media in line with cryonics, to spin the thing out.”
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As Haworth contemplated how best to manage the PR, Alcor hired Suspended Animation, Inc., of Florida to see to it that Williams’s body
was as well preserved as possible when it arrived in Scottsdale to be dismembered and frozen. Suspended Animation, then based in Boca Raton, worked to develop equipment and techniques to minimize cell damage after death.

John-Henry would give Alcor frequent updates on Ted’s condition, and Alcor would relay the information to Suspended Animation’s chief operating officer, David Hayes. “We were given certain parameters we had to prepare for,” Hayes said. “If Ted got sick or ill, we’d go into different levels of standby. We’d be prepared to get on the road, bags packed; or the other level of standby was to go to Citrus Hills and sit where the patient was for weeks on end. Crews went to wait near his house. There were many discussions about where to park the ambulance so it wouldn’t draw attention.”
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As he neared the end, Ted had had enough of life in his debilitated condition and asked one close friend, Steve Brown, to pray for him to die. Brown, an ardent Christian but not pushy about it, wanted to talk to Williams about God but didn’t know how.

“It hurt me not to bring a good argument about God,” Brown said. “I didn’t know how to present it. Ted was open to being convinced. My secretary prayed with Ted, and Ted prayed with her. He asked me what made me believe and think there’s an afterlife. I said I didn’t know, but I kind of look at it as an insurance policy. If there is, and all I have to do is ask His forgiveness, how can you not? I think he took it to heart. When I told him I couldn’t pray for him to die, he said, ‘That’s not the answer I was looking for, Bush, but it’s a good one.’ ”
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A few of Ted’s caretakers were zealous Christians as well. When they saw that Williams’s days were numbered, the caretakers looked for an opportunity to bring him to Christ, even though they knew that he was skeptical of religion at best and that John-Henry and Claudia were firm nonbelievers.

The leader in this effort was nurse Virginia Hiley-Self. Since October of 2001, when she started working for Ted, she had raised the subject several times with him, but he had declined to bite. “I’d say, ‘Jesus Christ is my savior; are you interested in sharing about it?’ He’d say, ‘Not now,’ ” Hiley-Self recalled. “It wasn’t something I did every day. I just felt when the time was right I’d bring it up because it was important to me that before he died he did accept Christ. I wanted him to go to heaven. I felt God led me to that house for that reason. I felt my purpose was served there, not only taking care of him but also eternal.”
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Hiley-Self enlisted the help of a friend who also was taking care of Williams, Donna Van Tassel, a nutritionist whom John-Henry had brought in to administer an herbal regimen for Ted. Van Tassel was also deeply religious and looked for ways to interact spiritually with her clients. “I go in there with people thinking they need herbs, but I do a lot of emotional healing, and a lot of times people have an experience with the Lord,” she said.

Van Tassel had never been to a baseball game and knew nothing about the sport when she first met Ted in January of 2002, but she said they bonded, and after a while, she “could see more of a reason for me to be there than for an herb,” so she concluded that Williams was ready for a spiritual approach.

One day (Hiley-Self recorded it in her journal as January 21), when Ted was alert and in the living room, sitting in his wheelchair, Van Tassel began to lead him in the sinner’s prayer. “I said to him, like with everybody, ‘Do you want to ask Jesus to come into your heart as your savior?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ So I said, ‘I’ll lead you, but you have to be the one to say it: Heavenly father, I know I’m a sinner.’ Then he’d say, ‘Heavenly father, I know I’m a sinner.…’

“I talked with him, and as I was talking, I was saying what I could see, and it was like we were on a baseball field, just me and him. It was very real. I was standing there on the base. It was spiritual baseball. That’s never happened to me—I could not have come up with these words. God knew what Ted needed, so He put it in terms that he could relate to. I’d say, ‘Okay, this is the greatest hit you’ve ever hit,’ and he’s playing along in the game, I’m throwing the ball and he’s at bat. It was very back and forth, together. He kept receiving. I’d say, ‘Okay, you’re up to bat,’ and he kept playing this spiritual baseball game, until the end. And they were cheering him, the fans, and in the spiritual field, the angels were rejoicing.”
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Thrilled, Van Tassel reported the exciting news to her friend Hiley-Self. Two days later, January 23, Virginia followed up with Ted. “I asked him who his Savior was, and he said, ‘Jesus Christ is my Savior,’ ” Hiley-Self said.

Claudia Williams was highly skeptical of these accounts and resentful that Hiley-Self and Van Tassel approached her father about such a personal issue. “I came to learn that some of the caretakers tried to enlighten Dad with God, and he’d be just squirming in bed, screaming, ‘John-Henry!’ ” Claudia said. “Dad at that point was either too tired to fight them and argue with them or was trying to be respectful of someone
who was wiping his butt and cleaning his wounds, or doing whatever they had to do, [and was trying] to not say something degrading to them. Even on his deathbed, he swore to God. ‘Why are you putting me through this?’ ”

On February 17, 2002, Ted made his first public appearance since his nine-hour heart surgery more than a year earlier. It would also be the last time he was seen in public.

The occasion was the annual induction ceremony at Williams’s museum, where Cal Ripken of the Baltimore Orioles, Don Mattingly of the Yankees, and Dwight Evans of the Red Sox were being honored. It was a last-minute decision by John-Henry to have Ted appear. Tommy Lasorda, the master of ceremonies, had already begun the program when he got word that Williams was on his way.

“We have a special guest,” Lasorda said. “Let’s wait a few seconds until he gets here.”

Outside, a van pulled up. The sliding door was opened, and the Kid, in his wheelchair, was lowered to the ground by a hydraulic lift. As John-Henry and Claudia guided their father onto a stage, Lasorda said: “Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest hitter that God ever put on earth, Ted Williams!” Nearly two thousand people, including Johnny Pesky, Dom DiMaggio, Elden Auker, and other old-timers—such as Enos Slaughter, the former Cardinal who had figured so prominently in the 1946 World Series against the Red Sox—rose to their feet, many weeping.

Ted wore a blanket around his legs and a sweater underneath his blue blazer despite the Florida heat. The ninety-one-year-old Auker bent down and kissed his friend of more than sixty years on the forehead. “I love you,” Williams said softly to Auker in response. Then Bob Lobel, a Boston TV sportscaster there to help with the awards, gently wiped a tear away from Ted’s cheek.

Lasorda turned the microphone over to John-Henry. “We knew this day was coming for a few weeks,” the young Williams said. “We never clearly realized what it would mean to be here on the same stage with my dad and my sister, breathing the same air everybody else is breathing and knowing how valuable life is and what love is.… I don’t think there are two children luckier in the whole wide world than my sister and I. All I want him to know is that I know the hell he and I have gone through in the last year and a half, and I and my sister could not have done it without him. Dad, we love you.” Claudia embraced her father, then Ted waved weakly to the audience without speaking.

Afterward, Auker made it clear to the
Boston Globe
’s Gordon Edes that he disapproved of the way John-Henry was handling his father’s care and suggested that the public appearance had been exploitive. Ted “can hardly talk,” Auker said. “He’s got this thing in his throat, he’s on dialysis every night, and now he’s lost his appetite and is losing weight. His face is very pale. They’re just keeping him alive. It just isn’t right. He doesn’t want to live. He’s in a wheelchair, he can’t take care of himself, he’s got someone around him 24 hours every day. It’s very, very unfortunate, sad to see.”

Auker said he thought Ted’s appearance at his museum was inappropriate. “It’s like he’s on display. Of course, people were thrilled to see him, but to see him in that condition, to see him like that?”
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In June, after nearly eight months of working with John-Henry, Steve Ferroli concluded that while the kid could never hit major-league pitching, he might be able to pass muster in rookie ball. But this would require signing a contract with a major-league team that sponsored a club in a rookie league.

John-Henry asked Ferroli what he should do. Ferroli suggested the obvious: approach the Red Sox. The team had just been sold to John W. Henry, a commodities trader who had previously owned the Florida Marlins. John-Henry should just call John Henry and ask for a meeting, Ferroli advised.

Henry, after acquiring the Sox, had gone to Citrus Hills to introduce himself to Ted and pay his respects. Now he sat down for a meeting at Fenway Park with Williams’s son, who was accompanied by Ferroli. Henry’s new Red Sox CEO, Larry Lucchino, who had held equivalent positions with the Baltimore Orioles and San Diego Padres, also attended.

“John-Henry was a nervous wreck,” said Ferroli, whose role was to be supportive, to attest to how hard his pupil had worked over the previous eight months, and to argue that he deserved a chance, despite his advanced baseball age.
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Everyone in the room understood that this scheme would have been a nonstarter absent the Ted connection, but the Red Sox agreed to give John-Henry a basic minor-league contract out of respect for the Kid. Henry warned the young Williams that he would likely be subjected to snarky and occasionally ruthless coverage from the press and even fans, but John-Henry was undeterred.
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Lucchino actually was attracted to the entertainment and curiosity aspects of the John-Henry gambit. “I’ve always been open to a vaudevillian
approach—the Bill Veeck school of baseball, if you will—if it’s not going to hurt anyone,” he said. “Ted was near the end of his life, and we saw it as a gesture of respect to the father. I called our farm director, Ben Cherington, then, and suggested that he be given an opportunity. It was not that big a deal. We’re in the yes business. We didn’t see it as that big an imposition on the organization, given his bloodlines.”
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The Red Sox announced the John-Henry signing on June 20, 2002, and said he would be assigned to the club’s Class A Fort Myers affiliate in the Gulf Coast League. With a few exceptions, press reaction ranged from skepticism to cruelty. Gordon Edes of the
Globe
called the signing a “ridiculous publicity grab.”
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The
Boston Herald
’s Steve Buckley ripped the Sox for perpetrating “this disgraceful, embarrassing sham.” He referred to John-Henry as “Thanks Ted” and said every inning of playing time he received would be an inning taken away from a legitimate prospect. “Let’s face it,” Buckley added, “the kid is a clown. If he’s going to play for the Red Sox, he might as well have red hair and a red nose.”
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In his first game for the Gulf Coast League Red Sox on June 26, John-Henry—wearing number 37 and batting eighth as the designated hitter—went 0–3 but acquitted himself honorably. He hit a slow roller to shortstop, popped up to short, and lined hard to the third baseman.
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In his second game, he played first base, where he recorded ten putouts and one error while again going 0–3, though he reached base when he was hit by a pitch.
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In his third game, John-Henry started at first once more, but had to leave the game before getting an at bat after running into a railing while chasing a pop-up and breaking a rib. The Red Sox said he would be sidelined for six weeks.
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