The Alcor staff then started to drain blood and water from Ted’s body in what Alcor called a washout, replacing them with glycerol and another cryoprotectant known as B2C, which was used for the head only. Then, using a perforator, a standard neurological tool that looks like an electric drill, a surgeon and his assistant bored two small holes on either side of Ted’s skull so that the surface of the brain could be examined during the perfusion process to guard against swelling. Small wire sensors were inserted into each hole to be used to detect cracking of the skull during the freezing process later.
A green-and-white tube popped out of the perfusion machine, disrupting the washout process and causing “lots” of Williams’s blood to surge over the protective plastic wall on the operating table and spill onto the floor, according to the OR notes, which were taken in an informal style by the lay girlfriend of one of the Alcorians.1 About forty-five minutes later, the surgeon “shut down some tube accidentally” on the machine, and the pressure ratcheted up too quickly, the notes reported, causing the mix of blood and chemicals to pump through Ted’s system at too high, and then at too low, a level. An “enormous amount of arterial leakage,” with blood flowing from Williams’s left eye, was also noted.2
Soon the surgeon announced that he was ready to perform the “cephalic isolation.” This meant Ted Williams’s head was now ready to be cut off. The surgeon took out a carving knife and began to cut—starting below Ted’s neck, slicing through tissue and bone, working his way down through the sixth cervical vertebra, at the top of the spine. At one point, the going slow, the surgeon remarked that he wished he had an electric knife. Finally, he switched to a bone saw to finish the job, and at 9:17 p.m. mountain time, the head of the greatest hitter who ever lived had been sliced off.
After Ted’s head was severed, it was put into a small plastic container and taken to an adjoining room known as the “neuro cool-down area.” There it was placed into a small Dewar connected to a larger Dewar filled with liquid nitrogen. The larger Dewar then began pumping nitrogen gas cooled to minus 202 degrees at a high velocity into the smaller Dewar containing Ted’s head. This went on for about three hours. The goal was to cool all parts of the head below the glass transition temperature, minus 191 degrees, as quickly as possible, after which it would be vitrified, or reach an ice-free state.
Over the next two weeks, a head would normally be placed in a cylindrical tank known as an LR-40 and gradually cooled further, to minus 321 degrees, the temperature at which it would be deemed fit for permanent storage. But in this case, the Alcorians chose to put Ted’s head inside what they called their Cryostar, an intermediate cooling facility where heads were sometimes stored during the freezing process. The Cryostar was supposed to limit the cracking of the brain that normally occurred as the head was frozen, but the machine was malfunctioning, causing its temperature to fluctuate. As a result, Ted’s brain may have been subjected to more cracking, not less.
The procedure took more than three hours to complete. Ted’s torso was taken to what Alcor called its whole-body cooling bath, a large, thermally insulated rectangular box filled with silicone oil cooled by dry ice. Two drums of oil were at the foot of the bath, connected by a pipe. The torso was wrapped in protective plastic and strapped to a wire-mesh stretcher before being lowered into the oil bath. A lid was placed over the bath, and a pump circulated the oil amid chunks of dry ice, cooling the torso to minus 110 degrees at a rate of 32 degrees per minute. Then Ted’s body was removed and deposited in a large Dewar, where, like his head, it would be cooled further over a period of two weeks.
Each Dewar is ten feet tall, a little more than three feet in diameter, and weighs about 5,400 pounds when full. The capacity is four bodies and five heads. The bodies are wrapped in insulated bags and put inside an aluminum container called a pod. Four pods ring the inside circumference of a Dewar, and in the middle is the “neuro column,” which consists of five large cans about the size of lobster pots, each resting on a shelf, one on top of the other. Each can contains a head.
An eyebolt is screwed into the bone below the neck to make it easier to handle the head when necessary. The heads lie upside down, resting on a can of Bumble Bee tuna, or if a head is larger than normal, perhaps a can of Dinty Moore beef stew. “They wanted the heads resting on something, not just setting at the bottom of the stockpot,” said Cindy Felix, a former facilities operations manager at Alcor. “It’s amazing some of the things they did. They were so high-tech in some areas but almost medieval in others—like the tuna can.”3
Whole bodies, those with the heads still attached, hang in the Dewars upside down. “We protected the head by putting it at the bottom, so that the last thing to be uncovered and thawed in the worst-case scenario is the brain, because we care about the identity and the personality, and most of that is encoded in the brain,” said Tanya Jones, then Alcor’s chief operating officer.4
After Ted’s long procedure was over, the Alcorians were tired but jubilant. Here was the celebrity who could transform cryonics and give it some legitimacy, the kind of boost Walt Disney’s preservation might have given the movement—had it actually happened and not merely been urban legend.
Of course, for the moment, at least, the company couldn’t say anything because of patient confidentiality rules. And John-Henry Williams, Ted’s son, was keeping them to that. Holding a sweeping power of attorney and health proxy for his father, John-Henry, thirty-three, had become a cryonics disciple. He’d been in secret talks with Alcor for more than a year about freezing Ted when the time came and had given the company strict instructions not to tell anyone his father was there. Alcor executives hoped they could eventually persuade John-Henry to let them go public—perhaps in return for a price concession. Meanwhile, Ted—his head now in a pot, his torso in a pod—settled in to await what would be his greatest comeback ever.
The fundamental question of whether Williams wanted his body to be in the place it now was—an Arizona cryonics facility—and decapitated, at that, was very much in doubt. He had never submitted an application to Alcor or signed up for the cryonics procedure himself, as is standard practice among the facility’s other clients. John-Henry had only faxed Alcor a completed application on his father’s behalf about six hours after Ted was pronounced dead. Moreover, Ted’s will, last revised in 1996, had specified that he wanted to be cremated, not frozen, and he had told scores of friends and associates over the years, at least one as late as 2002, that his wishes were to have his ashes scattered off the Florida Keys, where he had fished for years, along with the ashes of his beloved dog, a Dalmatian named Slugger, who had died in 1999.
John-Henry knew that Ted’s will specified he wished to be cremated, and he also knew that his half sister, Bobby-Jo Williams Ferrell, was vehemently against the idea of her father being frozen. She had told John-Henry so directly when he asked her to consider cryonics for Ted a year before. Bobby-Jo had also notified Alcor by e-mail on the day Williams died, when his body was still in Florida, that she opposed the procedure.
The preparation of Ted’s 1996 will, which was a revision of earlier drafts he had made over the years, was overseen by Eric Abel, a Williams family attorney. John-Henry had confided in Abel about his plans to freeze Ted several years before his death, and Abel had advised him on the issue. Abel said he counseled John-Henry that because of Ted’s stated preference for cremation in his will, it would be prudent for John-Henry to get something in writing from his father, preferably notarized, saying that he now wanted to be cryonically preserved. But after Ted died and his body was flown to Alcor, Abel said he didn’t know if John-Henry had obtained such a statement, nor did he ask him if he had.5
Besides facing opposition from Bobby-Jo on freezing Ted, John-Henry also encountered resistance from his younger sister, Claudia Williams. But Claudia said she gradually came around to the idea, and that while their father was initially dismissive of cryonics, she and John-Henry were able to convince him and gain his approval in N
ovember of 2000 during a private meeting in Ted’s hospital room, shortly before he had a pacemaker installed to boost his failing heart. Claudia and her brother also felt they could dispose of his body as they saw fit. “As far as I was concerned, our father had died, and John-Henry and I could do whatever we wanted with our father,” she said.6
Having no idea Williams had been frozen, his many fans were left to ponder the Kid’s legacy: his magnificent .406 mark in 1941, achieved on the last day of the season, when Ted, in perhaps the defining moment of his career, declined the invitation of his manager to sit out the final day of the year to protect his .39955 average, which would have been rounded to .400, and proceeded to go 6–8 playing both games of a doubleheader; and his consistent flair for delivering other dramatic moments—such as winning the 1941 All-Star Game for the American League with a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth inning, surviving a fiery crash landing in his jet after getting shot down by enemy gunfire in Korea, and hitting a home run on his last time at bat in 1960. They remembered Williams as the driven perfectionist; his swagger, style, and panache in the batter’s box—a shade under six foot four, skinny and loose, hips swaying back and forth, bat cocked close to his body, hands grinding, then unleashing, at the last possible second, his perfect, slightly uppercut swing—and the what-ifs of how much grander his final numbers would have been had he not lost nearly five seasons in his prime fighting two wars, tempered by the realization that serving in the wars had also enhanced his legacy immeasurably. And they recalled the way he loped around the bases in his distinctive home-run trot, head always tucked way down; the way his explosive, often dark persona regularly made more news than his exploits on the field as he feuded with, gestured toward, and spat at a small faction of fans who delighted in taunting him and as he carried on a running war with the sportswriters who, he felt, had pried unjustifiably into his life and knocked him unfairly; and how despite such crude outbursts, Williams consistently demonstrated a basic sense of generosity and kindness, especially through his work for the Jimmy Fund, a charity for children with cancer, for which he raised millions of dollars over the years.
Ted was an original; not a traditional, modest, self-effacing hero but brash, profane, outspoken, and guileless. Self-taught and inquiring, he excelled as a Marine fighter pilot and became one of the most accomplished fishermen in the world. For better and worse, he was always his own man, never a phony—characteristics that helped him outlast his critics and win widespread affection and admiration as he aged. He had three favorite songs, which he played in his mind to help him fall asleep: “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “The Marines’ Hymn,” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
On visits to Boston long after he retired, Williams was struck by how people fawned and fussed over him, puzzled that he seemed more popular in retirement than he was during his playing days. The best evidence of this was his reception at the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park. Ted, by then fragile and ailing, was driven out on the field in a golf cart to a thunderous ovation, and then, in a memorable scene, swarmed by a new generation of All-Star players who knew they were in the presence of baseball royalty. The players lingered, wanting to soak in the moment and bask in Williams’s glow.
Of course all the obituaries listed Ted’s key batting statistics, representing the spine of his twenty-two-year career: the .344 lifetime average, six batting titles (he led the league two more years, in 1954 and 1955, but injuries and walks prevented him from getting enough at bats to qualify for the batting titles in those years), two Most Valuable Player awards, two Triple Crowns, and 521 homers. He was selected an All-Star eighteen times.
Out of 7,706 at bats, Ted had nearly three times as many walks (2,021) as strikeouts (709), and he retired with a .482 on-base percentage—baseball’s best ever. That meant he reached base nearly every other time he came up. He was second in all-time slugging percentage at .634, behind Ruth’s .690. He led the league in homers four times and RBIs four times, in runs scored six times, walks eight times, slugging percentage eight times, and on-base percentage twelve times.
Ted’s .388 average in 1957, at age thirty-nine, was nearly as remarkable as his .406 year. Though injured, he won the batting title, then promptly did it again in 1958, at the age of forty. “If in the end I didn’t make it as the greatest hitter who ever lived—that long ago boyhood dream—I kind of enjoy thinking I might have become in those last years the greatest old hitter who ever lived,” Ted wrote in his autobiography, My Turn at Bat.
During each Williams at bat, something between a hush and a buzz suddenly filled the air as the crowd shifted from autopilot engagement to edge-of-the-seat anticipation. “I was looking around for a story one day, and someone said there was this blind guy on the first-base line,” remembered Tim Horgan, who covered the Red Sox for the Boston Herald and then the Boston Evening Traveler in the 1950s. “I went up to the man and said, ‘Pardon me for asking, but why do you come to the park? Why not listen to the game on the radio?’ He said, ‘I love the sounds of the game when Ted comes up.’ ”7
Red Sox fans and the rabid press corps that covered the team seemed as captivated by Ted’s personality as they were by his slugging. He was a prickly prima donna whose much-chronicled “rabbit ears” had an unerring ability to zero in on even a few scattered boos amid all the cheers. He seemed immune to receiving praise but generally couldn’t tolerate criticism. On the field, his moods ranged from sheer joy and exuberance during his rookie year in 1939 to rage and petulance later in his career.
Williams reasoned that he was an expert at what he did, was trying his best to do even better, and thus resented any criticism. From 1940 to his last game in 1960, he swore off the time-honored baseball convention of tipping his hat to the fans. Once, after a spring training game in Miami in 1947, Ted appeared to doff his cap as he crossed home plate after hitting a home run. So alert was the press to Williams’s every move that the Boston Globe’s beat writer at the time, Hy Hurwitz, rushed to the clubhouse after the game and asked Ted if he had, in fact, tipped his hat. He denied that he had and said he was merely mopping his brow. Whereupon Hurwitz famously wrote: “It was the heat, not the humility.”8
The self-made, intellectually curious Williams was ahead of his time in regarding hitting as a science worthy of study, experimentation, and technical analysis. He coddled the blunt instruments of his success: his bats. He boned them. He cleaned them with alcohol every night. He weighed them meticulously on small scales to make sure they hadn’t gotten slightly heavier through condensation. And, acting on the improbable suggestion of a teenage boy from Chelsea, Massachusetts, he even heated his bats to keep their moisture content low.
If anyone could get under Ted’s skin, it was reporters, a group he contemptuously called the Knights of the Keyboard. For most of Ted’s career, Boston had between seven and nine daily newspapers, plus another half dozen or so from the surrounding communities, not to mention the New York and national press. It was the post–Front Page era, but Ted was still prime fodder for intense tabloid and circulation wars in Boston, his every move dissected, debated, analyzed, second-guessed, and, of course, photographed.
A voracious consumer of his own press, Ted ignored all the positive coverage and focused only on the negative. “There were 49 million newspapers in Boston, from the Globe to the Brookline Something-or-Other, all ready to jump us,” he whined in My Turn at Bat.9 He was particularly sensitive about any stories that he felt delved unnecessarily into his private life, accused him of failing to hit in the clutch, or suggested that he was more interested in his own performance than that of the team.
It was natural for writers to despise Williams and fear him, because he treated them like dirt. But they also knew Ted was great copy, and if they could get him to talk, he was usually a terrific interview because he spoke with unvarnished candor. He was not above stirring the pot with reporters to give him something to be mad at if he felt he was losing his edge. He often said he hit better i
f he was mad. “He nurtured his rage,” as the writer Roger Kahn once put it.
If Ted had been quiet for a while, and perhaps not hitting as well as he normally did, the writers would learn to expect that he’d pick a fight with one or several of them, pop off, then usually go on a tear at the plate.
If Ted’s rages on and off the field dominated his public persona, his dedicated charitable work underscored his innate kindness. Once, after the Red Sox finished playing a night game in Washington, Ted chartered a plane and flew down to Raleigh, North Carolina, to spend five hours visiting a sick child, then flew back to Washington in time for an afternoon game the next day.
Every time Williams made a charitable visit on behalf of the Jimmy Fund or another organization, he would insist that no press coverage be allowed. If he saw a reporter or photographer, he would turn around and leave. He had a genuine, generous spirit and feared that press coverage might make people think he had some ulterior motive, such as trying to improve his churlish image. “He did not want to be thought of as a phony, I think,” said Tim Horgan.
In retirement, the public Ted blossomed. He was quickly inducted into the Hall of Fame, and in his acceptance speech made a totally unexpected, bald political statement that called on the lords of Cooperstown to lift their color ban and induct the old Negro League stars. The statement was courageous, earned Ted enormous goodwill among black players, and underlined his basic sense of fairness and decency. Later, he returned to baseball and did a turn as a manager for the Washington Senators, pursued big-time fishing and hunting around the world, made annual spring training forays to Florida on behalf of the Red Sox to work with young hitters, took bows at the White House, made his peace with the fans and press of Boston, dabbled in the memorabilia market, and was a goodwill ambassador for baseball. Unlike many old-timers who cling to their era while belittling and resenting modern players, Ted remained a fan of the game, heaped praise on current stars, and forged relationships with players such as Tony Gwynn and Nomar Garciaparra.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 2
