The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (108 page)

Ted might also have been pondering his own financial condition. Not only would he have to find some way to pay the $250,000 he’d just learned John-Henry still owed, but the $570,000 he had put up as collateral for John-Henry’s Hitter loan from SunTrust had been quickly seized by the bank after the bankruptcy filing. And God only knew how much money John-Henry had taken from the memorabilia companies—Ted Williams Family Enterprises and Green Diamond Sports—to invest in Hitter.

Ted had willingly given John-Henry his power of attorney, but some of the caretakers and aides say that Williams was pressured into signing papers even though he didn’t know what he was signing. “Once, John-Henry was having Ted sign papers that were blank,” said John Sullivan, a caretaker from 1997 to 2000. “He was signing pages for a larger document. Ted said, ‘I want you to tell me what it said!’ John-Henry said something that didn’t satisfy him, and they got into a shouting match.”
¹³

Another time, when Mary Dluhy, an aide to John-Henry from 1997
to 2001, was sitting with Ted at his kitchen table, having him sign a document, Williams said to her: “Mary, tell me I still own my own house.”
¹⁴

“Of course,” Dluhy replied, tearing up as she recalled the story.
^*

Within a few days of being told that Hitter had gone bankrupt and that John-Henry still had not fully repaid Bob Breitbard, Ted developed angry red blotches on his chest and under his left arm. “Ted came down with a case of the shingles and was in great pain,” George Carter said. “The stress really got to him. It was pitiful to see what this kid did to his father. It was just pitiful. When Ted got the shingles, that was a turning point. He spiraled down after that. I seen it happen right before my eyes.”
¹⁵

A few weeks later, Hitter’s link to pornography was partially revealed. The
St. Petersburg Times
reported that a man who worked for Strictly Hosting, Hitter’s dummy corporation, had been arrested and accused of raping a teenage girl. The article said that while the ties between Hitter and Strictly Hosting were unclear, when a reporter called Hitter and asked for Strictly Hosting, he ended up being put through to Hitter CEO John-Henry. John-Henry was quoted as saying that Hitter merely provided Strictly Hosting with high-bandwidth access to the Internet, and he denied that the two companies had any corporate links. Fortunately for John-Henry, Ted never heard about any of this and thus was spared further strain.
¹⁶

In early October, the Red Sox announced that the team was for sale. John-Henry—not lacking for chutzpah less than three months after Hitter had filed for bankruptcy—was one of the first to call John Harrington, who ran the Sox on behalf of Jean Yawkey’s JRY Trust, to express an interest in acquiring the club. John-Henry said he would be forming an investor group with his father as the titular head and wanted to let Harrington know that the group would be a contender. Harrington never took him seriously. “We looked at it as John-Henry saying to the world, ‘Hey, you want the inside track? Bring me in,’ ” Harrington said.
¹⁷

Still, John-Henry called Dan Shaughnessy of the
Globe
to fan interest in his bid. “There’s an awful lot of work ahead to make something like this come off,” he told Shaughnessy, whose story appeared under the headline
A SPLENDID IDEA: TED CONSIDERS SOX
. Said John-Henry, “We’ve had some positive people looking at all of our options regarding this, and over the next few weeks we’re going to have to put together a group. Unfortunately, Dad and I don’t have $400 million. But something that we do have is something that cannot be bought, and that is the Ted Williams name and the Ted Williams legacy and the Ted Williams feeling about baseball.” The Hitter bankruptcy, little known outside of Citrus County, was not mentioned in the
Globe
story.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig reacted favorably: “I will say that there is no name more synonymous with the Red Sox than Ted Williams.” But Ted himself—still staggered by Hitter’s bankruptcy, the lingering debt to Breitbard, and that painful case of shingles—hardly sounded as though he saw himself as a baseball baron. “John-Henry’s talked to me about it, and he’s got his own ideas,” Williams told Shaughnessy less than enthusiastically. “It’s gonna take a lot of dough, I don’t know how much. I’m a little peon down here. I might be able to buy the strap that holds third base.”
^18
*

In fact, on the night of October 30, just eighteen days after the
Globe
trial balloon, Ted was taken to Shands Hospital in Gainesville after having a hard time breathing. Williams had barely slept for two days and was showing symptoms of Cheyne-Stokes respiration—an abnormal breathing pattern alternating between slow, deep breaths and short, quick breaths, sometimes followed by a temporary stoppage of breathing altogether. Paged by Ted’s caretakers Frank Brothers and George Carter, John-Henry drove over quickly from his house at nearby Black Diamond Ranch. Eric Abel soon appeared as well. John-Henry called an ambulance, but when it arrived, Ted balked, saying he wouldn’t get in. The ambulance driver said that without the patient’s consent he couldn’t go anywhere. So Frank and George lifted Ted into Williams’s Suburban and drove the sixty-odd miles to Shands as John-Henry and Abel followed in John-Henry’s BMW.

Since Cheyne-Stokes breathing can be associated with heart failure, Williams’s cardiologist, Rick Kerensky, had been alerted and was waiting for Ted when he arrived at the emergency room. It was quickly determined that he should be admitted to the hospital. John-Henry told Frank and George to check into a motel across the street. They would be based there but take turns staying in Williams’s room to help with his care and, on alternating twelve-hour shifts, keep him company. Carter asked John-Henry if he wanted him to inform his sisters, Claudia and Bobby-Jo, that Ted had been admitted to the hospital. No, John-Henry told Carter; he would call his sisters.

Around 2:00 a.m., John-Henry and Abel were hungry, so they drove to a nearby Chevron gas station off Interstate 75 and picked up some snacks from the station’s all-night convenience store. As he ate in the car, John-Henry’s mind was racing. He realized his father was declining quickly. In two days, Kerensky would be performing a catheterization procedure on Ted’s heart, likely a precursor to installing a pacemaker several days later. John-Henry decided it was time to revisit with Abel, his best friend, a delicate subject he had first raised with the lawyer three years earlier: cryonics.

Cryonicists, operating on the margins of society, believe people can be frozen after they die in the hope that advancing science and medical knowledge will one day be able to bring them back to life through a process they call reanimation.

John-Henry was intrigued by the practice, which operates under the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, a law that allows people to donate their bodies to medical schools or laboratories for research. He had watched a documentary about cryonics on the Discovery Channel, conducted some research on his own, and was mindful that cryonics, while still widely viewed as a highly improbable theory subscribed to by several hundred eccentrics, had nonetheless seeped into popular culture through numerous science-fiction stories and movies like Woody Allen’s
Sleeper
and
Forever Young,
starring Mel Gibson.

Now, as Ted Williams neared death, John-Henry was getting increasingly serious about freezing his father’s remains.

The first time he raised the subject of cryonics with Abel, in 1997, they were at Ted’s house, fooling around online. John-Henry went to various cryonics websites. He showed Abel the two leading practitioners: the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Arizona, and the Cryonics Institute, in Michigan. “They freeze you on the chance they can bring you back,” John-Henry explained. Abel told him he was out of his mind.

In fact, young Williams had casually broached cryonics directly with Ted back in 1997. Frank Brothers was there at the time, along with another aide, Donna Fleischmann. “They were just finishing breakfast when John-Henry said, ‘Dad, you ever heard of cryonics?’ Ted goes, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard of it; they freeze your body,’ ” Brothers recalled. “John-Henry goes, ‘Well, you want to be frozen?’ and Ted goes, ‘No.’ But John-Henry kept pushing. ‘They can freeze you; they can only freeze your head,’ and Ted’s like, ‘I’ve already signed my will, John-Henry. I want to be cremated.’ The kid kept pushing it, and finally Ted just pushed himself from the table, and he got up without his walker and started walking back to his room. Oh, he was pissed.”
¹⁹
Fleischmann confirmed the conversation: “Ted had a few choice words for the cryonics idea. He said it was never going to happen.”
²⁰

Brothers said there were two other occasions when he and Williams discussed cryonics after John-Henry first raised the subject. And from those encounters, Brothers gathered that John-Henry was still talking to his father about the idea. Later in 1997, Brothers and Ted were watching a documentary about cryonics on TV. “We watched the thing, and Ted goes, ‘That’s a crock of shit.’ Then he said something like, ‘I can’t believe John-Henry still wants to have me frozen.’ ” The second conversation with Williams occurred in 1999 as Brothers was putting him to bed one night: “Ted brought it up to me that ‘John-Henry talked to me again about that cryogenics crap.’ ”

As he grew more interested in the subject, John-Henry asked various family friends, including Dom DiMaggio, what they thought of cryonics. “I remember him talking about it in Ted’s kitchen,” DiMaggio recalled. “I didn’t pay much attention to it. Then he said to me, ‘What do you think of it?’ I said something like, ‘That’s way off. Only a dream.’ I never dreamed he was thinking of that for Ted.”
²¹

But he was—and seriously, as Abel realized after sitting with John-Henry in his car for two hours in the early morning of October 31, 2000, near Shands Hospital.

“I’d say John-Henry was probably ninety-five percent there, maybe ninety-eight percent, by the time we had that late-night meeting,” Abel said. “At that point it was real to him. It was a decision he wanted to make. I beat him up on the mockery that was going to be made of him. He brushed that off. It was like, ‘That I can live with. I can handle that. It’s worth it, I believe.’ ”

Abel then began to discuss various legal options to prepare for a cryonics scenario. The first was that if John-Henry could get Ted to accept
it, they simply could write a new will and have him affirm that he no longer wished to be cremated—he wanted to be frozen. But this option was quickly rejected. “Changing the will would have raised competency issues,” Abel said. “No one wanted to jeopardize the will that had already been redone. With cryonics, the existing will could have been thrown out, and he would not get any of his intentions done. We already assumed Bobby-Jo would be a nightmare. We didn’t want to give her more ammo.”

The other options, Abel told John-Henry, would be to convince Ted and have him submit an application to Alcor or the Cryonics Institute; or he could sign a notarized statement saying he wished to be cryonically preserved. Or his three children could legally dispose of their father’s body as they wished. Ted would not have to apply to a cryonics facility himself, Abel added. Either all three children could submit an application on his behalf to a cryonics facility, or two out of the three—a majority—could do so.
²²

On November 3, Dr. Kerensky catheterized Ted’s heart in a routine diagnostic procedure. It was determined that his heart was beating too quickly and that the condition could be corrected by installing a pacemaker.

John-Henry was the only family member present during the catheterization procedure, according to Kerensky’s assistant, Nancy Carmichael, who was watching from the control room behind a glass wall. Soon after that, John-Henry developed a case of the chicken pox and was put under quarantine, barred from returning to the hospital for several days. One thing Carmichael found troubling was that young Williams had given instructions to Ted’s nurses not to put intravenous lines in his right arm. “He didn’t give a reason that I know of, but we assumed that it was because it was Ted’s signing hand.”
²³

The pacemaker surgery was scheduled for Monday, November 6. Claudia arrived the day before and got into a minor auto accident, rear-ending another car as she was getting off the highway near Shands. She hadn’t known that Ted was in the hospital again and had called George Carter earlier on the fifth, furious at him for not informing her. Carter replied that John-Henry had told him he would call her.

The pacemaker was installed by Dr. Anne Curtis. Later on November 6, after Ted recovered from the surgery, he filled out an absentee ballot to vote in the presidential election the following day. He voted for George W. Bush, the Republican, of course.

Williams stayed in the hospital for another two weeks, trying to get his
strength back, and he made friends with various nurses. One, Debbie Erb, had a house in the Keys and liked to fish. One day in mid-November, she brought in some pictures of herself fishing there. That prompted Ted and Frank Brothers to discuss their adventures in Islamorada. Frank noted that his late father, the famous guide and Williams pal Jack Brothers, had been cremated, and they’d sprinkled his ashes in what the locals called the Pocket, off Islamorada. “Ted said he wanted to do what his friend did, and that is be cremated and have his ashes scattered in the Keys,” Erb said.
²⁴

John-Henry knew he was going to need some extra help for his father, since Carter and Brothers had each worked twelve-hour shifts daily for three straight weeks and would need time off. So on November 19, the day before Ted checked out of Shands, John-Henry arranged for Becky Vaughn to come to the hospital.

Vaughn, a critical-care nurse at Citrus Memorial Hospital, had taken care of Ted after he fell and broke his hip in 1997. John-Henry remembered that Ted had liked her, so he called Vaughn and asked if she could come visit Ted to get reacquainted. Then they could discuss whether she’d be able to provide some care for him when he got home. Vaughn said she’d be happy to as long as she volunteered. A former model and amateur boxer who was married to a successful lawyer, Vaughn didn’t need the extra money, plus she’d grown fond of Williams after tending to him when he broke his hip. “I always got the feeling that somebody wanted something from Ted,” said Vaughn. “I didn’t want that. At the hospital in ninety-seven, people would ask me if I could get Ted to sign a baseball for them. I said no! I was like a mother bear to him because he needed to be protected. I was determined not to see him as a famous person. I was determined to treat him like a human being. People would do extra EKGs on him and pocket them. It was ridiculous. I wanted to protect him from that.”