Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [96]
At night, Ted occasionally joined a group of the campers for a dinner that would soon turn into a marathon discussion about hitting. He would sit at the head of the table sipping his branch water—Ted’s name for a whiskey straight up with water on the side—and pepper the campers with questions about whatever they had practiced that day. He treated them as professionals.
In their eyes, Ted could do no wrong, even when he flirted with their wives. One camper, though, did take exception. When he complained to me, I said, “You have to understand Ted doesn’t mean anything by it. He’s the Big Dog, and it’s just his way of being playful.” That mollified the husband somewhat. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess it’s all right if he just wants to sniff around. Just so long as that Big Dog doesn’t wag his tail in my bedroom.”
The thing you noticed about Ted once you spent time with him was his dedication to achieving excellence. He had no patience for halfhearted efforts in anything. One night my team dined with him in a Chinese restaurant where the service responded sluggishly. When the pu-pu platter arrived at a pace much too slow for his liking, Ted yanked the circular aluminum dish from the waiter’s hands and sailed it across the room like a Frisbee. The glassine noodles, pastel-colored won tons, and seared red ribs stuck to the wall in a paste of dark sauce, an abstract of textures and hues that Jackson Pollock could have painted.
That was pure Williams. Even when he behaved inappropriately, he responded as an artist. Ted paid for the order, even left a generous tip. But he never apologized. He did not censor his actions, words, or feelings, and he did not give a good goddamn what anyone thought about him. He was a man who had the courage to live an imperfect but honest life. I loved him for that.
So when the news reported Ted’s death from a stroke on July 5, 2002, well, it knocked me over. I called the Red Sox to ask where the William family planned to hold the funeral. Found out there would be no service. Ted’s son had already arranged to have his father’s body flown from their Florida home to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryogenics company in Scottsdale, Arizona.
We all learned what happened later. I read stories that described how Alcor’s engineers had removed Ted’s skull from his torso, froze the separated parts in a pool of liquid nitrogen, and stored them at subzero temperatures in two metal cylinders (Alcor has never confirmed this). This procedure supposedly preserved the remains until some future date when science discovered a way to revive the body.
I attended a dinner for the Jimmy Fund fourteen months after Ted died. Many of his closest friends sat at my table. Rage. That’s what they felt. They wanted to kill the people who had put this great man on ice.
The idea of Ted hanging in a freezer did not appeal to me either. I don’t hold with many traditions. Few things strike me as undignified, but this certainly qualified. Someone had to put the situation right. “I visit Scottsdale with my sons, Andy and Mike, every year,” I announced, “to compete in the father-son baseball tournament. We pass the Alcor factory whenever we drive to the ballpark. Why don’t I visit the place and find out where they keep Ted’s remains?”
“What good will that do?” one of Ted’s friends asked.
“I’m a bonded locksmith. Once we know where they’ve stored the body, my sons and I will return to Alcor