With the Larry Johnson kiss-and-tell book about Alcor Life Extension Labs coming out shortly, the pot is being stirred again about Ted Williams frozen head, and its treatment.

Forget that Mr. Johnson ran the lab, and could have cleaned up the very things that he is now lamenting for profit.

Disregard that Tom Verducci, the sports writer who began ringing the fire bell about Williams' handling of his father's estate at SI sourced Bobby Jo Williams, who had a very big axe to grind with her half-brother and sister over the disputed will of Ted Williams.  Williams had cut his oldest daughter, who was reported to have emotional problems severe enough for her institution at one point, out of the estate.  Verducci was a convenient pawn, as a commentator, because he didn't have to do much old-fashioned journalism to give his two cents.

We were the only news agency to which John Henry would grant an interview, after the press hounded him about the head and the other rumors about the labs. 

We found out quickly that the picture that SI was painting of the whole situation was grossly distorted.  In "The Kid's Kid" we gave you the side of John Henry Williams that SI did not want you to see during Verducci's march to turn the younger Williams into a blood-sucking leech, a pariah.  Several weeks after our articles ran, Williams spoke to Mike Fish at SI, and affirmed what he had told us.  Unfortunately, Fish is not Verducci, and the damage was already done.

In this open letter from a couple of weeks before the Fish interview, I called out Verducci, and the SI editors for what I still believe is the shoddy journalism that has allowed this story to have legs for nearly a decade. I hope that Fish's attempt to at least set the record straight was due in some small part to our work.

Following our stories, we received these two letters:

Dear Mr. Ross,

I am John-Henry's sister and I want to thank you for the eloquent and beautiful piece I just read on my brother [Elegy for a Lightweight].  You put other writers and journalists to shame with your insight and sensitivity to a human being.

Thank you for taking the time to get to know my brother and talking to him.

My brother put his dream on hold so he could be next to his father as long as he could and then waited a little bit longer so he could love him through his last days....  In the end, he still, despite discouragement from others, gave baseball a chance (or vice versa).  He may have been closest to his father during the opportunity that the minor leagues gave him.  

I would like to close by saying how highly my brother spoke of the short time he spent within the minor leagues and all the young men struggling to follow a dream.  Please thank them if you can ... from me.

 
Thank you.

 
Sincerely,
Claudia Williams

----

To Brian Ross:

Your comments regarding John-Henry Williams are right on the money.  I am the person who worked with J-H to try to help him hit at the professional level.  

J-H lived in my home for seven months trying to squeeze 7 months of hard work into 7 years of experience.  We worked together for 6 hours per day, 5 days each week.  His determination in trying to be a good professional baseball player was relentless.  We had several personal discussions regarding everything going on in his life but he was driven (based on his true love of his father) to give it his best.  

The media tried to ruin him with sensationalism and untruths, I am pleased to see someone like you  use reason to help people understand that he was not a villian.  J-H was a real person, with real desire to succeed at an impossible dream.  I respect him and will miss him.
 
Sincerely,
 
Terry Hardtke

Here, then, is my letter to the editors of SI:

Brian Ross
OPINION

An Open Letter to the Editors of Sports Illustrated:

Your stories by Tom Verducci and the accompanying pieces on si.com on August 12th demonstrate that Mr. Verducci has been an "insider" so long that he's obviously forgotten some of the basic tenants of good journalism.

Larry Johnson's information, the lynch pin of his piece, is tragic on its face, but says more about the lab and Mr. Verducci's reporting than it does about the sorry state of Ted Williams' final resting place, or the caring of his son, John Henry.

When we checked this story out for our publication (The Kid's Kid, 03.07.03), we found that John Henry was doing what he father wanted, and that the pact that he had made with his sister to put his father in cyrogenic suspension was on the level.

We also found that requests to freeze a whole corpse, at the two cryogenic facilities in the world that do it, often have to be deferred because preserving the body and the head may require slightly different storage temperatures and techniques, according to literature on the subject.

Some of the techniques and storage problems described by Verducci are common problems that arise in other bodies that are stored and preserved with the cryogenic process.

Some preservation issues, including the holes drilled into the skull, may speak to poor operating practices by the lab that Mr. Johnson ran when the procedure was performed.  No one seems to want to ask the whistle blower why he didn't fix the problems at the lab that he was running.

Without an endorsement of cyronics, a fair assessment of the pitfalls in the process would probably indicate that, while the average person finds the whole thing distasteful, nothing particularly out of the ordinary is  happening in the Williams case.

I would assume, if you took the time to get into the details of what must be done to prepare a body for cremation, you could find equally distasteful and graphic images to make a point, about how the body is prepared.

As regards John Henry Williams, our publication was one of the few to get an interview in-depth with him. Mr. Williams is no rocket scientist. In the raw transcript for our story, it is clear that he doesn't have a whole lot of ability to beguile sharp reporters.

The younger Mr. Williams is playing in third and fifth rate leagues as a somewhat unusual tribute to the father that he came to know much later in life. He is not sitting atop the Williams empire figuring out how to rake in every last dime from his father's vast collection of memorabilia.  Instead, he is on a ballfield in Schaumburg, Illinois, playing for less than Ted spent on a good meal in his heyday. 

Right or wrong to the outside world's point of view, John Henry seems quite convinced that he is doing what his father bade him to do.  Anyone who knew Ted Williams, also had to be a bit skeptical. No one controlled Ted Williams, even until the day he died.

Mr Verducci can't get him on the facts, so he blasts him with a lot of innuendo. That SI allowed this sloppy journalism on to its pages speaks to the fact that there is an emotional chord in the way that Ted Williams passed that sticks in the craw of your editorial staff as much as it bugs Mr. Verducci.

There are many, many people who don't make their final wishes known to more than one or two people because they either think it's nobody's damn business, or because they might fear the criticism of friends and family.

Mr. Williams didn't sign his cryonic paperwork? How many people each year die with wills that are unsigned, or failed to make payments on crypts or plots? A little smoke. No fire.

Williams executor didn't fight John Henry on the cryogenic suspension. If the young man was so far out in left field, one would think that the complaints of the sister and close personal friends might have been taken a bit more seriously.

Was John Henry aware of what was going on in the lab? Mr Verducci intimates that he should know. People were kept out of the lab's storage facility, though. It sounds like the lab, and the "caring" Mr. Johnson should have their feet held to the fire for shoddy practices.

Missing DNA? I would say that the liklihood of that showing up on e-Bay from the hands of an employee of the cryonics lab would be far more possible than suggesting that John Henry would be so crass as to peddle his father's genetic code.

Mr. Verducci's golden informant halo on the head of Mr. Johnson is poorly placed, and done so only as a means of vilifying the younger Mr. Williams.

Innuendo will not prove that John Henry didn't do what his father asked him to do. The article's principle mission, to discredit John Henry's call on his father's final resting place, could not factually do so.

The claims that picked up on the national sports gossip circuit that JHW was selling his father's remains were equally false, but spread like wildfire.  Williams said repeatedly that no one was even allowed in the storage area, and that he had not been.  If someone was indeed marketing bits of the Splendid Splinter, it would have had to have been someone at the lab.

Yet the lab's Mr. Johnson, a rather dubious character, is the hero, according to the media, for blowing the whistle on his own operation that HE RAN, and John Henry is the goat.

The personal attacks on John Henry Williams seem a bit unfounded. If he were the demonic, calculating guy that he is portrayed to be, he would be making a lot more bald-faced exploitation of his father's memory and memorabilia.

Thus far, the Ted Williams memorabilia collection is being moved with about the same energy that it was in the past. John Henry is occupying his time playing fifth-rate ball for below fifth-rate pay with some notion that it brings him closer to his father.

The one place where I will say John Henry is getting smarter is that he knows a guy from SI coming out to talk to him at Podunk Park is not there filled with good wishes and a lot of care for him, or, to his viewpoint, his family. So he shuts up.

Good for him. He's right. It's not Mr. Verducci's business. Nor is it the general public's. Nothing criminal has been done. The pundits don't like this being Ted Williams' resting place? Too damn bad.

The secret to Ted Williams hitting is also the secret to good journalism: Keep your eye on the ball. A little fact checking, and doing more than taking the word of someone with an axe to grind as if it were the gospel would seem to be prudent.  It was very easy to find a lot of people who disapprove, who find it disturbing that the great Ted Williams is stored in a warehouse in Arizona like some frozen TV dinner.

To not get the other Willams' side of the story, though, is shoddy journalism.  We did not begin as advocates of John Henry Williams, but after his interview, and the follow-up checks that we made that proved his story was true, at least we aired the truth, even if we were the only ones to do so.

The great things that Ted Williams did in his life are suitably honored by anyone who knew him or knew of him.

The sensationalism of the disposition of his remains, however poorly handled, makes Mr. Verducci and SI the ghouls, not John Henry Williams.



Sincerely,



Brian Ross
Sr. Editor
Minor League News