With the Larry Johnson kiss-and-tell book about Alcor Life Extension Labs about to reignite the controversy over Ted Williams final wishes, we take a look back at how we set the record about John Henry Williams straight.  This Opinion piece "An Elegy for a Lightweight" is from MinorLeagueNews.com's February, 2004, opinion page, shortly after John Henry passed away.

OPINION

Brian Ross
Sr. Editor

02.08.04 - Late Saturday, a baseball player exited this world at the age of 35. He was not one of the greats of the game. His career began in earnest at 33, and never took him beyond the lower depths of the affiliated minor leagues.

In his last season, 2003, he was relegated to the independent leagues, who took him more for his status as a celebrity pariah than for his abilities to field a ball.

Yet for all of that, John Henry Williams was a solid, simple young man who stood up for what he believed against the might of multi-billion dollar

sports media empires and their columnists who ran roughshod over him and his family. Much like his father Ted, he cared little what the media thought, and did things the way that the family had always don them: Their way.

Williams died from recently-diagnosed leukemia. A bone-marrow transplant in December failed. His passing would have joined the minor obituaries of legions of other unknown athletes. We mark it today because it will once again stir the pot of controversy that surrounded the passing in 2002 of his father, Ted Williams, the legendary Splendid Splinter.

Those who don't know the elder Williams are no fans of the game of baseball. His legend casts a mighty shadow. One of the greatest players to ever play the game, perhaps the greatest hitter of all time, he is a legend in baseball and in Boston, where he played most of his days as a pro. One can read about him elsewhere. His story is the stuff of books and documentaries.

Other than in the pages of this publication, John Henry's history will make few waves, save his epitaph with the louder voices of Sports Illustrated and others for his role in the cryonic suspension of his father's body and head.

The major media did not take kindly to their hero not receiving a traditional form of interment. Cryonic suspension, the freezing of a body and/or head until an opportunity in the future to possible reanimate them and cure their disease, was not the ending that they wanted to write.

In spite of John Henry's repeated protestations that he was following the wishes of his father, he was vilified by major media outlets, starting with SI, and following in shock-waves by talk-shows and other publications picking up the scent of blood in the proverbial media waters.

John Henry Williams was a simple man. His simplicity, and naiveté, were what landed him into the center of the media shark tank. He simply didn't know how to talk to the press. He knew what he was doing was what his father had asked of him. He didn't feel the need to justify it to anyone. The cynicism of reporters used to dealing with far sharper tacks led them to think that John Henry was hiding something. There is nothing more tenacious than reporters who begin with the premise that there is a veil of lies that they must somehow pierce to get at the truth.

They tried. They gathered up John Henry's critics, including a handful of family and friends. The infamous "note" which the media alleged John Henry forged to force his diabolical plan to have his father frozen turned out to be in Ted Williams handwriting.

In some odd way, Ted might be smiliing from the great beyond, as if to say to the media, with whom he fought almost continuously in Boston, 'We showed you, you pack of [insert stream of expletives here].' Ted was a very colorful guy.

On behalf of the rest of our non-apologetic business, we were collectively very wrong. Of course, when we are, it's buried on a sidebar on page 63, while we're busy spouting off about the next thing. In the case of the John Henry Williams stories, there was little or no apology at all for the gross inaccuracies and distortions that were treated as gospel fact.

We should be seldom wrong. If we seek the truth, and we only report what we know, corrections and belated apologies for the stink that we created in the name of the truth would be less necessary. This publication went and talked to John Henry [See The Kid's Kid] with a pad and pen, without the rope and noose.

We wondered why a young man who was supposed to be ghoulishly cashing in on his father's twisted fate was, instead, struggling mightily with a third-rate talent to play on independent baseball teams ranging from the decent to the bottom of the barrel in 2003.

MLN found a guy who had missed a great deal of his father's life growing up away from him. The John Henry to whom we spoke was far more interested in connecting with his father on a baseball field, the center of Ted Williams' universe, than in pitching his father's memorabilia for top dollar.

It was that same uncomplicated being that ultimately vindicated him.

Why would anyone who was as conniving and calculating as SI and others painted the younger Mr. Williams be so unconcerned with the spoils of the fame, or infamy, that he had generated with the controversy of his father's passing?

John Henry did what he thought was his father's bidding. He stood up to his critics, both family and the media, and then he moved back to his passion: To play the game of his father. He knew that he wasn't very good. He didn't make much money playing for Schaumburg and down in the Delta. Even though he spoke about putting out the effort to get to a major league career, he knew his chances were splinter-thin.

Why, then play? To aggravate the wags at SI? To cash in on his father's fame?

The answer is far more simple, and one that those who profess profound faith understand well. What church is to those who seek some solace and understanding of why those they love have passed, a baseball diamond is to the simple son of one of the legends of the game.

The younger Williams was communing with the spirit by trying, in his own limited way, to love the game as his father did, on the field.

John Henry Williams may not have been one of the greats of baseball. He will not appear in the Hall of Fame, save as an oddity in the ending of a story on his father.

Yet he showed the kind of character, and grace under fire, that is largely lost to players of this day and age. For those who can look beyond the hype generated by the sports pundits that swirled around him for a time, the headling that sums up John Henry Williams life may be one of the best stories in baseball:

Estranged Son Finds Father Fielding Flies

A tale of an upright young man, who, like his father, would not to be bullied by the talking heads. A man who ended his days playing on the warm summer grass in the game of his father.

That's a fitting elegy for this lightweight of great heart and character.