THE SON ALSO FREEZES (via Glenn Dryfoos):

In death, son finally matches baseball legend (Jewish World Review, 3/09/04)

John Henry Williams died at 35 Saturday night in Los Angeles. He was the son of Ted Williams, a baseball player superior, perhaps, to the likes of Babe Ruth or Henry Aaron, while his own life was like something out of O. Henry or Edgar Allen Poe, fraught with bitter irony and macabre twists.

His father was "my mentor, my best friend and the greatest hitter who ever lived," John Henry told me last Feb. 17, when he came here for a tryout with the Schaumburg Flyers of minor-league baseball's Northern League.

A day later, the newspaper ran a color photo of J.H. Williams in his dark Schaumburg cap with the red bill . . . the spitting image of a young Ted.

"That's something we all noticed when that picture ran, the really striking resemblance to his father," Matt McLaughlin, an executive and broadcaster for the Flyers, recalled Monday of the team's get-acquainted period with John Henry. [...]

Little was known of John Henry before that, other than what had become common knowledge from a worldwide publicity barrage - including a supermarket tabloid frenzy - that the "Vanilla Sky"-style cryogenic freezing of Ted Williams' corpse had generated in the summer of 2002.

Did he mind discussing it?

"Would you mind if we didn't?" John Henry asked me, voice quavering a bit. "There's been so much said already, and it's such a sensitive subject in our family, I would really rather not get into it again." [...]

To die himself at so tender an age, to will his own DNA to be frozen in a lab, is either a cruel fate or a bizarrely apt one. What a way to catch up to one's father.

In "Field of Dreams," a young man and his father's ghost get to have one last game of catch near a homemade diamond. John Henry Williams told me that he grew up on his father's 100-acre Vermont farm, where "I used to mow our fields into the shapes of baseball diamonds."

Others are frozen, but I am the one today who feels chills.

"What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 9, 2004 9:16 AM