As long as it's tastefully done...

[Shockeye]

Williams 'death mask' piece latest in fascination with Ted's head

Peter Corbett
The Arizona Republic
Aug. 27, 2005 12:00 AM

Ted Williams is a long way from being revived from his deep freeze in a Scottsdale warehouse, but the baseball legend is well on his way to immortality in the art world.

Connecticut sculptor Daniel Edwards will exhibit what he claims is a death mask of Williams' severed head at a New York gallery next month.

The macabre sculpture shows a grim-faced Williams resting his chin on a baseball.

Edwards, 40, of Moosup, Conn., said the inspiration for the piece started two years ago when it was revealed that Williams' head was decapitated and cryogenically frozen with his torso at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale.

"I think the piece isn't ghastly," Edwards said, though he admitted, "It might be kind of grim."

The show at the First Street Gallery in New York's Chelsea neighborhood includes three copies of the sculpture along with various Williams memorabilia, including a baseball card, cleats and a 1954 Life magazine cover of the slugger, who was the last man in baseball to finish a season with a batting average over .400.

Alcor CEO Joe Waynick said Edwards has never been inside Alcor's facility and "certainly does not have a bust" or mold of Williams' head.

"I think it's unfortunate that anyone feels they have to capitalize on the memory of Ted Williams for monetary gain," Waynick said. "The Williams family has been through enough."

Edwards said he does not expect to make any money from the show, which opens Sept. 6, although he said it could further his career.

Edwards is the latest artist to step to the plate in the bizarre swing of events that has followed Williams' disputed entombment at Alcor. Williams died July 5, 2002, at age 83.

While the family legal wrangling to "free Ted" has subsided, the art world has not forgotten the legend's limbo at Alcor, where he is stored in liquid nitrogen at minus-320 degrees.

Alcor is storing Williams and 68 other "patients" in the hopes that medical science in the future will be so far advanced that they can be revived.

Connecticut filmmaker A.D. Calvo, 37, has made a short film about Edwards' art and his Williams sculpture.

He plans to submit the movie, The Several Severed Heads of Daniel Edwards, to the Sundance Film Festival next year.

Two years ago, Charles Evered, an assistant professor at Boston's Emerson College, wrote a play called Ted's Head in which a Red Sox fan steals the modern world's most famous severed head from Alcor with the intention of burying it under the turf in Boston's Fenway Park.

Next month, New Hampshire writer Jack Polidoro is publishing a novel called Brain Freeze in which a Negro League baseball great is cryogenically frozen. Ted Williams, still alive in Polidoro's tale, is enlisted to rescue the deceased player from his liquid nitrogen tomb.

Polidoro's previous book, Project Samuel, written 10 months before Williams' death, was about cloning the baseball legend.

Some people theorized that Polidoro's book inspired Williams' son, John Henry, to have his father cryogenically preserved and perhaps to save his DNA.

Polidoro, 61, who has fought on behalf of freeing Williams from Alcor so he can be cremated, said he doubts the book influenced the younger Williams.

The younger Williams, who died last year of leukemia, is believed to be frozen at Alcor as well.

"My agenda has always been to bring to the public attention the plight of Ted Williams," Polidoro said, adding that he cannot believe that none of the influential people Williams knew in his life has taken up his cause.

Meanwhile, sculptor Edwards, whose first baseball bat was a Williams model from Sears, Roebuck &Co., said he has come to accept the late ballplayer's fate.

"I don't consider myself an advocate for or against it," Edwards said of cryogenic preservation.

He said he believes the Williams' story garners such interest because of people's fascination with severed heads, including terrorist beheadings, the TV show CSI and an episode of The Sopranos in which a mobster's decapitated head is shown in a bowling bag.

"I would say it's just one of those stories that will never go away," Edwards said of Williams' decapitation.

"The death mask is just putting a physical image to the story everyone is familiar with."