Maybe he wants Pop's DNA. Or just to wake him up

After baseball legend Ted Williams' son had his body frozen, the family went to court. Andrew Buncombe reports on the macabre row dividing the US

The mercury hit 110F in Scottsdale, Arizona, yesterday as a heat wave gripped the American West. Inside the building located at 7895 East Acoma Drive, however, there was certainly not a bead of sweat on the forehead of Ted Williams, the baseball legend with the near-perfect swing whom a generation of ball fans knew simply as the "The Kid".

Williams' head, which may not still be attached to his body, has been injected full of glycerol. His mortal remains lay upside down in an insulated aluminium flask into which liquid nitrogen has been poured to lower the temperature to a distinctly chilly -320F. One has to suffer a little for this immortality thing.

Williams, the Boston Red Sox veteran and the man remembered as the last player to hit a season average above .400 – which means in layman's terms that he hit more balls than most – is the latest "patient" at the Alcor Life Extension Facility where a person's remains can be frozen in the chance that at a future date they can be thawed out and brought back to life. (A full body freeze costs $120,000 but just having one's head frozen comes in at the relative bargain price of $50,000.)

Williams himself wanted none of this. He never asked to be placed among the 50 so-called cryonics patients waiting on ice at Alcor. According to many who knew him, the no-nonsense man from San Diego, California, wanted nothing more than to be cremated and have his ashes scattered along with those of his Dalmatian, Slugger, in the waters off the Florida Keys, and on the turf of the Red Sox stadium, Fenwick Park.

But his son, John, thought differently – and it was he who arranged for pop's remains to be thrown into the freezer, creating a family spat of major league proportions. President George Bush, his father, and the former astronaut and senator John Glenn have all now been dragged into this chilling tale.

Ted's daughter, Bobby-Jo Williams Ferrell, is currently seeking a court order that would release her father's remains from the deep-freeze so she can subject them to the 1,800F heat of a crematorium oven instead. It is enough to give a man chilblains.

"My dad's in a metal tube, on his head, so frozen that if I touched him it would crack him because of the warmth from my fingertips," Bobby-Jo has written in an open letter to her father's fans. "I need anyone and everyone, famous or not, if they have knowledge about my daddy's wishes to be cremated to stand up and be heard at this time. President Bush and his father need to come forward and work in this campaign for an old friend – like he worked for you."

Her letter also mentioned former Senator Glenn, who flew with Williams when both men were fighter pilots in the Korean War. "John Glenn appreciated my daddy's being his wingman. I want John Glenn to come forward now and come to a friend's aid."

Part of the problem, however, is that no one is sure what Ted Williams actually said in his will. That is something the judge will now have to investigate. Kay Munday, who used to manage the Williams household, has alleged that the son took advantage of his father, forcing him to sign endless memorabilia and documents the increasingly frail old man did not understand.

"When I was there I saw him push many documents in front of him," she said. "He didn't know what he was signing." Williams suffered several strokes and by the time he died nine days ago, aged 83, his poor health had left him extremely weak. Another former employer, Jack Gard, also believed Ted wanted to be cremated. "Anyone would know he wasn't capable of signing any papers," he said.

Quite what drove John Williams to freeze his father is unclear and as yet he has refused to comment on the matter. Many have assumed he is trying to cash in by freezing his father's DNA in the hope that one day it might be used to clone other baseball batters with wondrous hand-to-eye co-ordination and unusually strong wrists and hands.

It may be, however, that John simply wants to freeze his father and bring him back to life if and when science allows; although why he would wish to revive an elderly man in the poorest of health is unclear.

As one might expect, whatever John's motives may be, the decision to turn his father into a scientific experiment has not pleased the legion of fans who consider Williams to have been one of baseball's all-time greats, in the same league as Ty Cobb, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and Babe Ruth.

For those in Britain who have a less than perfect grasp of the great American game's history, the equivalent would be Bobby Moore, England's 1966 World Cup-winning captain who died in 1993 after suffering from cancer, being placed in a pickling jar.

Lawyers are expected to place their suit before a court tomorrow. It will then be up to a judge to decide whether one of America's greatest sportsmen can be released from the big chill.