GEORGE KIMBALL/America at Large: He voiced his life's ambition in simple terms any of us could understand: "When I walk down the street, I want people to stop and say 'There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived'." His plans for an afterlife were, unfortunately, somewhat more vague.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favour fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

- Robert Frost

Not yet dead a week, the Splendid Splinter has become the object of a nasty little war among his offspring. While his daughters (along with most of his baseball friends) maintain that Williams expressed a desire to have his remains cremated, no sooner had the great man expired than his son, John Henry Williams, had his father's body flown to Arizona, where it was drained of blood, filled with a special freezing solution, and left to float inside a pod filled with liquid nitrogen.

By submitting Williams to this scientifically dubious process, his son apparently hopes to make the baseball immortal truly immortal. Or perhaps, as his sisters suspect, he is attempting to keep his options open while he figures out a way to squeeze a few dollars more out of his meal ticket.

An outfielder who played 19 seasons, all for the Boston Red Sox, Williams was the last man to bat .400, a feat rarely performed before he did it in 1941 and never accomplished since.

He carried an even .400 average into the final day of the season that year, in which the Sox were scheduled to play a meaningless double-header against the Philadelphia Athletics. Manager Joe Cronin offered to let him sit the day out to protect the statistical milestone. Ted insisted on playing, went 6-for-8 over the two games, and finished with a .406 mark for the year.

His lifetime statistics place him among baseball's elite, but his numbers might have been even more stratospheric had he not lost five years from what should have been the prime of his career to wartime service. He spent three years flying combat missions in the second World War, and was called up for two more during the Korean conflict. As a Marine Corps fighter pilot he was John Glenn's wingman, and, with one wheel down, once crash-landed a burning plane on the deck of a carrier and walked away unscathed.

As it was, he hit 521 home runs. Give him back those five years, and another he lost when he broke his elbow running into an outfield wall during the All-Star game, and we're probably talking Babe Ruth numbers.

He was unquestionably blessed with extraordinary physical gifts. He is said to have had the quickest wrists of any man to play the game, and his eyesight was the stuff of legend: to settle a bet among his wartime buddies, he was able to read, word-for-word, the label of a record spinning at 78 rpm - and the label was in Spanish, a language in which he was not fluent.

He endured a love-hate relationship with the Boston fans, whose adulation he spurned, and, for most of his career, one of mutual animosity with the sportswriting fraternity. On the occasion of his 500th home run, he paused after crossing the plate and spat in the direction of the press box.

Following his retirement as a player, he had an unhappy, four-year fling at the helm of the Washington Senators/Texas Rangers, and proved only that he could not only hit .400, but manage .400 as well. He embarked on a second career as a sport fisherman, and was every bit as adept with a fly rod as he had been with a baseball bat in his hands, or at the controls of a warplane.

HIS domestic life was, by contrast, an abysmal failure. He was by all accounts, including his own, a bad husband to his three wives, and not a particularly good father to any of his three children. His efforts to atone for this oversight later in life led to the undignified mess in which his affairs lie today.

For the last decade his youngest offspring had increasingly taken control of his father's life, overseeing a market for memorabilia that turned a man who was once reluctant to sign a single autograph into a regular fixture at baseball card shows all over the country. Williams was only too happy to share his doddering years with the fawning son.

Several years ago, an FBI sting resulted in the arrest of three unscrupulous memorabilia dealers who were attempting to flog Ted Williams' 1946 World Series ring on the Internet. The culprits' defence was that they were acting with the connivance of John Henry Williams, who had supplied the ring. He denied it and claimed that the ring had been "stolen", but the three men were acquitted, suggesting that the jury valued the word of the career criminals over that of Williams' son.

The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived died at 83 last Friday in a Florida hospital. John Henry whisked the body off to the Alcor Life Extension Institute in Arizona to be cryogenically frozen. Barbara Joyce Williams Ferrell, John Henry's sister and Ted's oldest daughter, said she recognised the scheme for what it was as soon as her brother proposed it.

"I knew right away what it was," she said. "He's just trying to make money off Daddy. He said the way they're going with medical science and DNA, we could freeze dad's body, or we can freeze his head," she said. "He said 'We could sell the DNA'."

There are only two conceivable motives for having resorted to this cryogenic process. One is the far-fetched proposition that John Henry actually expects to bring his father back to life. The other is that he hopes to flog the great man's genes on the Internet.

Baseball memorabilia collectors would probably pay handsomely for a splinter of the Splinter, but that Williams' DNA will bequeath baseball greatness is genetically dubious. At this point, in fact, the only conclusive example of what Ted Williams' DNA will produce is John Henry Williams himself. You wouldn't want another one of those running around the house.