"I felt as if I was being flown onto my feet," she said.

Ferrell's stepsister, Claudia, was on the other end of the telephone.

"Dad wants to talk with you," she said.

It was Bobby-Jo Ferrell's first communication with her father, the great baseball player Ted Williams, in 10 months, ever since she says her stepbrother, John Henry Williams, cut her off from any contact or communication.

"I still don't know why I got that phone call that day," she said, "except that maybe my Daddy was raising hell that he wanted to talk to me."

When Claudia passed the telephone to their father, Ted Williams, his 83-year-old voice was strained and weak, muffled by the affects of multiple strokes.

"Hello?" he said.

"Oh, Daddy," Bobby-Jo Ferrell squealed. "Happy Father's Day. I love you, Daddy. You're the best father in the whole wide world. I miss you, Daddy. I miss you and I love you so much."

"Where are we going to meet?" Ted Williams asked his daughter, his words barely audible.

"Daddy, where do you want to meet?"

"At the park."

"Where are the park?"

"At the damn gate at the park, where we always meet."

A tear welled up in Bobby-Jo Ferrell's words as she recounted the conversation. The park Ted Williams talked about was Fenway Park, where he put together one of the greatest careers in baseball history with the Boston Red Sox. Perhaps Ted Williams, in his waning days, was thinking about two great loves in his life -- baseball and his beloved daughter.

"I'd like to believe that," Bobby-Jo Ferrell said softly, a sob in her voice. "I really would."

She'll never know for sure because it was the last conversation she ever had with her father. Ted Williams died two weeks later, a year ago today.

Bobby-Jo Ferrell is still tormented with nightmares, wondering what the last months of her father's life was like, and how he now hangs upside down, like so many of the big game fish he once caught, in a cryonics chamber. Sometimes she steps outside her home in Hernando, just a mile from where her father lived, has a smoke, and cries.

"Only God knows what my Daddy went through," she said, choking back tears.

Bobby-Jo Ferrell can't discuss her feelings about where her father is today. In legal terminology, she can't comment or object, either in the media or in court, to the disposition of her father's body. It's part of the settlement she reached with her stepbrother last December. Ferrell was Ted Williams' eldest child from his first marriage, and John Henry and Claudia Williams were the baseball star's only two other children, from his third marriage.

In return for Bobby-Jo's silence and her giving up the legal fight, John Henry Williams agreed to not sell Ted Williams' DNA or allow any scientific testing on his body, bodily fluids, muscles or tissues.

But Bobby-Jo's husband, Mark Ferrell, can comment.

"They were stupid enough to leave me out of the settlement," he said, speaking of John Henry, Claudia, their lawyer Eric Abel, and executor Al Cassidy. "So I can keep fighting this. And I am."

Passion and anger crept into Ferrell's voice the more he talked.

"I am going to get him out of that metal cylinder they have him in! I won't stop until I've taken my last breath! Ted Williams wasn't just my father-in-law, he was my friend. I loved the man. I am not going to let that son of a (bleep) John Henry get away with this."

The Ferrells say they spent $87,000 in the months after Ted Williams' death, fighting to get him out of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"Eight-seven thousand dollars, and we never even got before a judge," he said. "If we had kept fighting, it would've taken up to five years and $250,000, because of all the appeals. I don't have that kind of money. I'm just a retired guy who worked his whole life."

All the Ferrells wanted was Ted Williams' wishes from his Last Will and Testament, dated December 20, 1996, to be carried out. On that signed document, Williams stated, "I direct that my remains be cremated and my ashes sprinkled at sea off the coast of Florida where the water is very deep."

It is, Mark Ferrell said, what his father-in-law expressed on many occasions.

"If anyone ever asked Ted Williams what he wanted when he died, he would tell you right off, 'I want to be cremated, and I want my ashes mixed with Slugger's ashes and spread over the deep waters off of Islamorada, down in the Keys.'"

Slugger was his beloved dog.

Mark Ferrell, 63, says he and his wife have Slugger's ashes, and that John Henry Williams used to show his father a vial with dust in it and tell him it was Slugger. But it wasn't. "John Henry would never get off his lazy (butt) and go over to the vet's office to get Slugger's ashes, so finally we got them. And we still have them. And one day, I'm going carry out Ted's wishes and have both their ashes sprinkled over the deep waters down in Islamorada."

Relationship once good

The relationship in the family wasn't always this acrimonious. The Ferrells lived a mile away from Ted Williams, at his request, and would frequently see him, often dining together. Bobby-Jo also talked with John Henry almost daily.

Then, two months before she was cut off from seeing her father, Bobby-Jo says her stepbrother, 20 years her junior, talked to her about cryogenically preserving their father.

According to Ferrell, 54, this is how the telephone conversation went:

"How's Dad?" she asked John Henry. Their father was recuperating from a stroke and heart surgery at Shands Hospital in Gainesville.

"He's good," he said, and they chit-chatted before he broached the topic, saying to his sister, "Let me ask you something. Have you ever heard of cryonics?"

"Yeah," she replied.

(Ferrell is a science and medicine buff. "I love all that stuff," she said, "and my kids are the same way. One is a nurse and the other is a pharmacist.")

"Tell me what you know about it," John Henry said.

After telling stepbrother what she knew about cryonics, he replied:

"Wow! You really do know about it."

"Sure I do."

"What you think about it?"

"I think it sucks."

"Well, let me ask you something. What do you think if we did that with Dad?"

At this point, Ferrell said she began writing the conversation down on a piece of paper.

"You're not serious, are you?" she asked John Henry. "You have to be kidding."

"No, I'm not."

"That's insane. It's totally off base. It's not going to happen."

"Why not?"

"Because, simply, the fact is that's not what Daddy wants. It's not what's in his will."

"But let me ask you something," he countered. "What if we could make a lot of money selling Dad's DNA?"

Ferrell paused in retelling the conversation.

"That's when I knew we had serious problems," she said. "And I was writing it all down. Writing and writing. At one point John Henry told me, 'We don't have to take Dad's whole body. We can just take his head.'"

The Ferrells say they have kept Bobby-Jo's scribbled notes in the family safe.

Two months after that conversation, Bobby-Jo last saw her father when she visited him at Shands Hospital.

"I remember the date exactly, the 25th of August in 2001, 10 months before he died. He was out of it that day. When I went in to see him, he had this huge splint that went from the tip of his fingers, from his middle finger and index finger, all the way down to his elbow."

The physical therapist came in.

"He looked at me and said, 'Boy, am I glad to see you.' I told him I was glad to see him, and I thanked him for all he was doing for my father. Then I asked him, 'Can you tell me what happened to Daddy's arm? Did he fall?' He looked at me and rolled his eyes. Then he told me, 'Your brother had your father's hand put into a splint so he could continue to sign autographs.'"

Again, Bobby-Jo choked back her tears.

"It's so . . . sad that nobody knows exactly what happened to my father," she said. "And it was that bad for two years before he died. God only knows what I don't know."

Four days after seeing her father at Shands Hospital, Ted Williams came home to Hernando. Bobby-Jo called John Henry, but this time she said the conversation took a different tone, and the relationship altered forever.

She said John Henry's mood was cool and emotionless, and that this is how the conversation went:

"Hello, what exactly do you want?" John Henry asked on the telephone, his voice flat and distant.

"What? What's with you?"

"Nothing. I'm just wondering what you want?"

"I want to let everybody know that I'm coming over to see Daddy."

"No, I don't think you are."

"Why not?"

"Because you're not going to see Dad anymore."

"In what way?"

"In any way. You'll never see Dad again."

"What in the world are you talking about, John Henry? That's my father. That's my Daddy. You can't do that to me."

"Watch me."

Bobby-Jo Ferrell never saw her father again.

" I remember asking John Henry why he would do this to Daddy. And he told me, 'Because you are not a team player.' "

Misleading label hurt

The day her father died, Bobby-Jo Ferrell said she did an interview with the Boston Globe. She was asked why she hadn't seen her father in 10 months. She explained that she'd been barred from seeing him. But in the article, it was written that she was estranged from her father, and the phrase was picked up as fact from coast to coast.

"It was a new reporter," Ferrell said, "and she was on deadline when she wrote the story. She called and cried and apologized for writing that."

But it was too late, the damage was done. Ferrell was portrayed as an estranged daughter instead of the devoted daughter she'd always been, someone who uprooted her family and moved from North Carolina to Hernando in her father's later years, just so she could live a mile away and see him regularly.

"I was never estranged from my Daddy, or from his love," she said. "I was just barred from seeing him by someone who knew that I would fight to have his will enforced."

Her manner of speaking is much like her famous father's, brash and brassy and at times salty. When she mimics her father's voice, complete with that John Wayne-like lilt, the resemblance is stunning. She can talk for hours about her upbringing and how she shared hotel rooms with her father when he was a ballplayer and how, when her father returned home as a fighter pilot from the Korean War, he told a newspaper interviewer, as he held up his daughter, that it was his love for Bobby-Jo that pulled him through.

She is saddened that some in the media claim she settled with John Henry for $215,000. Most recently, Rick Reilly wrote that in his Sports Illustrated column last week. Ferrell says the money was in a trust fund her father allotted to her as inheritance. Not hush money.

But while Ferrell can't talk now, more and more people are coming forward with stories that corroborate her. This past week, on HBO's "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel," Buzz Hamon, one of Ted Williams' longtime friends, said John Henry gradually shut off his father from his friends and outside world, and that Williams complained to Hamon that he felt "like I'm a prisoner."

Hamon told HBO he last spoke to Williams a month before the baseball great died. "He said, 'I need a lawyer . . . I've made a mistake.' I heard some noise, I don't know what, but the phone went dead. I never spoke to him again."

HBO also interviewed Ted Williams' caretakers, Frank Brothers and George Carter. Brothers' father was Williams' longtime fishing buddy, and the younger Brothers knew the baseball great since he was a child. Both Brothers and Carter insist it was never Ted Williams' desire to be cryogenically preserved, and that the infamous oil-stained document John Henry produced a month after his father's death -- stating that he wanted to be cryogenically preserved -- is a forgery.

The date on the document is Nov. 2, 2000. On that day, Brothers and Carter say they were with Ted Williams at Shands Hospital as he awaited surgery for a pacemaker, and that he never signed any piece of paper.

"There is no way," Brothers said, pointing out that he and Carter were with Williams for all 24 hours of Nov. 2, 2000 -- 12 hours each. "There's no way that was done in that hospital room that day."

"Didn't happen," Carter concurred.

Carter said he raised the subject with Williams six months after John Henry insists his father signed that piece of paper. "I asked him, 'Ted, if something happens to you, you still want to be cremated and go down to the Keys with Slugger?' And he specifically said, sharp and clear, 'Yes!'"

Carter said he also was present one day when John Henry broached the subject of being cryogenically preserved with his father, and that Ted Williams shouted at his son, "You're nuts! I don't want to be frozen!"

A fantasy world

Mark Ferrell believes that John Henry Williams lives in a fantasy world.

"I think John Henry is sick," he said. "I think he's one sick puppy. Something is missing in his soul."

Ferrell pointed out how John Henry, who currently is trying to play minor league baseball at 34, recently told SI.com that he used to cut grass in the shape of baseball diamonds when he was a kid.

"All of that stuff comes from the movies," Ferrell said. "Cutting the grass in the shape of a baseball diamond is from 'Field of Dreams.' Trying to play baseball at 34 is from 'The Rookie.' And the cryonics stuff is from that movie 'Forever Young.' I think he sees this stuff and fantasizes about it. I think his motive to freeze his father is some fantasy he has for himself. I also think he wanted to make money off of his father's DNA."

Ferrell also has a theory as to how Ted Williams' signature came to be on that infamous scrap piece of paper, with handwritten instructions that read exactly like this: "JHW, Claudia, and Dad all agree To be Put into Bio-Stasis after we Die. This is what we want, To be able To be Together in The Future, even if it is only a chance." It is signed by John Henry Williams, Claudia Williams and, allegedly, Ted Williams.

"Because of his health," Mark Ferrell said, "they would have Ted sign a practice signature on a piece of paper before he would sign an expensive lithograph. It'd be, 'Here Dad, sign this and let's see how your signature is today.' That's where I think that signature on that piece of paper came from."

John Henry has steadfastly refused to comment about any of this in the year now since his father died. But last week, Mike Fish from SI.com interviewed him at a minor league game to talk with him about his baseball aspirations. In the interview, Fish was able to slip in a couple of questions that elicited telling comments from John Henry.

Asked Fish, "What do you say to those who asked about the decision to cryogenically preserve your father's body?"

Replied John Henry, "First off, it is none of their business. I don't poke my nose into what they are gonna do with their loved ones after they die. That is the way it should be."

"Notice how he worded that," Mark Ferrell said. "John Henry said that what a family does with a loved one's body is their business. Notice he didn't say anything about the loved one's wishes. He's not concerned with that."

And so it has become Mark Ferrell's concern.

"I've written to Gov. Jeb Bush. I've written to the state attorney general's office of Florida. I've contacted the local state attorney out of Ocala, and they're working on this. I've contacted the state attorney in Arizona. I've filed a complaint in Arizona against Alcor for going against their own documents that state if you want to be cryogenically preserved, your will must state that. But they took Ted Williams even though his will states that he wanted to be cremated."

Passion and anger again crept into Ferrell's voice.

"Here it is, the 4th of July weekend, and you have a great American like Ted Williams, who fought for our freedoms in two wars, and now he's hanging upside in a metal tube in a damn industrial warehouse against his will, and against his wishes. He couldn't even have his will enforced in Citrus County, Florida."

So Mark Ferrell continues the fight that his wife was forced to leave off. As he does, he recalled something Ted Williams said years ago, when the family was together one day.

"Let me tell you something," Ted Williams told John Henry as he pointed toward Ferrell. "Don't ever (bleep) with that guy, because he's a fighter."

Mark Ferrell chuckled in retelling the story.