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0 Subject: Simon Shuttlewood aka the_abbott

Posted by: JeffG
- [328551323] Sun, Oct 17, 2004, 23:13

As I am sure others of you have, I received this sad email today.

Dear friend of Simon

A few weeks ago Simon Shuttlewood (aka the_abbott) gave me a list of contacts who he wanted to contacted once his battle with Motor Neurone Disease ended. I'm writing to inform you that Simon died last night at home with his wife and family around him.

He truly valued your friendship over this recent time and wanted to communicate that to you.

I have known Simon and his family for the past six and a half years, first as his parish priest and then as a friend and I have only admiration for the way he and his family have faced up to and dealt with the increasing problems this debilitating disease has brought them. However, the last couple of years in particular have been blessed by Sky Sport TV and Simon's love for baseball. The sporting year seemed to give him new goals to aim for, so this year has been rich for him with the Olympics, the Ryder Cup, the World Series and a great deal more.

I thank you for contributing to the quality of life he maintained until very recently and hope you will feel able to hold Jane his wife, and Emma, George, Sam and Jack, their children in your thoughts and prayers in the days ahead.

With every blessing

Martin

Rev'd Martin Court
331 Scraptoft Lane
Leicester LE5 2HU
0116 241 3205
07843 235988 (m)
--------------------
Diocese of Leicester IT Coordinator
http://www.leicester.anglican.org
Vicar: All Saints, Scraptoft
http://www.scraptoft.leicester.anglican.org

1JeffG
      ID: 328551323
      Sun, Oct 17, 2004, 23:16
I only knew him this baseball season through rotoguru.com as he was in my fanatasy league thanks to the RIBC Qualifying league #2. As we got to know each other in March through these message boards during our draft, and we started corresponding via email. He shared with me, and I am sure other gurupies that he was suffering from ALS or Motor Neuron Disease as it is known in the UK. He has a form of the disease that is heriditary as there were several of his relatives who also died of ALS in three prior generations. He knew what his fate was, and chose to live for each day, was always very positive, and he definitely made the most of the time he had left.

As he had limited use of his motor functions, he used voice recognition software to make posts, work the internet, create analytical spread sheets, and send email. Amazing because he claims to have been compter-illerate 5 years earlier. Even though he had these limitations, he was still very participatory in our league, and was personable with a great sense of humor. For someone who lived his whole life in the UK, he was still quite the baseball fan, having followed the 2001 World Series, watching with interest because he became captivated by the resiliance of Americans and New Yorkers after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In 2002 he adopted the Cubs as his team. Even with his short exposure to baseball, he was very knowledgable about the game, and could add insightful analysis.

I decided to google him this evening and found he was active in ALS support chat groups, and also found him mentioned in a web site blog devoted to Cubs fans.

I figured I'd pass this along as we lost a good man today. I an thankful for this community giving me the opportunity to know such an inspirational person.

Jeff G
2Farn
      Sustainer
      ID: 451044109
      Sun, Oct 17, 2004, 23:34
I always loved his insight into topics here, especially baseball. The community has definately lost a great man.

Best wishes to his entire family.
3Perm Dude
      ID: 2343587
      Mon, Oct 18, 2004, 00:27
A good man. I only knew him through the boards--had no idea he had ALS.
4Species
      Leader
      ID: 07724916
      Mon, Oct 18, 2004, 13:27
I'm sorry to hear this. I found his posts highly enjoyable, intelligent and insightful.

My regards to his friends and family.
5blue hen
      ID: 372102211
      Mon, Oct 18, 2004, 16:48
I had almost no interaction with The Abbott, but this is a very important reminder that these forums are filled with actual people who live actual lives. It's fun to give each other a hard time, especially when sports are involved, but let's remember that there are real people here, with real feelings. Sad to hear what happened, but glad he was able to spend even a small part of his life at this website.
6holt
      ID: 497552
      Mon, Oct 18, 2004, 19:29
I didn't play tsn ultimate this year, but I remember last year he was putting up the pitcher ownership charts on a daily basis. pretty impressive to be running those charts every day using voice recognition software. very nice and polite guy.
7biliruben
      ID: 441182916
      Mon, Oct 18, 2004, 19:40
In my limited interaction with him, he seemed like a very nice, smart guy. He will be missed.
8Khahan
      ID: 31854515
      Mon, Oct 18, 2004, 21:39
I just got to know him a very little bit this year through the RIBC and qualifying leagues. Never actually played with him. But he and I had a few correspondence over email about our teams and drafts.
I was hoping to be in a league with him next year.
Gonna miss him.
Best wishes to your family The Abbott
9Bandos
      ID: 13762111
      Tue, Oct 19, 2004, 08:27
We had a chance to trade info with each other as we worked on the pitcher ownership charts. When I had my second child, he picked up the slack. An absolutely wonderful guy who got a tremendous amount of enjoyment out of these boards and fantasy sports. Truly we will miss you Simon. Best wishes to your family.

10Ender
      ID: 0442215
      Thu, Oct 21, 2004, 21:35
I have a picture of Simon decked out in his Cubs garb. It is in an email and I have no idea how to post it. If someone else knows and would like to I'd be happy to forward it on just so we can all put a face with the name.

He was a friendly guy and a heck of a baseball fan. we exchanged some emails during the season. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family.

Here is a blog entry he posted and shared with me during the season. It is a year old, but it will give those interested some insight into who Simon Shuttlewood aka the_abbott was:

"My name is Simon Shuttlewood and I am a 45-year-old English father of four and live in the city of Leicester in 'the Midlands', UK. Leicester is situated 100 miles north of London.

Where to start? Well I suppose the most prominent thing in my life at the moment is the fact that I have Motor Neurone Disease: in the US you know this illness as A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig's disease. I have a version of the illness that is called Familial MND and it is so called because our family has a history of this illness going back three generations. It started with my maternal grandmother who died in 1965 and then her two daughters, one being my mother, and so far, in the next generation, myself and my mother's sisters eldest Anthony. Mum died in 1990 and her sister one year later. Anthony died in 1997 aged 46. I was diagnosed one year later. The family trend appears to be approximately 10 years from onset of symptoms to death.

What has this got to do with the Chicago Cubs you might wonder? Well I have always been a sports fan having played Rugby Union in my youth and although I never played soccer I have always enjoyed watching the game. I also enjoy cricket but with my rugby background I became a fan in the early Eighties of American Football. That was the time when that particular sport started to be shown regularly in the UK. I quickly became a fan and started to support the Chicago Bears. I even went to Wembley Stadium in the mid-eighties to watch what was then called the British Bowl to see the losing team that year in the Super Bowl, Denver Broncos, take on the Buffalo Bills and a young Jim Kelly. But an avid Bears fan I have been for about 20 years.

So the illness forced me to retire from work in the spring of 1999 and as my body has slowly deteriorated over the years I have focused my mind towards other things and one principal thing was computing. From being a computer illiterate at 40 years old I have self-taught myself to be proficient in desktop publishing (PageMaker) in graphic manipulation (Photoshop) and latterly have started to play catch up with Web design (Dreamweaver). Starting with Microsoft's FrontPage I have developed for others three web sites and have enjoyed doing them.

This deterioration has also necessitated another learning curve with me needing to encompass and use voice recognition software (Dragon NaturallySpeaking) as I can no longer use my hands. So my computer is becoming more and more controlled with my voice. Purely from an interest point of view this e-mail is also being dictated using the voice recognition software.

Anyway, back to the Cubs; along with my deteriorating ability to do physical things I became more reliant on passing time by watching the TV and with a premium satellite service in the UK was able to watch many sports and sometimes late into the night. This is where baseball entered. A cinderella National Channel, called Channel 5, who coincidentally were the pioneers of televised gridiron in the UK before the satellite company of the Fox network, BSkyB (British Sky Broadcasting), bought up a lot of the sporting rights here in the UK, started in 1995 televising the Sunday Night Baseball programme from ESPN.

My introduction came after the 9/11 atrocity when late one evening (it was actually early hours of the morning) I switched over and it just happened to be game 1 of the 2001 World Series between the Yankees and the Diamondbacks.

Although I obviously knew that the game of baseball existed I had got no idea of the game apart from the obvious of hitting the ball, running round the bases, and hitting home runs. The nuances of the game (especially the language of the game from the commentators) were initially and totally lost on me but something must have made an impression on me in that first game because I taped all the games each night and watched them 'live' the following morning. It was a very exciting World Series culminating in a game seven down the stretch win. When the World Series was over I was gutted that I would have to wait another four months to watch baseball again!

Christmas of 2001, in conjunction with my January birthday of 2002, brought a fantastic gift from my father which was a visit to America, his treat, a country that I had always wanted to visit but up to this point had not been able to. The start of the 2002 baseball season I decided that I would not pin my allegiance to any team until the end of that season and watched from the beginning of the season the coverage available in the UK which was two games per week after the end of the NHL season.

I decided that Washington D. C., the political capital of America, was the area that I decided to visit and in truth my main objective was not necessarily to site-see but to try to meet ordinary Americans. Of that I managed to do lots!

On one of our travels into Pennsylvania we travelled to Philadelphia to see my very first live baseball game and the tickets, bought over the Internet prior to coming, were for Philadelphia versus the Arizona Diamondbacks at the Vet. I chose that game as Arizona were the reigning champions. As an aside it was interesting to see two new stadiums being built close by.

Following a sport from afar when there is little coverage locally is difficult but I was becoming more knowledgeable about the nuances and tactics of the sport and relished the 2002 World Series, with a nonbiased rooting for the Giants, and another exciting seven game thriller!

The fact that Dusty Baker had impressed me throughout that World Series seemed to be a sign not to be ignored when he left the Giants and joined the Cubs. At this point I had no knowledge of the Cubs past but felt that I needed to be loyal to the city of Chicago and decided, after research indicated they had been in Chicago all of their existence, to root for the Cubs.

A very nice family that my father and I had met on our trip to America sent me a surprise Christmas present last year and it was an authentic white striped Chicago Cubs shirt. So that was it. That confirmed my allegiance. I became a bonafide Chicago Cubs fan! (And so subsequently has my nearly 12-year-old son Jack)

Fast forward to the beginning of the 2003 season. A new satellite channel became available here in the UK, N. A. S. N. (North American Sports Network), and it was advertising the fact that it had MLB coverage. So recklessly I signed up for it and have been watching baseball all season. Conveniently and amazingly the fact that the Chicago Cubs play a lot of afternoon games I was able to watch quite a few live games from Wrigley Field this season. (I have been watching baseball nearly daily for the last six months!)

All I can say is that this last two weeks have been an ecstatic, nailbiting, frustrating and ultimately desolate time and I feel after game six of the NLCS I suddenly had 50 years of history descend on me as well. I was totally gutted. You sort of knew that good things were not going to happen.

I am in absolute agreement with you on the basis of the team's achievement this season from where they were. I also agree that Dusty's management style is somewhat enigmatic but fundamentally Florida and Chicago were very evenly matched with in my opinion the edge in hitting laying with Florida and the perceived edge in pitching laying with Chicago. In truth what happened was that Chicago's bats stepped up initially but could not sustain it and Florida's pitching came through in the end along with their hitting.

All of Chicago (well the northside anyway) are ruing the missed opportunity of a long waited opportunity to play in the World Series but I have missed an opportunity had they got there to come back over to America, which is what I intended to do, and find a sporting bar in Chicago to watch the World Series games. (Even as ill as I am!)

But that isn't to be. But I will be hopefully around to cheer on the Cubbies next season and you never know..............."
11Ref
      Donor
      ID: 539581218
      Thu, Oct 21, 2004, 22:01
Count your blessings. Tomorrow isn't promised to any of us. Thanks for sharing Ender! At least his words live on to people that didn't even know him.
13rockafellerskank
      Dude
      ID: 27652109
      Thu, Oct 21, 2004, 23:51
Really puts things into perspective. I'm going to name one of my hoops teams "4Simon" as a tribute.

Should his friends or family look at this site, please know the_abbott will be missed.

A pic of Simon as sent to Ender:



14Perm Dude
      ID: 2343587
      Thu, Oct 21, 2004, 23:58
Great email, Ender. Thanks for sharing it. Got a couple of emails from him, mostly involving drafts we were in together. Must be really fine VRS to be able to recognize "Perm Dude" in the text of his messages to me!
15vid
      ID: 2693225
      Fri, Oct 22, 2004, 20:53
I was also in the league with simon and when I first saw this post I was speechless. So many emotions. I am glad I had the opportunity to know him, even if it was through emails.

My thoughts and prayers are with Simon's family and friends.
16Twarpy
      ID: 228322110
      Sat, Oct 23, 2004, 01:58
I also received the email from Martin, as Jeff G did.

Simon first approached me when we were in a league together like Ender I also received almost the same detailed email as him.

Simon didn't realize how I was so much younger than him until we exchanged some stories, but there was a genuine sincerity in all his emails as he showed me some of the articles he had written for some prominent Cubs websites.

I wish I still had his collection of emails, but when I changed ISPs a couple of months ago I lost the emails unfortunately.

I didn't realize that Simon had talked to so many other people, the only other person I knew that he talked was Ender, I think it shows the courage and greatness of how he would write such huge emails without ever even being able to use his hands.

We all marvel at what Schilling did the other night with an injury, yet Simon was able to make maraculous acheivements everyday of his life, and his acomplishments are even greater than any of us can imagine.

Simon we will miss you.
17KTx
      ID: 49352220
      Sat, Oct 23, 2004, 05:58
Wow.
I never got a chance to talk to him... but from just this thread alone, Simon was definitely one incredible individual and will surely be missed.
18GoatLocker
      Sustainer
      ID: 060151121
      Sat, Oct 23, 2004, 12:36
Never did talk to him, but saw some of his posts.
Agree with the fact that he was an incredible individual.

My best wishes to his family and friends.

Cliff
19the_abbott's family
      Sustainer
      ID: 44010135
      Sat, Oct 23, 2004, 13:04
My husband - Simon, aka, the_abbott would have been truly overwhelmed by all the moving tributes you have paid to him. As i sit with my sons Sam and Jack reading through this thread our hearts are full of pride. Simon spent many hours on his computer and i thank you for befriending him he was a very brave and courageous man and watched his final baseball game the day before he died. He is now free from suffering and at peace. With all my heart i thank you,

Jayne
20Guru
      ID: 330592710
      Mon, Oct 25, 2004, 09:53
It is at times like this that I realize that fantasy sports may be what attracts people to this site, but fantasy sports is not necesarily what this site is about. I'm humbly grateful if I have played some small role in bringing Simon closer to baseball, and closer to many of you.

I've had several email exchanges with him (note that he was even a GuruPatron), and helped him last spring with a preseason projection for his RIBC qualifying league. I was unaware of his medical affliction, however.

Last spring, he wrote me to suggest a modification to the forum:
"Knowing how much of a computer and website whiz you are, I wondered whether I might make a suggestion in relation to accessing pages (threads) on your Forum website.

I do like the fact that your pages do not swap over to page 1, 2, 3 etc etc and are one continuous page. But when the posts reach a certain number you do have to scroll down a long way to reach the most recent posting.

Now when there is a new posting the posting time alters as that new posting goes to the top of the page. Would it be possible to have a hyperlink on the new date/time of the new posting such that when we (or if we) wish to just read the latest posting (because we already have read the main post) it would hyperlink directly to it?"
My response was that it was an interesting idea and I'd think about it. But I'd since forgotten about the idea. Simply scrolling to the bottom of a page probably didn't seem like an arduous task. But maybe, when navigating using voice recognition software, it's more inconvenient than simply dragging a scroll bar.

Consequently, I'm going to revisit this idea. If the programming isn't too troublesome, may I can implement it - as a parting favor to a loyal Gurupie.

21ukula
      ID: 36936266
      Tue, Oct 26, 2004, 09:51
Wow, what a moving thread and what a remarkable person - he will be missed. I remember the_abbott offering to take on a table-posting project (standings/schedule), a few years back because the regular person couldn't do it for some reason. Sorry I don't have more information than that but I checked the old threads and couldn't find it.

Simon's family - what is the origin of his screen name "the_abbott"? Are Sam and Jack also Cubs fans? Do they share their father's love of fantasy sports?

ukula



22Mike D
      Sustainer
      ID: 41831612
      Tue, Oct 26, 2004, 10:12
Moving thread indeed. I feel like I missed out by not having more interaction with such an incredible and wonderful individual. Thanks to everyone for sharing so much information about him.

"The mark of a great man is not what he says, and not what he does. It's what he is remembered by."
23the_abbott's family
      Sustainer
      ID: 44010135
      Tue, Oct 26, 2004, 18:01
Both Sam and Jack have a love of all sports, as yet only Sam has explored fantasy sport, not baseball though, football(i think you call it soccer). Jack has inherited his Dads Cubbies shirt and is a fan. We live in a city called Leicester and an area in that city known as Humberstone there used to be an old monestry inhabited by monks and our house is built on that site, Abbots Road hence the name the_abbott! Thank you for the replies to my earlier post.

Jayne
24Astade
      ID: 36828206
      Tue, Oct 26, 2004, 20:41
I'm very sorry to hear the news. the_abbott was in our RQL #2 league this past year. From the very beginning it was apparent how good natured and fun he was. I even went back and confirmed how nearly every post had a ":-)" or something witty to say.

Throughout our drafting which was quite drawn-out and lengthy the_abbott was always accomodating despite being the only person 5 time zones removed.
the_abbott was active in our league as I had the opportunity to exchange trade proposals and even work out a trade with him over the course of the season. It was obvious he shared the passion for the game as most of us did. I am glad to have seen him first hand on the message boards and to learn more about the person behind the 'screen name'. I wish the Shuttlewoods all the best.
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