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Shaquille
O'Neal: "When you are 60, hang out with 60-year-olds, not 20-year-olds.
That is all I got to say about Jerry Buss."
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HoopsHype.com Articles Not
a star, just a winner
It's equally surprising and refreshing to hear an NBA player talk like a common folk about insecurities and the harsh reality of this thing called life -- especially in an era when every basketball player feels they have been the chosen one since emerging from diapers. "I never was really recruited out of high school," Williams says sheepishly. "I never expected to make a career out of basketball," he says. This one seems to sting more than the others -- "I never got drafted." And finally, the beautiful honesty you rarely hear, since most players can't stroke their own egos enough -- "I never expected to be in the NBA." Really, he didn't. Williams is two decades removed from trips to the park with his brother and father -- decent high school players in their prime -- in Illinois, a good 15 years past his days of being mocked by the white suburban kids for being a mixed (he's got black and white parents) teenager, and a shade over 10 years past leading Xavier to more than respectability without posting monster numbers. Forget flying below the radar. Aaron Williams was barely ever on it. Alonzo Mourning walks past Williams in the Nets locker room. Everybody knows the story of Mourning -- growing up in Chesapeake, Virginia, high school All-American, stud at Georgetown, second pick of the NBA draft by the Charlotte Hornets. Richard Jefferson is opening mail nearby, and he, too, had a pretty famed schoolboy basketball existence -- absolute dominance at Moon Valley high school in Arizona, heavily recruited on the West Coast, went to a national title game at Arizona, NBA lottery pick. "I was at the opposite end of the spectrum from those [two] guys," Williams says. "I got talked about a little bit, mostly in my area. I wasn't All-State, though. I didn't expect to get a scholarship to college because I wasn't a high profile or big-time player." Williams grew up in "a black neighborhood" around Chicago, and said he never had any problems fitting in. Then, in eight grade, his family moved to the suburbs, and he "had a couple problems with the white kids." Williams estimated there were only 5-10 African-Americans in the high school of over 1,600 students at Rolling Meadows high school about 30 miles outside of Chicago. "I don't know what it was," he said of the run-ins. "It wasn't nothing major, just kids saying things, calling you names. But the older I got, they didn't say anything." Williams, who gets his height from his parents (dad is 6-foot-2, mom is 5-foot-11), responded on the basketball court, averaging 15.3 points, 9.4 rebounds, and 4.4 blocks in his senior year of high school -- only his second year of organized basketball. Still, Williams went largely unrecruited, drawing interest from Loyola (Ill.) and Western Michigan. Then Xavier, which wasn't quite a national name yet, toiling in the Midwestern Collegiate Conference, made a late push for him. Its new coach, Pete Gillen, later told the Chicago Tribune, "He was a diamond in the rough." Williams grew two inches between his junior year in high school (6-foot-5) and freshman year at Xavier (6-foot-7) and had an immediate impact with the Musketeers. As a freshman, he was part of the school's biggest win ever, an upset of mighty Georgetown (the one with Alonzo Mourning and Dikembe Mutombo) in the NCAA tournament. In that game, he scored a putback with less than two minutes left that sealed the victory. After four productive years in college though, Williams, labeled as a 6-foot-9 tweener -- too small to play power forward and without enough of perimeter game to be a small forward -- gave the NBA pre-draft camps a shot. An injured ankle slowed his game, and his future as a basketball player -- the one he never thought he'd have -- looked to be ending. "I got lucky enough to go to Xavier," he said. "My plan was just to get an education." He earned a degree in Criminal Justice, but never seriously considered entering the field of law. "I gave it some thought for about a second," he said. "[The NBA] wasn't a reality for me until I graduated college. Then I realized I could play. I was playing against players in college who got drafted, and I realized they were no better than I was." So Williams began on the journey of a basketball vagabond, bouncing around a few CBA teams and over to Italy and Greece. Williams, who at 6-foot-9 and 240-pounds has a body that looks like it has been chiseled from granite, had enjoyed a few brief stints in the NBA in between -- Utah, Milwaukee, Denver -- finally caught on for good in the league in 1997 in Vancouver with the Grizzlies. In 1998 it was off to Seattle, then Washington in 1999, and in 2000, the Nets signed him. "I just never thought that I would make it to the NBA," he said. "I just kept chipping away. It was a matter of making it at the right place, with the right team. Finding a team that likes you and wants to give you a chance." The question with Williams wasn't his size or work ethic. He feels it was that he didn't have the credentials. "I've always been more of a team player," he said. "I wasn't the guy that was going to shoot 20 or 30 times. If you come out of high school or college and you don't average 20 points, they basically don't think you can play at the next level. There aren't too many players getting drafted that average 10 points a game in college. That's about what I averaged. But my teams always won, so it wasn't any problem." And with consecutive trips to the NBA Finals now on his resume, and a third very likely, it still isn't. Jason McIntyre is a a freelance journalist in New York City and a regular contributor to HoopsHype.com Tell us what you think about this article. E-mail us at HoopsHype@HoopsHype.com _____________________ |
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