by Jay Williams
My dad not only preached to me about what it meant to be a man, but he also showed me what hard work and dedication looked like. He woke up every morning and put on a suit, saying, “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” My mom, the high school principal, was equally impressive in my eyes. The two of them showed me that hard work pays off and that it’s not about where you came from or how you look.
For so long I struggled with my identity. If I’m blessed to have kids one day, I’ll be damned if I ever let them feel as conflicted as I was growing up. I will do my best to guide them on the important things in life. Not their ethnicity, religious identity, sexual preference—those are just labels. All that matters is being a good person and putting in the work.
Of course, issues of race still play a major role in my life today. There are stigmas that come with being a black man. One example would be the women I choose to date. I’m obviously aware of the stereotype of black men who date or marry white women, and why it would upset many black women. But my love life is a personal choice, not a political statement. I’ve dated black women, I’ve dated Hispanic women, I’ve dated Asian women, and . . . I’ve dated white women. I don’t know what color of skin the woman I marry is going to have. I do know that she will be kind, loving, intelligent, and that I’ll cherish her as much as possible.
I am not blind to racism. I’ve been pulled over by police for no reason down in North Carolina more than once. In college, I remember when a group of us decided to spend a weekend at a friend’s home in South Carolina. On the drive down, we stopped at a bar in the sticks. We were underage but thought we’d try to have a drink anyway. The place had an antique popcorn machine and reeked of sour beer. I noticed the camouflage shirts on the patrons as they stared me down, but I didn’t think too much of it. I was too busy rehearsing my order, fake ID in hand.
“We don’t serve your kind here, boy,” the bartender said.
I thought he was referring to the fact that I went to Duke or that I wasn’t of drinking age yet.
“Excuse me?” I said, with as deep a voice as I could muster.
“We don’t serve niggers,” he clarified.
I just stared at him in disbelief. After waiting a moment to see if it was a joke, I came to the conclusion that he was drop-dead serious. I turned around and we quickly exited the building. Thankfully unharmed.
Black does not mean ignorant. White does not mean “the correct way.” I’ve had some people—people I still love to this day—say in front of their friends, “Come on, Jay, you know you aren’t really black.” Ignorance.
When I was in college, the public saw me through the lens of a story created by the media, one they thought they knew.
I guess we know now that things weren’t so perfect around the Huxtables, either.
4
Rafters
I had never been invited to the ABCD Camp until the summer heading into my senior year of high school. It was an All-American camp held at Fairleigh Dickinson University, in my home state of New Jersey. I always held a grudge against them for overlooking me, so, being the spiteful person I was then, I chose to accept an invite to the Nike All-American Basketball Camp, in Indianapolis, instead.
In high school, I played every position but point guard; go figure. That position belonged to Nick Cerulo. My high school coach, Mark Taylor, thought I was better off focusing my attention on scoring. I went to the Nike camp wondering how I would be able to differentiate myself from all these other top players. The thing was, everybody there could score. Some of those guys were averaging 35, 40 points a game in high school, and here I was, averaging a measly 24. I needed a plan.
I had only one or two guys on my high school team who were athletic. One guy in particular, 6’6” Paul Bocage, was our center. He also played volleyball and had an incredible vertical leap, but he had to be in certain spots for me to throw him the ball where I knew he could catch it. Now all of a sudden I’m surrounded by guys who are 6’8”, 6’9”, with 40-inch verticals, who are able to shoot threes and catch anything thrown their way. So I decided I was going to showcase my court vision and focus on making everyone else better. Just go in, pass, and keep everybody involved, I said to myself. And it worked.
In the first scrimmage, I had 17 assists and really started to find my groove. During the second scrimmage, I spotted Coach K on the sidelines. I also saw Roy Williams, who was at Kansas at the time. Kentucky’s Tubby Smith, UConn’s Jim Calhoun, Jim Boeheim out of Syracuse. The list went on and on.
But what really caught my eye were a couple of guys wearing North Carolina T-shirts. See, growing up, I wore my Tar Heel shorts—the heavy mesh Nike ones with a powder blue base and white accents—and I would lower the rim attempting to imitate the 360-degree dunks that UNC’s Vince Carter did. Phil Ford was a legend, Kenny Smith was from Jamaica, Queens, and who didn’t love watching Jerry Stackhouse play? I really didn’t follow the ACC a lot, because I lived in Big East country. It was a gritty style of play where a fight threatened to break out every game. It reminded me of Cedar Brook Park, and I loved it. My dad was infatuated with coach John Thompson at Georgetown. Duke? I was aware of Bobby Hurley, whose father, Bobby Hurley Sr., coached the basketball powerhouse St. Anthony’s in Jersey City. But nobody I knew was trying to be the next Bobby Hurley or his fellow Duke star Christian Laettner. It’s funny, considering how things panned out, but in high school I really didn’t pay attention to Duke at all.
I wanted to be a Tar Heel.
It was nerve-wracking playing in front of all these coaches. Every time somebody made a mistake, you would look over to the sideline and see these legends writing you up, like you’d committed a crime. When you did something good, it was the exact same response. They jotted down every small detail—the way you interacted with teammates, and your coach, how you dealt with the refs, with the opposing players, whether you used profanity, even if your shirt was tucked in or not. Most of all, we were being assessed on how we competed—did any of us slack off or, even worse, coast for stretches at a time?
One of the camp directors told me I averaged 16.5 assists per game. I didn’t realize I had it in me. For the first time in my basketball career, I discovered how excited and happy people were to play with a guard who got them the ball in positions to succeed. It was rewarding for me making my teammates better.
All my life I’ve been told by others what I couldn’t do. I would perk up whenever criticism came in my direction. Those slights—justified or not—have always stuck to my memory dartboard. When Street & Smith’s basketball annual came out, I wanted to be on the list of the best players—no, I wanted to be at the top of the list. A year earlier, Coach Taylor had strongly suggested that I commit early to Fordham. I was ranked behind guys like Brett Nelson and Jason Gardner. Both were fantastic talents at the time, but being graded below them only inspired me to work harder, with more urgency.
Things escalated quickly coming out of the Nike camp. Letters from major programs started to flood my mailbox, and phone messages left by big-time coaches came by the dozens. I started to get recognized the way I had always dreamed about. It was incredibly validating. The hard work was beginning to pay off.
When it came time to make a decision about where I would go, my parents did a great job making sure there was a system in place for talking to coaches. My dad treated the process very much like a business. He would say, “Hey, you have Roy Williams calling at four thirty; Tubby Smith calling at four forty-five; Mike Krzyzewski at five o’clock; Dean Smith at five twenty . . .”
It was surreal.
A coach at a very prestigious university was on a conference call with us, and as usual, my dad was asking all the right questions. What are most of your student-athletes majoring in? What is the political science program like? What kind of relationships do you have with your former players? Tell us about the alumni base. Can you recommend a list of players that we can speak with about their experiences? The call was going really well
. Every answer impressed us all. The school was shooting to the top of my list, and I couldn’t believe it. Then, right before we hung up, my dad had one more question.
“What is your graduation rate, Coach?”
Pause.
“You know, David, I need to get back to you with that.”
I watched my dad’s face change from excitement to resignation.
Down goes Kentucky!
I often wonder, if the man on the other end of the phone had been John Calipari, would my life have turned out differently?
I’d heard about some of the things that come with recruiting and campus visits. I saw He Got Game—I wanted to be Jesus Shuttlesworth. I definitely had people approach me from time to time asking if I needed anything. And what 16-year-old kid doesn’t want to have his pockets stuffed with money?
One time during the summer before my senior year, after a long day of playing ball at Spring Lake Park, in the next town over, a bunch of us were going for beverages at 7-Eleven. A guy named Eddie was hanging with us. He had started to come around regularly, even though he must’ve been at least ten years older. I thought nothing of it until that day.
He had given us a ride to the store in his gray Lexus ES sedan, and while everyone else was getting out, he grabbed my arm and said, “Let me holla at you for a sec.” I was in the passenger seat opposite him.
“Yo, you know you are blowing up right now?” I just looked at him, nodding my head, waiting for him to get to the point.
He then discussed how he could help with anything I needed. Money, women, flights, etc.
“Whatever it is, we got you.”
He then reached behind me and grabbed a small duffel from under my seat. I knew I should’ve bolted right then and there, but my curiosity got the better of me. He placed the bag on my lap and unzipped it, and my eyes almost popped out of my head. Money. A shitload of money. Countless wads of hundreds held together by rubber bands. He reached, grabbed a stack, and held it up.
“All this is yours. We are going to rep you when the time comes, and we are about to change the game.”
He then handed me the stack. I sat there wondering how much money that one wad was. I had never seen a hundred-dollar bill before. Now I had at least 40 or 50 of them in my hand. I remember thinking how wrong it was to accept it, but I sure as hell wanted to take it. My mind started racing. I could buy a whole lot of FUBU and a two-way pager.
It was 1998.
I remember thinking how soft I was being for not taking the cash.
Eddie was a “runner,” which meant he did his best to recruit kids like me to be represented by an agency. And if he was successful, like so many of them are, he would get a slice of the 4 percent commission the agent received from negotiating the NBA player contract.
The truth is, it was a lot easier for me to walk away than it would’ve been for another kid whose parents weren’t working to make ends meet. My parents were really clear with me that we were okay and that we didn’t need any kind of help. They were always adamant about not letting money influence our decisions.
There’s something seriously wrong with a process that puts kids in that kind of position and then brands them as cheaters if the temptation is too great for them to resist. And so I didn’t look down on others who made a different decision, and I still don’t to this day. Step in their shoes and then judge.
Schools weren’t offering me gym bags of money. They dealt in a different currency: minutes. Coaches from all over would guarantee a starting position as soon as I walked in the door. That meant a lot of playing time right out of the gate to showcase yourself for the next level. But I knew better than to trust anybody who guaranteed something that they could just as easily be offering up to another player in the next phone call.
All I knew was I wanted to play in Chapel Hill. I had played in the Bob Gibbons Tournament of Champions, an AAU contest, in the Dean Dome and was enamored with the arena. Dean Smith had been sending me letters, but he retired at the end of my junior year and Bill Guthridge became the new coach. Shortly thereafter, I received a call from Guthridge explaining that they were dropping me off the recruiting list. They had just signed Ronald Curry from Hampton, Virginia, who was a beast. According to USA Today, he was the best high school football player in the country two years running, and if that wasn’t impressive enough, he was also the MVP of the 1998 McDonald’s All American Game. And with their point guard Ed Cota having two years of eligibility left, there wasn’t enough room on the roster.
My heart sank when Guthridge delivered the news. He couldn’t have been nicer, but I was fuming. I couldn’t believe North Carolina was passing on me. It was pouring rain outside, but I went out anyway and shot what felt like a thousand jumpers. Fuck UNC.
I did mention I was spiteful back then.
Despite my disappointment, I consoled myself with the possibility of joining my friends at Rutgers. Dahntay Jones had committed there, and 6’10” power forward Troy Murphy of the Delbarton School, in New Jersey, was close to committing. I knew we had the potential to make some serious noise. I liked the coach, Kevin Bannon, and realized that this was an opportunity to stay local and put Rutgers on the map. So just like that, I made my decision. Or so I thought.
My parents have always lived by the notion that if you say you’re going to do something, you see it through. Once you’ve committed to someone or something, there is no backing out. Prior to making my decision about going to Rutgers, I had scheduled a trip down south to meet with Duke’s coach, Mike Krzyzewski.
“As a family, we keep our word,” my dad said. “You’re going to go down there, and that’s final.”
I protested the entire drive down. There was a forecast for a big storm, and I prayed that the weather would force us to cancel or that we’d be derailed by a flat tire.
It was the longest nine and a half hours of my life. I remember going through Virginia and thinking, Oh my God, Virginia is the longest state ever. For endless, tedious miles on I–95, I just stared out the window, watching tree after tree after tree, trying to get to a school I didn’t even want to attend.
But when we finally got there and I walked through the doors into Cameron Indoor Stadium for the first time, my disposition completely changed. The place had a special feel to it. I’d seen a few of their games on TV, but I had never been there to experience it in person. I never had the chance to feel it. My parents and I walked into the dimly lit gym and looked up at the rafters. There, hanging down, were the 1991 and 1992 championship banners. I could feel every hair follicle on the back of my neck start to stand up. I know my mom and dad felt the same. You could almost hear the history just by looking at the stands that the “Cameron Crazies” have called home for so many years.
The Dean Dome didn’t have a fraction of the character that Cameron Indoor had. From the outside, Cameron looked sedate. I thought I was walking into a library. Truly. There were a couple of spotlights on the banners overhead, and there was Grant Hill’s retired jersey. Laettner’s. Hurley’s. I breathed it all in. All of these big-time names played here, in this quaint, intimate “theater.”
At the time, Coach K’s office was in the back corner of the gymnasium. As we walked into his office, the first thing that came to my mind was how small it was, especially considering whose office it was. But it was his, all right.
Both of the national championship trophies sat on top of a cabinet, with the game nets draped over each. There were pictures from the dynasty years, the ’92 Dream Team, Coach K with Johnny Dawkins and Tommy Amaker. Memorabilia of all kinds. There was one picture in particular that struck me. It was of Steve “Wojo” Wojciechowski on the cover of Sports Illustrated with his arms crossed, staring down the camera. Only Coach K would be able to take a role player to such heights.
His desk had a commanding, grandfather-like chair behind it that dwarfed our chairs opposite him. As if meeting the man wasn’t going to be intimidating enough.
So the three of us sat
there . . . waiting.
Then the office door opened and we popped up out of our tiny chairs to greet him.
“Mr. Williams,” he said with piercing eye contact as he shook my hand. He then shifted his full attention to my parents. “David. Althea.”
It just might’ve been the first time I had ever been referred to as Mr. And what made it that much more powerful was his choosing to call my parents by their first names. He seemed taller in person. He had jet-black hair, perfectly combed—nothing’s changed 17 years later—and left the lingering scent of a masculine aftershave behind. He was wearing their team warm-up suit with sneakers that looked like they came fresh out of the box. All Nike. I was transfixed.
I had never scoped out a man like this before.
Rather than sitting behind his desk, he pulled up another chair to level the playing field. After breaking the ice, talking about our trip down, the area, and such, Coach K switched gears. He talked about his background, from playing at Army under Bobby Knight to eventually coaching there, and ultimately how he ended up at Duke. What the expectations and responsibilities that came along with being a Duke player and a Duke student meant.
I wish I could recall for you everything he said, but there came a point when I saw his lips moving without hearing a sound. The whole experience felt like a dream. One thing I do remember was that my dad kept calling him Mike, which was so awkward!
The things that Coach K offered me were values—values that were already in line with the ones instilled in me by my parents. He said he wanted to sharpen them.
“I can’t promise you’re going to be an NBA player,” he told me. “I’m not going to promise you you’re going to start. I’m not going to promise you that you’re going to play 25 minutes a night. But I do promise you that by the time you leave here, you will be a better man and you will learn how to approach this game in the same way that you should approach life.”
It resonated with me. No one affiliated with basketball had ever discussed themes like that. Other coaches would say, “You’re going to come in your freshman year, play 25 minutes . . . I can promise you this, I can promise you that . . .” and here was Coach K with his out-of-the-box thinking about becoming a man. He talked about putting me on the right path toward being successful in life.
