Quote:RISE AND FALL OF A LEGEND
Time for a turnaround
Former Milby and UH star Rob Williams dazzled crowds for years before drugs ended his career and a stroke nearly ended his life
By MICHAEL MURPHY
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

They streamed into the cramped gym, gathering as they always do to celebrate the past at the annual Milby Legends Game.

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Donald Driver, known as "Quickie" to Milby fans but more well-known as an All-Pro wide receiver with the Green Bay Packers, hammed his way up and down the court. Arizona guard Jawann McClellan came back for one more run with teammates like such as Larry Posey and Tremaine Webster, with whom he teamed on the Buffaloes' 2004 Class 5A state championship.

Few in the stands on this impossibly hot summer night seemed to care that many of Milby's past greats were unable to attend, most of them scattered across the globe pursuing professional careers.

So what? The gym still shook with dunks, no-look passes and can-you-top-this shooting, all played out to a blaring rap beat.

When the game ended, Milby coach Jim Duffer grabbed the microphone and made a special night even more magical.

Duffer let the crowd in on a little secret — in attendance was the player who not only is without a doubt the greatest Buff of them all but the man many insist is the city's greatest high school player ever. Period.

With that less-than-humble introduction, Rob Williams made his way to center court. The crowd jumped to its feet, sending warm waves of applause washing over the man who in another lifetime was the engine that drove the University of Houston machine that became Phi Slama Jama and was a first-round pick of the Denver Nuggets.

The years seemed to peel away as Williams waved in response, his daughter Alexia, 10, and fiancée, Jacqueline Harris, at his side. Former Milby coach Boyce Honea and his wife, Sandra, embraced Williams, a scene that had many dabbing tears from their eyes.

And in the emotion of the moment, hardly anyone noticed the paralysis that froze much of Williams' left side, the blindness in his left eye or the flattened section of his skull, now protected by a metal plate — all blunt evidence of the stroke that nearly killed him 7 1/2 years ago but "only" wound up taking away his ability to play the game that he once defined, and that once defined him.

On this night, for the first time in a long time, Rob Williams was back, in many ways.

'Rob! Rob! Rob!'
When Williams played, in what easily could be considered the golden age of HISD basketball, there was no need for anything as artificial as a rap soundtrack. With his quick smile, quicker first step and generations-ahead-of-its-time game, Williams was the only stimulus any crowd needed.

Crowds everywhere cut loose with the chant that was like the heartthrob that gave life to the city game — "Rob! Rob! Rob!"

"When Rob played here, we sold out everywhere we played," Honea said. "I remember that on the days we were going to play, the phone would ring in the coaches' office (at Milby) and the people would always ask the same thing — 'What time is Rob playing tonight?' It was never, 'What time is Milby playing tonight?'

"That's how popular Rob was as a player."

Like Honea, everyone who saw Williams play has a "Rob story," and they're always eager to tell it. Like the no-look, behind-the-back alley-oop he threw to Clyde Drexler from midcourt at Hofheinz Pavilion against Texas A&M.

"Everyone's got one of those stories," said former Cougar Reid Gettys. "Rob was always putting on a show. And the shame of it all was that no one ever saw him in practice, which is when he really got it going."

Whatever you want to call it — charisma, swagger or magic — Williams had it, and he didn't hesitate to exploit that natural resource. Williams was indestructible, or so everyone figured. Williams certainly thought so, and so did just about everyone who stood — however briefly — between the whippet-quick guard and the basket.

Williams' exploits were such that word started to leak beyond the state's borders.

In the days before the Internet and ESPN, basketball's cognoscenti across the nation cherished the stories of his long-range shooting, his no-look passes and on-a-leash dribbling prowess.

Williams was almost a fictional character because Texas players were barred from participating in summer camps and various all-star games that help carve out reputations like those in Williams' phenomenal class of 1979, which included future college and NBA greats such as Ralph Sampson, James Worthy, Dominique Wilkins, Terry Cummings, Thurl Bailey and Sam Bowie.

But despite the obstacles, word began to leak out that this Williams kid, who was effortlessly throwing in close to 30 points a night for Milby (without the benefit of the 3-point line, mind you), was the equal of any guard in the nation, including a rising star from Illinois named Isiah Thomas.

It was that tug of mystery that enticed a Rice freshman named Willis Wilson to see for himself what the hype was all about. Wilson grew up playing on the talent-rich playgrounds of Washington, D.C., and also had spent countless hours competing against the best players from New York, Philadelphia and Boston, so he wasn't about to be easily impressed.

"I kept hearing this name — Rob Williams," said Wilson, now the head coach at Rice. "I went to watch Milby and Jones at Barnett (Fieldhouse). Everybody there was talking about Rob Williams, Rob Williams, Rob Williams. I remember watching him warm up and thinking, 'There's no way this guy can compare to the guards coming out of D.C.'

"And then I watched him play, and it was mind-boggling. For a D.C. guy, it was hard for me to admit that this guy was as good as anybody I had ever seen. But he was."

There was a good reason for that — Williams had the opportunity to hone his basketball chops against NBA athletes, playing in high-level pickup games at Fonde Recreation Center and Hofheinz Pavilion before he even laced up a sneaker at Milby.

"Yeah, my camp was going to Fonde," Williams said. "I would go there and play with the likes of Moses Malone, Robert Reid, Allen Leavell, Calvin Murphy, Tom Henderson and Maurice Cheeks."

Rob Williams was destined for greatness.

Lottery winners
With Williams as the lure, Milby became a mecca for college coaches and recruiters, even though many figured it was a foregone conclusion that he would wind up at Houston. But it wasn't quite that simple. Williams and Larry Micheaux toyed with going to New Mexico as a package but decided against it.

And on the day he signed with UH, Williams had every intention of announcing San Francisco as his destination. But word of an impending probation at that school had Williams reconsidering his choice.

UH won the Rob Williams lottery.

"What I liked about the University of Houston was (coach) Guy Lewis," Williams said. "Guy sat me down and explained to me that if I came to the University of Houston, I would have an opportunity to play my first year until my last year. I liked that."

The arrival of Williams made UH a chic destination for local talent, with players such as Micheaux (Worthing), Michael Young (Yates) and Clyde Drexler (Sterling) soon following.

"Rob recruited me," Young said. "He wanted all of us to play here at the same time. We all wanted to come here and put something together because we kept hearing how Texas kids didn't really know how to play basketball."

Oh, yes they could.

The combination was magical, and the Cougars, blending in a raw 7-footer from Nigeria named Akeem Olajuwon, made a run to the 1982 Final Four, the first of three straight.

But the onset of good times turned out to be the beginning of the end for Williams, who had what he called "the worst game of my career" in the Cougars' semifinal loss to North Carolina, scoring just two points on 0-for-8 shooting.

Dabbling with drugs
With that game, the aura had been shattered, and in retrospect it seems as though Williams never recovered. Stories began to circulate that he was too high on cocaine to play against North Carolina.

But Williams denies such rumors,.

"I guess everybody has to explain it that way," Williams said. "What else could it be? I'm averaging 28 points in the NCAA Tournament, so what else can you come up with?

"But you have to understand that their box-and-one was designed to stop me. Nobody talks about that. They just say, 'Oh, he must have been out all night.'

"Well, let me tell you — I was out all night a lot that season, but I still averaged over 20 points a game. But North Carolina had Jimmy Black following me all over the court. Without that box-and-one, they couldn't have guarded me."

Besides, Williams explained, he was intending to enter the NBA draft, and he wasn't about to cost himself money with any reckless behavior.

Regardless of the explanation, the snowball had been nudged, and it was rolling downhill, taking Williams' career with it.

The North Carolina game wasn't the first time rumors of drug use swirled around Williams, stories he admits are mostly true.

"I started back in junior high school, just out there smoking weed on the playground," Williams said. "It wasn't nothing. Just something to do, that's all. That's part of my old ways. Cocaine came later, but I started out smoking weed. When I got to high school, I became this real good basketball player, and suddenly everybody wanted to be my friend.

"I've always been a curious type of fellow anyway, so I wanted to see what cocaine was about. So I tried it. And to tell you the truth, I liked it. But what started out as a party ended up as a fight for my life. I'm not hiding anything here.

"What started out as a temporary thing for me, my use of drugs, ended up being a necessary thing for me to get to this part of my life where I'm at now. I don't do drugs or alcohol anymore. I wish I had never done it, but I did, and it's over with now."

Every hero has a tragic flaw, and Williams had enough to stock a thousand Greek tragedies. But his greatest flaw is one that few who watched him play would ever believe — Williams never thought he was that good of a basketball player.

"No, I didn't really think I was that good," Williams said. "I knew I could play, right? I'm not going to kid you or myself — I knew I could play. But I didn't know I was that good. Everybody else always said I was, but at the time I never believed it."

A prisoner of other's expectations, Williams self-medicated to make himself the player and person everyone was expecting to see.

"There's something about yourself that's unacceptable to you," said former Rockets guard John Lucas, a good friend of Williams. "I don't know what Rob's was, but everyone has a fear of not being accepted. So the way you mask those feelings is to medicate. That makes you feel bulletproof, indestructible.

"But when you come off the drugs, you still have those insecurities — 'I don't feel like I'm invincible anymore' — so you do them again. You get that feeling back, but it becomes a habit."

A habit he carried into the 1982 NBA draft, where he was reluctantly selected by the Nuggets with the 19th pick. Williams held out for more money but didn't prepare properly and reported to camp almost 30 pounds overweight, a situation that caused Denver coach Doug Moe to utter the description that will forever be attached to Williams — "fat little hog."

"He was holding out, and I don't think that going down to Fonde to play pickup games was the way to get prepared, especially to play in Denver with that high altitude and the running game they played," Young said. "And I don't care where you were picked, when camp comes around, you need to be there, and you need to shine."

While he showed flashes of potential, Williams never got his game or his fitness level together enough to suit Moe. The coach had been through the grinder with former Nuggets star David Thompson's drug battles and was frustrated with all the missed practices, flights, team meetings and buses.

In Williams' second year, the Nuggets pulled off a blockbuster trade, sending Kiki Vandeweghe to Portland for point guard Lafayette Lever. Williams suddenly found himself as the fifth guard in a four-guard rotation.

"Doug Moe and I butted heads a bunch of times," Williams said. "As I look back on it now, I realize that he was right in his position. I had a bunch of (habits) that I thought were undetectable at the time but were obviously noticeable to him and anyone else with any reason."

After two years, Williams' NBA career was over. He became a vagabond, playing in the CBA, and overseas in Italy, Australia, Spain and the Philippines, where he still is regarded as a legend after averaging 48 points while leading Tanduay to the 1986 league title.

But after years of wandering, he decided to come home. It wasn't long before the money and the good times disappeared and the cheers turned into whispers. Williams found himself enduring the loneliness that comes with being homeless and the fact that he went from highly paid NBA player to having to ask friends for whatever handouts they could spare.

Rob Williams was finished. Burned out. A has-been. All before his 35th birthday.

Williams bounced around the city, sometimes using his keen business sense in an effort to get a legitimate business running but sometimes hiding in the shadows. Like his talent, Williams' appetites were enormous — drugs, booze and women, addictions he was unable to shake.

But the one enemy that would ultimately stop him wasn't found in a spoon, bottle or bed. For years, he had been plagued with severe headaches, but he didn't understand that the root cause was the high blood pressure that runs in his family. Williams still clearly remembers the last few moments of his previous life.

"I was coming from a little league basketball game (in January 1998) with a friend of mine," he said. "I was living in a condo at the time, and when I got out, I had this extremely bad headache.

"I went inside and I was sitting downstairs. I got up and walked toward the kitchen to get something to drink, and I just fell. I couldn't get up, and I had no idea what it was."

Harris discovered her fiancé on the floor and rushed him to the emergency room. Minutes later, Williams was on the operating table, being prepped for brain surgery.

"They told us going in that he could go into a coma and never come out," Harris said. "But we had to take that chance. They said that he could go into a coma or die. They said that after the surgery he was probably going to be in a coma for five days. But after the surgery, he woke up and was talking before they even had him in the recovery room."

Another "Rob story."

Turning life around
Williams, who along with Harris runs a care facility for mentally challenged adults, Ultimate Adult PHP, in Katy, says he toils every day to "make myself a better person."

It's just part of the new Rob Williams, the one who was rescued by pastor C.L. Jackson at Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church. With Jackson guiding him, Williams turned his life back over to the faith that he had long ago abandoned.

The stroke froze the left side of his body, which is quite an adjustment for someone who at age 14 was holding his own in regular pickup games against NBA players, but Williams, 44, insists he isn't bitter about what happened.

"I've been around the world, so what do I have to be bitter about?" he said. "My biggest dream was to be an NBA player. Man, I was a first-round draft choice, and you can't get any higher than that.

"Why should I be bitter?"

Well, there is one thing. He would love to see his No. 21 hanging from the Hofheinz rafters, or at least have someone from UH explain why it hasn't happened.

"If there's one thing that I did get a little upset about was that they haven't recognized me," Williams said. "I had a better average than just about everybody over there other than Otis Birdsong and Elvin Hayes."

Lewis agrees.

"If someone asks me about (great players), the first person I talk about is Rob," Lewis said. "He could play. He could do anything. I just love him. I do. I just have all the admiration in the world for Rob. By golly, I love Rob Williams."