No one was trying to hustle anyone. It just seemed there was forever someone new drifting out from underneath the Englewood elevated tracks, wanting in on the pickup game at the Kershaw Elementary School playground.
Somebody who hadn’t seen Kim Williams play.
“It was always like this,” her brother Ron said, his mouth quirking in amusement at the memory. “They’d say, `She’s playing?’ And we’d say, `Yeah, and you’re guarding her.’ “
How could they have known? All they saw was a small and slightly chunky girl with braids pulled back into a careless ponytail, slouching among a forest of boys, assessing them with the wide-set, impudent eyes of a tabby cat.
“The guys I grew up with, they knew what kind of player I was,” said Williams, 22, the 5-foot-6-inch DePaul University senior guard who is fourth in the NCAA in scoring (24.5 points a game) and fourth in steals (4.5).
“The new guys, they’d always get that look on their face, like, `This isn’t going to be a good game.’ And I’d think to myself, `He’s in for a surprise.’ “
Williams ignored the skeptics and became one of the rare schoolgirl players to bring the playground into the gym. Anyone who wanted to close the lid on her because of her gender or her size got a taste of her flying elbows. Her early combativeness stayed with her, and she has often chafed at the restrictions imposed by coaches.
In this, the last season for her to display her explosive gifts in her hometown, Williams is finally finding a way to manage her equally explosive temper. She has discerned that patience is not a sign of weakness and life is not necessarily best lived as a series of fast breaks.
Commentator Nancy Lieberman-Cline, herself a New York playground legend, said Williams’ hard-earned street wisdom deserves All-American recognition this year.
“Kim Williams doesn’t play it safe,” Lieberman-Cline said. “She’ll do things other players don’t even think about. I think more girls should learn to play one-on-one and two-on-two and three-on-three, like she did.”
Kim Williams also travels light. She has shorn her braids and shed her baby fat. Every trophy, plaque, watch and ring ever awarded to her, she has given away to family and friends, who describe her as sweet and loving away from the game.
She subscribes to the quick release. She slings passes along the baseline that sometimes threaten to decapitate her teammates. Her finger-rolls tip over the rim like water from a spout.
But Williams rarely celebrates on the court, where her startling chestnut-colored gaze is part of an impenetrable game-day mask. She simply expects her shots and passes to wing their way home.
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People tend to have distinct memories of the first time they saw Kim Williams. James Garland, a math teacher and basketball coach at Walter Reed Junior High School, had his epiphany as he walked by Kershaw early one morning.
“I saw a little girl shooting by herself, shooting with both hands, showing ambidexterity,” Garland said, his tone still awestruck more than 10 years later. “She was going to the hole with finesse.”
Driven doesn’t begin to describe this child. Once her older sister, Nataska, and brothers Ron and Lamont had hooked her on the game, Williams would slip out of the high-rise at 64th and Lowe with her hair uncombed and a crust of breakfast drying around her mouth and start her day to the steady thump of ball meeting concrete.
The family apartment overlooked the Kershaw playground, so her parents usually knew where Williams was. But Lillie Woodley was unaware that the game was anything more than a way for her youngest daughter to blow off steam.
“She wouldn’t pick fights, but she would stand her ground,” Woodley said. “In this type of environment, you can’t let other children know you’re afraid of them.”
Woodley always worked two jobs and made the spotless apartment where she and Willie Walls raised six children an oasis in a tough neighborhood. But even a fiercely close-knit family couldn’t shield Williams from the inevitable taunting. The other girls got on Kim because she had no use for dresses and doll babies. She liked motion and risk–taking flips off a pile of discarded mattresses, break dancing, playing football with pads and a helmet.
Her only childhood crush was reserved for the Bulls’ sensational new guard, whose game she strived to emulate. “When Michael got married, she wouldn’t watch the Bulls for two weeks–maybe a month,” Woodley said.
By the time Garland spotted the distaff baby Jordan, she was ready for organized ball. There was no girls team at Walter Reed, so he had her play with the boys.
“She had great peripheral vision, and court gumption,” Garland said. “She was tenacious and stocky and knew how to get position for rebounds. Kim jumped like a boy. Some of them didn’t like her, and they knocked her down. But that made her tough.”
Dorothy Gaters got her initial glimpse of Williams in a summer league. “She had just finished 7th grade,” said Gaters, the veteran coach at Marshall High School. “I saw her flip the ball behind her back out of a trap. Twelve years old.”
Williams would help Marshall win three state titles. Her flashy talent brought her national attention, and for a time, the men who would eventually produce “Hoop Dreams” put a camera crew on her. Some segments made their way into a half-hour pilot video.
During those years, she and Gaters forged a bond made of equal parts inspiration and exasperation. Gaters calls Williams the most dynamic player she has ever had, sensational in big games. Yet the coach can summon up with equal clarity a two-month period after one season where she was too angry to speak to her star.
“I enjoyed her,” Gaters said. “I was a fan. When I had to sit her down, I was disappointed. But she used to like to take me to the limit. She played hard and well when she wanted to, but she aggravated me so much by not hustling sometimes.
“The only thing that worked was taking the ball away from her. Whenever I did that, she immediately would become a good citizen. She had such a thirst to play.”
Williams refers to Gaters as a second mother.
“She is my biggest influence outside my family, my role model for discipline,” Williams said softly in the sitting room of her dormitory, a last ray of pale winter light illuminating her face. “She knows things about me that I don’t know about myself. I never disrespected her.
“I was testy. I’m not as testy as I used to be. It’s something I had to work on. This is something I have put so much time into, half my time on this earth, and I want to get something back. Playing the way anyone else wanted me to was something I had to learn.”
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Another first impression: Doug Bruno’s.
“I didn’t think we could co-exist,” DePaul’s coach said. “I thought I would be too structured for her, and I didn’t think she’d take to me shackling her.”
Bruno overcame his reservations in time to join the numerous Division I schools recruiting Williams, who let it be known that she favored DePaul. But their rendezvous would be delayed for two years.
Williams worked hard at her grades as a junior and senior in high school. However, she did poorly the first time she took a standardized test and stubbornly refused to repeat it. As her options dwindled, she elected to enroll at Westark Community College in Ft. Smith, Ark.
She battled homesickness at first, but the gamble paid off. Her team went to the national junior college finals that season and won the title the following year. More important, the distance gave her space to mature. Gaters and Woodley hint delicately that Williams had hometown running buddies they weren’t crazy about, and Williams now understands their concern.
“I was just starting to get myself on the right page,” she said. “If I’d stayed, there would have been so many distractions, I might have lost my focus.”
Not that her homecoming was any picnic. The first day of orientation at DePaul, Williams slipped out the back door rather than sit through a talk on the role of the student-athlete. Lectures? Limits? Not her thing. Bruno would discover that soon enough.
“It was a tough three months,” he said. “Kim didn’t trust me, and I didn’t know her well enough to interpret her signals. She likes to play. She doesn’t like to drill.”
Bruno tossed her from practice innumerable times when she balked at taking her turn in the layup line or waved him off dismissively. He suspended her for four early-season games because of incidents neither one will discuss. When she did play, she pressed too hard.
Things finally came to a head in December 1995, as the 2-5 Blue Demons geared up for a home game against powerful Tennessee. Bruno called Williams in and laid things on the line: Fit in or ship out. With some misgivings, he reinstated her. DePaul played well that night but lost.
Minutes after the final buzzer, Bruno’s wife, Patty, took him aside. She had horrific news. Earlier that day, Bruno’s emotionally troubled younger sister, Drotha, had committed suicide by jumping from her Near North Side high-rise. As word filtered back to the players, they gathered in the waiting area outside Bruno’s office.
“I’ll never forget the hug Kim gave me,” Bruno said, his eyes welling up. “She just said, `I’m sorry for you, coach.’
“After that, the behavior and the problems pretty much stopped. I mean, it wasn’t perfect, but she came to practice and worked and did what we asked her to do.”
It was like a first sliver of moon appearing in the sky, a singular moment in the gradual lunar shift that has taken place in their relationship. Williams says the tragedy showed her something: Even authority figures can suddenly find themselves stranded and vulnerable out there on the weak side.
“I thought I had to take it upon myself to show him he wasn’t alone, to show the good heart,” Williams said. “I looked at him not as a coach, but as a person.
“We tested one another. The things I went through last year, I don’t regret. I’ve learned and grown from that experience.”
Behind the play of Williams, All-American Latasha Byears and Conference USA all-league pick Tawona Alhaleem, DePaul closed out the season by winning 18 of its last 22 games. It lost to Iowa in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Down by a point with time running out, Bruno put the ball in Williams’ hands, but her shot rolled off the rim. She has had to wait a full year to redeem that result, and she is still not overly fond of waiting.
– – –
DePaul (17-6, 8-4) has had its tribulations this season. The starting point guard went down. The backup point guard went down. A heart defect ended a reserve forward’s career.
Williams has tried to reel in the slack. After taking only 16 three-point shots all of last season, she worked at improving her perimeter game and is shooting 38 percent (53 of 141) from long range.
On defense, she sometimes clings like lint and other times leaves the passing lanes open, darting in at the last second to steal the ball. She has played ashen-faced with flu and a painful toothache.
“When I saw her before the Memphis game, she was so sick and weak, I couldn’t believe she was out there,” Lieberman-Cline said. “If Kim Williams takes 10 shots or 40 shots, one thing you can be assured of is that she’s not playing for points. She’s playing to win. I admire that in her.
“The days of sitting around with cookies and milk, saying, `OK, this one’s got her shots and that one’s got her shots and everybody’s happy,’ are over. It’s OK to have a superstar in the women’s game. You give her her creativity but let her operate in your system.”
In the road rematch against Tennessee last month, with DePaul down 20 early in the second half, Williams took over. She shot 17 for 42, finishing with a career-high 41 points, with eight steals and four assists in a 94-83 loss.
“I’m very comfortable with her decision-making ability on the court,” Bruno said. “I’ll be doggoned if I’m going to turn her into a robot to make sure four other people are included. Everyone knows that when she has the ball, she’s free.”
Junior forward Mfon Udoka, who has been on the receiving end of many of Williams’ deft passes, says her teammates begrudge Williams nothing–not the moods, not the stats, not the spotlight.
“She’s a one-of-a-kind girl,” Udoka said. “She’s a winner, a champion who knows what it takes. This year, she’s taken on more of a leadership role.
“I’ve never seen somebody so quick. No one can guard her. She’s realized that she’s the only person who can stop herself.”
DePaul is host to the Conference USA tournament beginning Feb. 28. It will be Chicago’s last chance to watch Williams in the friendly confines of Alumni Hall. The new women’s pro leagues await.
If she could have, Kim Williams would have played with the boys straight on through. A lot of people who have watched her think she could have held her own.
Now, she is reaching down instead of stretching on tiptoe. She has taken on a pupil–her sister Sharon’s round-faced 6-year-old son, Denzel. Williams scoops him up periodically and absconds with him for a day or two. She shows him the white lines and the seams and the rims that were the first boundaries she ever respected.
“Kids tend to know more than what a lot of people might think,” Williams said.
She has all the time in the world for him.
