If you can imagine it, Frank Williams has probably done it on the basketball court. Eye-popping behind-the-back passes in transition. Cooler-than-cool between-the-leg dribbles. Did-you-see-that alley-oop passes to Marcus Griffin for monster dunks.
Anyone who has seen Illinois’ 6-foot-3-inch redshirt freshman point guard play the game knows that for the seventh of Mary Williams’ 10 children, basketball is like seventh heaven, his ultimate from of expression.
Underneath the showman, though, lies a sensitive soul.
“He’s like I was–on the quiet side till he gets to know a person,” Mary Williams said. “But he’s coming on. I could see things were bothering him earlier in the season because he wasn’t used to all that. I told him to pray about it.”
His prayers answered, Williams can smile about it now.
Now that Dick Vitale isn’t critiquing Williams’ every move on national TV. Now that he and coach Lon Kruger are on the same page (“Coach’s page,” Williams conceded with a smile). Now that his zero-assist/six-turnover games against Bradley and Michigan and his 4-for-17 shooting day against Duke and his two-game exit from the starting lineup and his what-was-he-thinking-trying-to-dribble-through-a double-team days are less frequent.
Williams felt the weight of the world on his shoulders in the season’s first two months. “I didn’t know what to expect and I didn’t know what it took to get the job done,” he said. “It was like someone was killing you and you can’t get away from it. That’s how I saw it. But now I know everyone wants me to do well. So I come in, practice hard, and when I go out and respond well, everyone’s happy and I feel good too.”
It turns out Williams had the answer to his struggles all along. It just took a while to relocate it. Williams never lost his way; he just lost his bearings. What he forgot was that he didn’t have to do it all–and certainly not all at once. What he forgot was a lesson he learned growing up in one of the poorest sections of Peoria.
After her divorce nine years ago, life tested Mary Williams as never before. But she dug in, refusing to let her family fall apart the way her marriage had. She started working the overnight shift in the admitting department at St. Francis Hospital (10:30 p.m.-7 a.m.) to put food on the table. And she laid down the law on the homefront.
“Man, they had a lot of kids,” said Griffin, Williams’ teammate at Peoria Manual, “but she always let Frank know she was there for him. Frank, Sergio [McClain] and I all call her mom. It’s hard to put into words all she has done for him. She kept him out of trouble, I know that. When you grow up in the neighborhood we did, you have to have your family or you have nobody.”
Growing up in a large family wasn’t hard, Williams said, because he always knew where he fit. He was near the bottom, behind basketball-playing brothers Richard (deceased), Vernon, 31, Ron, 30 and Courtney, 28, and basketball-playing sisters Melanie, 27 and Marlena, 21 (now at Missouri). He’s ahead of basketball playing-brothers Earnest, 18, Maurice, 17, and Aaron, 15. If the Boys and Girls Club, where Mary worked for 13 years as a secretary, was where the Williams kids learned to pass the ball, home was where they learned never to pass the buck.
“In our house you definitely weren’t spoiled,” Williams said. “Everything we had we shared with one another, even the chores. Sometimes you had to do the dishes, some days you had to mop the floor. We had a chart. Otherwise you wouldn’t know whose turn it was.”
That’s called sharing the load–and lately Williams is showing he can do that pretty well. When it comes to making his teammates better, he has come a long way since his 3-point, 6-turnover, 15-minute effort in an overtime loss Jan. 16 at Michigan. The loss dropped the Illini to 1-3 in the Big Ten and caused a frustrated Kruger to challenge the former Peoria Manual star to get with the program.
“The bottom line is Frank’s got to play for us,” Kruger said pointedly. “Frank has got to come in with the mind-set of a point guard and set the tone for the whole group.”
Heading into Friday’s NCAA tournament opener against Penn, Williams has been neither the savior some predicted nor the overrated recruit some feared he’d become. He’s improving, but still as capable of exasperating moves as awe-inspiring ones. Since returning to the starting lineup, Williams has averaged 11.1 points, 4.3 assists, 3.9 rebounds and 2.3 turnovers in 14 games.
“If you look at the stats, he’s becoming very consistent,” assistant coach Rob Judson said. “At Ohio State, against tremendous defensive pressure, he played 37 minutes without a turnover. He has made a lot of progress in his defensive intensity and he’s becoming more aware with his decision-making.”
Williams’ critics seem to forget he sat out last season as a partial academic qualifier. “Yes, he was able to practice,” Judson said, “but that’s not the same as playing defense at Wisconsin or running the offense at Ohio State.”
Peoria Manual coach Wayne McClain says Williams has had a good season, considering.
“How many other freshmen could come in and do what he has done?” he said. “People have to understand, Frank is directing a pretty good team and he’s only a freshman. That’s not easy in the Big Ten.
“Last year every one was singing the song about how Illinois lacked a point guard, and him being the player he was–Mr. Basketball and an All-American–I think early on he maybe tried to do too many things. There isn’t anything Frank thinks he can’t do, and his imagination gets him in trouble sometimes.”
But he’s learning, on and off the court. Earlier in the season Williams found himself staying up till 3 or 4 a.m. to finish papers. “I still have some of those papers,” he said, “but I’ve learned to start earlier.”
Kruger says he’s happy with Williams’ progress, but he never wants him to assume he has arrived. “Frank has made unbelievable strides,” he said, “but he’s also the first one to say he still has a lot of work to do. We’d like him to be farther along, but he’s getting a better feel all the time for directing the club.”
Williams appreciates Kruger’s input.
“He’s like my coach-slash-friend–he can yell, but you know it’s for your own good,” he said. “When I take a bad shot or make a bad pass now I realize it right away. The main thing he’s trying to get across is to learn from my mistakes. If I practice hard, it’ll come.
“When I go home now I meet guys who say `You remember that move you did in high school where you took it between your legs?’ That just makes me want to strive harder to do things guys will be talking about for years to come.”
