Now, It Looks as If LSU Was Right Choice

John Williams, pretty in purple, wears a small diamond earring in his left lobe. It goes nicely with his Laker-like Louisiana State basketball uniform, which he will be wearing this weekend at the NCAA Final Four in Dallas.

Williams and classmate Gregory Braggs got the idea when they were going to Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles. “Just about the whole team went out to get them,” Williams said of the earrings. “Everybody we knew was wearing them. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean we’re in a gang or anything.”

Cool John and the gang were more than just together. They could play. With Williams leading the way with his 28.7 points and 14.1 rebounds a game, Crenshaw took the city championship, which gave Williams his greatest thrill in basketball until last Saturday’s Southeast Regional success against Kentucky.

“I got that exact same tingle,” he said in the LSU locker room.

Williams, who stands 6-8 and weighs 237 pounds and plays point guard, swing forward and low-post center, sometimes simultaneously, reminds a lot of people of another current Los Angeles resident who has been known to play more than one position. Williams is built like Magic Johnson, shoots a little bit like him and looks a little bit like him, especially in those gold and purple threads.

He even shoots those little one-handed curls over taller people in the lane. He uses the backboard. He plays the whole court. “John Williams is a young Magic Johnson,” Georgia Tech Coach Bobby Cremins said the other day, and others have dished out compliments just as flattering.

Eddie Sutton of Kentucky, for example, recently said that Williams could be “the outstanding young player in college basketball.” Sutton was paying strict attention at the Southeastern Conference postseason tournament when Williams piled up 20 points and 20--yes, 20--rebounds against Florida, followed by 28 points and 10 rebounds against Kentucky.

“He not only can hurt you with his shooting, he’s a marvelous passer,” Sutton said. “I’m always thrilled because I think that is a lost art in college basketball today.”

Williams’ coach at LSU, Dale Brown, the mahatma of hyperbole, went so far as to say of his sophomore: “He reminds me of Baryshnikov or Nureyev. You see them jump across the stage and you say it doesn’t look hard. Try it sometime.”

No wonder, then, that college coaches were wondering how long Williams would stick around. Late in the season, despite Williams’ insistence that he intended to spend four years in Baton Rouge and shoot for the 1988 Olympics, LSU people feared and opponents hoped that Williams would impersonate Earvin Johnson again, leaving college after two seasons.

He still says he is staying.

There were some, of course, who thought Williams should not be welcome at Louisiana State at all. This was a prospect who was more than hot. Brown had to deal with many insinuations that he recruited Williams illegally, and since the finalists in this contest were LSU and Nevada Las Vegas, the NCAA naturally got interested. No two coaches have been at odds with that organization as Brown and Jerry Tarkanian have.

Williams has been happy with the Tigers and they have been happy with him, right from his college debut, when he in-your-faced Loyola of Chicago with 21 points, 11 rebounds and 8 assists. About the only trouble Brown ever had with Williams was trimming off some of the 260 pounds he was packing at the first day of practice.

The coach considers Williams “a legitimate point guard,” but was forced to move him around as LSU’s body count mounted, players being lost to illness and injury and academic underachievement. Williams himself was hospitalized for a week this season with chicken pox. “Man, that was terrible. There’s only so much TV you can watch,” Williams remembered.

Just before the regional opener against Purdue, a game LSU won in double overtime, Williams was ailing again. When he went to the university infirmary for intravenous nourishment, something he has done regularly since the pox came upon his house, the needle went into the wrong vein, tendinitis set in and Williams’ hand, by gametime, was swollen as a grapefruit.

He got 16 points.

Brown and others have become so accustomed to Williams’ reliable play that they were astonished at his 2 of 15 shooting in LSU’s regional game against Georgia Tech. Williams was just as astonished. “I spent a long night back at the hotel, thinking,” he said. “I told myself, ‘John, you’d better get out there against Kentucky and do something, man.’ ”

In the upset of a 32-3 Kentucky club that had beaten his team three times, Williams led all LSU scorers with 16 points. “All the stuff we went through this year, all the stuff that happened to me and everybody else, it doesn’t mean anything now,” Williams said later. “Nobody can say we didn’t earn what we got. We had to work double hard to get where we are.

“When I get back to L.A., everybody’s going to congratulate me now on going to LSU. They’re going to say, ‘Hey, you made the right choice, man.’ It doesn’t even matter if we win the national championship or don’t. We’re winners and nobody can say different.”