Williams: the Hoyas’ Man of All Positions

It was getting closer to the official start of basketball practice, and Reggie Williams was growing anxious. He was going to be Georgetown’s only returning senior, and all his running buddies from previous years were gone.

Ralph Dalton, David Wingate, Michael Jackson and Horace Broadnax had graduated last spring, and Williams was wondering who was going to take their places.

Hoyas Coach John Thompson already had the answer to that question. Williams would take their places.

All of them.

That doesn’t mean Georgetown doesn’t have other good players. In fact, the nine new Hoyas form the nucleus of what probably will be a great team by the end of next season.

But a month into this season, when asked what he expects of his only senior, his 6-foot 7-inch, 190-pound all-America guard-forward-sometimes center, Thompson will say: “Right now, we’re going to need Reggie to be our leading scorer, leading rebounder, and maybe the leader in assists and steals. He’s got to play for himself and for other people, too.”

Williams, the only player remaining from Georgetown’s 1984 NCAA title team, says he doesn’t mind doing more than his share. “At first it was strange to look around and not see anybody older than me,” he said. “It was great playing with them, but I’m not backing away from the challenge of playing without them, either.”

Many times, players have great junior seasons but falter the next year when expectations and pressures grow. Georgetown has played only 13 games this season, but there is no reason to think Williams, the once-terribly shy youngster who grew up in Baltimore, will finish it with anything but first-team all-America by his name.

Jan. 10, his four three-point field goals helped beat 14th-ranked Pittsburgh and, before that, he had 16 points and 9 rebounds in helping upset then-No. 10 St. John’s. On Monday night, he had 20 points in Philadelphia to lead a victory over Villanova.

His 23.2 points-a-game average leads the Big East, which named him player of the week for last week, and for the second straight season he is leading his team in rebounding with nine a game.

One NBA scout watching Williams closely at Capital Centre was asked to compare him with Northeastern’s Reggie Lewis and UCLA’s Reggie Miller. “He’s a lot better than one, and better than the other,” the scout said. “Other than (Navy’s) David Robinson, I think he’s the best player in the country.”

A graph of his development over the last four years would bear a diagonal line upward, athletically and socially. Only his appearance has remained virtually the same.

When the nation’s basketball fans got their first real look at him, he was getting 19 points and 7 rebounds in Georgetown’s national championship game victory over Houston.

It should have been a night only of joy for Williams, who had never been away from home for that long in his life. But there was an incident after the game that diminished the triumph.

In a live postgame interview on CBS, Williams stumbled through a couple of words, froze and couldn’t get out another syllable. Thompson said this week that Georgetown got quite a few nasty letters soon after.

Undoubtedly, some of them disparaged Williams. Probably, others criticized Thompson, reasoning that, if he had allowed his players to talk with the media throughout the season, Williams wouldn’t have been speechless.

It bothered Williams for much of the summer. “I was just so excited at that moment, I knew I needed to calm down,” he said. “I knew there were people around the nation sitting in front of their TVs saying, ‘Look at this, another typical basketball player. . . . ‘ “

What the people sitting at home didn’t know was that Williams wasn’t far removed from the days when he was so shy, his older sister Veronica recalled, “that Reggie would sometimes take his meals to his room if there were people in the house that he didn’t know.

“You couldn’t get him to say a word when he was younger,” she said. “He would stay mostly to himself. But lately, I’d say in the last year or so, he runs his mouth all the time. I’m not around him enough now to know why, but he’s Mr. Talk now. He’s a lot different.”

As it turns out, his personality has caught up with his game. From the time he and childhood buddy Tyrone (Mugsy) Bogues dropped baseball and wrestling for basketball, it was obvious that Williams had talent.

“Even when I first saw him in junior high, he was 6-3 and handled the ball a lot,” former Dunbar coach Bob Wade said. “There was a softness in his shot and he ran the court, caught the ball well and was very graceful.”

There was one thing Williams wanted to change about himself--his build.

“You know how when you’re really young, your friends tease you and they can get you to do anything,” Williams said.

“So I got some weights and started lifting. It lasted about two days. I was sore all over. I said, ‘Forget this, I’ll just stay the way I am.’ ”

His desire to gain weight became a source of some laughter within the family (he is the third of five children). Veronica, the only sister, remembered: “He was in the mirror every day trying to see if he gained a pound. I would say, ‘Reggie, why are you in that mirror so much? You’re still going to be skinny.’ ”

He insists he never tried to take any of those quickie weight-gain concoctions, but Veronica remembers it differently. “Yes, he did,” she said.

“Reggie came to me one day with some chocolate drink that was supposed to put weight on. He said, ‘Hey, girl, taste this stuff for me.’ And I told him, ‘Reggie, get that stuff out of here. It’s not going to help anyway. . . . ‘ “

Williams had not grown much when he selected Georgetown over 200 other schools, including Louisville and Georgia Tech. Wade, in a congratulatory conversation with Thompson, said: “John, you still don’t know what you’re getting yet, but you’ll find out.”

Williams averaged 9 points his freshman season and 11.9 as a sophomore. Then last season, after all-American center Patrick Ewing had graduated, he averaged a team-high 17.6 points on 53% shooting and led the Hoyas in rebounding.

He may wind up as one of the best three-point shooters in the nation, can post-up on the base line as well as anyone, and has developed a deft touch on a hook shot when Thompson puts him underneath to play against the monsters. Few players his size are quick enough to guard him, and he shoots over shorter players as if they aren’t there.

Everybody in the nation, especially in the Big East, knows what Georgetown has. Already this season, Williams has played all five positions in one game.

“I have absolutely no problem saying that, if I had a pick (of any non-center in the nation), I’d pick Reggie and put him at forward,” Seton Hall Coach P.J. Carlesimo said recently.

“Of all the things he can do, I really hate to see him in transition, when Georgetown comes down flying and they give it to him on the wing. When Reggie Williams is in the open floor, something bad’s going to happen to the other team. You’ve got no shot at defending him. Most players, you know what they’re going to do--one thing, one move. Some players can do two things. But Reggie is one of the few who can do all three--shoot the J, take it inside or deliver it to somebody else.”

Gary Williams, the Ohio State coach who saw all he wanted of Reggie Williams in three years at Boston College, said he has noticed a big improvement in one facet of his game since last season. “I’m sure his release is quicker,” the coach said. “The ball is gone before you can react. It’s so quick it’s like an open shot.”

The range of his jump shot means a defender has to play him tightly, which means Williams then holds the advantage because he can dribble around most anybody in the college game. Gary Williams says Reggie Williams solves the zones as quickly as anyone, “and you’re really caught trying to play Georgetown man for man.”

Of all the compliments paid to Williams in the last year, the highest may have come two weeks ago from Grambling Coach Bob Hopkins, who spent several years as an assistant and head coach with the Seattle SuperSonics.

After Williams’ 30-point, 17-rebound, 6-assist performance, Hopkins came into an interview room holding the box score and said, “You see those numbers and you expect the name Magic Johnson by them.”

It would be difficult for Thompson, an extremely hard man to please, to be happier about Williams’ play and leadership. “I don’t even discuss Reggie that much anymore,” Thompson said. “Reggie’s a given. I take what he does for granted. All he has done here is everything we ask.”

Williams said he has been delighted by the way his life at Georgetown has turned out. He has played with a great player, Ewing, and on a national championship team. And he plans to graduate on schedule with a degree in sociology.

“I struggled when I first got here, but I started to like school, I think, by my sophomore year,” he said. “It was the best thing I could have done to come to Georgetown. Mugsy (now at Wake Forest), and I always said we wanted to make sure we stayed in school and were productive in life. We didn’t know exactly what we were going to do, but we wanted to do something good.