DOUG WILLIAMS : Super Bowl XXII Hero Enjoying View From Top

Somehow, Doug Williams thinks he got what he deserved all along.

“I’m a firm believer that if it’s for you, you’re going to get it,” he said. “I think everything that has happened to me is because it was for me and I worked hard to get it. Ten years of being patient about a lot of things, I think it’s finally paid off.”

Williams, the starting quarterback of the Washington Redskins, put a decade of professional frustrations and personal trauma behind him in one brilliant January afternoon in San Diego, leading his team to an emphatic victory in Super Bowl XXII.

Now, no longer in involuntary exile from pro football just two years ago, he is comfortable with his role of superstar.

“I think this is the best time of my career and my life,” Williams said. “Ten years ago, I was wondering how long I was going to play this game. Now, I’m at a point where no matter what happens, I’m going to be happy. Whether I play another down or not, I’m going to be all right.”

Williams, 33, enters this season in an unfamilar position. He has not begun a season as a starting NFL quarterback since 1982, when he was the main man for the woeful Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Williams last year won the starting job from the supremely talented but equally erratic Jay Schroeder after the final week of the regular season. He went on to become the Most Valuable Player in the most important football game of the year.

The Redskins rewarded him with a new three-year contract worth a reported $3.5 million that made him the highest paid player in team history. The defending champions are in his hands.

“I feel like I’m the leader of this team, at this point,” Williams said. “I think they look to me.”

Williams is revered in the nation’s capital. He is a role model for millions of youngsters and something of a father figure for a few of the Redskins.

After the Super Bowl, however, he didn’t find people knocking down his door with endorsement contracts they way they did for previous Super Bowl stars Jim McMahon and Phil Simms. Williams did a television advertisement for Disney World while walking off the field at Jack Murphy Stadium moments after the 42-10 Super Bowl victory over the Denver Broncos. Since then, the offers have been few.

“A lot of people in corporate America probable feel like a lot of black athletes are not saleable,” Williams said. “I’ve heard that before. But I think the people in corporate America have a right to spend their dollars any way they want to.”

Williams says being black does not entirely for his few endorsements. He admits he is not as outrageous as other NFL players who have done well with television, such as McMahon or Brian Bosworth.

“I don’t wear the dark, dark sunglasses and say a lot of things,” he said. “If that’s what it takes to sell, I guess Doug Williams won’t sell because I’m going to be me. They have to take me for what I am. If they want that, they won’t have me at all.”

Williams’ succest season was all the more special considering what he has gone through.

He was the first-round draft choice of Tampa Bay in 1978 out of Grambling, going to the Buccaneers on the urging of a young assistant coach named Joe Gibbs. He d five years at Tampa Bay, leading a poor team to the playoffs three times, reaching the NFC title game in 1979. Along the way, Tampa Bay’s weak blocking led to bad beatings. He has five knee operations to show for it.

In 1982, his wife Janicd shortly after undergoing emergency brain surgery, leaving Williams distraught. After the 1982 season, when the five-year contract he signed as a rookie expired, team owner Hugh Culverhouse refused to pay Williams the $600,000 annual salary he so The dispute assumed racial overtones and Williams refused to accept the team’s offer.

He sat out the entire 1983 season and resurfaced in the U.S. Football League for 1984 and 1985. After the renegade league buckled in 1986, Williamepted a coaching job at Southern University, resigned to the likely end of his football career. The Redskins, with old friend Gibbs as coach, were the only team to call. Williams was off the scrap heap and on one of the NFL’s elite.

Williams remains bitter about his experience in Tampa, but he found it unnecessary to gloat after the Super Bowl.

“I’m sure (Culverhouse) was at the Super Bowl,” Williams said. “He has good eyes. I don’t have to say it.”

Perhaps because of all he has endured, Williams has earned the unwavering respect of his teammates.

“I think some of the guys respect me because a lot of them know where I’ve been and what I’ve been through,” he said. “And to get this far, I think to them it’s something of an achievement. I’m sure they want to do the same thing, but maybe not go the same route that I do.”

Some of the young Redskins players were in grade school when Williams was in Tampa.

“I don’t think it’s so much a father figure as much as somebody to look up to and realize, ‘You can make it if you try.’ That’s what it’s all about,” Williams said.

Williams, with one of the strongest arms ever in the NFL, has played nine seasons and passed for 20,561 yards. The knock on Williams was suspect performances in big games. But he obliterated that notion in Super Bowl XXII, when he set records for passing yardage and passing touchdowns while engineering the remarkable 35-point second quarter.

Williams has handled the preseason publicity avalanche with patience.

“I find it hard when I see guys (teammates) who walk by and don’t sign autographs,” Williams said. “There are some people who would give their left arm to be in their position. Some rookie, as a matter of fact, was going through the back door one day (to avoid autographs) and I say, ‘What are you going through the back door for? There’s going to be a day when nobody wants you’re autopgraph.’ That’s why I try to never avoid a kid. I could never just walk through kids and not sign an autograph.”

This spring he created the Doug Williams Foundation, which annually awards $1,000 college scholarships to 10 students in Washington and its suburbs.

Perhaps the best thing that happened to Williams with the Redskins was the team’s decision to not honor his request for a trade last summer. At that time it appeared he would spend the rest of his career behind Schroeder, the 1986 Pro Bowl selection. Now Schroeder is demanding a trade.

“I ain’t sympathetic,” Williams said. “Hell, no. Why should I be? I know how it feels. I wanted to play, too. Sometimes it builds character (to sit). Sometimes it has to happen to some people. Who knows, if he gets an opportunity again, he might be the best quarterback who ever played the game.”

The biggest regret Williams has is that he, like former New Orleans quarterback Archie Manning, had to withstand hard times with a bad team while others flourished with good teams.

“I envy young guys who come in right away and play with good football teams,” Williams said. “When I look at a Bernie Kosar or a John Elway or a Jim Everett or a Dan Marino, they didn’t have to go through the process of trying to make something out of a football team. I was thrown in right from the start -- ‘You’re Moses.’ Or, ‘Walk on water.”’

Williams said he is planning a book and has talked to “Roots” author Alex Haley about the project.

“I’m not going to talk about people I knew who used cocaine,” Williams said. I don’t think I should do that. I feel like if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it with somebody who understands the way I grew up. I just don’t want to do a sports book. I want to do it and do it right.”