Talent Pool Not Dry in Desert : Arizona: Elliott is gone but Wildcats expected to go right on winning with addition of Brian Williams.

One of the newest restaurants here in the desert is Olson’s, which is on Broadway, next door to a bank. And if that’s not the perfect spot, cactus won’t grow in sand.

This is one eatery that is absolutely in the right neighborhood because it is owned by Arizona basketball Coach Lute Olson, whose gig is part slam dunk and part show-biz, featuring the very tall and soon-to-be quite rich.

Only a few months ago, 6-foot-8 Sean Elliott left Olson’s troupe as its lead player and joined the San Antonio Spurs, signing a contract that will pay him $9 million over five years. Even at Olson’s, where they serve Italian food (Olson’s?), patrons are pretty sure Elliott’s contract isn’t exactly chopped veal.

And now, stepping out from the shadow of the Catalina Mountains, comes a new featured performer, a 6-11, 235-pound scorer-rebounder-shot blocker named Brian Williams, here by way of Santa Monica Bay and Chesapeake Bay with a chance to accomplish the previously unthinkable among the Wildcat faithful.

Outshine Sean? That would be a big order, but then Williams seems to be that type of center.

“He has the skills to make the most impact as a center since Bill Walton in the (Pacific 10) conference,” USC Coach George Raveling said. “If he’s not the best center in the country, he would be pretty close. I’ll tell you, it would be a hell of a game between him and Georgetown’s Alonzo Mourning.”

UCLA Coach Jim Harrick, who called Williams “a tremendous talent,” came up with another comparison.

“He’s the second coming of David Robinson,” Harrick said, referring to the Spurs’ center. “Brian Williams has got the longest arms in America and he uses them to block shots, shoot, dunk, whatever he wants.”

Quick, agile, intense, very gifted, Williams is being counted on to continue Olson’s winning tradition and maintain Arizona’s position as a prime candidate for the Final Four.

That is the task facing the 20-year-old from Santa Monica’s St. Monica High School, who transferred after playing one tumultuous year of college ball at Maryland. But to shed a little light on how Williams thinks, it is hardly his only assignment.

For one thing, he has to study for his Italian class. A communications major last year, when he was ineligible to play after transferring, Williams is changing his field of study to history. He has also studied calculus, computer science, sociology and Greek mythology in the classroom, and human behavior outside it.

Ever since he decided to leave Maryland, Williams has become sadly wise in the ways of basketball while a stress fracture in his left foot healed.

“The thing about it, which I learned from that and I have learned here, your first and foremost loyalty is to yourself because no matter what, they see you as a win-loss column,” Williams said. “They see you, ‘You are here to help us. You can’t leave because of all the things that have been planned. You can’t go against that.’

“Well, it’s not about conforming,” he said. “You always have to act and react to a different stimulus. With my foot here, people have approached me, ‘How is your foot?’ It’s not, ‘Hey, Brian, how are you?’ And they just take off. That’s it. These are people on the street. These are fans.

“Some people say, ‘Hey, Brian, I hope your foot gets better, I hope it really goes great for you this year.’ And those are the people who are fans. They are supportive of what you do. But it’s surprising. A lot of people come up and hey, if your foot’s not good, man, you’re not falling in line with what’s planned. Hey, you can’t deviate from that. Well, it’s just not ‘Fall in line because that’s the way it’s always been.’ ”

On the court, Williams has always been at the front of the line and others fell in behind him. Son of Gene Williams of the Platters singing group, Williams was born on Easter Sunday in 1969 and weighed six pounds nine ounces. By his 13th birthday, Williams was 6 feet tall. He played his junior year at Bishop Gorman High School in Las Vegas, where he lived with his father and played alongside Matt Othick, now a teammate at Arizona.

Williams was a first-team All-American after his senior year at St. Monica in 1987, with scholarship offers from schools coast to coast. He finally narrowed them to Maryland and Temple before deciding on the Terrapins of the Atlantic Coast Conference, coached by newcomer Bob Wade.

Williams was an instant success as a freshman, blocking 36 shots in 29 games while averaging 12.5 points and six rebounds. He was named the ACC’s newcomer of the year and made the conference’s all-freshman first team. His school work also produced high marks. He earned a 3.0 grade-point average in what turned out to be his last semester at Maryland.

Despite Williams’ efforts, Maryland finished 18-13, was a first-round loser in the NCAA tournament and could overcome neither the specter of the cocaine-caused death of All-American Len Bias nor the subsequent messy dismissal of Coach Lefty Driesell. Wade, a former Baltimore high school coach, got low marks from his players. Williams became the sixth player in two years to leave Maryland.

If choosing Maryland had been a difficult decision, Williams found leaving it fairly easy.

“I think there wasn’t proper leadership from the top to some of the players,” he said. “It wasn’t nearly as close-knit as this team is, not nearly as focused as this. And the (Arizona) coaching staff is just much better prepared, much better organized.

“One, (Wade) had been in the league one year and didn’t have a very good track record,” he said. “I was saying, ‘Well, what fundamentals does he have that he’s going to build on, something that I can interact with?’ There was always a period of, ‘Well, when is this going to get better? When am I going to fit in more.’

“I was just getting involved in the collegiate life, so there was a transitional period, so you say, ‘In time, it will smooth out,’ ” he said. “Well, that time never came. I knew I had to make a decision. It was very difficult to be comfortable around the coaching staff and what direction they were taking. Of course, wanting to be a good player and wanting to keep improving and see your team do that, that was the problem I had.”

Soon, Wade had even greater problems besides players leaving. The NCAA began investigating his program and Wade, linked to the NCAA’s accusations of providing illegal transportation for a recruit, was forced to resign. Wade, who moved back to Baltimore, would not comment on Williams or the NCAA investigation.

Oklahoma City University Coach Abe Lemons, who knows Wade, said Wade was probably ignorant of the rules.

“What happens to guys that come out of high school and come out of places that’s not involved with the NCAA, they get caught on all them damned rules,” Lemons said. “You know, give a guy a Popsicle, hell, that’s 30 days in the electric chair right there. They get caught. People that’s not in there don’t know all the damned trivia that’s with a deal like that.”

In any event, Williams left, even though a petition signed by 200 Maryland students urged him to stay. Wade and Athletic Director Lew Perkins even visited Williams in Santa Monica to try to persuade him to stay. Faced with selecting a school again, Williams considered UCLA, Duke and Loyola Marymount along with Arizona before he settled on Olson’s program.

“Mentally, I knew I was going to a place where it would be drastically different, that it would be much easier to cope,” Williams said. “It was the program I was looking for, the players I’m looking to be with and the environment I want to be around.”

So far, Williams seems to be thriving in that environment. He’s taken up horseback riding, hunting, trap shooting and off-road motorcycling. He spins around campus on a navy blue 12-speed bike and after class, he often may be found checking out some art gallery.

Basketball and schoolwork take up a lot of time, but there always seems to be enough Brian Williams to go around. He donated his time for the Arthritis Foundation when someone bid $700 to play a round of golf with him. He judged a bikini contest during a school lacrosse tournament. He escorted entrants in a beauty pageant.

Olson says Williams may be the key for his team as it tries to match last season’s 29-4 record. With seven Arizona games on national television this year, Williams will be playing under intense scrutiny. Olson thinks Williams will hold up well.

“Brian Williams gives us a different factor than we’ve ever had inside,” Olson said. “Brian Williams is just an unbelievable athlete. He makes things happen. But he’ll need to make the good decisions and things like that, too. A year off doesn’t help you a lick in that way.

“Early last year in practice, Anthony Cook gave him a lesson daily, just killed him,” Olson said. “By the last month of the season, Brian Williams was the one doing the killing. Anthony could not handle him at all by the end of the year.”

Cook, last year’s starting center, was a first-round choice in the NBA draft.

Raveling said he is not surprised by Williams’ ability.

“The best thing about him is he can score without shooting, because with his blocked shots and rebounding, he helps other people score, too,” Raveling said.

College basketball television commentator Dick Vitale said Williams is the best center in the nation because of his shot blocking, his inside scoring, soft touch, quickness, speed and leaping ability. What else is there?

“He’s ready for a big, big year,” Vitale said, adding that Williams’ offense makes him slightly better than Mourning.

But Olson said jokingly that Williams believes his shooting is better than it actually is.

“He’s capable of shooting the ball well--he thinks from three-point range, I think from 17 feet, and I think I’ll win that one,” Olson said. “Brian can face up to the basket, but his strength is still down in the post because he’s so quick and he jumps so well and he’s so strong that he’s hard to stop when he gets the ball down there.”

The Wildcats’ expectations have grown as tall as Williams, even without 6-7 Chris Mills, who must sit out this year after transferring from Kentucky. Senior forward Jud Buechler and the all-Matt backcourt of guards Othick and Matt Muehlebach form a talented nucleus to go with Williams. But no one will feel the weight of expectations more than Williams, who seems unfazed, even though pressure is something from which he just can’t transfer away.

“Once you create high standards for yourself, what other people create for you is something removed from me,” he said.

So when Arizona opens Saturday night against defending champion Michigan in the Hall of Fame game in Springfield, Mass., Williams begins the creation of his standards as a basketball player with a new team. Barely out of his teens, Williams has already learned an important lesson about basketball as a business and how he may fit into it. Be your own person is what Williams has discovered.

He may contemplate the ramifications of his new-found knowledge as he shoots soft jumpers on the basketball court or pedals around campus on his 12-speed or conjugates Italian verbs in the classroom or sits atop one of those horses he likes to ride at a ranch just outside town.

“I have to do the things that I want to explore,” Williams told a reporter for the Tucson Weekly. “If not, then I’m dead, living a life like so many people out there. They wake up in the morning, they go to a 9-to-5 job, complain all day about being there and then don’t do anything about it.

“ ‘Just another day. It’s so repetitious, a rut . . . ‘ I do what I can. I do what I enjoy.”

* WEDNESDAY

A look at Loyola Marymount and Pepperdine, and the Waves’ Tom Lewis.