Williams Worth a Second Look

By DIANE PUCIN

March 24, 2001 12 AM PT

Gary Williams always seems so tortured. He sweats through his suits, he whacks his temples with his hands, he yells at everyone around him during a basketball game. He can’t help it. Williams doesn’t want to be one of those coaches who have ulcers or migraine headaches. He needs to let it all out.

“I remember my first year at Maryland,” forward Byron Mouton says, “I wasn’t even playing. I was wearing street clothes. And Coach Williams was yelling at me on the bench. He got right in my face. And I’m wearing loafers. I was real surprised.”

But this picture of Williams we have, of this spring-loaded weapon of a coach who cuts through the noise of a college basketball game by screaming while teaching, by hollering while nurturing, makes us underestimate him sometimes.

Because there is another Gary Williams.

After Maryland choked up what could have been a season-making victory by blowing a 10-point lead against No. 1 Duke in the last 54 seconds of regulation, then losing in overtime, at home, when the partisan fans were yelling “Enjoy the NIT,” when Williams should have been at his livid, bombastic best, he became as calm as the school librarian.

“Coach came in real quiet,” Maryland guard Juan Dixon says, “and talked to us for, like, half an hour. He told us these things happen and that we were still a good basketball team and that it would be up to us to prove that. We were a little surprised. But what Coach did was a good thing.”

Williams may have saved a season by talking to his players during a two-week, post-Duke slump. By just talking. Not yelling or chastising or denigrating. Just talking.

And now Maryland is here to play Stanford today in the NCAA West Regional final at the Arrowhead Pond. For the winner, there will be a trip to the Final Four. Stanford Coach Mike Montgomery has taken a team to the Final Four. Montgomery is rightly given credit for building a classy, nationally admired program at a school where men’s basketball hadn’t mattered for a long time.

Williams seems to get much less credit for fixing a program that was close to destruction.

When Williams, a Maryland grad, arrived in College Park in 1989, the Terrapins were a mess. After Len Bias, one of Maryland’s greatest players, died of a cocaine overdose a day after he was the No. 2 pick in the NBA draft, the crumbling began. Coach Lefty Driesell contentiously departed, fighting until the end while tidbits trickled out about the sorry state of academics.

Driesell’s replacement was Baltimore high school coaching legend Bob Wade. Wade couldn’t win (he was 7-35 in the Atlantic Coast Conference in his three-year tenure) and his recruiting practices attracted the NCAA’s attention.

Wade was forced to resign in 1989. Williams took the job. NCAA sanctions came next.

There was the loss of two scholarships, a two-year ban on televised games and a two-year NCAA tournament ban. In this age of immediacy, when high school games are televised, when it seems the sum total of youngsters’ basketball history is who played last Monday’s ESPN game, Maryland could have disappeared from the basketball world.

The Terrapins didn’t.

Because of Williams.

Williams will give all the credit to Walt Williams, a talented sophomore who could have transferred with no waiting period to another team. Walt Williams stayed though. He kept the team from being horrible, gave it a chance to be mediocre.

What Gary Williams promised Walt and Walt’s parents was that the skinny, 6-foot-8 forward would be allowed to play point guard, to develop a game more suited to the position he might play as a pro, and that he would graduate. Walt stayed, graduated and became a top-10 draft pick who is still in the NBA.

And Gary Williams decided that while the Terrapins were on probation, while he was playing with walk-ons and non-scholarship kids in the ACC against Duke and North Carolina and Wake Forest--those places filled with future pros--he would make the game fun.

“We ran, we pressed, we played 94 feet all the time,” Williams said. “We might get our butts beat, but it would be high scoring. The students loved it, the players loved it. We might not have been on TV, but at least people locally talked about us and because Walt stayed, we still got publicity. We didn’t fall off the radar screen.

“By Walt staying, we were able to recruit players like Exree Hipp, Johnny Rhodes and Duane Simpkins. They were good. And because Hipp and Rhodes and Simpkins made Maryland better, Joe Smith and Keith Booth and Steve Francis came along.”

In 1994, 1995, 1998 and 1999 Williams led Maryland to the Sweet 16. Twice, Williams brought Boston College to the Sweet 16 and had coaxed a moribund Ohio State program back to the NCAA tournament.

For those efforts Williams had earned the tag of underachiever, of being unable to win the “big one.”

Williams has wondered how it is we define success.

How many coaches have brought seven consecutive teams to the NCAA tournament? The answer is seven. How many have reached the Sweet 16 in five of the last eight years? The answer is six. How many coaches are on both lists? Four. Williams, Kentucky’s Tubby Smith, Arizona’s Lute Olson and Kansas’ Roy Williams.

Not Mike Krzyzewski at Duke or Montgomery or John Chaney or Rick Majerus, who all are considered excellent college coaches. Rick Pitino never did that well and we all know that Pitino is a genius.

Gary Williams? He doesn’t belong, does he?

Williams would like us to define our terms when we label coaches great or disappointing. Has he accomplished what Krzyzewski has? No. He will admit that. “We have not won those single, big games that everyone will remember.”

Is he a coach whose teams are always right there, always where they belong, in the top 10, the top 20, mostly playing during the second week of the NCAA tournament?

Yes. Is that good coaching? “What do you think?” Williams says. He is not being sarcastic. He is being curious.

If the Terrapins, seeded third in the West Regional, lose to top-seeded Stanford, then Williams probably will be labeled again. He will be the good coach who can’t become great because he can’t make it to the Final Four.

But that’s OK. It really is. Williams looks you in the eye and says so and you believe him. He is proud of what has become of Maryland. It could have been nothing. It is a contender. Every year.

Great work? Define your terms. Be the judge.

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.

Gary Williams in the Tournament

Maryland Coach Gary Williams has a 16-10 record in the NCAA tournament. His tournament history by school:

BOSTON COLLEGE

* 1983: bye in first round; beat Princeton, 51-42; lost to Virginia, 95-92.

* 1985: beat Texas Tech, 55-53; beat Duke, 74-73; lost to Memphis, 59-57.

OHIO STATE

* 1987: beat Kentucky, 91-77; lost to Georgetown, 82-79.

MARYLAND

* 1994: beat Saint Louis, 74-66; beat Massachusetts, 95-87; lost to Michigan, 78-71.

* 1995: beat Gonzaga, 87-63; beat Texas, 82-68; lost to Connecticut, 99-89.