Williams Case Shows Care Must be Taken Before Shooting at N.C. State

ALAMEDA, Calif. —  This is the easy time to be mean. Go ahead. Call for rolling heads and sweeping indictments and houses scrubbed squeaky clean. Who will question it? Things have gone too far, yes? Of course they must fire Jim Valvano. Of course they must tidy up that mess at North Carolina State. Of course, it is a perfect example of all that is wrong with college athletics.

So what do we do? Time to get hard, yes? Time to crack down. The media swarm must circle. Charles Shackleford. Vinny Del Negro. Coach V. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Get their names on the air. Stain their reputations before anyone really knows what’s going on. Bring their heads on a plate. Easy time to be mean.

This isn’t new. This isn’t something we haven’t seen before. This doesn’t move us forward at all. Gamblers and dropped passes and cash and maybe even that acrid stink of drugs--this just pushes us back again. For some old-timers, it shoves them all the way to 1962, when a national point-shaving scandal rocked the nation. For others, though, the mind slips a few cogs back to 1985, when a school self-destructed and everyone cracked down and an innocent man named “Hot Rod” saw his life going to ashes.

In late March of that year, police in New Orleans began arresting suspects. Eight Tulane University basketball players were indicted in a point-shaving scandal involving three games. Forward John Williams alone faced three counts of conspiring to fix games and two counts of sports bribery--charges that, if proved true, could carry a maximum penalty of 17 years in prison and a $35,000 fine. A second indictment charged a Tulane student with selling cocaine to members of the team.

A month later, things got even worse. Sports Illustrated reported that Williams and other players received payments from alumni boosters. On the stand, Williams revealed that he had received, as a high school senior, a shoe box filled with $10,000 cash from a Tulane recruiter. The head coach, Ned Fowler, was found to have been making weekly cash payments to his players.

The year after wasn’t very good for everyone involved. Along with Fowler, more than five dozen people in the athletic department and its support staff either resigned or found themselves fired or reassigned. The basketball program was disbanded. Williams, considered a sure Top-Twenty pick in the NBA draft--and the benefit of the millions that would go to such a talent--suddenly had no takers. The Cleveland Cavaliers gambled and took him in the second round, but few believed he would ever play an NBA minute.

Five years have passed since all that. You’d think John “Hot Rod” Williams, now a productive member of the Cavaliers, would have put it behind him by now. But when asked what he thought about the developments at N.C. State after a practice Wednesday at the College of Alameda, Williams’ first reaction was a strong denial of having any involvement. He hasn’t, obviously, been accused of any such thing. The scars haven’t faded.

“You can’t believe everything you hear, so it was no big deal to me,” he said. “Whatever happens in that situation, it’s not me, there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s something I don’t really think I can tell you about. My lawyer probably knows more than I do.”

Williams never played his rookie year in the NBA. His first day in court, in August of 1985, ended in a mistrial because of prosecutorial misconduct. The Cavs paid his legal expenses, but the NBA forced them to withdraw his contract because his name still hadn’t been cleared. He made $15,000 playing summer ball for the Rhode Island Gulls of the U.S. Basketball League. He never allowed himself to get depressed, he said.

“Why should something get you down when you know you haven’t done anything at all?” he said. “Only losers have a reason to complain. I knew I wasn’t a loser. I knew I was always a winner, so I always kept my head up.”

But it was a long year, regardless, the longest of his life. He went to the Cavs’ home games, watched from the stands as the men who should have been his teammates played the game he should have been playing. People would point at him, and whisper, and wonder. On June 18, 1986, the wondering ended. A six-man jury unanimously found Williams, the only Tulane player ever brought to trial, innocent of all five charges.

Sure, he’s heard all about N.C. State in the past week. Point-shaving and gambling and payoffs. (begin italics) You can’t believe everything you hear. (end italics)

“That happened five years ago, and it’s really something that I put behind me and said I would never look back,” said Williams. “If I look back, it’ll probably be in my book someday. But through the whole situation, John Williams never said a word. I didn’t even have to say a word in the courthouse when everybody else told their story. People never heard my side of the story.

“It’s just something that’s happened, and now with that guy at State? It’s just a situation that’s hard to explain. It’s just something you go through. And I think that guy has the same thing. He’s just got to get him his date in the courthouse.”

Williams said he tries not to think much about his ordeal, but he admits it was difficult at times to avoid despair. “In ways it was, but really, I’ve put all that behind me. It don’t even bother me, everything’s going good for me. I thank the good Lord, you know?”

Scandal at N.C. State.

Easy time to be mean.

Easy time for everyone, it seems, but John Williams, Class of ’85.