John Smith, one of the few people Williams could rely on when he was growing up, obliged, pulling up in his Nash Rambler station wagon in the spring of 1963.
“We drove in and looked around and thought, ‘This is okay,’ ” recalled Smith, now 79 and retired in Port St. Lucie, Fla. “Then we saw this side door to Cole Field House. Well, we walked in there and Gary saw all those yellow seats coming down, forming a big bowl. I remember it clear as day. He said, ‘This is the place for me.’ ”
You see, Gary Williams’s love affair with College Park didn’t begin when he accepted the toughest job in collegiate athletics in 1989, taking over his probation-scarred alma mater three years after Len Bias had died on campus. Nor did it start years later when he began beating Tobacco Road royalty.
It began because a coach cared about a kid who had drive but not enough direction. It began because John Smith took Gary Williams to the office his sophomore year of high school and made him take geometry and Latin for summer school, to “get rid of the D’s on his report card so he could go to college one day.”
Williams is fond of saying “in other words” when he wants to place emphasis on a point he is trying to make. But there is no “in other words” needed Wednesday night.
If Smith and his wife, Olive, hadn’t provided plates of spaghetti, transportation and, hell, stability at a critical juncture in his life, Williams wouldn’t have become the most important figure in Maryland’s athletic history and wouldn’t be having the basketball court named after him nearly 50 years after that first visit.
“In the back of my mind I think coaching became an option for me because of him,” Williams said Monday over breakfast at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda. “When you have someone like that in your life — a person who liked the game but really liked helping kids and getting them to where they wanted to go — it rubs off on you subconsciously. That’s one of the reasons I became a coach.”
On the night he celebrates a Hall of Fame career with family and friends, including Coach K, it bears repeating what Williams was faced with when he left a good job at Ohio State to take over the Terrapins. The basketball program was still reeling from the tragic death of Bias, and then was slapped with sanctions for recruiting violations — penalties that kept Maryland off TV and out of the NCAA tournament for two years, and cost the basketball program three scholarships.
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