LITTLE ROCK — Corliss Williamson stands at the top of the key inside the University of Central Arkansas’ student gymnasium in Conway, a basketball poised like an idea bubble above his head. This is a set that drives true point guards batty - the biggest, most dominant player on the team is the farthest away from the net, getting ready to ... pass?
Cut Big Nasty a break. The man’s in transition. Three seasons ago, he was lacing up his size-18 Nikes to butt heads with the likes of National Basketball Association bruisers Zach Randolph and Carlos Boozer. In his 12th season in the NBA, the former high school Gatorade National Player of the Year had become a bench player who saw limited action, but he was still playing.
“I hate watching basketball because I love to play it,” he said back in 1995, when his professional career was getting started, not winding down.
Today, the 6-foot-7-inch young man - he’s still a young man, just 36 - is sidelined. His life is in limbo: three years removed from his playing days, three months since being named head basketball coach of a Division I school - three years before a triumphal return to the NCAA Tournament.
You heard it here first. Williamson predicts that the Bears, last season’s 9-21 last-place finishers in the Southland Conference, will go to the Big Dance within three years.
“It would be a hell of a leap for us to be there in three years, but I didn’t make it this far in life by setting low goals,” he says. “If I set them on just being competitive in the conference, if that’s the goal, that’s the attitude my players would have.”
Instead, “I expect them, and I expect our program, to make it to the NCAA Tournament.”
Williamson literally wears his credentials. His royal purple practice jersey might appear stock issue on the UCA campus if not for the “S/K” monogram - that’s Sacramento Kings. His tube socks bear the NBA logo. Off the court, on a recruitment trip, let’s say, he could don his NBA championship ring.
That’s something his old college coach, Nolan Richardson, couldn’t have done when he began recruiting Williamson (in eighth grade) for a University of Arkansas career that was capped by a six-game tear through the NCAA Tournament in 1994, the basketball Razorbacks’ only championship.
“He’s been on the biggest levels,” Richardson says. “He can go into a kid’s house .... See, everyone wants to play in the NBA. Here’s a man who’s played in the NBA. Not only did he play, but he knows people. They think, ‘Maybe he can get me there.’”
Williamson wheels tightly around a high screen and arcs a shot at the basket. The effort is minimal, the way Baryshnikov caught air.
This is the regular lunchtime game at the university in Conway. Everyone on the court is an athlete, from UCA three-sport player Quad Sanders to former Division I basketball player Jesse Flack. At 6-foot-6, Flack is matched up against Big Nasty.
Williamson, though, looks different from the others. It’s in the swivel of his shoulders, the way the ball goes to sleep in his hands.
WHAT THE CAMERA MISSES
You’ve seen him - there are nearly 12,000 images of Corliss Williamson online - but here are a few features the camera misses. The sheer mass of his legs draws stares. Like tree trunks, their girth appears to be the product of seasonal layering, each concentric ring marking the start of a basketball season.
Along with the fading image on his chest of a Tasmanian devil spinning a basketball on his finger, there are tattoos on each upper arm. One says 2 Timothy 2:3 (Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus). The other is a sketch of a toddler above another Bible citation, Proverbs 22:6 (Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it).
The latter is the linchpin of Williamson’s personal ethic. He wants to be a father figure to the younger men in his life, whether they’re on his 14-year old son Chasen’s AAU team, or the young men he coached at Arkansas Baptist College the past three years. Recently he took a few of Chasen’s friends to St. Mark Baptist Church, where the family attends Sunday services.
And his own boys? It’s no coincidence he has three of them. He says God gave him those boys, “to share my life’s experiences with, help them become strong young men.
“And it starts with holding them accountable.”
Accountability is big with Williamson, as it is with his father, Jerry. It’s wonderful to be given the gifts of height, strength and quickness, but dad wanted to know that he was exercising them to the utmost. While the rest of the city, and later the state and the nation, hailed Williamson as a basketball titan above reproach, his dad asked about missed rebounds, dispassionate defense.
“My junior year in high school,” recalls Williamson, “I remember one time I said, ‘Do I ever do anything right?’ I think he said at that point, I guess in his mind, ‘Maybe I need to ease up just a little bit.’ He started giving me more praise.”
Jerry Williamson remembers the moment, too. “He said, ‘Daddy, you’re always telling me everything I always do bad, but never everything I thought I did good.’ I said, ‘You’re right. Son, you played a good game, but ....’”
After a game, says Corliss Williamson, “you have everybody in the world patting you on the back, telling you how great you played. I’d come home, and my dad would get right into me. Not that he was criticizing me, but so I wouldn’t just listen to all the praise.
“From growing up, I always, I guess you could say, played trying to please my father.”
Pleasing his father might have happened more often than Jerry Williamson let show.
Though there are competing reports, the man-child informed his parents at age 8 or 9 that he would play professional basketball. Dad first thought this was a real possibility in a game against a tough team from Fort Smith’s Kimmons Junior High. That’s when Corliss, a seventh-grader starting on the ninth-grade squad, caught up to a fastbreak attempt by a Kimmonsplayer and pinned the ball against the backboard. The referee “just let the whistle just drop from his mouth, and that’s when I knew,” the father says.
The rest of the state got the idea two years later, when, during the taping of a feature story for KARK-TV, Channel 4, in Little Rock, Williamson shattered a glass backboard on a dunk.
A NEW CHAPTER
Back at the UCA gym, Williamson picks up a loose ball and comes streaking down the court on a fast break.
The game’s tied. There’s no one in front of him, and someone shouts, “Dunk.” But Williamson stutter-steps at the top of the key, shuffles left as if presented with a defender - there is none - and puts up a three-pointer.
A participant at the lunchtime game says he’s looking forward to the higher profile the small school will get with Williamson’s arrival. The popular sports website Rivals.com ran a long story on UCA and Williamson, including a timeline of his career. It named him to a hypothetical starting five of basketball coaches based on their college stats.
This hints at a perception Williamson intends to refute - that he got the job on star power alone.
“I know there’s some people probably saying that. As a matter of fact, I’ve gotten word back from people saying that. Not to be mean or nothing, but, so what? A lot of people in this world have gotten opportunities [because of] name recognition or people they know, or people their parents know.”
Another common sports axiom that Williamson faces is that superstar athletes make poor coaches. Gifted athletes can’t relate to lesser athletes, the theory goes, their innate gifts have blunted their tactical growth and work ethic.
Williamson must do better than Sidney Moncrief, another University of Arkansas and NBA star. Moncrief took over the University of Arkansas at Little Rock basketball program a decade ago and lasted only one 4-24 season.
But Richardson says Williamson was always interested in strategy. His dad says he started watching game tapes as a fifth-grader.
And Williamson’s professional career wasn’t a smooth ride. He was traded four times in as many years at one point, slipped from being his team’s second-leading scorer (18 points a game) to playing only a few minutes off the bench, and then went on to win the league’s Sixth Man Award for the 2001-02season. In one stretch he played under seven coaches in eight years.
One was Pete Carril, creator of the heralded “Princeton offense,” a set of plays meant to free players to drive to the basket without the ball, receiving the pass at the end. Williamson collected playbooks throughout his career, some the size of small phone books. One is dedicated to a single series - the 2003 NBA Eastern Conference Finals that pitted Williamson’s Detroit Pistons against the New Jersey Nets, who won.
“I think he’s thought about being a college coach all his playing days,” says UCA Athletic Director Brad Teague.
Williamson says he intends to bring Gonzaga- and Butler-type renown to Conway, but an apt inspiration might be East Tennessee State University. The Buccaneers are also a “directional” state school with just over 10,000 undergraduates. In the last seven years, they have earned three automatic bids to the NCAA tournament. Coach Murry Bartow credits successful recruiting and a history of winning.
UCA doesn’t have the latter, so “It’s going to come down to recruiting, [and] I think you’ve got to be smart in recruiting. If he’s in the home of a kid looking at [Kentucky or Florida], he’s going to lose,” Bartow says.
Beg your pardon, lose? We’re talking about Big Nasty. A man who believes, really believes, that winning, success, is a function of desire and determination and nothing else.
He says, “I preach to my son, ‘You can have all the potential in the world, but if you don’t use it, then what good is it?’ The world is full of people like that. Don’t talk about what you should have done, could have done. Go do it. Push yourself to achieve that.
“It’s all mind-set and hard work.”SELF PORTRAIT Corliss Williamson
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH Russellville, Dec. 4, 1973.
MY NICKNAMES ARE Tree and Big Nasty. But the oldest is Kojak because for a long time when I was young, I didn’t have a lot of hair.
MY GREATEST WEAKNESS AS A PLAYER Was my perimeter shot.
MY GREATEST STRENGTH AS A PLAYER Was running the floor.
A VIRTUE I COVET IS Being talkative. As far as just striking up a conversation, I'm not good at that. I can sit in a room with my friends, and I can say zero. For the most part, I'm mute.
BEFORE EVERY FREE THROW I SHOT IN THE NBA, I USED TO SAY You must prove it.
THE TURNING POINT OF MY LIFE WAS Getting traded to Detroit. That whole time I was in Toronto, I went from where I started to eventually not playing at all. After two weeks in Detroit, I finally got a chance to breathe and an opportunity to perform. Mainly, I felt like that organization wanted me to be there.
THE LAST TIME I CRIED OVER BASKETBALL WAS My last college game. I actually held it in the entire time until my dad came in the locker room and put his arm around me, telling me to keep my head up.
MY FAVORITE THING TO SAY TO MY WIFE IS Olive juice. If she reads my lips, it looks like I’m saying “I love you.”
THE PERSON I’M MOST COMPETITIVE WITH IS Scotty Thurman.
THE NUMBER OF SHOTS OUT OF 10 FROM HALF COURT I COULD MAKE RIGHT NOW IS 2. (In the gym, he made 1.)
ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP Weird.
High Profile, Pages 37 on 06/20/2010