scapegoat griz
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Not sure if any of you would remember Freeman Williams who played for Portland State in the late 70's and against the Griz a few times. Incredible tallent but went the wrong direction. My uncle was his PSU coach and always thought that he would be one of the NBA's greats. Sad to see how it turned out.
Williams, a player lost and found
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
The Oregonian
LOS ANGELES -- T he tips came from a liquor store clerk, and a corner prostitute, and a former neighbor who said that Freeman Williams was homeless, addicted to crack, and living in an alley four blocks from his old high school.
They said the finest basketball player in Portland State history, a guy who once scored 81 points in a college game, lived in a scattershot of filthy blankets, glass pipes, syringes and a long line of thin-faced people pushing grocery-store shopping carts.
"Freeman refuses to push a cart," the prostitute, Tammy, said. "Pride, I suppose."
The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office said there was a warrant for Williams' arrest stemming from an 8-year-old drug possession charge. A custodian at Manual Arts High School, Charles Salter, said he went to high school with Williams, and that he'd seen him walk past his alma mater a year ago, "but Freeman was so skinny and out of it, I hardly recognized him."
Also, a homeless man with a long white beard -- nicknamed "Santa Claus" in this South Central Los Angeles neighborhood -- stood in the mouth of the alley near 46th Avenue and Vermont Street last week and claimed Williams' face was punched and bloodied that morning over a $20 debt to a couple of local drug dealers.
The man said: "Freeman said he'd be back here at sundown."
Williams never showed up.
Finding the truth about Freeman Williams is a complex task. So, a week later, I was back on a plane to Los Angeles, where Williams was waiting for me, ready to insist none of it could be true.
I felt torn.
Williams doesn't have a valid driver's license, and his last listed address is a decade old. He directed me to a housing complex, a pink building with graffiti on the front, near the Hollywood Park Racetrack. And when I arrived at the address he'd given me, Williams was sitting in front, his legs dangling off a short concrete wall. He wore a frayed black basketball sweatsuit and a baseball cap, and he was smiling.
"See, I'm not on the streets, I'm doing OK," he said.
Then, he roared with forced laughter.
Maybe you're thrilled Portland State is playing in its first NCAA Tournament. Or maybe you're just hoping the No. 16 seeded Vikings don't arrive in Omaha, Neb., for the Midwest Regional opening-round game wide-eyed and get flattened by No. 1 seed Kansas on Thursday.
But while we're talking about mixed emotions, and split worries, and the deep, revealing intersection where sport meets life, there's a former NBA player with no known address that might be as good a place as any to begin the discussion.
Williams is 51. He weighs 255 pounds, 50 over his playing weight. And Williams said he lives off his $1,500 a month NBA pension, splitting the bills and sharing Unit No. 8 at the complex on Hardy Street, with his girlfriend Tina Wooten.
"It hurt to hear people talking that I was on the street, and saying scandalous stuff about me," Williams said. "I'm not homeless. That old neighborhood is full of criminals and drug addicts, and bad people.
"I haven't been back there for years."
Except, he has been back.
A liquor store owner said Williams stops in for ice cream, occasionally. And when told this, Williams said, "Yeah, I do stop by there once in a while."
In 1977 and 1978 no other men's Division I basketball player scored more often than Williams. He's second all-time in career scoring, trailing only Pete Maravich. And Williams, the No. 8 overall pick by the Boston Celtics in the 1978 NBA draft, played parts of six NBA seasons and remains the only player in league history to lead his team in scoring coming off the bench.
Still, on his old high school campus, almost nobody remembers Williams.
Most of the teachers are younger than him. His old basketball coach, Lionel Harris, owns a neighborhood nightclub now. The students don't know Williams' name, and when they learn that he played for the Clippers, Jazz, Hawks and Bullets, they wrinkle their noses and say things such as, "He played in the NBA and he's not rich?"
"Can't let it bother me," Williams said.
Williams can't really explain how he makes ends meet, and he can barely recall his address when you ask for it. He said he doesn't remember where exactly he lived in Portland when he played there, but he calls it "PO," and said, "I lived North, Northeast, South, Southeast, pretty much anywhere but Beaverton."
He's wondering if people on the streets, those who claim he's destitute and drug-addicted, might have him confused with a homeless man named Freeman who died here a few years ago.
"I've been thinking a lot about that," he said.
What Williams will tell you is that he has no automobile, because his last one, a Mercedes, was shot up during a neighborhood beef. Also, he has no savings, even though he once made $150,000 a year in the NBA and was paid $20,000 for his part in the 1992 film "White Men Can't Jump." Also, while he spent four months stocking the shelves at a Safeway in McMinnville after retiring from the NBA in 1986, he hasn't held a regular job in almost two decades.
Also, Williams said, he had a drug problem, which led to the drug possession charge.
"I'm not going to lie about the drugs," he said. "It was cocaine. And I'm clean now. I went two or three years in a bad stretch after my parents died, but I never hit rock bottom. I never got to the bottom like some people."
Earlier this season, coach Ken Bone left him a ticket for Portland State's game with UCLA. Williams never picked it up. But Williams said he watched on TV last Wednesday as the Vikings beat Northern Arizona in the Big Sky Conference tournament to earn an NCAA bid.
And on Tuesday, Williams took a step toward reconnecting with his high school.
He shot baskets in his old gymnasium at Manual Arts. His back bothers him. His legs are stiff, and his knees don't bend easily. But Williams shot, and the children stopped talking to watch, and every once in a while, he looked so beautiful with the ball you came to understand why the fans here used to call him "Silk."
A young teen at the school asked, "How many points did you score in college?"
"3,249," Williams said.
He knows it like a phone number. The number feels like an old friend to him. So much so that Williams said he made 3-2-4-9 the voicemail code on the cell phone he's using.
Another teen calls out, "You say you played in the NBA, so bang out one," and laughs at Williams, daring him to dunk.
"I'm old now," he said. "You ain't going to be laughing when you're my age."
Williams said he doesn't care what people think, but it's clear, like so many of us, that he does. He's kind and likeable, and with one look in his eyes, you can tell everything isn't right in his world, even as he wishes you'd believe it is.
"I was born at the wrong time," he said. "I didn't get the big money. I didn't make what the Kobes and Shaqs made."
When we drive past the Los Angeles Forum, Williams points out that he used to love to play there against the Lakers. It was so close to the neighborhood he grew up in, and so many of his friends and family went to see him play that he said they filled a whole section.
"You know," he said, "they hold church service there now on Sundays.
"A church with 17,909 seats."
Williams said that he sometimes works with children, helping them develop basketball skills. He left PSU for the NBA after four years, but is still 36 units shy of his degree. He said he's most proud that he has three daughters -- ages 25, 24 and 19 -- who are enrolled in college courses.
"None of them got pregnant out of wedlock," he said. "Three girls, that's a lot of trouble."
He laughed that deep laugh again.
Maybe it says something about the rest of us that Williams' story seemed exponentially more intriguing when he was rumored to be sleeping in the alley near West 46th Street, doing drugs, and hanging with Santa Claus and a prostitute. Had he been selling insurance and living in the suburbs no one would have flinched.
We enjoy complications and drama, don't we? We're addicts, too, I suppose. Every one of us. We crave juxtaposition. And intrigue. And shock.
What we have here is a former NBA player who slept in five-star hotels and didn't have to worry about money. At one time Williams had the world by a leather ball, but people said he ended up sleeping in an alley. While we'd all agree it was tragic and sad, it made us sit up in our chairs and want to hear more, didn't it?
Turns out Williams isn't living the American Dream. Most days, he feels like a No. 16 seed himself. But he said he's happy, and when I dropped him off, he got out of the car, crossed the street, and leaned over a fence beside the place he lives, talking with a neighbor.
But before that he did something no other column subject has done.
Williams asked if he could borrow $20, and mumbled something about paying it back someday
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