There comes a time in every old basketball coach’s life when he stops keeping score, unless it’s to count the number of hearts touched between the opening tip and the final buzzer.
At age 92, Colorado State legend Jim Williams has difficulty chronicling each of his 352 victories without a historian looking up the details, although no other coach from the Rocky Mountains has ever made hoops matter so much.
Now’s the time for every Coloradan who loves basketball to send Williams a thank-you note from the state, because it’s never too late.
“I don’t know anybody who has ever loved his players more than Coach. I don’t know anybody who has ever loved basketball more than Coach,” said Boyd Grant, himself a participant in many huge CSU victories, as both a player and coach. “I’m 73 years old, and there’s no way I’ll call him anything other than Coach. He will always be Coach Williams to me.”
These days, only basketball fans with as many gray hairs as fond memories can recall when one tough cowboy rode his Colorado State players hard and cared for them more. At a basketball outpost hidden way out West, Williams did what nobody else dared to imagine.
Coach beat John Wooden and mighty UCLA – twice. Coach got the Rams to the Big Dance four times. Coach had NBA scouts buying maps to find Fort Collins.
“I remember when I was a little girl, Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp came out to Colorado and my dad drove him up to Estes Park,” said Carol Williams, who grew up and went to work in the Nuggets’ front office. “Rupp thought he was on another planet, what with all the big mountains and the wildlife. I remember Rupp telling him: ‘Who the heck lives out here? And why?”‘
Why? Somebody had to make enough noise to allow big-time athletes to notice hoops really did exist in America’s lost time zone.
Folks called the feisty Williams by a lot of names, including some words unprintable in a family newspaper. Nobody, however, called him bashful.
“I tell you what,” said Hal Kinard, who played on Williams’ first CSU team in 1954-55 and eventually nurtured a lifelong friendship with his coach. “When you went to the sideline after being taken out of the game, there was no welcoming committee waiting for you on the bench. There was just Coach Williams and his clipboard, telling you exactly what he thought.”
For 26 seasons, Williams was the thunder that made CSU hoops electric.
Coach was there when Bill Green became the school’s first basketball All-American, when Lonnie Wright would leave Fort Collins to play two pro sports, when the Rams came within an eyelash of advancing to the Final Four in ’69. Moby Gym was the house Coach Williams built.
“I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” Williams once told me, grabbing my wrist and refusing to let go until Coach was confident he had my full attention. “I’ve beat polio and the shingles and leukemia.”
For several years now, Kinard and Williams have gathered in the home where Coach now lives with his daughter, Joan. The two old guys brew a pot of coffee, nibble from a box of chocolates and laugh, swapping old tales, like the time Williams was a college student and won $10 at a dance party while dressed as that little rascal Alfalfa from “Our Gang.”
It has been nearly three decades since Williams hung up his clipboard. The secret of staying young at heart, however, is finding new reasons to love.
While the late Henry Iba of Oklahoma State and DePaul’s Ray Meyer and many of the sport’s proud guardians who served alongside Williams have passed away, in retirement Coach developed a not-so-secret crush on women’s basketball, once confessing in defiant seriousness that former CSU great Becky Hammon could have started at point guard for any of his men’s teams.
“Coach always said Bill Green was his best player,” Kinard confirmed. “But Becky Hammon was his favorite player.”
Love can keep a heart ticking strong, but not forever. After recently battling pneumonia, Williams must know Iba, Meyer and Rupp are patiently waiting to talk hoops with him in heaven, but he refuses to go only because Coach is too stubborn to quit.
You look back on a distinguished man’s life, squinting to see him as he would want to be remembered. I’m told there is a photograph of a young Williams, all raw bones and unbeatable spunk, sitting atop a horse, riding as tall in the saddle as John Wayne ever did.
“He really always was kind of a basketball cowboy,” said Kinard, who knows Williams best.
If there was ever a tougher, funnier, more passionate cowboy in this state’s history, I never met him.
And, really, there is little more that needs to be said about Jim Williams, except what’s in the heart of every Coloradan who truly loves basketball.
Thanks, cowboy. Happy trails.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
