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Since former Phoenix center John "Hot Rod" Williams died of cancer at the age of fifty-three last Friday, I wanted to pay tribute to his life and career for those who remember him or are curious about him.
His life story proved unbelievable. Williams was born in rural Louisiana, in a time and place where Jim Crow segregation and the Ku Klux Klan remained very much entrenched. When he was an eight-month old baby, his mother died and his father left him with his son's maternal grandfather, an elderly blind man named Felton Williams. Baby Hot Rod's father said that he would return shortly, but he never did. A few days later, the next-door neighbor, a young divorcee named Barbara Colar, who had three kids of her own, found baby Hot Rod crying on Felton Williams' front porch and took him in, becoming his new mother.
As Hot Rod was growing up, Colar worked as a school janitor from six in the morning until three in the afternoon, then came home for an hour, and then headed to her second job as a cook at a steak-and-seafood restaurant, not returning again until midnight. Thus she managed to single-handedly support her four kids—her three biological daughters plus Hot Rod—while they all lived in a fourteen-by-sixty-foot trailer.
Like Kevin Johnson (or Michael Jordan, for that matter), Williams' original favorite sport was baseball, but a high school growth spurt turned him into an elite basketball prospect and sent him to Tulane University in New Orleans. There, he became wrapped up in a point-shaving scandal, resulting in an arrest, charges, and a possible seventeen-year prison sentence. With his impoverished background, Hot Rod acknowledged taking cash payments from whoever dumped the money in his lap, but he vociferously denied the charge that he had tanked games. The statistics and game film supported his case, and a jury eventually found him innocent.
The Cavaliers drafted him in the second round in 1985 and paid his legal bills while he spent a year in the United States Basketball League until being cleared of his charges. In Cleveland, he became the kind of player appreciated by crusty gym scouts—and who would now be appreciated by devotees of Real Plus-Minus. An excellent defender at multiple positions (he could guard centers, power forwards, small forwards, and even shooting guards on switches or cross-matches) and a selfless teammate who set good screens and contributed points, rebounds, and blocked shots, Williams became a vital component of perennial playoff clubs in Cleveland. As his head coach, Lenny Wilkens, stated, "Hot Rod knows where everyone is supposed to be on every play." As a restricted free agent in the summer of 1990, coming off a season where he had averaged 16.8 points, 8.1 rebounds, 2.0 blocks shots, 2.0 assists, and a .493 field goal percentage, the twenty-eight-year old Williams saw the Miami Heat, a third-year expansion franchise desperate to make a splash, offer him an outlandish contract for those days: $26.5M over seven years, including $5M in the first year, twice what Michael Jordan would earn in the upcoming season.
Cleveland thought highly enough of Williams to match the offer. He had gone from frightful poverty in rural Louisiana to receiving the second-largest contract in North American team sports history at that time, behind only Jose Canseco. Williams also fathered four children with his wife and gave all of them a variation of his own first name—John—to cement the bond that his own father had broken with him. And he used his interest in mathematics to become a carpenter who could read engineering blueprints, allowing him to build multiple churches in his native Louisiana.
Money and familial stability obviously did not end Williams' adversity, however. He was involved in a car accident in Cleveland in the summer of 1995, and the Cavaliers traded him to Phoenix a few weeks later. After the accident, Williams had mostly complained about his back, which the Suns found to be structurally sound and which resolved itself soon enough. But the actual damage turned out to be far more extensive. Nerve irritation imperiled his right knee and leg, and a piece of metal was embedded in his foot and would not be discovered until the fall of 1996, costing Williams the first 12 games of the following season. Hobbled by the effects of the car accident for the first four-plus months of the '95-'96 season in Phoenix, Williams missed a number of games and struggled with his mobility and effectiveness when he was on the floor. The result, combined with nostalgia for Dan Majerle (the player shipped to Cleveland in exchange for Williams), was that many media members and fans (and bloggers who straddle the fence of that ignorant contingent) still, to this day, ridicule Hot Rod as a "bust" or a "stiff," as some "joke" who wrecked the Suns.
His life story proved unbelievable. Williams was born in rural Louisiana, in a time and place where Jim Crow segregation and the Ku Klux Klan remained very much entrenched. When he was an eight-month old baby, his mother died and his father left him with his son's maternal grandfather, an elderly blind man named Felton Williams. Baby Hot Rod's father said that he would return shortly, but he never did. A few days later, the next-door neighbor, a young divorcee named Barbara Colar, who had three kids of her own, found baby Hot Rod crying on Felton Williams' front porch and took him in, becoming his new mother.
As Hot Rod was growing up, Colar worked as a school janitor from six in the morning until three in the afternoon, then came home for an hour, and then headed to her second job as a cook at a steak-and-seafood restaurant, not returning again until midnight. Thus she managed to single-handedly support her four kids—her three biological daughters plus Hot Rod—while they all lived in a fourteen-by-sixty-foot trailer.
Like Kevin Johnson (or Michael Jordan, for that matter), Williams' original favorite sport was baseball, but a high school growth spurt turned him into an elite basketball prospect and sent him to Tulane University in New Orleans. There, he became wrapped up in a point-shaving scandal, resulting in an arrest, charges, and a possible seventeen-year prison sentence. With his impoverished background, Hot Rod acknowledged taking cash payments from whoever dumped the money in his lap, but he vociferously denied the charge that he had tanked games. The statistics and game film supported his case, and a jury eventually found him innocent.
The Cavaliers drafted him in the second round in 1985 and paid his legal bills while he spent a year in the United States Basketball League until being cleared of his charges. In Cleveland, he became the kind of player appreciated by crusty gym scouts—and who would now be appreciated by devotees of Real Plus-Minus. An excellent defender at multiple positions (he could guard centers, power forwards, small forwards, and even shooting guards on switches or cross-matches) and a selfless teammate who set good screens and contributed points, rebounds, and blocked shots, Williams became a vital component of perennial playoff clubs in Cleveland. As his head coach, Lenny Wilkens, stated, "Hot Rod knows where everyone is supposed to be on every play." As a restricted free agent in the summer of 1990, coming off a season where he had averaged 16.8 points, 8.1 rebounds, 2.0 blocks shots, 2.0 assists, and a .493 field goal percentage, the twenty-eight-year old Williams saw the Miami Heat, a third-year expansion franchise desperate to make a splash, offer him an outlandish contract for those days: $26.5M over seven years, including $5M in the first year, twice what Michael Jordan would earn in the upcoming season.
Cleveland thought highly enough of Williams to match the offer. He had gone from frightful poverty in rural Louisiana to receiving the second-largest contract in North American team sports history at that time, behind only Jose Canseco. Williams also fathered four children with his wife and gave all of them a variation of his own first name—John—to cement the bond that his own father had broken with him. And he used his interest in mathematics to become a carpenter who could read engineering blueprints, allowing him to build multiple churches in his native Louisiana.
Money and familial stability obviously did not end Williams' adversity, however. He was involved in a car accident in Cleveland in the summer of 1995, and the Cavaliers traded him to Phoenix a few weeks later. After the accident, Williams had mostly complained about his back, which the Suns found to be structurally sound and which resolved itself soon enough. But the actual damage turned out to be far more extensive. Nerve irritation imperiled his right knee and leg, and a piece of metal was embedded in his foot and would not be discovered until the fall of 1996, costing Williams the first 12 games of the following season. Hobbled by the effects of the car accident for the first four-plus months of the '95-'96 season in Phoenix, Williams missed a number of games and struggled with his mobility and effectiveness when he was on the floor. The result, combined with nostalgia for Dan Majerle (the player shipped to Cleveland in exchange for Williams), was that many media members and fans (and bloggers who straddle the fence of that ignorant contingent) still, to this day, ridicule Hot Rod as a "bust" or a "stiff," as some "joke" who wrecked the Suns.
