Memory Lane: Deron's NBA talent show

EACH WEEK, WE'LL TAKE A LOOK BACK AT A MEMORABLE MOMENT IN ILLINI HISTORY, THANKS TO THE WORDS OF THE NEWS-GAZETTE

This week: Before he became an NBA star — and after his Illinois career — Deron Williams worked his tail off to make sure the transition was smooth.

Date: June 12, 2005

Headline:  Cooped up and counting calories, Deron Williams has eyes on professional future?

By BRETT DAWSON

CHICAGO – There are glimpses of the life that awaits Deron Williams, but only glimpses.

A one-time corporate securities attorney hovers during his interviews now, interjecting occasionally to say which questions his client will not be answering. As Williams steps off a bus in front of Moody Bible Institute's Solheim Center, a gym staffer with boulders for biceps orders autograph seekers out of the way.

And as he settles into a comfortable chair at the Wyndham Hotel, downtown traffic three floors below, Williams' cellphone and text messenger both chirp a time or two before he switches them off.

He's a man in demand. This is Williams' taste of what's to come.

But it's only a taste.

If you've come looking for glamorous stories from a man who's about to be a millionaire, you're going to be disappointed.

In fact, as Williams prepares for the June 28 NBA draft, the most accurate description of his life might be boring. Or lonely.

"I'm pretty much by myself," Williams says. "I don't see very many people. My personal trainer. Bracey (Wright). My high school coach. These guys."

"These guys" are Williams' agent, Bob McClaren, and Michael Sorrell, the former securities lawyer and White House employee who's serving as Williams' media liaison.

As Williams talks about the draft – and the lifelong wait for it that's dwindled now to 16 days – McClaren and Sorrell pace nearby, rarely interjecting but providing ever-present presence, a sign that Williams has gone from collegian to commodity in the seven weeks since he announced his decision to leave Illinois after his junior year.

Life in Champaign was poker and PlayStation and the Big Ten. Friends were a hallway away. Bus rides were social events. Williams, cool customer that he is, didn't sweat much, outside of practice or maybe a math test.

These days, Williams has more pressing worries.

In a little more than two weeks, an NBA team – probably one of the first five to make selections on draft night – will decide his foreseeable basketball future. And Williams has no idea who it will be.

"It's kind of like the recruiting process all over, except you're the coach on the other side," Williams says. "It's like you're the one wanting the player to come to you and you don't know where they're going to go. I feel like a coach, sitting here not knowing what's going to happen."

So Williams controls what he can.

And he makes a full-time gig of it.

"This is his job now," McClaren says. "He's living, breathing, eating basketball."

Burning hunger

Actually, he eats chicken.

Lots of it.

Among the changes in Williams' life since he left Champaign in April – and there are many – is his diet, altered to harden up the soft edges. It's working. At his only private workout so far, in New Orleans, Williams weighed in at 199 pounds and 7.5 percent body fat.

"When I first started working out for the draft, it was 12.5 percent," Williams says. "That's a pretty good change for a month or whatever it's been."

Trimming down was no happy accident, not like when Williams broke his jaw during his sophomore year at Illinois and dipped all the way to 190 pounds (he typically played at about 210).

He has a personal trainer now. He has a list of approved foods and rules of thumb (grilled good, fried bad) and a workout regimen intense enough that it fills a full workday, keeping Williams at a Houston gym sometimes from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. with an afternoon lunch break.

"I get up in the morning, go lift weights with my personal trainer, do cardio," Williams says. "I was playing for a while, but I cut that out because I didn't want to get injured. So now I come back in the afternoon and do individual workouts, a lot of shooting, a lot of drills."

He worked out at first with former Illini Derek Harper, then in Milwaukee under former Utah coach Rick Majerus. Now he's back in Houston under the tutelage of Tommy Thomas, his high school coach at The Colony.

And though Williams is working with a man he's known since he was a kid, and in a state where he spent his whole life, he's living in a different world than the one he inhabited the past three seasons.

He gives a knowing laugh when he hears that some Illinois fans wonder why he couldn't slim down for his college days, a concern he's clearly heard before.

"You don't have the same resources," Williams says. "You don't have a personal trainer, a nutritionist. You have a strength coach, but you can't see him all the time because your schedule's so busy. You're always on the run, so you go home and grab a hot dog instead of eating a grilled chicken breast. It's a different lifestyle. On road trips, we wanted to eat at places where there isn't that much good stuff to eat."

It doesn't hurt, either, that there are millions of dollars at stake now.

"That too," Williams says.

His smile is the rare indicator that, for all the loneliness, the focus on basketball and body, Williams is a 19-year-old kid who is weeks away from having his every dream become reality.

There's some fun in that.

Cashing in

Because he's signed with an agent, Williams has some cash to flash already, and he's making use of it.

A gearhead for as long as he's been a basketball junkie, Williams has sprung for an unsurprising indulgence: a brand-new Lincoln Navigator, custom painted in white fading to silver and sporting 24-inch rims on the tires and a thumping stereo system

"I've been waiting for that," he says. "Definitely been wanting a nice ride."

He's hardly living lavish, staying alone in a Houston apartment, separated from family and friends. Still, Williams already has felt the impact of a massive financial shift, and though he's tense as draft day approaches, it has nothing to do with funds.

He's yet to be hit up for a loan ("I don't expect that to happen with people I know, but you never know,'" he says) and Williams hasn't gone overboard on extravagances yet, but Williams clearly is living a different lifestyle.

"Not having to worry about money is nice," he says. "Not having to struggle for stuff is definitely nice. Knowing your family is secure, that's nice. This is the first time it's been like that for me."

Still, there isn't time for much shopping.

The lifestyle has its benefits, but for now there are plenty of drawbacks.

Williams admits his schedule isn't as hectic with outside distractions as you might think.

He has done very few interviews since declaring for the draft, which is one of the reasons why, an hour after this private chat, a sea of reporters will surround his table at the afternoon's media session.

And while Wright, his former high school teammate and sometimes workout partner, has worked out for six NBA teams already, Williams' schedule has been sedate, with only a trip to New Orleans so far. When teams have questions for Williams, they talk to McClaren.

Williams mostly is sequestered. Which suits him, at least for now.

"It's a little bit better than having to worry about school and Coach (Bruce) Weber yelling at me," he says. "Basically all I do is play basketball and sleep and eat. And I wait around and see who's going to pick me."

For Williams, that's the hard part.

Wait problem

Unless you are Jason Kidd, Deron Williams does not covet your job. Soon, he'll be doing what he loves, what he has dreamed of doing, and being paid handsomely for it.

But the real world, the one the rest of us dwell in, has its advantages.

"This is not like most jobs where you apply and then you work there and you can stay there unless you get fired or something," Williams says. "With this, it's like there's no telling. You could get picked by somebody on draft day and the same day you get traded. You have no idea where you're going to end up."

Atlanta? Portland? Charlotte? Utah? Any are viable options for Williams, though he'd prefer not to end up with the Jazz, unless it's trading up. Utah has the sixth pick in the draft. Williams has his sights set on the top five.

"From all the information we've got, we'd by very, very surprised if he were not in the top five," McClaren says.

When he's asked in interviews later in the day, Williams will repeat this as a stated goal, will drive home the point that he wants to be among the first five players taken in the draft.

But in a quieter moment, he stops to consider just what that means.

Here is a kid who admits that when, during his junior year of high school he first began to see the NBA as a possibility, "I was the only one who thought so."

When he left for Illinois and Wright moved on to Indiana, "I was pretty much Bracey's sidekick," Williams says.

Now Williams, dressed casually in an oversized polo and baggy jeans, has flown to the NBA predraft camp to be measured and take physical tests, even as Wright dons a jersey and sweats through games in front of a horde of scouts picking apart his game.

"It's crazy when you think about it," Williams says.

And it makes him proud.

"If you look at the draft Web sites, a lot of them didn't even have me in the draft this year, and some of them had me as a second-round pick next year," Williams said. "And I haven't gotten here just on God-given talent. I've worked to get here. I've put in a lot of hours in the gym to get where I am today."

Where he is today is on the verge.

For all the uncertainty, for as much as he insists he's a nervous wreck about draft day, he seems at ease there.

"I think he's enjoying the process," McClaren says. "He feels comfortable in it. That's what sets him apart, to me, and it's kind of the way he plays the game. He's comfortable on the court. He's comfortable talking about his career and where he wants to be. Some people just have that innate ability to really fit in to what their gifts are. His gift is to play basketball, and he really understands what it is to be a professional."

Apparently, he also knows what it takes to become one.

Singular focus

It takes focus, and Williams has that. It takes determination, and that's hardly in short supply. And to hear Williams tell it, it takes a bit of an edge, too, and he's never lacked that.

When he hears that some scouts question his speed or his physical skills, it pours gasoline on a fire that's been burning inside for years, since at least his freshman year at The Colony, when Thomas decided Williams would play junior varsity hoops.

"I was really mad about that. I felt like I was better than the point guard they had on the varsity," Williams says. "So I made it a point that I was going to start varsity sophomore year. That might be where it came from, but really, for as long as I can remember, I've wanted to prove people wrong."

That intensity has kept Williams going in what has been a lonely stretch. He has been back to The Colony once this spring to visit family and friends. He has kept in close contact with his former teammates at Illinois. He took Luther Head out to dinner when Head worked out for the Houston Rockets, and James Augustine sends him a text message as Williams answers a question about his life in Houston.

"It's not easy being away from everybody," Williams says. "But that's the choice I made when I decided to leave Illinois, so you take the good and the bad. I've been ready for it.

"This is something I knew I was going to do since the beginning of the year, so I've been getting myself ready. So I'm comfortable and everything. I just wish I knew where I was going to be playing."

Even then, there will be questions. Williams will need to get settled, to find a home and determine if he'll share it. It's well documented that Williams and his longtime girlfriend, Amy Young, have a 2-year-old daughter, Denae, and Williams says the couple haven't decided yet if they'll live together his rookie year.

For now, Young and Denae – who will sit with Williams in the green room on draft night, he says - are with Young's family in Dallas, an arrangement that makes sense, Williams says, given how few hours he spends in his Houston apartment.

It's a lonely life Williams leads.

But he doesn't mind. Not now. Not when he's this close.

"Right now, I like it, because I need to be focused on what's in front of me, which is the draft," Williams says. "I don't want any other life right now. The most important thing is getting there - getting in the draft, going as high as possible. For now, that's all I want to think about. Once I do that, I'll start worrying about staying there."

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