BUFFALO — Minutes after waking up, Eric Williams sauntered out to his second-floor porch. The 10 a.m. light piercing his eyes, he yelled to family members piling into his house below.

Eric had more bad news.

‘Mardy Gilyard just got drafted!’ said Eric, Mike Williams’ younger brother, referencing the former Cincinnati wide receiver.

Moans and groans bellowed back. No words. The crew ambled upstairs — past dusty, framed newspaper clippings of Mike — and huddled around the television. Williams himself was MIA. He couldn’t be at his house, couldn’t be around anybody. The night before, his draft party flopped. Through three rounds, nobody wanted him. Anxiety replaced excitement.

So the former Syracuse wideout took refuge at the Staybridge Suites Hotel, 15 minutes away from his home. He’d watch the rest of the draft in solitude.

Back at his home, three ‘Congratulations’ balloons had cruelly risen to the ceiling. Eric paced the living room, gripping the remote like a baton. Thirteen wide receivers had already been drafted. Ridiculous. And when his back was turned, the words ‘Tampa Bay Selects Mike Williams’ flashed on the screen. With a two-handed underhand hurl, Eric chucked the remote across the room. Everyone screamed, hugged and pulled out cell phones to call Mike.

‘Their wide receivers coach said he’d stick up for Mike!’ Eric yelled.

A breeze of ‘Shhh’s!’ silenced the pandemonium. The group herded within inches of the television and treated Mel Kiper Jr.’s word as gospel. Mike’s uncle held a tape recorder in front of the TV. After Chris Mortensen claimed Williams could be the best athlete in the draft, Mike’s mother — still in her nightshirt behind the pile — spoke up.

‘That’s what I’ve been saying! That’s what I’ve been saying!’

Finally, Mike Williams can move on. His exit from Syracuse was tsunami-unexpected and pulled the plug on the Orange’s season. At SU, he is immortalized as one of the greatest enigmas ever.

On the field, he was unstoppable. A spectacle. A talent you intentionally force the ball to in triple coverage. Off it, a mystery. Williams missed the entire 2008 season due to academic suspension, improved his grades at junior college, returned to Syracuse and then quit the team with four games left last fall.

Since January, his life has been a four-month audit. NFL scouts shoved his character under the microscope. His resolve was tested. Now he’s itching to show everyone who the real Mike Williams is, to put some walk behind his ‘I’m not a quitter’ talk.

After a short wait that bright April 24 day in Buffalo, Mike’s black Cadillac finally appeared. He parked in the middle of Stewart Street, left the engine running, left his door wide open and raced out to hug everyone in his path. The main attraction. The cheering drowned out barking dogs and police sirens, so loud neighbors three houses down peered outside in curiosity.

Williams left his car running in the street for the next hour. This moment would be savored. This moment was always his light at the end of the tunnel.

‘It’s relieving,’ Williams said. ‘All yesterday I was waiting and waiting. The time seemed like it was never going to come.’

On Nov. 1, 2009, it really did seem like this time would never come.

The fallout

This was Halloween Saturday. As far as teammate Donte Davis remembers, practically everyone was out past curfew. Davis and running back Delone Carter were dressed as Chippendales. The night was a rare reprieve from a rocky season.

But only four players got caught.

Driving near the Turning Stone Casino exit at 5:30 a.m. on Nov. 1, Williams, Antwon Bailey, Torrey Ball and Andrew Tiller were rear-ended by a tractor-trailer. No alcohol was involved, but this was Williams’ second curfew violation. A multi-game suspension awaited.

To Orange head coach Doug Marrone, who declined to comment on Williams, a theme was developing. Later that day, he held a team vote to decide whether or not Williams should stay on the team. It wasn’t even close. Multiple players said that the black players generally voted ‘yes’ and the white players generally voted ‘no.’

Davis said more than 80 percent of the team voted Williams to stay.

‘And the next thing I know, they say that he won’t be on the team again,’ Davis said. ‘I said, ‘Well, that’s crazy!’ I don’t know what went down. The majority voted him back on the team.’

The problem was communication. After the vote, Williams said Marrone tried to call him. Tried to give him a chance to come back. One problem. Williams’ phone was lost inside the car involved in the accident. He wasn’t available at his apartment, either. His roommate had swine flu. Williams was quarantining himself at another friend’s house.

Naturally, Syracuse coaches got the feeling that Williams didn’t want to play.

The next day, Marrone announced that Mike Williams had left the program. A bombshell that ‘changed the whole morale of the team,’ Davis said. Williams’ high school coach, Tony Truilizio, heard both sides. Marrone called him after the split. Plainly, it was bad communication all around.

‘Mike should have came out and said, ‘Hey, I’m staying at my friend’s house,” Truilizio said. ‘And maybe the staff shouldn’t have been as upset with the situation after hearing it.’

Williams wasn’t through yet. He tried to claw his way back. A couple days later, he drove back to Syracuse from Buffalo with his mother and mentor. First, the trio met with SU Athletics Director Daryl Gross.

‘Daryl Gross said, ‘We can’t lose you,” Williams recalls. ‘He was saying that I should be back on the team.’

Then, the group met with the head coach. Marrone wouldn’t budge.

‘He told me he’d see me next year,’ Williams said. ‘He said, ‘See me next year.”

So they went their separate ways. Marrone was setting a precedent for his program, and Williams didn’t want to be a lingering distraction into next year. No hard feelings. Again and again, Williams expressed praise for Marrone.

As long as one thing’s clear.

‘People kept saying I quit,’ he said. ‘I never quit. That wasn’t how it was. I never quit on my teammates and my teammates know that.’

Williams took the split hard. He couldn’t immediately transition into NFL mode. He looked in the mirror. He talked to himself. He cried. Williams’ voice skips a beat rehashing his exit from Syracuse.

He never wanted it to end like this.

‘It was time for them to move on and time for me to move on,’ he said. ‘That’s how I took it. We were still on good terms and I wanted to leave it at that. I decided to move on.’

Character concern?

If nothing else, Jaime Elizondo knows he tried. He committed himself to saving his star pupil. So many times, Syracuse’s ex-receivers coach brought Williams into his office.

The meetings were numerous (Elizondo doesn’t have a count), honest (Mike opened up about living with a single mother) and uncensored (always).

‘Are you going to be a guy that maximizes this chance?’ Elizondo remembers asking him. ‘Or will you be a guy that works at McDonald’s?’

This is the concern, the virus that infected Williams’ draft stock. However things deteriorated at Syracuse — whether he quit or was kicked off — Williams can’t escape perception. Twenty-one teams were interested during the draft process. His maturity, his professionalism and his character were always on trial.

Williams didn’t have a problem with coaching. Elizondo, now the offensive coordinator for the Toronto Argonauts in the CFL, said the wideout struggled taking authority from male figures. This was a common topic in their meetings. Be it a professor, a coach or a father, this was a problem for Williams. Not unlike a person that struggles with anxiety, anger management or some other social disorder, Elizondo said.

At times, athleticism became a crutch. Little things that are a prerequisite in the NFL — preparation, film work, taking notes — were neglected.

‘He needs to take that next step as a person in terms of maturity and growth and understanding that it’s not always going to be a cakewalk,’ Elizondo said. ‘With him, it was typically a fight-or-flight response. That doesn’t always work.’

Added one former teammate who wished to remain anonymous, ‘He stood out as one of the only people to not put forth effort. It’s not like everybody on the team doesn’t put forth effort. Bullsh**. He was the only one who didn’t put forth even an adequate amount.’

Exactly the opposite, say teammates, family and his high school coach. They scoff at any ‘character concern’ criticism.

At Riverside (N.Y.) High School, where Truilizio runs the triple option, Williams rarely touched the ball. Riverside ran the ball 85 percent of the time. Out of sympathy, Truilizio plugged Williams in at quarterback in his final game so he could score a touchdown.

With every right to, Williams never demanded the ball. Never pouted.

‘This kid is not a problem child,’ Truilizio said. ‘This kid is not a character-issue kid.’

Mike’s brother agrees. Eric, a 19-year-old business management student at D’Youville College, says he looks up to Mike as a dad.

Three days before the draft, Eric planned on joining Mike and friends on a trip to Rochester to get tuxedos for their draft party. Only Mike wouldn’t let Eric go. Little brother had biology class. Mike made him stay back.

So after all 32 teams passed on Williams through three rounds, Eric texted Mike encouragement during the night. First, he reminded him to keep his phone charged. A coach would be calling him very soon the next morning, he assured. Second, Eric told Mike he’d make all those teams pay. 

They didn’t know the real Mike.

‘People don’t see him as the person he really is,’ Eric said. ‘He’s really a good person. He looks out for everyone.’

Elizondo will never forget that megawatt smile wiped across Mike Williams’ face during practice and games. He assures that Williams wasn’t malignant on the field. He was not the stereotypical prima donna receiver jawing in a quarterback’s ear.

Still, Elizondo is worried. He wonders if those meetings accomplished anything. He wonders if Williams will flip a switch. In the pros, ‘it’s not just about going out on Sunday and making the spectacular catch,’ he said.

Laziness is booted to the waiver wire. The man Davis calls ‘One More’ for demanding everyone to do one more sprint at practice promises he’s ready.

‘With me leaving Syracuse the way I did, I’ve worked even harder,’ Williams said. ‘Instead of doing one extra, I was doing two extra. Instead of running two extra laps, I was running four extra laps. It’s been the hardest I’ve worked in my life.’

Proving himself again

The road to redemption began in Pensacola, Fla., at the Athletes’ Performance Institute (API). Williams found an ally immediately — eventual-No. 1 overall pick, Sam Bradford.

A bond was forged through the prove-them-wrong swagger driving both players. They worked on routes daily. Their workout group became family. Before every team interview — when Williams faced a barrage of character questions and Bradford faced questions about his surgically repaired shoulder — the duo texted each other four simple words.

One for the family.

‘Everybody else has judgments on you,’ Williams said. ‘So let’s get one for the family.’

Gradually, both battled their demons. At the NFL combine, abandoned to the back of long lines for every drill, Williams was restless. Nerves affected his performance. Though he made a handful of highlight-reel catches, Williams came in too bulky. At 222 pounds, he lumbered through his shuttle drills.

After this, he migrated back to Buffalo to train at Thurman Thomas Sports Training. Williams never brought up the Syracuse divorce, trainer Rich Sanders said. But Sanders could see that ‘something’ was driving him. Williams quietly shed 10 pounds and improved his vertical leap, broad jump and shuttle times at his pro day.

‘He had one goal in mind,’ Sanders said. ‘That was just proving everybody — anybody that said negative things about him — wrong.’

Proving himself on the field was easy. He caught 49 passes for 746 yards and six touchdowns in only seven games last year. The physical freak inside Williams was bound to burst out in the pre-draft drills. This is the same guy that upstaged Donte Greene in a dunk contest at Archbold Gymnasium. Next was the hard part — proving he’s a good person. Truilizio heard it all from scouts the past few months. One scout even asked him if Williams had any children.

‘That shocked me,’ Truilizio said. ‘What’s the difference?’

In a league polluted with arrests and assaults, teams needed to know if Williams was a criminal-in-waiting.

‘He is not a kid that walks around carrying a gun. He’s not a kid with a knife,’ Truilizio told scouts. ‘He never swore in front of me. I never heard the kid swear. No profanity.’

When the Buccaneers dug into Mike’s past, they couldn’t even find a speeding ticket. They talked to Truilizio and Marrone for details on the breakup. Interest grew. Contact between Truilizio and a Bucs scout escalated from a phone call to e-mails to a one-hour meeting at Williams’ pro day.

But somehow Williams himself needed to prove his professionalism, the trait that has Elizondo worried.

So there Williams was, sitting inside the Buccaneers’ film room. Breaking down his routes with the team’s wide receivers coach, Eric Yarber. One play had Yarber confused. On a ‘POCO’ route, in which receivers can either take a route to the post or the corner, Williams dashed to the corner. Strange. With the right safety cheating to the outside, it didn’t make sense.

Then Williams explained his reasoning. No other receivers in the designed play were running a route that’d freeze the backside safety. Going to the post meant decapitation. Or an interception. Williams knew better. He went to the corner, ensured a one-on-one matchup and won the jump ball.

‘That’s a three- or four-year vet telling you that,’ Yarber said. ‘He said things you don’t expect a rookie to say.’

And somewhere in Williams’ phone inbox that day was a text from Bradford, reminding him that he’s not alone.

‘I had my guy’

Inside his hotel, Williams’ eyes glazed over reruns of SportsCenter the night before he was drafted. That thin strip recapping picks at the bottom of the TV screen became an evil source of insomnia. He didn’t sleep.

‘Wow, this receiver was taken over me and this receiver over me and this receiver!’ he told himself.

Down in Tampa Bay, Yarber had trouble sleeping, too. Yarber feared that a team would leapfrog the Bucs to take Williams. Under the table, he was pulling for Mike. Two picks elapsed, Williams was still there and Tampa Bay pounced.

Moments after the pick, Yarber talked to Williams on the phone. He wants to be Williams’ mentor, the one entrusted with the fate of his career. Yarber coached Chad Ochocinco at Oregon State and Terrell Owens in San Francisco. He knows bad eggs. He vows that Mike isn’t one.

On the short phone call, Yarber told Williams not to look at his rearview mirror, not to replay the breakup from Syracuse in his head.

‘Look through your windshield,’ he said.

Mike answered with a series of ‘Yes sirs’ and hopped into his Cadillac to head home from the hotel. Along the way, he received 78 text messages. His voicemail filled up. Friends that bailed on him a year ago when Williams was at a junior college to improve his grades are crawling back. He smiles at the irony.

On his front lawn, Williams cycled through conversations with his real friends. The ones that stood by him all along.

Wearing a black, long-sleeved shirt from the combine and a Buccaneers hat, it’s clear. Williams has officially left Syracuse in the past. Curfew, team votes, missing phones and failed comeback attempts mean nothing now. Six months ago, it appeared Williams lost everything.

Now he’s a Buc. His second chance begins.

‘You had a pitfall, we stumbled, we had a hurdle. How do you get over that hurdle and come back?’ Yarber said. ‘That’s the type of attitude and fight it looks like Mike has in him.’

Over the coming months and years, we find out.

thdunne@syr.edu

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Published on May 3, 2010 at 12:00 pm