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Vandy’s Williams a fit for a distinctive program

Vanderbilt University’s Renaissance man grew up in pre-Motown Detroit, playing the clarinet and listening to Count Basie perform at the old Garfield Hotel.

He ran track in college, taught in Detroit’s public schools, fell in love with tax law and studied at New York University. He spent three terms on the Nashville Symphony board and was chairman of the United Way.

Then, through the most unpredictable series of events, David Williams became Vanderbilt’s athletic director — at the same time he was also the school’s general counsel.

“Tuesday was for legal, Wednesday was for athletics and Thursday would be something else,” Williams said. “I used to wake up in the middle of the night worrying about a lawsuit. Now I wake up thinking about the women’s tennis program.”

Williams, 67, has been in charge of Vanderbilt athletics since 2003. During the first nine years he was also the school’s lead attorney, but since 2012 he’s simply been the Commodores’ athletic director.

As his background attests, Williams never has been the traditional AD.

He’s more likely to tell you about the 10 Vandy athletes who went to Cuba last month than the school’s latest facility project. He beams with pride when he talks about the football team’s best player, running back Ralph Webb, who was one of 15 athletes to spend the summer studying biodiversity in Australia.

Small, exclusive and private, Vanderbilt has never been like its bigger brethren in the Southeastern Conference. Williams tells his coaches and athletes to embrace those distinctions. Vandy will never be a football factory, and he doesn’t want them wasting their time trying.

Williams encourages athletes to sit in the front of the class and he doesn’t apologize for the lack of preferential scheduling for athletes. They sign up for classes like every other student, and that’s the way it should be, he says.

Williams’ approach, his friends say, has been forged by years as a professor, university administrator and schoolteacher. He’s still a tenured professor in the law school who teaches a sports law class each week. Just last week, he initiated a class discussion on the antitrust cases that threaten the current model of intercollegiate athletics.

“He really is a Renaissance man,” said retired SEC Commissioner Mike Slive, who, like Williams, practiced law before moving into athletics. “He’s done it all.”

■ ■ ■ ■

The challenges of being Vanderbilt in the hypercompetitive SEC are visible all around its aging football stadium.

As the Vanderbilt band played the school song before the Sept. 12 game against Georgia, Williams stood in his customary position on the sideline. He thrust his hand into the air with the index and middle fingers forming a V for Vanderbilt.

Williams greets several luminaries before the game. From top to bottom: Chatting with SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey; shaking hands with ESPN and SEC Network analyst Tim Tebow; and talking with former Vanderbilt hoops player Festus Ezeli of the NBA champion Golden State Warriors.
Photos by: MIKE STRASINGER
Williams couldn’t ignore the obvious as he looked around the stadium. Fans in Georgia red far outnumbered the fans in black and gold. Vandy is the only school in the football-crazed conference that could be the minority in its own stadium.

“Yeah, it bothers me,” he said. “But we’ve got to win.”

Vanderbilt shares little in common with its peers in the SEC, a dynamic that for years made it a struggle to fit in and find its place of relevance. Williams manages an annual budget of $67 million in a conference where the top half of

the schools spend $100 million or more.

Rod Williamson, who has overseen communications at Vanderbilt since 1983, has seen ADs come and go at the school, which has 6,700 undergraduate students. Before Williams came along, the Commodores’ message in athletics was to pretend that they were just like Florida and Alabama, the kind of massive state institutions that

largely define the SEC.

“We’re certainly an unconventional power five school, and David is someone with an unconventional background to be AD,” Williamson said. “But it works here.”

Understanding that Vanderbilt, because of its size and high academic standards, is the least SEC of any school in the conference, Williams flipped the script. He told his coaches to shine a light on the qualities that make the Commodores different. Vanderbilt is not like the other SEC schools at all and it shouldn’t try to be, he says.

“David is very passionate about the athletes, their rights and the opportunities they have here,” men’s basketball coach Kevin Stallings said. “He really thinks about the big picture and how well-rounded the athletes are when they leave here. That’s where he’s a little different than most.”

Williams, the law professor turned AD, is the embodiment of that distinction between Vanderbilt and its peers.

“I used to have arguments with our former band director and he’d get so mad,” Williams said. “He was trying to take a band at a place without many students and make them look like Tennessee’s band. That’s not who we are. Be who we are. Get in your lane, be the best in your lane, and make other people play you in your lane.”

“What football coach would try to run up the middle with a 125-pound running back? Find out what you’re good at, and be the best you can be.”

In Williams’ office at the McGugin athletics building, class notes are strewn across his desk, bookcases are filled with thick binders on tax and labor law, and his purple graduation gown from NYU hangs in the corner. Only a few keepsake footballs on top of a shelf give away the fact that Williams is the school’s chief athletic administrator.

“That’s what makes him such a good fit here,” said Steve Walsh, Vandy’s senior associate AD for external affairs. “We are who we are, and David is who he is. We embrace that uniqueness.”

■ ■ ■ ■

Learning why Williams is shaped the way he is starts in his hometown of Detroit. Even in the pre-Motown years, music, especially jazz, was a major influence in the city.

On Saturday mornings in the 1950s, a young David Williams boarded the city bus with his clarinet and rode to Grinnell’s, a well-known music house and retail store in Detroit.

“I had no interest whatsoever in playing the clarinet,” Williams said. “But my mother loved Benny Goodman, so I played the clarinet.”

After his morning music lessons, Williams rode the bus to the Garfield Hotel, which was owned by his uncle, Randolph Wallace. In those segregated days of the 1940s and ’50s, African-Americans who visited Detroit stayed in either the Garfield or the Gotham hotels.

During a break in the Georgia game, Williams salutes the Vanderbilt NCAA champion women’s tennis team.
Photo by: MIKE STRASINGER
On Monday nights at the Garfield, Williams recalls, the special was chicken in a basket, with two pieces of fried chicken, fries, bread and a drink for 29 cents. The hotel also had a lounge that attracted artists such as Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

“Many of the great musicians came through there,” Williams said. “With that, you also got the other elements: the hustlers, the gamblers, the pimps. You saw all of that.

“After the 1960 Olympics, a lot of the athletes like Wilma Rudolph, Ralph Boston … and Cassius Clay stayed at the Garfield on their victory tour.”

The thriving Detroit that Williams remembers from his youth is much different than the struggling Detroit of today.

“Because of the factories, Detroit became a mecca for the black middle class in America,” he said. “What made Motown such a success was that Berry Gordy had a market for it right there in Detroit. There was a black middle class that actually had disposable income.”

David’s parents, David Sr. and Juanita, both teachers who moved out of Mississippi and migrated north, became part of that middle class. And his parents’ focus on academics forever shaped Williams’ perspective on the importance of education.

■ ■ ■ ■

Williams ran the mile and half-mile at Mumford High School, whose enrollment of 5,000 was so large that Williams and his classmates went to school in shifts. Some went in the morning, some in the afternoon.

A self-described “OK athlete,” Williams went on to run track at Northern Michigan and came out of college as a teacher and coach himself. One of the first major events to make him think about the law as a profession was the Detroit teachers’ strike in 1972. Williams served as the union representative for the school where he taught, and he thought labor law might be his future.

“My whole goal became to work for the labor department of the Detroit city schools,” he said.

After stints working for the IRS, city of Detroit, Ford and a few law firms, Williams decided to get a Master of Laws at NYU, which led to teaching law at the University of Detroit, Ohio State and eventually Vanderbilt.

“I’ve always told David that he’s an educator and a teacher, and he’s never strayed from that,” said Charles Moore, Williams’ college roommate at Northern Michigan. “It’s who he is, so it doesn’t surprise me that he emphasizes that so much as an AD.”

■ ■ ■ ■

By 2003, Williams was firmly entrenched at Vanderbilt as the school’s general counsel, vice chancellor for student affairs and a tax law professor. His office at Kirkland Hall, the university’s main administrative building, was twice as large as his office now as AD.

But Williams’ life was about to get very complicated.

That’s when Vanderbilt’s chancellor at the time, Gordon Gee, had the idea to eliminate the athletics department moniker and move all of the sports under Williams’ department of student affairs. Gee was tired of the separatist mentality in athletics and wanted it to behave more like a university department, not a pro sports franchise.

Williams: “The expectation here is to win and to win the right way with good grades.”
Photo by: MIKE STRASINGER
He put Williams in charge of what Gee admitted was an experiment to transform athletics.

“We got a lot of criticism for that and, honestly, David’s background was part of it,” Williamson said. “People thought of him as a professor. ‘What does he know about sports?’ He wasn’t your traditional AD. But what happened is, because of his background, he was able to unite a campus like never before. I don’t know of anyone else who could have brought that kind of credibility to athletics at Vanderbilt.”

In the last dozen years, Williams has created the study abroad program for athletes that pays for about 15 a year to study in a foreign country. He works with student housing to make sure freshman athletes are evenly distributed in the dorms, so that they’re not clustered together.

Each semester, he receives a report that outlines which students are in which classes. If too many athletes are in the same class, it will show up on the report. Williams doesn’t want athletes accounting for more than 20 percent of any one class.

In his address to freshman athletes, he urges them to make other students see them as students, not just athletes.
“David’s an innovator,” Slive said. “He’s incredibly bright and thoughtful, and he’s played a significant role in this conference.”

■ ■ ■ ■

Williams insists that athletes experience Vandy like any other student, but he’s not willing to do it at the expense of winning.

“There’s a lot of myths out there about Vanderbilt athletics,” said Williamson, the school’s veteran communications chief. “Where we’re misunderstood is that people think we’re a bunch of eggheads who aren’t interested in winning. We’re very interested in winning, and David has been at the center of this. He pushes. He’s never content.”

Vanderbilt has established its baseball and women’s tennis programs as among the best in the nation, and both have won national championships in the last two seasons. The baseball team has made the NCAA tournament 10 straight years, winning the College World Series in 2014 and finishing runner-up earlier this year. The men’s basketball program has made the NCAA tournament six times since 2004, including a pair of runs to the Sweet 16. Women’s bowling won an NCAA crown in 2007.

“There’s a club now and our coaches want to be in that club,” Williams said of coaches who have won national titles. “There’s a set of expectations.”

Those expectations apply to football as well. Under James Franklin, the coach who left for Penn State two years ago, the Commodores went to three straight bowl games and posted nine-win seasons in 2012 and 2013, so it can be done. Despite a slow start under second-year coach Derek Mason, Williams won’t stop talking about winning the SEC East.

Even though it sounds like a long shot, Vandy’s AD harked back on his days growing up in Detroit to explain why that’s important.

“We all have goals that you don’t want to tell anybody,” Williams said. “Why don’t you want to tell them? It’s the fear of failing.

“When I was running track, my parents asked me what my goal was. I didn’t want to tell them my real goal because I was afraid I wouldn’t make it. I was protecting myself. When I say it, that goal puts you out there and pushes you to get it. So, yeah, the expectation here is to win and to win the right way with good grades, and with a different experience.”

Getting to know David Williams

It was during the 1972 teachers strike in Detroit that David Williams, then a schoolteacher, became enamored with labor law. Years later, after graduating from law school, Williams evolved into more of a tax law expert, but he never lost his curiosity and interest in labor. Given the continuing antitrust battles facing the NCAA, Williams shared his thoughts on athletes as employees and other topics:

On the NLRB decision that stopped short of calling Northwestern’s football players employees, even though an earlier ruling did define them as employees:
“I don’t believe college athletes are employees. I don’t think they should be. I followed the Northwestern case. I understand the NLRB’s initial ruling (that athletes are employees, which was subsequently overturned). The common law test that determines the employee-employer relationship goes to the concept of control. If I’m paying you and you’re working for me, you’re either an employee or an independent contractor. There’s not a third thing you could be. But here, that concept of independent contractor morphed into the student-athlete piece of nonemployee.”

On the antitrust cases against the NCAA:
“If your goal is amateurism, you might be allowed to come together under some rules that on its face may appear to be antitrust. But if the goal is purely commercial, you can’t do that. That whole concept of employee or not becomes: Is this student athlete a student? The distinction between college football and pro football lies in the fact that you’re watching students and you expect that they’re going to class and that they’re not getting paid. That’s what makes it unique. That’s the thing we have to be conscious of. At the beginning and at the end of this, these kids have to be students. And that’s what I worry about us losing. When we lose that, we’re going to have a lot of problems with labor and antitrust. Once the NCAA stops making rules that support ‘students-slash-amateurism,’ the courts are going to say, Why should we protect that?”

On the flood of legal challenges to the NCAA’s model:
“If we’re in a battle in college athletics, who is the other side? Who are we battling? The media? No. The fans? No. The athletes? No. Who is it? It’s the lawyers. In America, lawyers are very astute at following the dollars. Lawyers understand that’s where you go and that’s who you sue. … As a legal entity, nowhere in the world do we have concepts like medical malpractice except here. It all comes out of negligence. I owe you a duty of care, I breached that duty, and that duty caused you harm. That’s basic negligence. That’s something America made up. Now think about educational malpractice. If you’ve played here four years and you still can’t read, then I’ve breached that duty. If you’re living in poverty, has there been harm? If you connect those things, bam! It not only hurts the model, it also drives the lawsuit.”

                                                                                                         — Compiled by Michael Smith


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