Williams runs ahead of past failures

Photo by Clay Owen

Tennessee track star Rubin Williams laces up his track shoes during a practice session last Wednesday at Tom Black Track. Williams, who has more SEC and NCAA championships than any other Tennessee athlete in school history, had to persevere through two years’ worth of college entrance exams before finally qualifying.

Photo by Clay Owen

Tennessee track star Rubin Williams laces up his track shoes during a practice session last Wednesday at Tom Black Track. Williams, who has more SEC and NCAA championships than any other Tennessee athlete in school history, had to persevere through two years’ worth of college entrance exams before finally qualifying.

Photo by Clay Owen

Tennessee’s Rubin Williams, left, practices relay baton handoffs with teammate Kyle Stevenson at Tom Black Track last Wednesday.

Patience is a required virtue for a sprinter. Its first cousin, perseverance, comes in handy, too.

You devote your existence to your sport, body and soul. Month upon month. And improvement, when it comes at all, comes in barely measurable increments.

Two hundredths of a second, say.

Rubin Williams is fine with that agenda.

He is an SEC and NCAA champion in the 200 meters. He has more All-America certificates (14) than any University of Tennessee male track and field athlete ever.

He's not done yet. His final outdoor season is just getting serious as the Vols head to Auburn for the SEC championships that begin on Thursday.

And Williams graduated Friday with a degree in journalism and electronic media.

What he went through in order to accomplish all of the above is a lesson in patience and perseverance.

"It's pretty unique," said UT coach Bill Webb.

Way back in 2002, Williams was a senior star at Valley Christian High School in San Jose, Calif. The recruiters were lined up.

One slight hitch.

"My GPA didn't match with SAT scores," Williams said. "I had to retake the SAT a couple of times."

Only it wasn't just a couple of times.

The long road

For two long years, Williams retook the test every time it came around. He stayed at home with his mother, Blynthia. He trained at a nearby junior college. He worked a graveyard shift loading trucks.

He counts nine tries at the SAT and two or three at the ACT.

"It was very frustrating," Williams said. "I thought it was going to take one or two tests. I didn't think it was going to take two years."

He had options. The convenient route would have been a junior college. He took a couple of classes at one, but never enrolled full time.

"I just knew I wasn't a junior-college athlete," he said. "I wanted to experience four years at a Division One school."

So he kept plugging away. Train, load trucks, retake the test.

Over time, the college recruiters forgot about Williams. But he kept training and even competing.

He used some of his paycheck to travel to meets on the West Coast. He ran unattached against world-class professionals.

"We'd drive or fly to meets," Blynthia Williams said. "Whatever it took, we did it."

Turning pro was another option. Williams figured he was fast enough to earn at least a modest living.

"I saw the bigger picture," he said, "to get my degree. My dream was to be a college graduate."

Train, load trucks, retake the test.

"After test five or six I just wanted to throw everything in and forget about it," Williams said. "But my mom, my high school coaches, my family, they were like my backbone."

'We passed'

Then one day in May 2004, Williams saw another test-results envelope in the mail.

Bingo. He had his score.

"He called me at work," Blynthia Williams said. "He said, 'Mom you won't believe it.'

"I said, 'Did we pass?' Because at that point it was beyond just Rubin. It was 'we.' And he told me we passed."

They went out to dinner to celebrate. The weight off his chest, Williams started calling schools. One of the recruiters Williams liked was Vince Anderson, then the sprints coach at Tennessee. Yes, Anderson said, UT was still interested.

Anderson ran it by Webb. Track scholarships are precious. Webb called former Olympic decathlete Chris Huffins, who coached at Cal-Berkeley.

"He gave me a very strong recommendation," Webb said. "He said Rubin was the real deal."

Williams visited several Pac 10 schools but decided to come east and look at UT. School was already out of session. There wasn't much going on around campus.

"It was probably my worst trip," he said, "but there was something about the school and the town that I liked."

So he enrolled in the fall of 2004. He was a college freshman, finally, at 21.

Looking back, he isn't bitter over the two years lost in limbo. They weren't lost at all in his mind.

"That was two years I needed," he said, "to grow up and figure out what I wanted to do.

"The other way, I wouldn't have really focused on school and track. It would have been the party life."

Webb thinks the two years on the outside was good for Williams as an athlete.

"He got hardened," Webb said. "He got a lot of really good competition. He's not seeing anything (in college) he hadn't seen before."

Future runs

With the same patience and perseverance that he used to get to Tennessee, Williams has shaved those hundredths of seconds off his time over the past four years.

Last summer he won bronze for the U.S. at the Pan American Games in Brazil. In March he won the NCAA indoor 200 title in 20.36 seconds, breaking Justin Gatlin's indoor school record.

With the SEC, NCAA and Olympic Trials coming up, Williams faces a daunting summer. The 200 is a loaded event, even at the SEC level.

Based on his past, don't count Williams out of anything. But in a sense, anything he accomplishes from here on is gravy.

For four years, he was a Division One athlete, and an excellent one at that. Besides, he earned his degree. On the first try, you could say.

Mother said it best:

"He had an ambition like I've never seen.''

Mike Strange may be reached at 865-342-6276.

© 2008, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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