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Sports take Stivers hall-of-famer to ‘good places’

Staff photo by Ron Alvey/Ron Alvey Bobby Claude Williams, a Dayton resident, reflects on his life while going through his scrapbook.

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By Tom Archdeacon, Staff Writer Updated 9:49 PM Sunday, October 10, 2010

He’s proof there is truth in advertising.

“My younger brother (Charles) used to take my clippings from Tennessee into school and show Coach Sullivan,” Bobby Williams said in reference to Stivers High assistant football coach Joe Sullivan.

“My brother would tell him I could help the Tigers ... and Coach would always tease, ‘You can’t play football in Tennessee; there are too many hills.’ ”

Whether you want to call it turning those Rocky Top mountains into runty little molehills — or, more aptly, opposing ballcarriers into flattened grease spots — Bobby Williams played some standout football in eastern Tennessee in the mid-1950s.

From his little town of Crab Orchard — where his dad had loaded timber on freight cars, his mom worked in a diner and he picked strawberries and beans — he went to nearby Homestead High where he won all-Eastern Tennessee honors.

Finally, after his junior season down there — he’d been living with friends and coming to Ohio for parts of three winters and springs — he moved to Dayton, joining the rest of his family who lived in two rooms of a rooming house at Clay and Richards, not far from Stivers.

With no money and few friends here, Williams said he took up boxing to “keep people from picking on me and my brother.”

Although it would work out in the end — especially when you hear what will happen today — it began on quite a black-and-blue note.

“I’d started boxing at the Boys Club, and my first fight ended up being in the Ohio AAU Tournament,” he said. “I was just supposed to be the (welterweight) alternate, but the night before the fight, Otis Glover went home and ate a big steak and then couldn’t make weight. They put me in against Don Hollinger, the national AAU champ, and I got knocked out.”

Williams vowed that never would happen again, and in nearly 30 amateur fights — including several later in the Air Force where he was known as “Killer” Williams and finished second in the U.S. Air Forces in Europe Championships — he lost only two other bouts, both on close decisions.

He was just as dominant for Stivers on the football field his senior season. As a 160-pound offensive guard and linebacker, he won All City honors and watched his status grow in school.

“All of it was due to sports,” Williams said. “They’ve been a big part of my life and taken me to a lot of places.”

He was talking about more than just Tennessee to Dayton. From Stivers, he got a scholarship to Central State, where he was the only white on the historically black university’s team and, though he was there just one season, he learned some race lessons firsthand.

He spent eight years in the Air Force — a considerable part of it living in France, both in Paris and Versailles — then became an athletic trainer at CSU, got a sports scholarship to the University of Dayton, was a recreation leader in Turkey, a Dayton city schools teacher and multisport coach. He also guided the Wright State wheelchair basketball team to an intercollegiate championship.

Talk about going places.

And today, sports will take the 71-year-old Williams to one more special destination. This afternoon — at a gala luncheon emceed by Don Donoher and Bill Hosket — he’ll be inducted into the Stivers Athletic Hall of Fame.

Lessons in race

Among the 17 who wil be enshrined, there are athletes who played on an Ohio State national championship football team, in the NFL, were successful high school and college coaches, and even one who was an accomplished gymnast for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

But none has had a more diverse career than Williams.

Coming out of Stivers, he said he chose Central State over Furman University in Greenville, S.C., because it was close to home and “everyone there treated me so nice.”

The fact that he was the only white Marauder didn’t faze him: “Where I grew up in Cumberland County (Tennessee) it was all white and, by never being in the situation, I never got a chance to be prejudiced.”

He certainly found out about it quick enough, though.

“We played at Morgan State in Baltimore, and when we got there I went off to get something to eat, and a couple of the guys went with me,” he said. “At the restaurant I walked into, the guy says, ‘We’ll serve you, but your friends have to get theirs to go.’ I’d never seen anything like that before, and we all just left.”

The next day, he got a racial introduction from the other side. Morgan State is a predominately black school, too, and he said its players had his picture up in their locker room.

He started laughing as he remembered the game: “I was easily spotted, and they tried to kill me. On one play, a punt, I got knocked down three different times.”

With his father laid off, he left school to work and then joined the Air Force, where he played football until he blew out his knee in a game in Germany. After that he became a trainer.

But he made his biggest sports name in the Air Force as “Killer” Williams.

“I was doing Muhammad Ali before Muhammad Ali,” he said with a laugh. To make his point, he pulled out a newspaper clipping from one of his bouts.

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