Stepping Up

Oct 25, 2009 (The Philadelphia Inquirer - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- ZZHQD | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- The visitors' locker room at Madison Square Garden is not much bigger than the NBA's three-second lane.

It's a box.

The ceilings are low; the walls seem closer every minute. And on this mid-October evening, to 76ers rookie Jrue Holiday, it's probably not just the walls that seem to be closing around him.

It's a few minutes after the Sixers have beaten the New York Knicks in a preseason game, one in which Holiday did not play, and the locker room is steamy, sweaty, and filled with twice as many people as could comfortably fit.

Lou Williams, sneaking through, fresh from his shower, passes Holiday. Williams must smell the disappointment and frustration radiating from Holiday like cologne -- you can't help but notice -- because, holding his towel tight, Williams turns to his teammate: "We'll talk on the bus."

Holiday nods, noncommittal.

"No," Williams repeats, "we will talk on the bus."

"All right," Holiday says.

Wasn't it recently that Williams stood where Holiday stands: a cast-aside rookie, stewing at the end of an NBA bench?

It seems that way, yes, but it's been years.

Now, Williams is the guy consoling the rookie, the guy offering not hollow words of sympathy, but actual empathy, advice borne from success. He's been in Holiday's pool of embarrassment and he swam his way out.

There is hope.

Four years after Williams was shipped to

the NBA Development League, four years after he appeared in fewer than half of the Sixers' games, four years after he was forced to wear a suit on the sidelines, inactive, Williams has been given the keys to the car and told to drive: He is the starting point guard for the Philadelphia 76ers.

Williams' assignment will officially begin Wednesday, when the Sixers open the regular season at the Orlando Magic.

A month into Williams' rookie year of 2005-06, he was shipped to Fort Worth, Texas -- a wide detour from the NBA -- where he played three games in the D-League. He appeared in 30 of the Sixers' 82 games, averaging 4.8 minutes in the games he did play.

When Williams, a slight 6-foot-2, decided to jump straight from South Gwinnett High School in Snellville, Ga., to the NBA, he had a realistic, three-year plan for his NBA career: He told his high school coaches he aimed to play eight to 12 minutes a game the first season, 12 to 16 minutes the second, and become a daily contributor by the third.

That first NBA season, even those modest goals looked like skyscrapers in the distance.

He was, according to teammate Andre Iguodala, "just a little boy hanging out with the big guys. It was like you see parents who are drinking and you hang around them and want to do what they do. He was like that."

Added Iguodala: "He always had game, though."

Laughing, Iguodala equated Williams' rookie season to Like Mike, a 2002 flick starring Williams' friend, Bow Wow. In the movie, Bow Wow stars as a 14-year-old whose magical sneakers elevate his game to the NBA level.

"Except," Iguodala said. "Lou didn't actually play."

"Yeah, that's fair," Williams said when asked about the comparison. "You take an 18-year-old and you put him around these guys with all this money and fame and Bentleys and he's never seen this stuff."

Idol worship

Williams, drafted out of South Gwinnett with the 45th pick of the 2005 NBA draft, said Allen Iverson, then the Sixers' point guard, was his idol.

Expecting to be a first-round pick, Williams did not work out for the Sixers.

"From what we heard, in his workouts he was just getting manhandled," said Sixers assistant general manager Tony DiLeo, part of the crew responsible for drafting Williams.

"It was hard for him that first year, because he was the man that whole time in high school," DiLeo said. "Even though he was disappointed inside, he was never a problem."

DiLeo said Williams was probably consoled because he could look at Iverson -- and subsequently Iverson's replacement, Andre Miller -- and say, 'OK, I'm not playing, but that's Allen Iverson.'

"Anything A.I. did, I was like 'Wow,' " said Williams, making goggles with his hands. "My eyes were this big."

Williams watched as Iverson ate poorly, slept little and still filled the stat sheet each night. Williams watched, yes -- but he did not follow.

"I've never been a follower, but I've been an admirer," Williams said. "I'm not one of those guys who looks at what he's doing and says, 'Maybe I should do that.' I say, 'He's doing that, that looks cool, but let me try it my way and see if that works.' I'm not easily influenced by a lot of people. I've heard people say that I survived the Allen Iverson era, whatever that's supposed to mean."

Schoolboy stardom

After that first season, Williams reluctantly returned home to Snellville, enriched with NBA culture but struggling on the court.

"I didn't really want to go home," Williams said. "I wanted to find somewhere else to live. You go from scoring 4,000 points at your high school, and they name the whole city, they nicknamed it 'LouWillVille' -- and you didn't necessarily represent? It's kind of tough to look those people in the eyes. But I was young -- I was 18 years old."

The next season, Williams, now 22, played in 61 games and averaged 4.3 points; the year after he played in 80 games and averaged 11.5 points; last season, he signed a five-year, $25 million contract extension, played in 81 games, and scored 12.8 points a game.

Folks in Snellville love Williams.

When he was at South Gwinnett, the people of Atlanta poured into the gym, many to witness the greatness of Louis Williams, the eventual 2005 Naismith Prep Player of the Year.

"I came to the conclusion that he was quite possibly the best high school basketball player I'd ever seen," said former University of Georgia basketball coach Dennis Felton, who received an oral commitment from Williams to play college ball, if he played college ball, for the Bulldogs.

"You might go to the game and be sitting next to Bow Wow or Michael Vick," Felton recalled. "It was a pretty wild scene."

Wilder still is that no matter to whom you talk, people at South Gwinnett remember a mature, sometimes shy, thoughtful kid, not an ego blown up the size of his reputation.

Williams said he's a different person on the court: "I'm kind of arrogant and cocky when I play. . . . It's kind of weird. It's like I have split personalities."

Mentor and driver

Roger Fleetwood, whom Williams calls his "white pop," coached Williams at South Gwinnett. For three years, Fleetwood drove Williams to school every day until Williams got a black GMC Yukon his senior year. ("My car was the community, high school, everybody-got-in car," recalled Williams.)

"I miss being around him more than watching him play," Fleetwood said. "I would pick him up, we'd talk on the way to school, I'd take him home every night. He's an old soul; he's from the '60s. Everyone gets the 'Yes, ma'am' and 'No, ma'am.' . . . If you can't like Lou, you can't like anybody."

When Williams was a 145-pound high school freshman, as explosive to the rim and agile as any in the country, Fleetwood, an old-school kind of guy, laid down the ground rules with his coveted guard.

Williams, as he did his rookie season with the Sixers and throughout his AAU career as a schoolboy, wore a headband when he played.

"We were walking out of the weight room and I said, 'You know you can't wear that headband with me. There are things I can't change on.' "

Williams nodded and never once -- in four years -- mentioned wearing a headband.

"If he'd have come up and asked me as a senior if he could wear it, I might have changed my rule," joked Fleetwood. "But he was too respectful for that."

Every high school summer, South Gwinnett went to team camp at Middle Tennessee State. They'd leave for camp at 5 a.m.

Williams, who liked pulling an all-nighter watching movies at a teammate's house the night before team camp, would ride with Fleetwood. Once, an exhausted Williams fell asleep.

"Out of nowhere, he has a nightmare, wakes up kicking and screaming and hitting the windshield," Fleetwood said. "He's totally blown his coop."

Immediately, Williams started laughing at himself -- a quality Fleetwood finds all too rare.

Williams knew this story before it was recounted to him. Fleetwood, who works Williams' summer camps each summer, has reminded Williams of it a thousand times.

"Whenever things go rough, I always get a little text message from him saying, 'Keep playing, keep shooting, don't worry about anything.' " Williams said. "Just a reminder that this guy is still coaching me even without trying."

Ask the people of South Gwinnett and they'll tell you Philadelphia hasn't seen the Lou Williams they saw. At first, he wasn't playing. Then later, he was told to score -- just score -- coming off the bench.

The Williams they know is a natural leader, blessed with a knack for knowing how to win games, able to make his teammates better.

Sixers coach Eddie Jordan and the organization must see some of this, too, because they allowed Miller, one of the NBA's most consistent point guards, to sign with the Portland Trail Blazers.

DiLeo even said the decision to draft Holiday was partly influenced by Holiday's size and style, meaning he could play alongside Williams, not instead of Williams.

"I loved his personality," Jordan said of Williams. "He has leadership qualities -- once he starts to branch out and get more confident."

"I think in his mind, too, part of it was, 'I have to start to become more of a leader,' " said Sixers general manager Ed Stefanski. "He didn't feel being off the bench, being the guy who came in to score a lot of points, he could be the leader."

Team leader

This summer, South Gwinnett's former girls' basketball coach, Mike Allison, was in the gym with Williams around the time Miller signed with Portland.

"Lou said to me, 'They didn't bring back Miller,' " recounted Allison. "And I said right there, 'They have confidence in you,' and you could see it in his eyes, the difference, that they believed in him."

But do the fans following the Sixers have the same belief? It's here -- with this topic -- that Williams undergoes one of his aforementioned personality shifts, away from easygoing guy and into confident basketball player.

"I'm not going to be the guy that says, 'I'm the new point guard, look at me, look at me, put me on billboards and sell my jersey.' I'm not going to be him. I'm going to do my job. It's not hard to hear what people are saying. They make their opinions very well known. So I'm not going to volunteer myself to people who probably don't believe in me anyway."

Williams said he believes this is his first opportunity to show people he can lead a basketball team. He won't be Miller: slow, methodical, effective. He won't be Iverson: flashy, go-go-go.

"I know how to get to the point where I can help us win games. I do know how to do that. I don't know where I get it from. It's something I've been able to do all my life: figure out ways to win games. If that counts for anything in this city, then I'm sure people will respect that."

Added Williams: "For people to think I can't come in and fill Andre Miller's shoes -- Andre was a great player, but I was in a lot of those games at the end. . . . it wasn't just Andre Miller. I want people to understand that."

On that bus leaving Madison Square Garden, Williams talked to Holiday because he once was in Holiday's spot. Both were high school all-everythings, guys who had never seen the end of a bench.

Leaving New York City, Williams told Holiday this story:

"I told Jrue the first time I was put on the inactive list, I cried," Williams said.

Maurice Cheeks, then the Sixers' coach, asked Williams why he was crying.

" 'Because,' " Williams told Cheeks, " 'this is the first time anyone in my life has told me I can't play.' "

He now says, "I've always felt, with everything I do in life, that all I needed was the opportunity."

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Follow the 76ers all season, including video and Twitter updates, on Kate Fagan's blog, Deep Sixer,

at http://go.philly.com/sports.

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Contact staff writer Kate Fagan

at 856-779-3844 or kfagan@phillynews.com.

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