WWHS ALUMNI PAGE
Danny Williams ('57)
Williams' Glory Days Recalled
Coach Van Meter calls former signal-caller "the best quarterback I ever had."
PHOTO CAPTION: HAPPY DAYS - Taking Christmas break from respective colleges, these four Woodrow Wilson High School athletes give the thumbs up sign in a 1959 photograph. From left are Robert "Froggy" Young, Walt Rappold, Howard Hurt and Danny Williams. Willliams died Wednesday in an Atlanta suburb after a long illness.The following article appeared in the Register-Herald on Dec. 15, 2000.
By MANNIX PORTERFIELD
Danny D. Williams, a gifted athlete who led Beckley to a state basketball crown and came within an eyelash of handing the Eagles a football title, died Wednesday in an Atlanta suburb after losing a two-year battle to pancreatic cancer.
He was 61.
Williams carved his niche among Woodrow Wilson High School athletic legends as a do-it-all quarterback with a rifle arm, and as a sensational center on the basketball court.
"He was No. 1," offered Jerome Van Meter, who coached Williams at the Beckley school in the 1950s.
"He was the best quarterback I ever had. I can't tell you anybody who was better than Williams. He had it all. He had the spirit and everything. He just had it all."
A daughter said Williams was stricken with the cancer two years ago, and at the time of the diagnosis his physician gave him only three months to live.
"But he beat that," said Shannon Williams from her Atlanta home.
Just over 5-foot-10, Williams was accustomed to beating the odds on the gridiron and the basketball court.
"He was an exceptional athlete," reflected Robert "Froggy" Young of Beckley, a teammate of his from the time the two were students at the old Institute Elementary School.
Young and Williams played together from grade school on to Beckley Junior High and eventually at WWHS.
"I would have to say he probably was as good an athlete as I have ever seen," said Young, the starting halfback for the Eagles.
"He excelled in football, basketball and track. In track, he was the guy who anchored the relays.
"I have to give him a lot of credit. He made me a better athlete, because I was always competing with him. I wanted to be as good as he was."
Williams helped the Flying Eagles capture the state Class AAA hoop title in 1957, dazzling foes with an unbeatable one-hand jump shot.
"You ever watch Billy Karbonit play?" Young asked referring to the versatile Eagle whose clutch layup the final seconds handed undefeated WWHS the basketball crown against Weirton in the finals at Morgantown.
"You know how he was, an all-around athlete? Danny was in that category."
Williams possessed a slingshot arm and directed Beckley to what might have been a perfect football season in his senior campaign, but the Eagles were upended by Charleston on a controversial play.
A wizard at disguising handoffs, Williams baffled officials on three occasions with the deftness of a magician, but one such sleight-of-hand in the Mountain Lions contest proved costly.
Faking twice near the goal line, Williams waltzed into the end zone but an official blew the whistle prematurely after seeing a fullback dive into the line empty-handed.
End of play. End of touchdown. End of Beckley's title hopes.
"It was an inadvertent whistle," Young recalled. "They called the play back. That cost us the state championship."
Williams was at the helm in another controversy that season in a game with rival Princeton.
Toward the end, Doug Lewis exited the huddle and made a beeline for a Tiger defensive player, triggering a melee that prompted officials to ban play between the rivals for two decades.
"I've never seen anything like it," Young said. "All the police had left who were there to take care of the crowd. It was quite a brawl."
Williams was a skilled punter, specializing in quick kicks. He averaged 40 yards per punt. In his junior and senior years, his offense surpassed 1,700 total yards. In two campaigns, he returned a dozen punts for 137 yards and ran back a like number of kickoffs for 244 yards.
Young followed his former quarterback's career when Williams moved into the college circuit to call signals for West Virginia University under Coach Art Lewis.
Even though he had played in backfield with him for years, Young was always amazed at his childhood buddy's prowess when he donned a Mountaineer uni form, choosing WVU over 39 other schools in pursuit of him.
"He made one of the darndest plays I've ever seen one time," Young mused.
On a rollout pass pattern, the right-handed Williams sped to the left of the formation under intense pressure, shuffled the ball into his left hand, and uncorked a beauty, Young noted.
"I've never seen a quarterback put the ball in his other hand and complete a pass like that," he said.
"That was some kind of play."
Williams had a penchant for improvising when the heat was on, he noted.
"I haven't stayed in touch with him," Young said. "I knew he had been sick. But I didn't realize it was quite that serious."
As he has done with many of the athletes he coached, Van Meter renewed the old friendship with Williams when he and his late wife moved to Florida for retirement.
"We visited back and forth," the Gray Eagle recalled.
In one such visit, Van Meter took him fishing in an area so remote the two spied an alligator lurking in midstream.
"What are you going to do?" Williams asked.
"I'm going to run over the s.o.b.," the coach replied. "And we did. That was stupid. When you hit an alligator like that, 99 out of 100 of them will go down. But what if it hadn't? It was a pretty good-sized boat.
"I wouldn't do that again. That was awful. But we did catch some pretty nice fish."
Van Meter said his high school prodigy never posed any problems when he coached him.
"He was one of those guys you didn't have to gab at him," he said.
"He'd just say, 'What you want me to do, coach?' and he'd do it. I never had any problems with Danny Williams. I wouldn't have traded him for anybody."
Another ex-Beckley athlete, Buster Williams, remembers the late quarterback for his benevolence toward underclassmen.
Williams (no relation to the quarterback) was four years behind him, and in that era, as now, upperclassmen tended to exude an air of condescension toward younger students.
"Danny was always nice to us guys," he said.
"We didn't mean anything to him, but he always took time to be polite. We looked up to him and admired him. He set a real good example for us. He just reached out to us. Danny was somebody who took the time to be nice to us."
While the all-star athlete was ending his schoolboy career, Williams was only in the ninth grade, playing all sports, but the kindness displayed him evolved into an enduring friendship between the two.
"I was just intrigued by him as a young guy," Williams said. "And we became real good friends as adults."
Williams retired after 31 years with the Secret Service, guarding such luminaries as Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.
Nowadays, he works with the Inspector General's Office on Social Security fraud.
"I've been watching him die the last two years," he said of his fellow Beckleyan.
"Never once did he even acknowledge he had one bit of pain. He had no fear of dying. That was the most incredible thing about it. I would have died of self-pity. He never whimpered one time. He was a man's man."
Williams remembered his friend as the prototype of the American success story.
His mother died in his boyhood, while his father eked out a modest living delivering for a soft drink bottling firm in Beckley, he said.
"It was a nice success story," he said.
"He was the starting quarterback at WVU four years. We'd all go to the high school games and holler at him. That was in the good ol' days, when everybody knew everybody in town. Danny treated us all special."
Williams owned a couple of Harley-Davidson motorcycles and loved nothing better than an outing of golf, his friend recalled
"He could hit a ball 340 yards, sometimes the last 20 in the woods," Williams laughed.
"We played a couple of times with Mickey Mantle. Danny could hit the ball as far as Mickey Mantle. That was incredible."
Other survivors include children Cary L. Williams of Huntington Beach, Calif., Danny D. Williams II of Buckhannon, David Lee Williams of Tucker, Ga., and Teresa Knight of Buckhannon; and a brother, Jack Williams of Beckley.
The funeral is scheduled Saturday at 2 p.m. at Bill Head Funeral Home, with Dr. John W. Wyatt officiating. Burial will be in Melwood Cemetery at Stone Mountain.
A member of Tucker First Baptist Church, Williams was a retired sales representative for Novartis Pharmaceutical Co. and lived in Tucker, a suburb of Atlanta.
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