PALO ALTO, Calif. — Let’s start with the garbage. Piles of it, actually, inside Mirrielees House. There was no trash chute on each floor to streamline the removal process. Dorm residents had to tote their bags of refuse to the elevator or down multiple flights of stairs and then deposit said bags in the dumpsters outside. And it seems this was too much to ask. A compost heap sprouted in the space between the elevator doors and the passage to the dumpster, and not long after, stern official warnings were given about behavior that was just plain rubbish.
Advertisement
Ziaire Williams, not for the first time, saw opportunity in a place everyone else might prefer to avoid. He was a five-star forward and arguably the most talented recruit to matriculate at Stanford. He was also a freshman with a six-page essay on a random act of kindness hurtling toward its due date. So he found a big red cart. He wheeled it to the pile of garbage. He loaded the bags onto the cart and then pushed it to the dumpster and tossed them in. In those few minutes, he fixed an escalating crisis while giving himself the material for a paper he’d stay up until about 3 a.m. to finish.
This episode stayed between the essay’s author and his professor until Williams discussed it in a corner of Stanford’s practice gym in early November. He didn’t tell anyone, teammates included. It kind of offsets the “random” part of the kindness if he did. “I’m honestly glad they don’t know who did it,” Williams says of his fellow Cardinal.
It’s an incidental story, yes. Borderline hagiography? Maybe. But it happened. It happened because Ziaire Williams does the right thing. And here, right is not entirely a matter of empathy or morality; right, for him, is the product of self-awareness and opportunity. Clearing the dorm vestibule allowed him to fulfill an assignment. It was nice, and he does like to be nice to people. He probably wouldn’t make trash hauling a habit, though, so in the end Williams did a thing no one expected him to do because he calculated it to be right, for him, and this requires no validation after the fact.
One of the best freshmen in the country will play at a school not known for signing one of the best freshmen in the country, with hardly anyone around on campus and hardly anyone in the arenas, a future pro living a mostly anodyne existence. He’s led the other life before, mind you. Day after day of sound and fury. He also thinks he knows what the right thing to do is, and what he needs to throw away. “I like to be undercover,” Williams says. “Just a normal person. I’m not really too big on the whole fame and publicity part. I’m just me. This quiet space, the peace we have on campus, is exactly what I wanted. It’s like the perfect spot for me. Seriously.”
From a guy only a few months removed from participating in a high school basketball spectacle equivalent to the Beatles at Shea Stadium, repeated 30-plus times across the country, it sounds a little rich. There’s a story to that, though, which we’ll get to. For now, there’s Ziaire Williams, barely noticeable on the fringes at a Stanford workout, although there’s no choice in this matter either: He had a bike accident the day before. He was cold, so he rode with one hand on the handle and the other stuffed in his pocket. Then he hit a pothole. Jumping off at the last moment probably saved him from flipping over the front, head-first, but it nevertheless resulted in a banged-up knee swathed in a brace and a few days relegated to the sideline.
Advertisement
Still, he’s trying to be a part of something. As Williams walks by Keenan Fitzmorris, who’s shooting free throws between intrasquad scrimmage periods, he has a question. “Keenan,” the freshman asks the redshirt sophomore, “you’re not going to get your bag out for me today?” This draws a wide smile from the 7-footer with six career points. “It’s coming,” Fitzmorris replies. The pair small-talk until duty calls Fitzmorris back to the scrimmage. In another moment Williams hovers at the side of coach Jerod Haase, absorbing pointers as the Cardinal run through offensive sets. He blends in because he has to, but he probably would anyway. “He hangs out with us outside of practice just like he’s going to be here all four years,” junior forward Jaden Delaire says.
Williams will not be here all four years. If he is here all four years, something has gone cataclysmically wrong. He most likely will only be here for a matter of months because the combination of his build (a lithe 6-8 frame), skill set and production will make him the archetype of a modern wing and therefore a coveted draft commodity in 2021. “From a basketball perspective, he’s as talented as anyone I’ve ever been around, and I’ve been around a lot of great ones at Kansas and (North) Carolina, as a player and as a coach,” Haase says. “But he’s as talented as anyone I’ve ever seen.”
So why Stanford, and not, well, anywhere else? Maybe any other program that has appeared in any of the last six NCAA Tournaments, which Stanford has not? Or maybe another program that has produced more than one first-round draft pick since 2009.
It’s not a short answer. It may require some suspension of cynicism. Broadly? It’s about being compelled by a singular and specialized definition of what’s right, and consideration of how long he can rely on that.
He is the only child of Ziaire Williams and Marquita Fields-Williams, a Marine father and a mother who spent time in the Army and the Air Force before settling in Lancaster, Calif. That the younger Ziaire would have clarity on the concept of discipline is no surprise. It should be noted the Williams household was not a caricature; it’s probably fairest to say respect for others — and yourself, and who you represent — reigned paramount. When you met strangers, you stood so you could look them in the eyes and shake their hand. While confidence has been an issue for Williams for pretty much as long as he has walked this planet, he typically was coaxed out of the shell or the shell was smashed to pieces so he was left with no choice. To wit: He once wanted to order pizza for dinner, an idea green-lighted by his parents, provided he made the call to order it. It was a harmless teaching moment, a rep in human-to-human communication.
Advertisement
To little Ziaire, it felt like child endangerment. “I’d be like, Mom, can you please just order it, I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what to do,” he says. “She’s like, ‘Boy, you better order this damn pizza if you want it.'”
If there was any area of overemphasis, of outright intransigence about results, it was classwork. Whereas schools set a 2.0 GPA minimum for eligibility to play sports, the Williams household deemed that number unacceptably low. The bar was a B or better, in everything, upon threat of no basketball and no phone should any grade on any report card fall below that. “If you can’t be disciplined in the classroom, that transitions to other things in life,” Marquita says. “There’s no reason that’s not attainable.” Ziaire once received a failing grade on a test because his teacher asked students to write their name in the upper left corner and the date in the upper right corner; Williams stacked both in the upper right and couldn’t understand why this essentially negated his knowledge of the material demonstrated on the page.
“Well, these were the instructions,” Marquita explained to her son, “and you did not adhere to those instructions.”
It must be noted: Only once did Williams’ academics strain against the standard. He was a freshman at Sherman Oaks Notre Dame. He was not generally a fan of reading. His literary tastes leaned to “Captain Underpants” and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” His English class, meanwhile, leaned more to actual novels with actual words and themes. He struggled. He received a C. He did not immediately inform his parents, possibly because he thought they’d have simultaneous coronary episodes if they found out, and he was not too far off. Upon Marquita’s due-diligence check of the school’s grade portal — she is a juvenile probation officer now, after all — she discovered the grade. Based on her reaction, her co-workers asked her what was wrong, as if she’d endured some shocking personal tragedy.
Ziaire pleaded his case, arguing it had been a tough adjustment to a new school on a social level, and the more challenging curriculum compounded the problem. He then received his orders from his mother: Ask his English teacher what he could do for extra credit to raise the grade. Arrange outside tutoring to help with the class. And never, ever let this happen again. “That was the first and last time I ever got a C on my report card,” Ziaire says.
When he was bored of being a soccer goalie and the time came to get serious about basketball, the discipline followed there as well. But it was more about respecting your natural gifts by not wasting them. The elder Ziaire Williams, who played at Antelope Valley College before entering the Marine Corps, established a backyard regimen of cone drills and push-ups that was in place by the time young Ziaire was 8. By the time he was 10, his father was fibbing about his age in order to get his kid into a 24 Hour Fitness at 5:30 a.m. for shooting workouts. A car ride back from an AAU event in Arizona became a four-hour, one-way screed about how poorly Ziaire had played in a blowout championship game loss and what he needed to do better. He was a sixth-grader. “He’s walked into team huddles and said how soft I was, and how much of a punk I was,” Williams says of his father. “He yells at me at the free-throw line during games. He’s my biggest supporter and my biggest hater, for sure. I tell him that all the time. No matter what anybody says about me — the coaches, just random people, the media — none of that can faze me. I’ve been through it all, and I’m glad I did.”
What sounds like over-parenting also might be rationalized as just another way to get the kid to stand up straight when he met someone, or to get him to order the damn pizza. There has been and always will be that right way to do things, should you want to wind up anywhere near where you want to be. In the basketball context, that led to an ascent from tantalizing prospect to unequivocally elite by the end of his junior year of high school, by which point he’d battled through a hip injury that cost him a chunk of his sophomore season to become a 27-point, 10-rebound, three-assist force for Sherman Oaks Notre Dame, to take a step up in club play and join the Oakland Soldiers of the EYBL, to win a gold medal with Team USA in Greece at the U19 World Cup and to land in the top 10 of the Class of 2020 rankings by the time the summer ended.
Advertisement
The shift to Sierra Canyon and the willful dive into celebrity — the sort of thing Williams says he’d rather avoid — created in large part by the presence of Bronny James makes sense in that basketball context, given the company Williams would keep and the platform he’d play on. Anonymity was a trade-off. There were other factors: Marquita says the family was startled when Notre Dame’s coach introduced them to a longtime friend after one game … and the friend happened to be an agent. Matt Sargeant, a former Princeton player and the coach in question, says the connection didn’t even occur to him, that the “10 to 15” second chat involving a visitor from Chicago wasn’t premeditated, but that he understood the family’s concerns. Whatever the particulars, the Williams family reevaluated. Next stop: Sierra Canyon. “Ultimately, the kid — who is a great kid, a fantastic kid who works really hard — got to have some pretty wonderful moments last year,” Sargeant says.
Williams (right) with Sierra Canyon teammates Zaire Wade (left) and Ryan Rifkind. (Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today)Williams traveled more than 20,000 miles, played in front of raucous crowds, won the California division championship he craved and built relationships with the likes of B.J. Boston and Zaire Wade and others along the way. That amounts to a singular, unrepeatable definition of the right thing to do, whatever drove it in the first place. And in the end it’s all somewhat incidental to the question at hand, the one we’ve walked up to but not quite answered: Why Stanford?
To get at that, totally, we have to peek inside Williams’ closet. There we’ll find two shoeboxes stuffed with handwritten letters.
The first is dated Aug. 1, 2019.
There are 364 others, one for each day that followed.
If you were one of Carol Haase’s five children, you understood the importance of building intimate, person-to-person connections. Of putting in the effort. There wasn’t a family seminar on the matter; Carol just was and is a letter writer. To this day, a short note from Mom usually shows up in the mail days after she visits.
The youngest of the clan, Jerod, picked up the habit. As it applied to a coaching career that began a couple of years after his playing days at Cal and Kansas ended, Haase believed taking a little extra time, showing a little more investment, might be a separator in the college basketball universe. As it happened, his first head coaching stop was UAB, and one of the first key prospects in his sights was a 6-9 forward named William Lee, a three-star, consensus top-150 prospect who had options that included multiple SEC schools. By the time Lee was coming to a decision, Haase had coached all of 64 college games and twice finished under .500 in Conference USA. He needed to make an impression.
Advertisement
So he wrote a 25-page letter to Lee.
By the end of his college career, Lee had scored almost 1,400 career points and UAB had enjoyed three 20-win seasons and two postseason berths, including an upset win of No. 3 seed Iowa State in the first round of the 2015 NCAA Tournament. Haase left UAB for Stanford midway through Lee’s career, but that sort of serves the point: Who knows if Haase would’ve had the option to leave without putting pen to paper to woo Lee? If Haase wasn’t a guy with a mother who treated thank you notes as sacrament? “Those personal touches,” Haase says. “She’s always emphasized doing that.”
Which brings us to five years later, and the pursuit of another wiry prospect with the potential to help change a place.
The air gets thin quickly when you go after someone like Williams. He’d come to Stanford’s basketball camp after his ninth-grade season and the coaching staff saw enough and knew enough to commence the relationship-building. Still, Williams’ surpassing talents eventually told on him, and everyone joined the chase. When Williams held off on a decision about where he’d play college basketball until after his senior season, it didn’t frustrate a Stanford staff that had doggedly recruited him from the start; it created an opportunity for one last push. Haase told Williams as much. This was it, Haase said. This was the final stretch. To commemorate the occasion, he told Williams he’d write him one letter, every day, for an entire year.
Back at the basketball offices, Haase gathered a stack of paper with Stanford letterhead. He figured out how to use Mail Merge to pre-date every page, starting on Aug. 1. He set the stack on his desk, and every morning when he arrived, he’d yank the next sheet off the top of the pile and spend five or 10 minutes writing a letter. Some were standard recruiting love notes, so to speak. Some highlighted what Stanford had to offer academically. Over time, Haase wrote about people he’d meet on campus, about whatever national holiday it might be and, befitting the son of an art teacher, he even doodled Ziaire Williams dunking a basketball. Every day, a new sheet and another letter, slipped into an envelope, 365 days of promises kept.
“There’s no formula for everybody,” Haase says. “You take each situation and be a little bit unique and different. I do think as recruiting has evolved over the years — technology, text messages, tweets, all of that stuff has become the norm. And I’m a little bit old-school, or old soul, to a certain extent, where I think it’s pretty neat to get a hand-written letter. I’ve always thought that’s a nice deal, and everybody’s gotten away from that. It is a way to set us apart. I don’t know if I would’ve sent 365 text messages that it would’ve had the same impact.”
Texts cannot be stuffed into a shoebox for posterity. Tweets are not tangible evidence of anything besides a fraction of a moment of thought. Williams is a hoarder by nature — he still has a soccer trophy he earned when he was 4 years old — so he’s inclined to keep stuff anyway. But while Williams held on to most of his correspondence from recruiting, the material from one school is collated apart from all the others, never to be discarded. He concedes he needed all the time he took, that he’d lean to North Carolina after his North Carolina visit or to USC after his USC visit. He also emphasizes that it was always the School of the Moment … or Stanford. There was a constant. And there was a reason for that. A person who somewhat ironically struggled with belief throughout his life has a year’s worth of it at his fingertips, should he ever need it.
Advertisement
“I’m not going to lie,” Williams says. “If I was ever recruiting a player, there’s no way I’d be able to send him a letter every day. Ever. It just showed me how much he really cared for me. Like that confidence factor — knowing he believes in me and he believes I can take his program to the next level.”
Right: That also is why Ziaire Williams is here.
He’s the highest-rated recruit in program history, so there’s nothing Williams is not expected to do at Stanford. He trained two or three times a day in Las Vegas last spring and summer in order to hone his playmaking at all three levels, hammering on the nuances; using two dribbles to create space, working on a post fade, improving his consistency from 3-point range. Ideally, he’ll have an answer for whatever matchup the defense presents, in a system that should amplify his strengths by creating driving angles. “Our offense is set up to expose the players that are going to be guarding him,” his teammate Delaire says. Moreover, Williams has wowed Stanford’s staff and players with his passing, which is critical. It not only helps fill the void left by Terry, who posted the second-most assists for the Cardinal last season, but it also gives teammates not-insignificant reassurance they won’t be bystanders.
“He doesn’t try to make every game or every practice the Ziaire Williams Show,” says senior Oscar Da Silva, a first-team All-Pac-12 forward last year. “He tries to make it the Stanford Men’s Basketball Show. That’s a very important factor in it. He makes the right passes. He anticipates well. He knows where guys are moving, where guys are going to be. He has a good sense of who wants the ball where. He has really good timing and reads situations very quickly. That facilitates your offense in every way.”
Similarly, Williams at least pays lip service to Stanford’s demands on the other end — this was the nation’s seventh-most efficient defense last year, per KenPom.com — as less of a challenge and more of an attraction. “A huge thing I’ve been trying to work on,” he says. If he can score while also being a savvy playmaker and responsible defender, he’ll check the last remaining boxes as a cultural fit across the board. He’ll have a good shot at navigating the paradox confronting players like him every winter, wherein it can’t be all about him while it is very much all about him. It’s a balance of audacity and humility trickier to achieve in a place such as Palo Alto; no one is inclined to be super impressed with you when they’re doing super impressive stuff themselves in all manner of pursuits around campus.
“He doesn’t see himself as this one-dimensional, I-want-to-get-to-the-league-and-make-money type of guy,” says Da Silva, who, not incidentally, is a biology major with a concentration on biochemistry and biophysics. “I saw an interview with him earlier this spring, after his commitment, where he said he certainly did want to go to the NBA and have a good career, but he wanted to do it his own way and wanted to blaze his own trail. I have a lot of respect for that. I kind of admire that, because it speaks to his uniqueness. You’re not going to find a ton of top-five guys that are quite like him.”
Williams is expected to be a top pick in the 2021 NBA Draft. (Hannah Foslien / Getty)Should all go well, Williams goes to the NBA in 2021. This part cannot be romanticized. The end was in sight before he stepped on campus. If you’d like, debate the sincerity of considering what a school can do for you over a lifetime when you’re there for nine or 10 months. Williams credibly points to enervating conversations he has already had with venture capitalists and executives at massive corporations such as Walmart, made possible by his standing as a student at this university. He points to the kids in Lancaster who don’t have anywhere to go, really, if they want to play basketball and maybe get some tutoring while they’re there. He’d like to be in a position to build a place to change that. His mother says he talks about helping kids in foster care and aiding them in their transitions to new families. So, yes, Ziaire Williams has some plans.
Advertisement
Why is he here? It’s a question put to him in so many words. Upon hearing it, Williams lifts his left arm and extends his left index finger and directs your attention to the far side of the gym.
“You see that right there?” he asks.
It’s impossible to miss. It’s a massive sign on the practice facility wall. It reads: “STANFORD. NOT A FOUR YEAR DECISION BUT A LIFETIME DECISION.”
As if to underscore the point, Williams recites every word on the sign.
“Man, it’s the best of both worlds,” he says. “I’m just trying to take advantage of everything I have.”
Ziaire Williams is, at heart, a daredevil. A first-car-of-the-roller-coaster guy. He once broached the idea of skydiving, but his parents responded with a hard no. He loves nothing more than to be on a jet ski; after he rode in tandem with his father on a family vacation in Hawaii years ago, he was hooked. The rush was too provocative to resist. He has since graduated from riding with his arms wrapped around Dad’s waist to whizzing along with his feet on the handlebars. (There are videos, Marquita says, in case anyone needs proof.) He crashes into the wake of passing boats entirely on purpose.
It’s about what you’d expect from the boy who understands the value of order but occasionally and harmlessly rebels against it. If he’s to sate the insurgent part of him, he has to hit the water, where he alone is in control, and go full throttle.
“It just takes your mind off everything,” Williams says. “It’s just you and the jet ski and the waves and the wind pushing against you. It’s a weird sensation. Just adrenaline and endorphins releasing out of your body. And I love speed. I’m out there just enjoying the ocean. It’s a pretty dope thing.”
Of course this makes complete sense. When he points the nose of a jet ski into a ridge of wake waves, he’s charging into a space of some uncertainty without trepidation. He’s going where he’s not supposed to go.
Advertisement
That’s the thrill of it. And it feels right.
(Photo: Hannah Foslien / Getty Images)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kWpwbGhgbXxzfJFpZmppX2aGcMbImqCrnV2stq24yJqkrGWjqa6vss6rm2avmKS5pnnCqKyrrF8%3D