you hafta compete!

The National Football League offensive lineman plays in the range between anonymity and blame. He fills your TV screen only when he jumps offside or gets beat in pass protection or comes back to the huddle with a wedge of sod in his faceguard. He never touches the football. It doesn’t hurt if he has an active brain, but the job mostly rewards size and strength, holding his ground against 300-pound snorters who are bigger and faster than he is. One measure of his accomplishment in the NFL is that you don’t remember his name.

Larry Williams, the University’s new athletic director, toiled eight years in those pro football trenches. He had come to the NFL through Notre Dame, where he was twice All-American at guard and tackle, and was drafted by the Cleveland Browns. Williams almost touched the football with the Browns. Before a playoff game against the Colts, they had practiced this tackle-eligible play for a goal-line situation. Williams was to be eligible to catch a pass from Bernie Kosar. “It worked great in practice,” he says. “All week long. I was pumped. I’d thought about my end zone dance.”

So it’s game time at the old Cleveland stadium, and the field is a sheet of ice, with snow blowing in off Lake Erie. Late in the game, they call his play. Williams, number 70, reports to the ref before lining up at tight end. He’s going to catch a TD pass. The play develops just right. He slips off his block and leaks between the linebackers, wide open. “My hands are up. Kosar sees me. We make eye contact. Then he looks me off, and throws to a running back in the flat. The pass is intercepted! And the play is not over; I have a chance to make the tackle. I’m lumbering out in the open field, and I get just creamed. I had gone from anticipating glory to laid out on the ice with a badly sprained ankle.”

Those Cleveland Browns in the mid-1980s were good. Two years in a row they reached the AFC championship game against John Elway’s Denver Broncos. You remember those games. The first, at Cleveland, was the famously exhilarating or heartbreaking comeback by Elway. The Drive. The second, at Denver, Williams recalls as The Fumble. “We ran a trap, perfectly executed against a blitz package. Their cornerback blew his assignment, or he wouldn’t even have been in the play. He got a helmet on the ball, and Ernest [Byner] fumbled as he was crossing the goal line with the winning score.” Williams was that close to the Super Bowl. And to the football. “The ball was on the ground, right there. Just a yard away from me. But I had a guy lying across my legs. I couldn’t reach that ball. This is a recurring dream of mine...” Recovering himself, Williams says, “NFL line play is more technical than you’d think. You had to know where everybody’s supposed to be. What to do against this defense or that.” There were chalk talks. There was film to study. There was...religious instruction. “On the field you hear Reggie White introduce himself. I’m a preacher, he says. Like he’s a man of peace and good will. Next time up, Reggie says, I’m a preacher, you know. On third down and long, I’m a preacher, says Reggie, and you’re about to see God.”

So there was lots to learn, but those off-the-field skull sessions were taught to the lowest level. “Once you’ve got it,” Williams says, “you’ve got it. After college, I was used to really studying.” Not given to idleness, Williams enrolled in evening classes at Cleveland State Law School. When he went to the Chargers as a free agent, he finished law school at the University of San Diego. Then he helped negotiate player contracts with NFL clubs.

His toughest individual match-up in the NFL?

“Howie Long,” he says. “Howie was so quick off the blocks. And sooooo strong. He’d come at you low, and you couldn’t get leverage on him.” Williams, in his Chiles Center office, stands to demonstrate. His hands are at belt level, fending off a conference table as if to hurl it through the window. “Howie Long.”

Firsthand encounters with these bruisers led to four reconstructions of his left shoulder, but Williams emerged from pro football relatively intact. It was time to find another career while his knees worked. Williams practiced business law — mergers and acquisitions — for an Indianapolis-based firm for six years before returning to Notre Dame to direct the licensing and marketing program. It’s hard to imagine the Fighting Irish needing help with branding, but his boss at the time — one Father Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C. — credits Williams with turning that program around.

Father Bill, in his new post as the University of Portland’s president, wrote recommendations and called other presidents when Williams began casting about for a different challenge. Just last spring, Williams, still only 41, was in the final stages of the athletic director search at John Carroll University, in Ohio. He called Father Bill to tell him, to thank him, and the wheel of career fortune took a sharp spin. Joe Etzel had just tendered his resignation as AD on The Bluff. Would Larry take a look at the University of Portland?

“He’s smart,” says Beauchamp. “He’d practiced law. He’s a man of great integrity, with no tolerance for laziness. He’s a family man. He has competed at the highest level, and he wants to win the right way.” Beauchamp flew Williams to the campus for a whirlwind series of meetings with deans, faculty, staff, alumni, and trustees. “Ordinarily we’d form a committee and conduct a search. But here was a man with all the values we’re interested in, and he was about to get away. We offered him the job.” Williams accepted on the spot.

Here’s a story. It might not be completely true. The story comes from Gerry Faust’s Tales from the Notre Dame Sidelines. Faust, the football coach, wanders into The Grotto on campus one winter day just seeking a little quiet time and sees there a girl, praying. They strike up a conversation. The girl is a freshman, from southern California. An Indiana winter can be hard on a girl from California, and she is homesick. Faust has a freshman football player from California, and maybe, he says, this guy could give her a call sometime. She says O.K. The football player — eager to please the coach, thinking he is performing some kind of charity — invites the girl to a party and ends up escorting the fabulous Laura Lee, All-American tennis player, through four Indiana winters and into what has become 19 years of marriage.

“It’s sort of true,” says Williams. “I knew who she was. I’d thought wow...” How could he not know who she was, this heart-stoppingly-gorgeous athlete? How could Laura Lee be lonely, or not booked? “It was awkward, but I did give her a call. Turns out she was not a bit stuck up. And we did have in common this wonder about frozen South Bend. We became great friends.”

Mornings these days find Williams juggling game and practice schedules, reviewing academic performances and lining up transportation for student athletes. That’s before he leaves home for work. Laura Lee drives a 15-passenger Ford Econoline van for her and Larry’s high-octane, larger-than-average kids and their friends. Kristin, 18, stepped right into Jesuit High School varsity basketball this winter, and is headed for Boston College in the fall. Sean, 16, was a sophomore pass-rusher on the Jesuit football team. Scott, 14, is a CYO quarterback. Eric, 11, can’t stop fidgeting with ball or bat, always competing against older kids. And Louis, 6, a surprise addition to this family, “is our joker,” Williams says. “Louis will come down the stairs with a big smile, looking for mischief. “Football?” Louis says. “That game where you run into each other? Why would you want to do that?”

Williams glows, talking family. All of these kids are top students, and this is a competitive crowd. “The jab,” he says, “is an acceptable form of communication. Self-satisfaction gets punctured right away. They’ll go around the table, picking on one person at a time.” Williams, here, is the guy who can’t beat their mom at tennis. “But I’m still bigger than they are.”

Williams works out six days a week and steps across campus now at 6’5”, 265 pounds, 45 pounds less than his NFL playing weight but erect and somehow larger in a coat and tie. He strides into the faculty dining hall like the Queen Elizabeth II into Portland harbor. He’s only been here since last summer, but he knows everybody’s name, apparently relishing the friendly digs and greetings and the opportunity to hold the door open for the next person. Jovial and approachable, blue eyed and balding, he is evidently a laid-back regular guy, only way bigger. He’s so personable, so likeable, you could miss the competitive fire — a furnace, really — that burns within.

Back at his office, Williams is focused on men’s basketball. The roundballers have just returned from a lost weekend in California, where they were out-scored by 34 points and opened WCC play 0 and 2. Williams is unhappy.

“We got blasted,” he says. It’s not that the Pilots lost. What steams him is how they lost. “We didn’t compete,” he says. Competing has little to do with talent and everything to do with wanting it more than the other guy. “You have to compete,” he says, with an explosive p!, and that second syllable comes at you like a projectile. He’s into basketball not just because it’s January. “American culture speaks basketball,” he says. “Men’s basketball gets the most press, and where else can we gather a thousand students at a time?” He also has high regard for Coach Michael Holton and the young players Michael has brought in. The Pilots were a pre-season pick to finish last in the league, but Williams thinks they can compete. His job is to kick the flywheel of enthusiasm by energizing students and fans, putting people in the seats. “We have to fill this place,” he says, of the Chiles Center, where the difference between 1,000 fans and 3,000 fans is the difference between sleep and frenzy. “Rock the building. Let these guys feel what it means to compete.” Williams has initiated “marquee events” for attracting first-time fans — such things as “Blackout Nights” for soccer and basketball, when the whole neighborhood is invited and raucous students, stomping and chanting, fill their quarter of the arena to the rafters. Williams, at these games, doesn’t sit. The seats aren’t made for a man his size, nor can they hold a man of his intensity. He roams. He works the crowd. Here he massages a sponsor. There he quizzes a season ticket holder about what we could do better. Then you’ll see him watching from a balcony railing, so agitated he’ll need a shower after the game. Is everybody having fun? That’s the main thing at his house. And competing. “You throw a party, you better deliver the athletic performance,” he says.

He appreciates the good work of Joe Etzel, but he’s aware, too, that any new leader has a rare opportunity to push the whole athletic program to the next level. The next level is where Pilot women’s soccer is now, recruiting kids from all over the country, feeding national teams, feeding World Cup teams, competing for the NCAA title, making the University known internationally.

“We have distinct advantages here,” says Williams. “We have a great campus. Portland is a sizeable community, and we’re competing against fewer professional and Division I teams than, say, in the Bay Area.” Overall, down the road, Williams aspires less toward Gonzaga than to the Stanford model, with dominance in many different sports — some of which, like varsity women’s crew, don’t exist on The Bluff yet.

First things first, he knows. Build your identity around a few key programs, and bring the others along. But you like a guy thinking big. You like a guy who expects to compete! at the highest level.

— Robin Cody