News
July 5, 2012
Chris O’Leary
Edmonton Journal
(Edmonton) Before the Edmonton Eskimos took to the field to open their season on Saturday, Kavis Reed and Kit Lathrop had to make a tough, tough sell.
Reed, the Eskimo Head Coach, and Lathrop, the team’s Assistant Head Coach and Defensive Line Coordinator, sat down with defensive end Julius Williams and floated an idea.
The idea was to have the six-foot-two, 265-pound, Decatur, Ga., native sit out of the Eskimos’ Canadian Football League season opener against Ricky Ray and the Toronto Argonauts. Williams had missed a large chunk of training camp with a hip flexor issue and had just the week leading into the team’s season opener to get his body up to speed.
“It was tough, I’m not even going to lie,” Williams said. “Coach Kavis and coach Kit were talking with me a lot, and I wanted to play.
“It’s about being a professional. They talked to me and told me, ‘It’s a long season and we’d rather have you miss one game than miss four or five because you go out and re-aggravate something, or you’re not ready and go out and you mess something up.’
“So it was definitely them understanding and being a professional and knowing that we had other guys at the camp that can come out and make plays in my absence. When we talked about that, it was OK to sit.”
Big picture aside, sitting out of games goes against Williams’ nature. The 25-year-old had plenty of reasons – four, to be exact – to be on the Eskimo injured list down the stretch of the 2011 season, his first in the CFL.
“I had a tweaked ankle, a cracked rib, I had a chipped bone in my wrist,” Williams said, laughing about his hobbled state last fall.
“All types of stuff going on.”
The fourth ailment – the only thing that managed to turf him last year – was a dislocated elbow that he suffered in training camp.
Even that grotesque injury didn’t slow him like it might have. He missed the first three games of the season and was in uniform three full weeks ahead of schedule. He was an integral part of the Eskimos’ success on defence last year, recording 20 tackles and five quarterback sacks.
Williams’ toughness came from growing up in Decatur, a place that he said, “has come a long way,” since he was a kid there.
“I was always a rough kid. In the summertime I would wake up in the morning, maybe six o’clock and be out of the house by seven and I wouldn’t be back until 10 o’clock,” he said.
“I would get in all types of fights, play basketball, wrestle, fall and get hurt, come home bloody. I guess it’s my nature. I was always athletic, just a prideful guy and I didn’t let stuff keep me from doing what I want to do.”
Williams said there was plenty there to keep him from doing what he wanted to do.
“There were a lot of distractions, a lot of other stuff going on,” he said. “But kids like me, we kind of take sports as an anti-drug. We had gangs, a lot of violence and crime.
“For a little kid like myself, being athletic, I kind of use that you play sports, you’ve got buddies and you do stuff, to keep you away, keep your attention away from the negative stuff that’s going on around you.”
A natural athlete, Williams was dunking a basketball by the end of the sixth grade. On his way to a four-year career at the University of Connecticut (where he never missed a game), Williams crossed paths with coach Lee Carter, who was also Kavis Reed’s high school coach. Carter ingrained a saying on Williams that he lives by to this day.
“Give them hell when you’re well and be good when you’re hurt,” Williams said. “That’s the kind of thing that just stuck with me.
“There’s a difference between being injured and being hurt. You tweak your ankle and in my case, I’d cracked my rib, but I was still able to play. It was a little bit of pain, but as long as I felt like I could go out and get my job done, I felt like I could help the team.”
Having had his fill of the sideline in the Eskimo win over the Argonauts, Williams is ready to get into the action on Sunday when the Eskimos face the Saskatchewan Roughriders in Regina.
“That was a big win. That was another reason I wanted to be a part of it,” Williams said. “We needed a collective effort from everybody, but I wanted to put my two cents in as well. The good thing is, the guys went in and held it down without me. I’m happy to be back and be a part of such a good defence and to play my role.”
Williams isn’t worried about getting hurt on Sunday.
“Where there’s a will there’s a way. That’s something that my mom preached to me from a young age,” he said.
“When I get hurt now, if there’s a will for me to go out and play, if I want to do it, I can go out and do it, you know? Once the game starts, I don’t even feel it.”
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