It's all about KC for Williams
By KENT BABB Special to the News Herald

GOT IT - Linebacker Demorrio Williams (51) holds up the ball after recovering a fumble for the Atlanta Falcons. Williams, now a Kansas City Chief, is a former Kilgore College standout, and will be on the field here at R.E. St. John Memorial Stadium here on Saturday as a part of the coaching staff in the Rangers' spring game.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - The sun beat down on Demorrio Williams, and he prayed for rain. When the clouds gathered and answered his prayers, Williams stood in the Louisiana oil field and soaked in the relief.

Then he heard a voice. It was his boss, telling Williams and dozens of other contracted oil-field hands to keep working; this won't be an early night. Oil pipes were clogged, and the company that had hired Williams' outfit was losing money. They were going to work until the pipes were clear - rain, shine or by moonlight.

Williams was 18, a high school graduate desperate for money and one credit short of staying in college. He did what you do when you're from East Texas and have no college education: He worked from daybreak to dark in filth and muck, clearing oil pipes and assembling drills and derricks - and $8 an hour wasn't bad money for someone without a firm grasp on a future.

"Ain't nothing good about it," Williams says now. "But I thought buying a nice car, that'll make you known and popular and stuff like that. I wanted to get me a Cadillac."

Nearly a decade after leaving the oil fields for good after sloshing through the Louisiana mud until the job was finished, Williams is the Chiefs' newest linebacker. A path to the NFLhad no chance, co-workers and coaches told him, even the ones who believed in him. He was blue collar, a roughneck, and he might find a better life somewhere, but the NFLwouldn't be it.

One year. That's how long Williams worked in oil fields before the rain came and persuaded him there was something more. He returned from Louisiana to East Texas, walked into a football coach's office and told him he wanted to work - but never again in an oil field.

OK, the coach told him, it was time to see how badly he wanted to be a football player.

"You're talking about a guy lifting pipe, doing it in 110 degrees," said Jim Rieves, the former coach at Kilgore College, a two-year school in East Texas. "He was doing all the dirty work.

"We figured, shoot, if he can work there in the oil field in Texas, he can handle pretty much anything."

Every day was the same. Demorrio pulled himself out of bed before sunrise and slid on a long-sleeve denim shirt, thick blue jeans and steel-toed boots. Another day, another dollar.

He drove to the oil field and worked most days for Pierce Construction, a company that operates near Williams' hometown of Beckville. It is a rural community less than 30 miles from Louisiana.

Williams had cousins working in the oil fields, and long hours ran in the family. His mother, Veronica Hicks, drove 40 minutes each way to Longview, Texas, to work the fryer and the floor at the Catfish King, where she spent 16 hours a day for just enough money to support Demorrio and his brother and sister.

Demorrio was 17 when he graduated from high school and enrolled at Cisco Junior College, a school 280 miles west of home. He stuck there one semester but was ruled academically ineligible for the football team because, he said, one class did not count. Eight months after leaving, he was back in Beckville, a college dropout who sat across from a man offering a job as a hand in the oil fields. It was money. It was something."You're just trying to keep up," he said.

Mostly, Demorrio and other field hands were nothing more than that: a set of hands. They dug holes in the thick Texas soil, dirt so thick and so exhausting to penetrate they call it "soft cement." Demorrio dug hundreds of holes in a day, or climbed inside huge oil tanks to scrub debris from the walls, or helped build the massive machines that pull oil from the ground. Then he would drive home, fall into bed and then do it all again the next day.

Sometimes, he and his mother would stay up late, talking about their jobs and how this wasn't how Demorrio had outlined his life.

"He was heartbroken," Veronica said. "He came home one day and said, 'Man, Mama, this is just not for me.'"

Then it rained while the crew was on a contract job in Monroe, La. Demorrio thought that, like usual, rain meant that the work was finished for the day and that the men would spend the night in a hotel. The boss said they had to finish, and Demorrio decided he needed to do something different.

"After that," he said, "I just told myself, I've got my whole life to work. Ever since then, things have just been falling in line for me."

They started when he walked into the office of Kilgore coach Rieves in January 2000 and asked for a tryout. He played safety in high school and was pretty good at it. Rieves looked at the kid, all 6 feet and 180 pounds of him, and thought Williams looked nothing like a college football player, let alone one who was talking about the NFL.

Sure, though. He could try out. Dozens of other players were doing the same. And whoever survives, suits up. "Basically," Rieves said, "if somebody wants to walk on, we have two weeks where we just try to run all of the riff-raff off. We try our best to kill them."

For two weeks, the walk-ons were required to be in a gymnasium at 5:30 a.m. They ran conditioning drills, did agility work and then ran a mile. That's when Rieves' fun started. Players executed what the former coach calls "four quarters," a series of four exercises that about 80 prospective walk-ons must do in unison. If one player executes a sit-up faster or slower than everyone else, they all start again. If another player does his pushups slower or faster than everyone else, they all start again. If one player vomits from the heat or from exhaustion, he cleans it up - and then they all start again. The process sometimes lasted two hours.

Some players got sick, and others quit the team after one day. Rieves called walk-ons' introductory period "two weeks of hell," and the name fit. But one player, the kid who used to work out in the oil fields, kept showing up and kept keeping time.

"No matter how hard we pushed him," said Rieves, now Kilgore's athletic director, "we couldn't break him."

Instead, he yelled at players who loafed through drills and tried to motivate others who said playing college football seemed too much like hard work.

"He let a lot of the guys know, from his experience, 'Hey, this is nothing,' " said Scott Chism, Kilgore's running backs coach at the time. "'You think this is work? I've worked. This is fun.'"

Demorrio moved from safety to linebacker during spring practice and became Kilgore's best defender. He was an All-American his sophomore season and attracted the attention of coaches at Nebraska. He transferred there in 2001, played two seasons for the Cornhuskers and completed his degree in sociology.

Still, coaches told him the NFLwas a long shot. He was too small - speed and desire go only so far. They put him on a high-protein diet and watched as Demorrio packed on enough pounds to quiet the scouts and coaches who insisted that the undersized kid with a blue-collar background never could play in the NFL.

The Atlanta Falcons picked him in the fourth round of the 2004 NFLdraft. He had made it. And to hear him tell it now, making it never was negotiable. "I don't take this game for granted," he said. "I knew what I had to go back to."

He goes back often. Williams spends weeks during the offseason in East Texas, sometimes speaking to athletes about his path from the oil fields to the NFL. Other times, he listens to his cousins, the men who work the long hours in the searing heat for the unsympathetic bosses.

"I just listen to their stories," Williams said.

And they listen to his. Mostly, they want to know about the games and the perks. He said they don't think about the practices and two-a-days, the hard work that must be done for their cousin to play a prominent role with the Chiefs.

"A lot of guys take the NFLfor granted at times because they don't know what it's like in the real world," he said. "Once you go out there and experience a job, that'll make you respect it a little more. This is probably one of the best jobs there is out there, you know?" Kilgore College spring game

• Saturday at 11 a.m. at R.E. St. John Memorial Stadium. Admission is free.

• Climax to KC's spring practices that began March 27.

• Former KC head coach and soon to be athletic director Jimmy Rieves and Kansas City linebacker Demorrio Williams will be guest coaches.