Commentary: Packer star fades; visions of glory don't
Just a couple of terse paragraphs in an 0out-of-town newspaper, but oh, the memories they triggered.
​
Travis Williams, 45 (forty-five!), died of heart failure last Sunday. He played for the Green Bay Packers and the Los Angeles Rams. Busted knee. Had some problems with the bottle after he left the NFL. "Fell into poverty," the newspaper said.
​
We are almost all members in good standing of the television generation, and our heroes are not the poets and patriots of our forefathers but the TV stars of our youth. My first childhood hero was Williams, and his artistry came to life in my living room during his rookie year with the Packers in the fall of 1967.
My brother and I would flip on the television early Sunday afternoon and watch Williams gazing skyward, waiting for the kickoff to fall into his arms. We would watch Williams smoothly accelerate toward the other end of the field, looking for openings, for seams, gauging the speed of opposing players and then accelerating yet again, flying past scattered bodies and into the end zone. He scored touchdowns on four kickoff returns in the fall of 1967, but I remember it differently today. Today, I'm certain he scored every time he touched the ball.
​
When the game was over and my beloved Packers had won again, my brother and I and a friend would go out to the backyard and play three-man football in the fading South Carolina twilight – a receiver, a quarterback who wasn't allowed to run with the ball and a defender. We fought over who would be Travis "Roadrunner" Williams. We juked and jived and feinted our way past flat-footed trees that were, in our minds, imaginary Bears and Lions and Vikings in hot pursuit. We scored every time we touched the ball.
​
My family lived in a trailer on the outskirts of an Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina, awaiting my father's transfer to the Vietnam War. Southern traditions were strange for the son of an Ohio farm boy and an Arizona ranch girls. Grits were gross. Black-eyed peas were not much better. Two different school buses made runs past our street – one for white children, one for black.
​
After we moved into base housing, my mother hired a maid, a black woman whose name I don't even remember, who came to our home once a week to help a harried Air Force wife clean up the damage done by four rambunctious children. When I, a nosy 9-year-old, asked what the woman was paid and why we didn't pay her more, my parents explained that should wouldn't accept it, that she would only take the going rate. I believed it at the time, and the bag of groceries we occasionally gave the woman helped soften my guilt.
​
For me, however, football remained unaffected by this first introduction to the vagaries of the relationship between blacks and whites in South Carolina, a state that had once threatened to derail the passage of the Declaration of Independence if slaves were to be counted among those men who were created equal. Football players were the color of their jerseys, not the color of their skin. Travis Williams wasn't black, he was green and gold.
​
I didn't know much about Williams' post-football problems until I read his obituaries last week. That is the nature of heroism in the age of television – a brief burst of intense glory, and then the camera turns to someone else and the hero fades into oblivion. Williams drank too much, he lost his house in Richmond, California, he was homeless for a year, he spent a year in jail. His wife, mother and sister all died within a few months of each other. And finally, while battling liver and kidney problems no doubt brought on by his love affair with alcohol, he, too, succumbed, only 45.
​
Perhaps it is fitting that Williams died in a Martinez, California, hospital. San Francisco, on the western side of the bay, is a haven for yuppies and bankers, the trendy and the entrepreneurial. The eastern side of the bay – Martinez, Richmond, Emeryville, Oakland – is blue-collar and bitter, the home of drug dealers and lost hope, felonies and broken dreams.
But I won't remember Williams' troubles. For me, Williams will always be the man who couldn't be stopped, the man who taught a young boy living in the South that sports can, if ever so briefly, transcend race.
May he run free forever.
* * *