Arden Zwelling
CFL.ca
Calmly placing his feet in the starting blocks under the hot New Mexico sun, track star Chris Williams lowers his head to check his foot placement and pauses for a silent, serene moment of reflection.
It’s 2004 and the 17-year-old Williams, the defending New Mexico State champion in the 200m dash, is about to reclaim his title with ease. Later, the athletic star at Rio Rancho, New Mexico’s lone high school will also win the state high jump competition and be a part of the Rio Rancho Rams state champion 4×100-metre relay team.
At the time, there were just around 50,000 people in the small city just north of Albequrque which housed a large Intel Corporation plant and not much else.
There was just the one high school in 2004 but Williams put it and Rio Rancho on the map with his prodigious speed both on the track and the football field. Standing barely over five feet and a half, Williams was symbolic of the small town, struggling to make a name for itself in virtually the middle of nowhere.
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| Barely a fifth of the way into the CFL season, Williams is suddenly the league’s breakout player and further solidifies his position in the Tiger-Cats lineup with each passing week. |
Williams carried much of that weight and it may very well have been what he focused on as he patiently knelt in the starting blocks in the sweltering New Mexico heat. Safe to say, the very last thing on his mind was Hamilton, Ontario.
But now, a mere six years later, that’s where Williams finds himself, plying his trade for the Tiger-Cats in the Canadian Football League, some 1,800 miles from Rio Rancho which has nearly doubled its population since 2004 and is now one of New Mexico’s fasted growing communities.
So you can’t really blame Williams for doing a double take when a football outlet from some place called Hamilton called him up last year, figuring he would be a good fit for head coach Marcel Bellefeuille’s high octane offence.
Forget finding it on a map. Williams couldn’t find Hamilton in the realm of consciousness.
“I can’t lie about that. I never even knew Hamilton was a place until they called me up and wanted me to come down last year,” Williams said of Canada’s ninth largest city. “But man, I really like it out here.”
The Tiger-Cats certainly like it too as Williams has gone from not even getting a sniff of the ball in the team’s season opener to currently presiding as the team’s most prolific receiver just three weeks later.
He leads all Tiger-Cats receivers with 16 receptions, 250 yards and three touchdowns through the team’s first four games, although Williams has piled up most of his numbers in the past two weeks alone since being called on to replace injured wideout Aaron Kelly.
Williams was a training camp afterthought, barely considered for a starting position as Kelly and fellow rookie Bakari Grant battled for the lone free position in the Tiger-Cats receiving corps.
Now, barely a fifth of the way into the CFL season, Williams is suddenly the league’s breakout player and further solidifies his position in the Tiger-Cats lineup with each passing week.
“There’s a lot of good players on this team. I was just able to come in here and keep it going,” Williams, who started running track and field when he was eight, said. “You always want to think that you’re going to be the starter when you’re coming in — I was always working towards that. I didn’t know when it was going to come or if it was going to come but that was always the goal.”
One of the reasons he was looked over in the preseason was no doubt his size, a non-issue for Williams that nevertheless comes up wherever he goes. The 24-year-old is listed generously as 5’9″, 155 lbs. — inflated measurements that still make him the smallest man on the team.
Kelly and Grant, meanwhile, are both well over six feet and fit the more traditional mold of which cupboards a wide receiver should be able to reach.
But Williams does not play like a small man and certainly does not talk like one either. The questions about his size follow him everywhere he goes but Williams will never shy away from answering them.
“I know it looks funny — a little guy out there running around breaking tackles and stuff,” Williams said with a chuckle in his distinctively southern tone. “It’s just one of those things that’s going to come up. It doesn’t matter how big you are. You can or you can’t play. That’s the bottom line.”
It’s that stubborn, determined attitude that has allowed Williams to fit right in with the Tiger-Cats and the workman city they play in.
Hamilton isn’t Canada’s most glamorous city and the Tiger-Cats aren’t Canada’s most glamorous football team either. For the most part it’s a roughshod collection of misfits and cast-offs from other teams — a unique outfit of CFL wanderers who didn’t fit in with other squads.
The quarterback, 32-year-old Kevin Glenn, holds the notorious distinction of being traded by two teams in one day and was simply asked to leave by his most recent team, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, after twice losing his job to backups.
The team’s biggest star, the contentious receiver Arland Bruce III, was run out of town just up highway 401 in Toronto after a very public and messy falling out with then Argonauts head coach Bart Andrus.
Earlier this year, Bruce suggested publicly that his production was down because he wasn’t being thrown the ball enough. He would sit out Hamilton’s next game with a curious knee injury.
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| Williams leads all Tiger-Cats receivers with 16 receptions, 250 yards and three touchdowns through the team’s first four games |
And then, of course, there is Williams who parlayed his exceptional track speed over to football at Rio Rancho where he starred as a running back and kick returner. He rushed for over 2,000 yards in his senior year, racking up 33 touchdowns — including three on kick returns — in just 11 games while being recruited to play college ball close to home at New Mexico State.
Once he hit the NCAA he was immediately converted to a receiver and set New Mexico State records in 2006 with 92 receptions and 1,425 receiving yards.
He also led the entire NCAA in receiving yards per game that year with 117.9 and followed it up with another solid season in 2007 when he was a finalist for the Biletnikoff Award which is given to the country’s top receiver.
But all of those yards, all of those accolades and a sizzling 4.28 40-yard dash time in his draft year could not quell the doubts about his size and Williams was completely overlooked in the 2009 NFL Draft.
He would land a tryout with the Miami Dolphins later that year in May, lasting just four months before he was released in August after he broke his hand. He would land on the Cleveland Browns practice roster three months later but was released again, this time after just nine days with the team.
Then came a quick stint in the United Football League that ended in yet another release last September. That was when the Tiger-Cats called and Williams learned that Hamilton was not only a city, but one with a football team that had a practice squad spot for yet another misfit looking for somewhere to play ball.
The rest, you could say, is very brief history.
“We just work hard out there. I think it models the city, the way our team plays. It’s just a bunch of hard working guys trying to get better,” Williams said.
“We’re trying to build an identity and build a way of playing. We did have a rough start but we were playing the right way.”
The Tiger-Cats, who have not had a winning season since 2004, were not exactly turning heads with an offence that scored just 26 combined points in back-to-back losses to open the 2011 campaign.
But the most recent two weeks have been a different story altogether as the team has piled up more than 30 points in a pair of dominant wins that has the squad just a game out of first in the CFL’s East Division.
A lot changed for the Tiger-Cats after those first two weeks, not the least of which was the fact the team started throwing Williams the ball. After just three receptions in week two against Edmonton, Glenn found Williams five times in week three against the Roughriders, including two for touchdowns as part of a dominant 33-3 Tiger-Cats victory.
So naturally, after a performance like that, Glenn looked for Williams as early as possible against the Lions in week four, on their first play from scrimmage, in fact. What happened next was likely the most exciting play yet of this young CFL season.
Lining up on Glenn’s right side, Williams dashed eight yards down field before stopping suddenly and turning back towards his quarterback. Glenn delivered the ball right in the number 80 on his chest as two Lions quickly converged on Williams.
But the compact receiver swiftly lowered his shoulders and burst forward as the two defenders slid off him and collided in his wake. Williams looked up and saw Lions defensive back Ryan Phillips, who lunged at his shoulders and ripped at the ball.
But Williams calmly spun around and sent Phillips flying to the grass, momentarily landing on the Lions defender before springing back up and taking off.
Then it was simply a dash for the finish line, not unlike so many that Williams ran on the hot New Mexico track in high school. Improbably enough, Williams was caught on the 10 yard line — it’s been a while since his last race, evidently — but it set up the Tiger-Cats first score in an important 39-31 win on the road.
“I was just trying to take advantage of the moment. They didn’t really do a great job of wrapping me up and getting me to the ground, so I just spun and kept going,” Williams said. “You’ve got to be smart about when you do stuff like that. But the opportunity presented itself.”
It’s just the latest in a string of opportunities that have presented themselves to the small kid out of a small town in New Mexico. And once he explodes out of the starting blocks, there’s no looking back.
