Outside the locked bathroom door, eight or nine men stirred angrily. Their bladders needed a break, and whoever stood behind the door wasn’t giving it to them. Five minutes they’d been waiting. What was up with that? Girls wait. Guys just use the bathroom as a pit stop in between Miller Lites.

The crowded basement corridor caught the eye of a Konrad’s employee. Within a minute, two bouncers thump-thump-thumped on the door, demanding whoever was in there to get the hell out. The shouts went ignored.

Inside, DeShaun Williams heard the pounding – he’s no idiot; he knew people were waiting. Too bad. They’d wait a little longer. He’d leave when he finished receiving oral sex.

In his three years as a Syracuse basketball star, Williams had already earned a reputation for such selfishness, such unrelenting, blissfully indifferent pursuit of personal pleasure, damn the consequences. He’d ignored open teammates during games and partied until 6 a.m. before morning practices. Classes meant even less to him. When they became too hard, he stopped going. His grade-point average dipped farther and farther below 2.0 for four straight semesters, leading to his dismissal from school. At once SU’s most talented basketball player and pre-eminent partier, Williams lived in the moment. For himself, only.

That’s what the crowd outside the bathroom was just finding out. The bouncers, tired of going unnoticed, stuck their shoulders into the door and forced their way into Williams’s barricaded stall, into Williams’s barricaded consciousness, where he ignored everyone and everything. Unnerved, Williams reacted as he sometimes did in such circumstances: He brawled.

Williams, a 6-foot-3 guard, is now playing out his final year of basketball eligibility at Iona College, two years removed from the tabloid-worthy junior season by which this campus still remembers him. The year included a bathroom sex scene, a bizarre court trial, a suspension for drunken driving, a host of bar fights, a rumor that split a basketball team and his eventual academic combustion.

Williams, for one, reflects on that year with carefree nonchalance. He’s found comfort at Iona, in New Rochelle, where he’s closer to his Paterson, N.J., family and on track to graduate in May. His current basketball underachievement – he averages 14.8 points for a 7-14 team – is just a footnote. He’s a mega-talent in a small conference, a dominating player by name if not by results.

Since Williams came to Syracuse in 1999, a chasm has separated expectations from results, and words from actions. For Williams, this chasm acts as a buffer, a convenient defense mechanism, shielding his fun-loving behavior from its destructive results. Playing now for an Iona team beset by chemistry problems, Williams preaches selfless team play – so long as the offense always runs through him. He embraces his past mistakes, because he claims he’s learned from them. But his mistakes continue.

Williams waited a half-year too long to rehabilitate from arthroscopic knee surgery performed in January 2003. It’s a mistake the Gaels are still paying for.

‘DeShaun’s playing on one leg, maybe one and a half,’ Iona head coach Jeff Ruland said two weeks ago. ‘He should be playing on two.

‘Sometimes he frustrates the shit out of me. He wasted half of this season. After the knee surgery, he said, ‘Well, I don’t have to work hard just because I’m DeShaun Williams.”

Syracuse had taught him that being DeShaun Williams was special. He went weeks at a time without attending particular classes. Yet sometimes, his final grade seemed unaffected.

‘I saw him pass a bunch of classes that he shouldn’t have,’ said Amal Baggar, Williams’s girlfriend and a current senior at Syracuse. ‘He would get away with anything and everything.’

He enjoyed the same freedom at night, when he feasted in bulk on the luxuries – bars, parties, girls – foreign to most college freshmen. Life had never been so lighthearted. During childhood, Williams concerned himself more with survival than revelry. When his mother, Jackie, disappeared on week-long partying binges, Williams, then in his early teens, stole food for his two younger brothers. He walked to and from basketball practice on streets where others from Paterson Catholic High School have since been shot and killed. He equipped himself with mechanisms necessary for survival: self-reliance, mistrust, the ability to pursue his own interests without concern for the obstacles. It worked in Paterson. Not on Marshall Street.

Three older basketball players – Tony Bland, Allen Griffin and Damone Brown – took the freshman Williams into their group. The Four Amigos, they called themselves, and together they ran up a 19-0 record to start the 1999-2000 season. They spent their weekends at Harry’s, where the underage Williams could always get in.

‘We lived it up,’ Bland said. ‘Girls, booze, parties, autographs, scuffles – just a crazy life. I still remember a lot of wild nights and a lot of early mornings. I think that’s why DeShaun and I got so close, because we were the partiers on the team. He was the only other guy who could stay up drinking all night and still make it to practice in the morning.’

What resulted would become Williams’ trademark as a Syracuse player: tantalizing displays of ability interrupted by maddening immaturity. One night against Pittsburgh early in 2000, Williams scored 23 points in 24 minutes. Another game in the same week, he went scoreless. The inconsistency so frustrated then-assistant coach Louis Orr that he regularly called Jerome Smart, Williams’ high school coach, for advice. ‘How do I handle this kid?’ Orr would ask. Smart never found an answer that satisfied him.

‘It almost got to the point,’ Smart recently recalled, ‘where I didn’t want Coach Orr calling my cell phone anymore. DeShaun was part of their family. Not mine.’

When Orr left to become head coach at Siena, another SU assistant, Mike Hopkins, inherited responsibility for Williams. Hopkins and Williams scheduled frequent dawn workouts during the off-season. Sometimes Hopkins was the only one there.

Coaches at Iona grapple with the same frustration – managing a player who needs structure but doesn’t want it, a player who wants freedom but can’t handle it. On a team handicapped by Williams’ delayed knee rehab, chemistry problems have soured the season. Coaches hoped Williams, Iona’s lone senior starter, could provide the young team mentoring and leadership. Instead, he’s only deprived teammates of minutes and shots, though, based on talent, both are probably warranted.

Williams has the best first step in the conference, a rare ability to beat opponents off the dribble, yet he’s content to shoot off-balance 3-pointers from several feet beyond the arc. He’s already set an Iona record for 3-point attempts in a season. Before ever playing a game at Iona, the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference honored Williams as one of its five best players. He now ranks eighth on the team in field-goal percentage, shooting .364.

‘He’s a once-every-few-years get in this conference,’ Manhattan coach Bobby Gonzalez said. ‘You don’t see guys with his ability and size coming down to play here. Has he underachieved so far? Yeah, probably.’

Gonzalez spoke immediately following an 18-point Williams performance, one that handed Manhattan its only conference loss of the year. Yet even during that afternoon’s game, Williams sulked on the bench with three fouls as his teammates turned a five-point deficit into a five-point lead. Towel around his shoulders, Williams stayed expressionless in an arena bursting with emotion. He didn’t need Iona to take the lead, or even win the game. He needed to be on the court, scoring the points for which he’d worked so hard.

Williams paid two years and a few thousand dollars for just 30-some precious games. He enrolled at Iona knowing he had to sit out a year because of NCAA transfer regulations. Because the team had no scholarships available, he also paid some tuition money out of pocket. He studied hard and stayed out of trouble. His first semester GPA at Iona, a 2.7, stood in such contrast to his record that it even shocked his mother.

From its start, Iona had been about business, about graduating, about scoring points and attracting attention and paving a path to the NBA. ‘That’s what I came here for.’ Williams said, ‘To get a degree and just leave.’

He also wanted to be closer to his brothers, Jerrell and Terrell, both 6-foot-7 high school sophomores and highly recruited basketball players. They lived with him last summer, so that Williams could carefully monitor their progress. ‘All that recruiting, coaches coming in, where they’re going to take visits – all that’s going through me,’ Williams said. ‘I take care of all that for them, tell them what they’ve got to do and how they’re going to do it.’

For once, his actions pointed to maturity. Too bad nobody noticed.

At Iona’s games, seats assigned for NBA scouts go unfilled. Six scouts and two scouting directors had little to say about Williams. His legend of misbehavior still eclipses any evidence that disputes it. When Williams comes to Syracuse – as he does a few times every semester to visit Baggar, his girlfriend – he’s still regarded as the same headline-making wild man that he grew into during his infamous junior year.

That season, 2001-02, had started with such promise. He led Syracuse to the Preseason NIT championship, averaging 23.3 points and winning tournament MVP. It’s an award earned by some of college basketball’s most talented: Allen Iverson, Paul Pierce and Sherman Douglas. Observers would later say such success only made Williams’s fall more frustrating. He gained weight. He lost his shot. He argued with teammates. And somehow, cocooned by his defenses, he never realized he had fallen.

Word spread quickly through campus, though. Despite his plummeting statistics, Williams’ fame, by midseason, metastasized from a student body to an entire region of basketball fans. What started as a private rumor turned quickly to public gossip, prompting whispers in the Carrier Dome student section and fueling the taunts of opposing crowds. Even Williams’ teammates wondered: Had Williams really impregnated SU co-captain Preston Shumpert’s girlfriend?

To this day, those intimately involved say no. When contacted by The Daily Orange, Williams, Baggar, Shumpert and his girlfriend, who requested her name not be used for this story, all denied the rumor. Its effect on the team, however, seemed undeniable. After starting 16-2 and climbing into the nation’s top 10, the Orangemen stopped getting along. They lost eight of their last 12 regular-season games and missed the NCAA Tournament, providing fodder for those who believed the rumor.

Yet those targeted by the gossip never took it seriously. Baggar said she first heard about the rumor when Shumpert’s girlfriend said to her, ‘Damn, girl, did you know I’m carrying DeShaun’s child?’

‘We joked about it and laughed about it,’ Baggar said. ‘I mean, it was just totally ridiculous.’

Still, neither Williams nor Shumpert bothered to publicly address the rumor. Neither did head coach Jim Boeheim or any of his assistants. Left untouched, the rumor grew. It had all the elements of a great story: superstars, scandal and sex.

‘I guess what it all comes down to is, there are some good sides to the fame,’ said Shumpert’s then-girlfriend and current fiancee. ‘But if you take that, you have to take a lot of crap too.’

Said Williams: ‘Maybe they can say because we were roommates and his girl was there all of the time. But you know, I had a girl there too. So why didn’t they say Preston was fucking DeShaun’s girl?

‘The way I see it, because I’m the type of person I am – the type of person that did these things and wasn’t the proper, blue-collar type of person: ‘Yes, sir, no, sir’ – because I wasn’t that person, things would just get put on me because people thought I was a nutcase. I fit the identity. If there was something like that going on with the team, DeShaun looked like somebody who might do it. I think in certain situations, I was the one who fit certain identities. But those types of rumors, they don’t ever bother me. I’m from the hood; it don’t matter. I’ve been getting that since I was little.’

Said Shumpert, now playing basketball in Italy: ‘If I tried to chase everybody who was saying stuff about me, I’d be exhausted. We knew what the truth was, so what are you going to do? You can’t go around pleading your case to everybody who’s around you.’

So they told almost nobody. To this day, former teammates James Thues and Kueth Duany said they don’t know if the rumor is true. Same for assistant Mike Hopkins. Even Iona assistant Craig Holcomb, who heard about the rumor before Williams arrived, doesn’t know what to believe. Williams said a few teammates inquired privately during the season, but he gave his answer only to those who asked directly.

‘I wanted to know real bad, but I didn’t want to ask him,’ said Thues, the starting point guard who transferred after the season to the University of Detroit Mercy. ‘There was definitely tension between him and Preston, though. That cost us big time. There would be times in a game where those guys would look each other off, not pass the ball when they would have before. They both wanted the shots and the glory.’

Neither would get it. And, in truth, that didn’t seem to bother Williams much. He still played with the same carefree, aw-shucks smile that had always come with basketball, which gave him a rare chance to focus on thriving, not surviving. When he missed crucial shots, Williams would shout playfully. Even when difficult, basketball remained fun.

A shooting slump? No problem. He’d overcome it. A losing streak? Fine, try him. He’d learn from it. Basketball, like life, was more about experiences than results. More about a big, blurry picture than any one detail. So long as he had fun, mistakes were forgivable, even forgettable. He lived without regret.

‘I’m happy that I got a chance to experience that,’ Williams said. ‘I wish everybody could have a chance to get on that type of level and play that type of basketball and be on that type of campus atmosphere and do everything there was to do up there – the women, the parties — all that.

‘With basketball I had fun, and being a student I had fun. Being a student at Syracuse, I loved every bit of it, and I would not take anything back if I could change it. I just had fun. I did things that dudes do: women. I didn’t have a favorite. I just took advantage of everything that came to me.’

Williams represented his wild pursuit of fun so endearingly that he won over even those whom he trampled with it. To Boeheim, who calls Williams his only player to flunk out in 27 years of coaching, ‘He’s as good as anybody.’ To Konrad’s owner John Cadorette, who called Williams the biggest troublemaker to ever visit his bar, ‘He’s like a friend.’ To Ruland, the Iona coach whose season has been sandbagged by Williams’s erraticism, ‘He’s the type of kid who makes me appreciate being a coach.’

Syracuse coaches so liked Williams that, in spite of his proclivity for missteps, they recommended him to several schools, Iona included. They swore that, deep down, Williams meant no trouble, even as his actions screamed otherwise.

Early in Williams’s career, he punched a Lucy’s bouncer after the employee told him he could not enter the bar with a bottle of Hennessey, sources said. The blow broke the bouncer’s cheekbone and cracked his nose. The bouncer spoke with Boeheim but decided not to press charges. Other Marshall Street employees said they remember Williams more for urinating inside of a bar, undeterred by the crowd watching him.

‘With DeShaun, you can’t have one person keeping an eye on him, trying to keep him out of trouble,’ Bland said. ‘You have to have either one person totally devoted or like an army.’

Said Boeheim: ‘(Williams) had problems when he would drink. That’s when it all happened. He’d get into fights and it never seemed to stop.’

Even one DeShaun Williams night could drag on forever. The evening of May 7, 2002 started mundanely enough. Williams shared a few laughs at Shumpert’s apartment, then headed for Marshall Street. By 5 a.m., he had earned a ticket to court that would lead to a suspension from Syracuse.

According to Williams, nothing that happened that night was really his fault. If all had gone according to plan, he would have left for summer break earlier in the day, free of headlines and embarrassment. Williams only remained in Syracuse because Baggar, his girlfriend, needed one more day to pack before leaving. Williams offered to help her move out.

That’s how fate forced Williams into the Konrad’s basement around midnight. There, he scuffled for the first time that night, punching a bouncer, Cadorette said. The Konrad’s owner kicked Williams out of the bar, officially banning him for life. ‘I said enough was enough,’ Cadorette said. ‘I didn’t want to ever deal with him again after that.’

He would, though. Within an hour, Williams, surrounded by a host of friends, snuck back into the bar. Because of a miscommunication between Cadorette and his co-owner, the bouncer at the door didn’t know of Williams’ lifetime ban. It would be made explicit to him, however, when Williams was soon kicked out again.

By 1 a.m., Williams had found his way into another altercation. At the bar, he approached three girls, including one, Nicole Wilcox, who worked as SU’s mascot, Otto the Orange. Wilcox’s version of the story goes as such:

‘I didn’t like him because he was always drunk and trying to feel up on my girls,’ she told The D.O. ‘Anyway, DeShaun came across the bar all pissed off and looking for trouble. He came up to my girls and starting talking, so I came up like, ‘No, get out of here. Stop trying to cause trouble.’

‘I wasn’t an angel or anything. I yelled at him and stuff, but the bottom line is I never even touched him. Next thing I know, DeShaun brings his hand back and punches me in the face. I went down, and as I was trying to get back up, somebody punched me again. I didn’t see, but later a bunch of people told me that it was DeShaun.’

Williams denied punching Wilcox, as he would do again and again in the proceeding court trial. He claimed Wilcox filed charges because he was a celebrity target.

‘I didn’t have to go through that, and the girl knew it,’ Williams said. ‘I just think she was trying to be an asshole. I think certain students are just jealous of athletes, especially some women. Because certain girls – maybe you say groupies – we would mess with, and others we wouldn’t give the time of day. That’s why, when you’re drunk, everything comes out. Everybody wants something.’

Wilcox said she hesitated to press charges. She only decided to go forward when she woke up the next morning and looked in the mirror, finding her left eye swollen shut and a gash above it that would require four stitches. Said Wilcox: ‘I knew I had to stand up for myself.’

The court trial that ensued – a defendant noted as SU’s foremost troublemaker pitted against an alleged victim representing the school’s fuzzy, fan-friendly mascot – seemingly brewed its own sensationalized oddities. Witnesses took the stand and gave varying accounts of the night. One, Mia Ballard, even confessed to throwing the second punch herself. When contacted, Ballard, a current SU senior and an acquaintance of Williams, stood by her story.

A jury found Williams not guilty of assault, in part because people had so many different stories. Williams woke up just in time to hear the verdict. As his lawyer delivered his final argument, Williams napped in the defendant’s chair, prompting stern Judge Karen Uplinger to suggest throwing water on him.

‘I didn’t even care whether or not he was convicted,’ Wilcox said. ‘I wanted him to come to terms with what he’d done and the kind of person he’d become. But as soon as I saw how little he cared in trial, it was obvious that’s never going to happen.’

The enraged Williams, that Wilcox remembered seeing in the early morning of May 8, found trouble again after leaving Konrad’s for the second time. Two bouncers removed Williams from the bar and, before 5 a.m., he showed up at Baggar’s South Campus apartment.

The two fought. Williams left angrily, then returned. He wanted his cell phone charger, which he had left inside. When Baggar refused to open the door, Williams kicked it down. Neighbors who heard the commotion called Public Safety, and officers hauled Williams from the scene. Baggar later refused to press charges. ‘Basically,’ she said, ‘we just got into an argument, like all girlfriends and boyfriends do. It’s crazy how big a deal they made out of nothing.’

The night – though it led to no lawful damages – reaffirmed Williams’ reputation and triggered his ignominious exit, which, he said recently, never would have happened if he’d left for summer break a day earlier.

‘The only thing I kind of regret that day,’ Williams said, ‘is that I stuck around to help my girl move some of her stuff.’

Initially, Williams bemoaned the outcome. Syracuse sent Williams a letter in late July, dismissing him for academic reasons and providing a definite answer to his shaky SU future. Within weeks, he spoke with Syracuse coaches about a decision that would remove him from his teammates and girlfriend, that would deprive him of a senior season and a chance to captain a potential national championship team, that would force him to pick between two schools – Iona and Manhattan – that he’d never envisioned playing against, much less playing for.

Williams stumbled onto a team that buses to most games, that practices in a gym so small that its baskets stand just 10 feet from doors to the outside, that plays before student fans so apathetic that the school must dole out free tickets and free pizza to attract them to home games. Even so, only about 100 show up.

And somehow, it fits him. Fewer people applaud his successes, but fewer people notice his failures. Nobody much cares he’s a basketball player – even in the classroom, where he’s treated like everybody else.

‘If he can graduate from Iona and get a job, that’s success,’ said Allen Griffin, Williams’ former teammate and current SU administrative assistant. ‘You know why that’s success? Because at the rate he was going while he was here, he should have ended up in jail.’

He’ll graduate in May by passing all of his remaining classes, and some will laud him for growing up, for making the mature decisions he never could at Syracuse. But those who best know Williams know he’s the same kid who wouldn’t leave the Konrad’s bathroom. He’s still concerned with his own interests first. And he’s willing to pursue them recklessly.

Whatever gets in his way, be it two bar bouncers or a young Iona team that won’t pass the ball, will almost certainly be pushed aside. He might cause damage. His reputation might suffer. But that’s not for DeShaun Williams to worry about.

‘Some people love you and some hate you,’ Williams said. ‘I don’t worry about if they love me or not or they hate me or not. I play basketball, that’s all I do.’

Published on February 11, 2004 at 12:00 pm