Staying in Champaign

CHICAGO — And now, the rest of the story.
The one about how Deron Williams wound up helping lead the University of Illinois, where the Jazz lost a preseason game to Chicago on Friday night, to the 2005 NCAA championship game.
Texas native Billy Gillispie, now head coach at the University of Kentucky, was an assistant to Bill Self when he recruited Dallas-area high school product Williams to Illinois.
But Self left after Williams’ freshman season to become head coach at the University of Kansas, and Gillispie had exited earlier to coach at the University of Texas at El Paso and later at Texas A&M.
The new head coach at Illinois would be former Southern Illinois coach Bruce Weber, who feared Williams might be out the door as well.
“Deron probably maybe would have transferred back to Texas after Coach Self left,” Weber said the morning before Friday night’s exhibition game.
If, that is, he hadn’t been talked out of it.
Williams confirms as much.
The boy from the Big D — Dallas — was having an awfully hard time anyway adjusting to the remote Midwestern radar blip that is Champaign, Ill.
“I was a little homesick at first,” Williams said. “It was a little different out there. Just kind of a small town, college town. I wasn’t used to that.”
So what convinced Williams to stay?
Credit for that goes to former Illinois teammate and ex-Jazz point guard Dee Brown, who now is with Washington Wizards, and former college teammate Jerrance Howard, now an Illini assistant coach.
Williams remains close friends with both, and he spent some time with Howard during the late-week trip to Champaign.
Just what did they say?
“How much they needed me,” Williams said. “Told me they thought we could win a championship.”
As it turns out, Brown, Williams and the rest of the Illini lost to the University of North Carolina in that ’05 title game.
But Williams is adored in Champaign nonetheless, evidenced by how the 2008 Olympic gold medal-winner was treated during a whirlwind visit that also included a trip with Jazz teammates to his favorite restaurant in town, a steak place called The Ribeye where the 10-ounce cut goes for a very fair $17.99, and some much-enjoyed time hitting balls at the school’s ultra-cool indoor golf facility.
The uniform numbers of about 30 former Illini basketball players were honored earlier this year, but only one — Williams’ No. 5 — was hanging from the rafters at Assembly Hall on Friday.
School officials, still dealing with how and where to hang all the rest, went to great lengths to make sure his was up there.
Just the sort of treatment one might suspect would be afforded to someone who just recently endowed a basketball scholarship at the school with a $300,000 donation made shortly after signing a new NBA contract will pay between $50 million and $70 million over the next few years.
The right decision to stay, then, at somewhere where in the words of Williams it was “a little different”?
You make the call.