As you've likely heard, we don't have any live-action contests to cover at LetsGoPeay.com right now. What we do have is free time; oodles and oodles of free time. Enough free time to swap oodles of emails with various people who would know to create a snapshot of the 10 best players in Austin Peay men's basketball history. Our penultimate entry is the Fly.
We should probably start with a caveat—this is about basketball. Not the twists and turns the life of James "Fly" Williams has taken. Williams took the Austin Peay basketball program to heights unseen before his arrival, heights that are still among the benchmarks we talk about today.
You simply cannot have a list of the greats without Fly. We had to build a new arena because of the man. Got a cheer out of his nickname that resonates to this day. If you're ever wearing Austin Peay gear in another city, if someone asks you about the Peay there's a pretty good chance they're also going to ask you about Fly. Not just sports people, either—truck drivers and priests, teachers and senators, you never know who will have a passing knowledge of Fly.
The stories, possibly apocryphal, help make the legend. That on his first journey to Austin Peay, Fly mistakenly flew to Austin, Texas and asked the first person he saw where the Peay was. The lack of teeth. How former Austin Peay assistant and current Florida State head coach Leonard Hamilton, who once called Williams the most talented player he ever recruited, kept turning back the kitchen clock so Williams' mother didn't know what time it was during his visit to their Brownsville home—he wound up leaving at 4:30 a.m., after Williams didn't get home until 2:30.
Fly delivered the goods on the court. He poured in points. Before the three-point line, Williams routinely launched from deep with success, making his eye-popping numbers—29.5 points per game as a freshman, 27.5 as a sophomore for a two-year total of 1,541—even more astonishing. Give him a four-year career and the three-point line and a 3,000-point finish wouldn't have been out of the question. Regardless, his freshman year stood as the NCAA record until 1989 and his 854 points that year remain both the single-season school record and the third-highest tally in Ohio Valley Conference history. Of the 21 40-point performances in Austin Peay history, four belong to Williams, including the only two 50-point outings by a Gov.
In addition to a slew of freshman All-American nods his first year, Williams took home OVC Player of the Year honors in 1973-74 as a sophomore.
Of course it would have been great to get more than two seasons of Fly. But those two seasons left a mark on Austin Peay athletics that simply can't be erased. The story of Fly Williams and the story of Austin Peay basketball are indelibly intertwined.
