Injury nearly sidelined top vote-getter

Steve Guiremand

Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2000 | 10:37 a.m.

He is arguably the top prep football prospect in the Class of 2000, topping this year's Las Vegas Sun Super 11 squad. But for a few anxious moments, Concord (Calif.) De La Salle linebacker D.J. Williams wondered if he would even play high school football.

While attending eighth grade in the Bay Area city of Hercules, Williams was too big and too strong to take on the other students in his physical education wrestling class. So he sparred with the teacher.

Midway through one of their matches, Williams landed awkwardly on his right elbow, severely dislocating it.

"It was messed up pretty bad," Williams said. "They had to go in and put screws in there and everything. When it happened, I had a flash that I would never be able to play football again."

But the 6-3, 220-pound Williams recuperated in time to play junior varsity football the following year at De La Salle, a school that will take a national record 100-game winning streak into the 2000 season.

"I remember our trainer saying at the time that there was just no way he could play on the freshman team because he might kill somebody," De La Salle athletic director and defensive coordinator Terry Eidson said.

"(San Diego Chargers head coach) Mike Riley was the offensive coordinator at USC at the time and he was recruiting one of our kids on the varsity. I told him he might want to come early to watch the JV game so he could see D.J. Afterward he asked me if it was too early to offer him a scholarship."

Ah, the line forms to the left, gentlemen.

Everybody from national champion Florida State to Michigan to Cal have made Williams their top priority.

"He's just a genetic freak," Eidson says. "And he has worked very hard. He's learned how to play the game. Now he's like a bolt of lightning out there racing to plug the hole."

Williams never lost a game at De La Salle, going 36-0 in three years on the varsity football team, 10-0 on the junior varsity as a freshman and 35-0 as a member of the freshman basketball team.

"The thing that really stands out to me is that he always played his best in the big games," Eidson said.

Bruce Rollinson, coach of Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, Calif., knows firsthand what Eidson is talking about. Williams led De La Salle to wins over the Monarchs in both his junior and senior year in much anticipated north-south battles featuring two of California's most storied prep programs.

"As a linebacker, he's attacking all the time," Rollinson said. "He has the innate ability to see things quickly, react and then cause havoc." Havoc is a word with which Williams -- whose uncle, Channing Williams, starred at Arizona State and played four years in the NFL -- has become all too familiar.

Because he has been so heavily recruited, he has been besieged with phone calls from media, recruiting publications and even fans who can't wait to find out where he'll play college football.