So he returned to the assistant-coaching ranks after one year, joining Crean's staff at Marquette. After more than a decade as an assistant, Williams served a short tenure as the head coach at the University of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina left the school unable to run a Division I program. Like Butler, Williams hailed from a small Texas town called Van Alstyne in the northeast part of the state. That was my goal."īutler was Williams' first signee as head coach, and the two had a lot in common at that point in their lives. "I was going to be able to go to college and get a degree," he says. There were no recruiting trips or sit-down pitches made in anyone's living room, and there certainly was no press conference when Butler arrived on campus-without a winter coat or any other cold-weather clothing-for the first day of school.īutler, meanwhile, sat in the car outside the McDonald's, thinking his greatest wish had come true. Williams took over the program for Tom Crean, who left to coach Indiana, a week before the spring signing period, which left the Golden Eagles scrambling to fill out their roster. He wound up at Marquette only because Williams scouted one of his Tyler teammates, Joseph Fulce. He went because he didn't have any other options." He didn't go to play at a junior college because a Division I program sent him there to prepare him. He was an afterthought in every possible way. "He was ranked 73rd in the state of Texas coming out of high school," says Virginia Tech head coach Buzz Williams, who coached Butler at Marquette. Butler was a portrait of teenage bravado, a kid who didn't have anything else to buttress his self worth. Later, at Marquette, he received the same empty reception. Two hundred miles up the road at Tyler Junior College, no one knew him or seemed to think much of his game. "I'm not going to say this is the beginning. "I would call it the step before a new beginning," the new Jimmy says. Today's Jimmy would rather talk big picture, about where he is in his journey and who has helped get him there. That is how the old Jimmy would've described himself, anyway, because the old Jimmy was all about personal accolades. He hates that story because he doesn't believe what happened in Tomball shaped him into an NBA All-Star shooting guard for the Chicago Bulls, and someone sure to be one of the most attractive restricted free agents on the market this summer. Nor is it because he doesn't appreciate the Lamberts, the blended family with seven kids that parented him through high school after he couch-surfed for a time. "Me and my family are on great terms now," he says of his biological mother, whom he spent time with in Tomball last summer. He lives, after all, in Houston during the offseason Tomball is on the outskirts. Nor is it because he's still haunted by his childhood and would rather not reflect on where it took place.
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