Joe Williams, who coached Artis Gilmour and the tiny University of Jacksonville in the 1970 NCAA championship game against the mighty UCLA, died Saturday. He was 88 years old.
Williams, who also coached at Furman and Florida State, died in Enterprise, Mississippi, at a hospice after a long battle with cancer, his son Joe Williams Jr. said.
The Dolphins were one of the real Cinderella teams in NCAA tournament history. Led by the 7-foot Gilmour and unranked to start the season, they beat Western Kentucky, Iowa, Kentucky and St. Bonaventure en route to the championship game. They scored over 100 points 18 times that season, including three times in the tournament.
In the final, they faced the Bruins’ mid-dynasty coach John Wooden program. UCLA won 80–69 for their fourth consecutive national championship and sixth in seven years.
Williams was an assistant coach at Furman when he took over the program at Jacksonville in 1964, and the school played in the NAIA for one more season before moving to the NCAA, where it quickly rose to prominence.
Gilmour spent his first two seasons in junior college before signing with Williams and Jacksonville.
According to his son, Williams was willing to recruit black players to Southern colleges when many coaches were still reluctant to do so, and defended them in a hostile environment on the road.
“He was one of the first coaches in the South to do this. When dad was traveling with the team, if there was a restaurant that wouldn’t let the whole team eat together, dad would just get the whole team together and they would go to a restaurant where they could,” Joe Williams Jr. said.
“Dad was never the type to get into the soap box and talk about things like that, he just always did the right thing… He went through a lot. He received death threats by mail. all of his players were equal and wanted to be treated equally. It was about teaching your players to be good people.”
According to his son, the son and brother of Methodist ministers, Williams became a coach by accident. He was a high school English teacher in Jacksonville when someone noticed a tall guy in the hallway playing college basketball and asked if he would like to help the coach.
“He realized that this was his passion, and this is what he wanted to do,” said Joe Williams Jr.
Williams left Jacksonville after the title game to return to Furman, where he coached until 1978 before heading to Florida State. He finished with a 336-231 record over 22 seasons and was inducted into the Jacksonville University Hall of Fame in 1994.