Chaz Williams plays for past, future

— -- AMHERST, Mass. -- He is trapped in a trance. A grown man, reluctantly 9 years old again.

Damn that day.

Massachusetts star Chaz Williams stares at a wall while the images of a father taken too soon roll in the theater of his mind. On this breezy Friday afternoon, he is surrounded by photos of Julius Erving and other UMass greats in the team's film room at the Mullins Center.

The star point guard for an undefeated and nationally ranked UMass squad nibbles on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich but only after he meticulously removes and discards its crust.

"Too much bread," he says.

Once he has taken his snack apart, it's now his turn to unravel.

He loathes this necessary tale, the one that helps strangers understand his makeup.

He slumps forward and his gray, baggy UMass sweatshirt inflates his slight frame. His eyes fill, and slowly, he recalls the moment when everything changed for a hopeful third-grader.

That day, he sprinted into his grandmother's house.

He'd earned a high score on one of his elementary school assignments. And he knew she'd be proud.

His father, if able, would have praised him, too.

But he was sick, she told him. So sick that he had to be transported to a hospice while Chaz was at school.

Calvin Williams always brought his son along whenever he played in his feisty Sunday pickup games at the neighborhood rec center in Brooklyn. That's where the boy fell in love with the game he'd soon hate.

"He never did anything wrong in my eyes," Chaz says.

His father had forgotten things in those final weeks, but Williams still tried to enjoy their limited time together during trips to the hospice.

Sometimes, he'd mistakenly call Chaz by his older brother's name. But Chaz refused to accept the reality that a brain tumor was rapidly stealing his father's mind and his life.

Maybe one day he'd come home and discover that his father was well again. Maybe they'd walk to the rec center together and his father would kick the door with the back of his foot three times so that the guys inside would know it was him.

And then, maybe and hope and dreams died one day, evaporating when his grandmother sat him down and told him what he'd always feared. His father was gone.

Thirteen years ago, he lost the hero who always knew his son would overcome all doubts that critics would have about him.

Williams couldn't digest the revelation.

He remembers jumping down a flight of stairs and rushing toward the door.

He had to end the nightmare.

"I just wanted to get hit by a car or something," he says.

Had that happened, however, he would've never had the chance to continue his father's legacy through a 3-year-old princess named Cheree.