Even though the Dunn Center where Austin Peay now plays basketball has been nicknamed "The House that Fly Built," officials at the school don't know precisely where James "Fly" Williams is these days, although they do recall hearing he was in New York City a couple of years ago.

"He's doesn't interact with the program. He only played here two years," said a spokesman.

But what a two years it was.

In that short span the flashy, nearly toothless street-balling legend from New York City established some school records that still stand, and he even put anonymous Austin Peay on the road map to the Final Four in 1973. After beating Jacksonville for Peay's first NCAA tournament win, the precocious freshman and company took on the basketball blue bloods of Kentucky.

"We were from across the tracks, and they were kind of the country club," said former Peay coach Lake Kelly. "That (a win) would have set the basketball world on its ear."

A 106-100 overtime loss, in which Williams scored 26 points, still helped make a name for Fly and the small school where he was such an unlikely and sometimes volatile fit.

"To the people in Clarksville, he's a legend, a folk hero," said Dave Link, a Knoxville, Tenn.-based journalist who is working on a book about Williams. "With the administration, though, it's like they wished it had never happened, that Fly was a renegade from a time they'd like to forget."

Link added, "Some people around here even think he's dead."

With Link's help, Williams was reached by cell phone at a diner in Brooklyn, near the Brownsville Recreation Center where he grew up playing and where he now works to get kids in the gym and off the streets.

It was raining, and Williams had slept little Wednesday night as the weather had triggered some aches and pains that he still gets from a nearly fatal gunshot wound he suffered two decades ago. Shootings, drugs, prison — Williams, 55, has experienced it all in a life that has rarely been far from the city's mean streets.

"He was from an area that was decimated; it almost looked like it had been bombed. Survival was an everyday thing, and basketball was his way of survival," Kelly said. "He was 6-foot-6 and could shoot the ball as well as anyone I ever coached. He played a lot like Dr. J."

Some think Fly was even better. The Web site for the Street Basketball Association has Julius Erving listed as No. 47 all-time among street ballers, just behind No. 45 Connie Hawkins and just ahead of No. 51 Allen Iverson. Williams was No. 2 behind only Earl "The Goat" Menigault.

Small wonder that Williams attracted the attention of big-name programs such as Marquette and UCLA and was planning to go to the University of Houston. But Leonard Hamilton, now head coach at Florida State, was a persistent young assistant at Peay.

"He slept in his car outside my house for a week, waiting for me to get back(from trips)," recalled Williams, who knew nothing about Hamilton's school. "Before I went there no one knew where the school was. I thought it was in Austin.

An urban legend relates that Williams, ready to enroll in college, actually took a flight to Austin, deplaned and asked, "Where's Peay?"

"Yeah," Williams confirmed. "I was even on campus for about a week. I was enrolled and everything. I went to the gym and asked for coach Hamilton, and they said there was no coach Hamilton."

Although it's unclear which area campus served as Williams' temporary home, a quick phone call to Hamilton got him straightened out and headed to Tennessee. There, jets from the nearby Fort Campbell army base spelled out a spectacular welcome in sky writing. Williams proved just as breathtaking on the court.

"People say I was before my time. We also had a terrific team. We had guys who knew their job. I was the gunner, like the gunner on a plane," Williams said.

Williams could hit from deep in three-point land, but those long shots counted for only two points in those days. He was also a leaper who wasn't allowed to dunk by the college rules of that day. Yet, he still he found ways to entertain.

"I remember we played a game in Madison Square against Long Island University where he did a 360-degree layup that made fans get up and scream and dance," Kelly said. "Even the players on the other team were giving each other high fives." Williams has been called the Pete Maravich of the Ohio Valley Conference. At the Little Red Barn, as Peay's gym was known, fans began lining up at 4 p.m. for 8 o'clock games.

They came up with the chant that still is regarded by some as the best ever in college basketball: "The Fly is open. Let's go Peay."

The show was also a hit on the road.

"We were selling out gyms that had probably never seen a sellout," Kelly said.

At one stop pamphlets were dropped from a small airplane to announce that the nation's leading scorer was in town. At other arenas, fans began showing up with flyswatters, often to little avail.

Williams finished the year with a 29.4 scoring average that was fifth highest in the country. The team's average of 93.1 points per game is still a school record, as is Williams' season total of 854 points and the 51 points he twice scored in a game.

The go-to guy

In the NCAA tournament, Peay first drew Jacksonville, a team that had made the NCAA final three years earlier.

The game was deadlocked with time running out.

"We were all in the huddle and deciding what play to run," Williams recalled. "I said, 'We're going to run the give and go.' That was, give it to me and get the hell out of the way."

Draped with Jacksonville players, Williams hit the game-winner, finishing with 26 points. In the Mideast Regional semifinal against Kentucky, Peay had a chance to win in regulation, but the shooter, not Williams, missed.

The tournament's format in 1973 included a regional consolation game, so Peay faced Marquette, a team that would play in the NCAA title game the next year against David Thompson and North Carolina State.

Williams scored 22 points against Marquette. In the first half. And in the game.

Kelly benched in him in the second half as, in the aftermath of the Kentucky loss, Williams and some teammates were squabbling.

"He was flamboyant, a coach's nightmare in some ways," said Kelly, who added that he thought of sending Williams back to New York quite a few times, but was talked out of it by his wife, professors, and Williams' teammates.

Williams returned the next year and averaged 27.5 points, third in the country, but Peay's NCAA tournament run ended quickly with a crushing 108-66 loss to an Adrian Dantley and John Shumate Notre Dame team, although Williams got his 26 points on 31 shots.

Even worse for Peay, Kelly said, was that Williams was one of more than 30 Ohio Valley Conference players to be ruled ineligible for the next season because the conference schools had erred in using equivalent ACT scores as substitutes for SAT scores.

Williams left school and played a year in the American Basketball Association with the St. Louis Spirits before that team became a casualty of the ABA-NBA merger. He played some overseas and more back on the street. In 1987 in a argument after a pickup game, Williams was shot by an off-duty court officer, with the blast ripping through a lung and parts of his kidney and stomach. As a result of the incident, Williams was charged with, among other things, attempted robbery and spent 14 months in prisons, including Attica. He did another prison stint from 1993-95 for drug possession.

His son, Fly Williams III, is an actor who has appeared in the movie "Finding Forrester" and several television dramas.

Williams said. "He was actually a good ballplayer, but he got tired of everybody always talking about me, so he signed up for an acting class."

As for the upcoming Austin Peay-Texas game, Williams didn't have high hopes for Peay.

"Texas is really good," Williams said. "But if I was playing, Texas would lose."



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