VIVIAN, La. — He was bigger than everyone else his age, and due to an innately friendly, generous nature, Robert Williams III gave back to everyone, be it his smaller opponents or his classmates.

Youth coaches took him out of games in Vivian Little League Basketball when the results got lopsided, or when Williams, feeling bad, passed the ball back to the other team after grabbing a rebound or blocking a shot. Or he would back off altogether and let them shoot. Dexter Long, founder of the league and Williams’ first coach, had a prodding joke whenever this altruistic youngster took it too easy on others.

“Maybe we need to get you some red pepper, get some meanness in you,” said Long, who remained close to this young prodigy, and was an assistant boys basketball coach at North Caddo High School by Williams’ freshman year.

North Caddo’s freshman team was locked in a tight game against Northwood one day, and the Rebels trailed by a point on the final possession when, out of a timeout, the first option on an inbounds play was sealed off. The ball instead went to Williams, who froze as the clock expired.

“He looked like the headlights coming on a deer — what should I do?” said Long. “He didn’t want to screw the game up or throw the ball away. He had the ball, the clock was ticking, you have to shoot.

“I told him, ‘You’re the best player on this team, so you play like you’re the best player on the team.’ After that play, he started to play more, started to assert himself, kind of realized, ‘Hey, I guess I am pretty good.’”

But there was still that red pepper deficiency, that lack of ego, only a partial awareness of the massive talent that he has brought to the Celtics and the NBA. Ricky Evans, his mentor and former AAU coach, marvels at how far Williams has come without a hint of affectation.

“He still doesn’t understand it. He’s so humble and unique,” said Evans, who renamed his team the RW III All-Stars this season in honor of the Celtics rookie. “I was having a conversation with him the other day. He gives everyone so much credit. He thinks everybody else is so great and he’s just average.

“He don’t understand — you are just as great as everyone else. But he’s so humble and unique that he doesn’t put it up here,” the coach said, pointing to his head. “All through high school I was saying this boy has rare talent. He could be one of the best in the world. He still hasn’t wrapped his mind around it — how good he really can be.”

Above the rim

Tondra Williams and her former husband, Robert Williams Jr., were in the kitchen of their Oil City home one day when she saw a flash of something wild and unusual in two large trees out front, like a long bird descending through the branches.

It was Robert III, then seven. He had pushed a trampoline near a free-standing basket, adjusted to regulation height, on the lawn. He was launching, up through the branches, and “hit his head on a couple of them,” as his older sister Brittanni Smith recalls.

“To dunk it, he was actually coming down from over the goal.”

By his junior year at North Caddo in neighboring Vivian, Williams had sprouted roughly four inches to 6-foot-10. Elbows rim-high, he was now dunking down on the basket without the aid of a prop.

By senior year he was averaging a triple double that included 10.5 blocks per game, with a single-night high of 17 blocks. Most opponents had stopped attacking the paint, and with Williams getting to virtually everything within reach, North Caddo reached Louisiana’s Div. 2A Final Four in three straight seasons.

There was something about being the most imposing player on the floor, though, that continued to bother Williams.

“He wanted us to list him at 6-foot-7,” said Ron Meikle, a longtime NBA scout with the Cavaliers, Warriors and Hawks who, in a case of great timing for Williams, had taken over the North Caddo program. “The thing was that he was a point guard in junior high school, and that’s why he was such a good passer and has the great handle.

“The problem is that he was maybe too unselfish. If he’s more selfish, I think we win a state championship.”

Instead, the most underdeveloped part of Williams’ game continued to be his ego. Meikle laid out an NBA road map for him. The coach was on the Cleveland staff during the Brad Daugherty/Larry Nance/Mark Price era, and helped scout and draft Al Horford for Atlanta. But Williams only had a vague notion of playing on that level.

“He never realized back then how special his talent was,” said Meikle. “But when that light comes on, and you know it will, you’re really going to see something.”

Leaving ‘Mayberry’

Williams’ greatest passion was rooted in everything and everyone around him. In the fall of his junior year, Williams stood on the sideline of North Caddo’s football field, next to the school’s principal, Dr. Marby Barker, as the undermanned Rebels practiced. As a small division school, with 5A the largest and 1A the smallest, North Caddo had trouble filling an entire football roster.

Williams, wanting to help, had an idea.

“He tells me, ‘I’m the tallest person on the field — maybe I can help them. I’ll sign up and then I can be on the field with them next week,’” said Barker. “I told him, ‘Robert, someone would hit you, and those twigs you have for legs would be broken. No, you are not playing football.’”

By then he was too much of a local treasure to risk. On game nights, he was the greatest draw in the parish in this broad, flat spread of oil country, with Dallas 200 miles to the West, Jackson, Miss., 250 miles to the East, New Orleans at the opposite corner of the state 400 miles to the Southeast, and the nearest city, Shreveport, 40 miles south.

A drive up I-49 from Shreveport is flanked by fields of cattle and small oil derricks, with Vivian connected by a narrow interstate road, on the other side of a pine forest. Meikle took to calling Williams “The Mayor” because of his surging popularity in this tight, blue-collar community.

“They call Robert the ‘Time Lord?’” said Barker, now retired. “Well, there’s a ‘time warp’ that exists up there. You have moms who don’t work and bring lunches every day to school for their kids. It’s Mayberry-ish. Everyone knew Robert, and knew he was destined for a basketball scholarship.”

Texas A&M and, after a call from Meikle to an acquaintance, the University Oregon, were the only programs to recruit Williams early. And the Aggies were indeed all-in on the young big man, who would later become a two-time SEC player of the year under coach Billy Kennedy.

North Caddo athletic director Johnny Kavanaugh remembers an A&M recruiter following Williams around like “a puppy dog.”

Notably absent was anyone from Louisiana State University, which pained North Caddo faculty members Jessica Slack and Donna Pannell — a pair of Tiger alumnae who would ultimately put their allegiances aside and make regular four-hour drives to College Station, Texas, to watch Williams play.

Pannell, Williams’ senior year English teacher, always knew when he was in her wing of the school. There’s a metal vent above the door of her classroom that only someone with an NBA prospect’s reach could touch, and this is how Williams would deliver his homework, through the slats.

“You knew it was him because nobody else was tall enough to do that,” she said. “He’d stick in his hand and wave like, ‘Hey, Miss Pannell.’”

Slack, North Caddo’s librarian whose office door is covered with the pictures of former students — including several of Williams and his teammates — accumulated a number of unintended souvenirs, like a “smelly” gym bag she finally asked him to retrieve.

Digging into a box in the back, Slack pulled out a pair of long black loafers — dress shoes Williams once asked her to hold onto for some forgotten reason. At the bottom of the box are an equally boat-like pair of maroon low-cut sneakers.

“Honestly, he’s a good, kind-hearted kid,” said Slack. “I’ve watched him here, when the younger kids would come up to him, and he would always talk to them, and I’d tell him always be a good role model. He was like, ‘I’m not a role model.’ But yeah, you are. He said, ‘I just like to play the game,’ and I was like, ‘You don’t even realize that these kids are looking up to you.’”

“And then I’m watching him at A&M, and all these little kids are lined up and he’d greet every one of them, and I teared up,” she said. “He said, ‘What’s wrong?’ I told him, ‘Don’t you ever stop that, don’t you ever change that. In the end it’s about the fans. Yeah, you love the game, but you also have these people who love to watch you. Don’t ever change that.’”

Texas-bound

Based on the influences from those close to him in Vivian and nearby Oil City, Robert Williams III couldn’t have turned out much differently.

Louisiana State University jumped into the recruiting game late. Assistant coach Eric Musselman attended a closed winter practice. It was cold, which is why Slack was worried when her grandfather, an 84-year-old Vivian entrepreneur named Joe Lawler, knocked on her office door wearing a sleeveless LSU game jersey, with no undershirt.

Lawler was a major donor to the basketball program, with his own banner high on a wall behind one of the baskets, and considered himself Williams’ No. 1 fan.

Slack wasn’t sure how he scored the LSU jersey, but tagged along when he rushed outside in an attempt to chase down Musselman. Lawler started pestering the coach for an assessment, and when Musselman said he had a few other players to scout the old man got a little agitated. Slack, sensing trouble, took over.

“I was very disappointed, and I let (Musselman) know,” she said. “You just made a really big mistake. No. 1, that’s my kid out there, and No. 2, you don’t realize. You’d never hear Robert say look at me, and by then A&M had already offered him. He’s going to have to go to A&M and I’m like, grrr, no, we’re Tigers.”

When Williams led A&M into Baton Rouge on Feb. 4, 2017, he scored 18 points and added four blocks in the Aggies’ second win that season over LSU. Slack wagged a finger at her alma mater.

“When we played (A&M) and they beat us, I was like, ‘That’s what you get. You had Robert Williams, and you let him go.’”

Out of his shell

Home was a cocoon for Williams — perhaps even more so than for most entering the NBA — with a support network that made the unknown unnerving.

But Williams liked the college experience so much — the student section brandished signs of “Stay” during his freshman year — that he did, indeed return for another year.

And then he had to break free again last spring, albeit with some reluctance. He turned down an invitation to sit with his family in the NBA’s Green Room on draft night, instead inviting everyone he knew to a local Buffalo Wild Wings. But an even more radical break was coming.

“You know how they say fame and fortune? That was my concern,” said Tondra. “If it was given to him, I was going to worry about him. I didn’t want him to go there and it would get into his head, or he would get into a lot of stuff — the wrong stuff. That was my worry.”

Williams began his NBA career with an overflowing plate. He’s a first-time father, with the birth of a daughter, Ava, in early December to a Texas A&M classmate.

“He has a lot of help, people talking to him about time management, showing him the maximum amount of time he can spend with the baby and make sure he’s doing what he needs to do,” said Evans. “Right now, he’s probably not seeing the baby as much as he wants to, but he’ll make up for it in the offseason.”

Williams’ father, Robert Jr., always filled the role of disciplinarian from afar in Houston, where he moved and remarried after leaving the family when his son was 12. He subsequently put an estimated 75,000 miles on his Chevy truck driving to games between Vivian and College Station.

He is a little bemused now. His son’s first step into the NBA was errant. Robert III missed the first day of summer league practice after missing a flight, and then came the birth announcement.

“Well, he’s gonna find out like the rest of us,” said Robert Jr. “It’s not easy to juggle a career when you start with a newborn kid. He didn’t tell me about it because he knew I would lose it.”

But count Robert Jr. in the camp that believes that missed flight and practice may have been a blessing for Williams. The rookie’s life has been structured down to the minute by Brad Stevens and his staff ever since.

“My original thought was, ‘This is the way he’s gonna get it,’” said Robert Jr. “You’re a pro now. You have to grow up. It occurred to me that’s what he needed — someone in his face letting him know this ain’t college. He took it to heart, too. It doesn’t surprise me that his work ethic is as good as it is. Now he has people constantly letting him know how it’s going to be.”

But the nickname lingers.

The moniker “Time Lord,” created by an inventive member of the Celtics’ Twitter community as a result of Williams’ early time management issues, was not received well back home.

His sister, Brittanni, went on Twitter to remind people that her brother’s nickname was actually “Boo-Butt” — given him by Tondra from a lullaby she sang to Williams as an infant sitting in her lap. Tondra prefers not to acknowledge the inspiration behind “Time Lord,” choosing to believe it has something to do with his timing as a shot blocker.

Some, like Pannell, took offense once social media caught fire.

“There were times I would read what people were posting on Instagram,” she said. “I would quit reading it, because I would get so defensive of him. I’m thinking, Ya’ll don’t know what a totally good person he is, not just as a basketball player, just a good person. The cut-downs and such, he’s still a kid. He doesn’t have experience. I know he has skills beyond what most kids at that age have.”

Slack admits, “My claws came out a bit,” while also realizing the problem was self-created.

“At the end of the day yeah, he had to own it,” she said. “I was like, ‘Dude, you did it, you were irresponsible. This is your job. You have a job now. College is one thing. But you have a job that you’re getting paid to do. Like I wake up every day to go to work, this is now your assignment.’

“Next time he was like, ‘You’re right, this is my job.’”

Pannell and Slack were stunned by two recent calls from Williams that both teachers believe is another sign of his maturity. Instead of asking about the team, or his friends, he wanted a report on North Caddo’s recently improved state educational ranking.

“I was like, ‘Where’s Robert, am I still talking to Robert?’” said Pannell. “Now he’s more concerned with the welfare of the school academically, because now he’s been in a place where he sees the value of what we do here. He sees a bigger picture.”

Right on time

There’s also a new picture. To help Williams adapt, Brittanni moved to Boston with her brother, into a place not far from the Celtics’ Brighton practice facility. Chefs and nutritionists at the Auerbach Center take care of his meals. She monitors his schedule, knocks on his bedroom door to make sure he’s not over-sleeping.

“Now, some mornings I wake up thinking he’s in his room sleeping,” said Brittanni. “If it’s not a game day and his door is closed, I have to go over there and say, where’s Boo-Butt? But he’s not in there. Then he’ll come back and say, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you Bri, I had to do this charity thing for so-and-so.’ I was like, hey, I don’t have to tell him, ‘You have to get up. Get this done.’”

Some things haven’t changed, though. His ego isn’t any larger. The next time Williams called home after blocking Anthony Davis twice during a Dec. 10 game against New Orleans, he was predictably low-key.

In this way he’s like Tondra, whose own reaction to that signature night was to say, “Yes, I saw it, it’s basketball isn’t it?’”

But mention of that same moment brought a spark to Evans’ eyes.

“He treats it like it’s normal. No, it’s not normal, that’s one of the best players in the league,” said the AAU coach. “He shows everybody else how good he can be, but in his mind that’s just normal. That’s what he does … His instinct, his God-given ability is to block shots.

“Kind of like dunking for him — his reaction is, ‘I don’t see the big deal, but I guess I’m making everybody else happy.’”