Jeff Lockridge

jlockridge@tennessean.com

Gail Williams casts a helpless grin, shakes her head and rolls her eyes. It's the look that a loving wife gives when speaking about her husband's embarrassing little idiosyncrasies.

"They were talking about his shoes," she said about a radio broadcast during the Vanderbilt football coaching search.

"The guys were talking about, 'David Williams, he'll wear those jogging suits. And have you seen those shoes he wears?' I don't know what shoes they were talking about, but that was pretty funny. He has (nice clothes). He just doesn't wear them. He likes that jogging suit and run-over gym shoes."

David Williams, who has watched over Vanderbilt athletics since 2003, sits at the end of the dining room table at the family's exquisite residence on Millstone Lane, three miles from campus.

He is content to listen and smile.

Perhaps somewhere in the tale of Williams' casual work attire is the secret to his admirable and unlikely climb from Detroit public school teacher to an established SEC athletic director.

Williams, the SEC's fourth-longest tenured AD, is putting the finishing touches on one of the most eventful years in Commodores athletics history, one that featured a third-straight football bowl appearance, the drama-filled coaching departure of James Franklin and subsequent search that lassoed Derek Mason, a tumultuous men's basketball season and the ongoing rape case involving former football players as a constant backdrop.

And, today, the Commodores' baseball team opens World Series play in Omaha, Neb., where it faces Louisville (7 p.m., ESPN).

Throughout it all, Williams has been seemingly unfazed, a pillar of consistency and composure amid the good times and the bad.

Williams, 66, is the same man at home as he is at the office, the same man at his son's track meets as he is when the university Board of Trust meets. He doesn't have time for false facades. He is too busy.

"What you see is what you get," Vanderbilt booster John Ingram said. "There's a lot of substance there. If you're lucky enough to see David in action, you realize he's pretty remarkable. I encourage anybody not to be put off because he's a big ol' burly bear of a man. He's a kindhearted, good man and someone I'm honored to call a friend."

Becoming the AD

Williams' role as athletic director really began 11 years ago when former Vanderbilt Chancellor Gordon Gee restructured the athletics program and placed it under the blanket of Student Life.

For almost a decade, Williams held down several roles at the same time, including vice chancellor of student affairs, tenured law professor, general counsel and university secretary.

Williams was officially bestowed the AD title in 2012. By then he had hired a long list of winning non-revenue sport coaches as well as Franklin, a relative unknown, as the football coach in 2010, sparking an unprecedented run of success across the department.

"The James Franklin hire is as good of a hire as anybody has made in the SEC in the last 20 years," said Clay Travis, co-host of sports talk show "3HL" on 104.5-The Zone and a former law student who studied under Williams at Vanderbilt. "David Williams deserves a lot of credit for identifying and hiring him.

"I think he's brilliant. I had him for Taxation of Nonprofit Entities … which is an interesting one because it sounds incredibly complicated and also not very interesting. What I loved about him was how dynamic and engaging and just how totally fascinating he made the tax code."

As Gail Williams tells it, those achievements are just details of her husband's job. But they don't reveal who he is. That question is tougher to answer.

Labors of love

The more Williams delves into his history, the easier it is to see how such a laid-back, easy-going guy also can double as a diligent worker.

David and Juanita, Williams' late parents, were Mississippi sweethearts who reunited in Motor City amid the factory boom after World War II. David was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen who aided ground operations during the war. He later ran a neighborhood grocery, worked for the post office, went to night school and became a teacher, always holding two jobs at once while making time to watch his only child run track and play football at Mumford High.

Juanita also taught in Detroit's public schools, though her ambition was best exemplified by a part-time job she sought when Williams was in college at Northern Michigan.

"I come home and my mother tells me she's going to work for J.L. Hudson (department store) as a sales lady during Christmas," Williams recalled. "So I ask my dad, 'Are we broke? Did something happen?' And that's when he told me the story.

"(Years earlier) she went to get a job at J.L. Hudson. At that time, they were only hiring black women as elevator operators. They had a skin-color test. They held up a paper bag, and if you were darker than the paper bag, they wouldn't hire you (for that job). So they didn't hire her. Throughout all that time, she had this in her — something she had to make right. 'Before I die, I have to go work for J.L. Hudson.' "

Williams grew up a few blocks from Olympia Stadium, where the Red Wings and Pistons fueled his love of sports along with the swimming he did at the YMCA and boxing lessons from his older cousin.

His love of music flourished at the famed Garfield Hotel and Lounge, owned and operated by Randolph Wallace, Williams' uncle. It was an important jazz spot in the 1950s and early '60s for some of the day's biggest acts on the doorstep of Motown.

"If you were black and you came to Detroit up until about 1963, you stayed at someone's home or you stayed in one of two places: Randolph Wallace's Garfield Lounge or Sonny Wilson's Gotham (Hotel)," Williams said. "All of the great black musicians, entertainers, politicians and athletes I ended up seeing. I have vivid memories after the 1960 Olympics when they were making their victory tour, and I met a guy by the name of Cassius Clay, who, of course, became Muhammad Ali.

"I saw Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway — everybody came. Those groups played at the club. It was kind of cool because I got to see both sides of the street — the gamblers, the pimps, the hustlers and the number runners. That's who was there."

Williams was a bit of a musician himself, taking clarinet, saxophone and flute lessons by age 4 (though it didn't put him on the level of his late cousin, Milan Williams, a founding member of the Commodores). Juanita liked the woodwinds because Benny Goodman was her favorite artist.

Williams' desk drawers at McGugin Center bear claim of his roots. They are overflowing with CDs, a mix of R&B, jazz and Motown classics. There is a rumor that music can be heard coming from his office after 5 p.m. when most of the building is empty.

Family is law

Williams never considered law — practicing or teaching it — until he had a master's degree and teaching certificate (Williams did his student teaching for Will Robinson, who became the first African-American coach of a Division I basketball team at Illinois State in 1970).

He spent a year teaching kindergarten. Just as he decided to give law school a try and was accepted at the University of Detroit, there was a teachers' strike. Williams was the equivalent of his school's union representative. Law school got put on hold. That was 1972. He didn't revisit the idea until 1979.

Williams stayed busy teaching in junior high and coaching Detroit Central High's tennis program. "I had no idea what the hell I was doing," Williams said of the tennis.

Williams met Gail at Detroit's law school. Her cousin had been Williams' locker mate back at Mumford. The couple will be married 26 years come this summer.

Williams' career path led to Ohio State, where he was a law professor and served in various capacities for Gee, including oversight of the athletic director — his first real glimpse at what that job entailed. When Gee was named Vanderbilt chancellor in 2001, Williams, his wife and their two youngest children, Samantha and Nick, followed him to Nashville.

"You can't niche him," said Gee, who was recently appointed president of West Virginia University. "You can't say, 'This is David.' You can say, 'This is a problem, and who do you want to have solve it?' And the answer is David Williams.

"He has widespread respect. He's a tax professor. What in the heck does a tax professor know about athletics? But yet he has done a remarkable job. We were the butt of every joke in America (with the 2003 restructuring), and now Vanderbilt is laughing all the way to success."

Rod Williamson, Vanderbilt's longtime director of athletics communications, said Williams' compassion for students and ability to cross boundaries in the university community changed the game.

"In past with traditional ADs, we would spend a reasonable amount of time saying, 'OK, that's what we think in McGugin Center. Now how do we communicate what we want?' " Williamson said.

"When David sat at the table, we went from spending a reasonable amount of time thinking about that to zero, because he was the senior management and had the authority to say, 'We can do that.' That matters a lot on a campus when it comes to harmony. When David speaks at a faculty staff senate meeting, they look at him as much as a peer as they do an AD that's trying to sell them something."

When Gee got ready to return to Ohio State as president in 2007, he came to Williams' house. He asked Williams to follow him once more. But this time, it was a decision for the family — and it was unanimous.

"This became home," Williams said. "Columbus, as nice as it was, it never took the place of Detroit as home. But this actually became home. None of us are from here, but this actually became home. We didn't want to leave."

Art of an AD

The decision to stay gave Vanderbilt fans a chance to learn more about Williams, thanks in part to his availability during coaching searches and a series of forthright interviews he has given on other matters. But there are some things fans probably don't know about him.

Williams is a book addict. He doesn't read a Kindle — only hardbacks. And they fill the shelves. He also is an art junkie, and every piece in his home has a story. Nothing is random.

There is a framed program from the musical "Five Guys Named Moe," which was performed in England while Williams was directing Ohio State's summer law classes at Oxford. Samantha was asked to come up on stage at age 4 and became part of the musical.

There is a scene of the Detroit River's banks, pre-construction, peering across to Windsor, Canada — a gift that Williams' neighbor painted many moons ago looking out the window while serving jury duty.

Above the front door, there is a wood-carved picture of a pregnant woman kneeling before her tribe's elders, awaiting her fate. Williams got this piece in South Africa and carried it around during his vacation so it wouldn't be damaged.

A painting of five elderly African men hangs in the dining room. The tops of their heads are cut off. The South African prisoner who painted himself and his fellow inmates ran out of canvas and wasn't given any more.

Williams is passionate about South Africa and Nelson Mandela. He missed a chance to go back in July because of the Vanderbilt rape case, although Gail and Samantha — a Brown University graduate who works on U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander's staff — were able to go.

A striking centerpiece hangs at the top of the stairs. A brilliant sunset is the backdrop for a jewelry-clad African woman in a red hat. An Ohio State student and U.S. veteran painted it for Williams after learning that Williams had secretly given a personal check to the registrar's office so the student could sign up for classes when his government assistance didn't arrive on time.

Pictures of Williams' children, including his older ones — Erika, 41, and David III, 40 — are everywhere. Like his father, Williams has tried to attend all of his children's activities. If he wasn't in his office during the afternoon from 2010-13, odds are he was at University School of Nashville watching Nick run track or cross country, or play soccer or basketball.

"I've been playing sports about 10 years, and he's always been there, no matter what the circumstance," said Nick, who runs the 400 and 800 meters at High Point University. "He's a hardworking, smart person who's going to give you his all in whatever he does. And he's a good person."

Williams makes his family presence a priority.

"I enjoy (Vanderbilt) sports and watching games," Williams added. "But wherever I am, if I can get home quicker, I'm doing it."

The desire to be home won't drive Williams to retirement in the immediate future. He said last year that he envisioned being the athletic director for three to five more years. This year, same answer. And he anticipates giving the same answer next year.

The lone caveat is that Williams wants to make sure he can return to teaching law and undergrad classes once his AD days are done. Teaching, after all, is his first calling. It's in his blood.

Just don't ask him to wear a suit and tie to class.

"I told him one time, 'David, people think you need to dress up a little more,' " Gee said. "He said, 'That's just not me.' And I said, 'Well, I want you to be who you are.' "

He's not going to change.

"I'm pretty comfortable being who I am," Williams said. "The older I get, the less I have any desire to be anybody other than that. At the age I am now, I'm like, 'Nah. This is what I'm wearing. If it doesn't work for you, I'm sorry.' "

Reach Jeff Lockridge on Twitter @jefflockridge.

THE SEC'S LONGEST-TENURED ATHLETIC DIRECTORS

22 years: Jeremy Foley, Florida

16 years: Mike Alden, Missouri

12 years:: Mitch Barnhart, Kentucky

11 years*:

David Williams, Vanderbilt

9.5 years: Jay Jacobs, Auburn

* By appointment of Williams as vice chancellor of student affairs and athletics after Vanderbilt's 2003 restructuring of departments

DAVID WILLIAMS II

• Age: 66

• Title: Vanderbilt athletics director

• Born: Detroit

• Family: Wife, Gail; children Erika, David III, Samantha, Nick

• Education: LLM, New York University; JD, MBA, University of Detroit; master's, B.A., Northern Michigan.

• Coaching hires: Derek Mason (2014) and James Franklin (2011) in football; Scott Limbaugh in men's golf; Greg Allen in women's golf; Steve Keith in women's track and field and cross country; John Williamson in women's bowling (2007 NCAA title); Ian Duvenhage in men's tennis; Derek Greene in women's soccer; Jeremy Organ in women's swimming.