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Lions WR Jameson Williams returns from suspension ready to roar

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They were finishing dinner in the living room when the first gunshots rang out.

Jameson Williams was committed to Ohio State at the time, and his guests that night on a home recruiting visit were new Buckeyes coach Ryan Day and wide receivers coach Brian Hartline.

“We (were) just eating dinner on the couch, boom, it go down outside,” Williams recalled in an interview with the Free Press this week. “They asked me, ‘What is that?’ You know what it is. It’s gunshots, it’s a shootout right outside the house, bro. So after that they just got up out of there and it was just that.”

No one dove on the floor or ran for cover.

“You don’t really duck for cover. You’re used to it. It’s every night,” Williams said.

But as Day and Hartline were saying their good-byes on the porch, Williams’ father, James, remembers the gunshots got more intense.

“It just started happening crazy,” James said. “And they was startled a little bit and I don’t know if in their mind they (were) thinking like, ‘Where we getting this kid from?’ But this is where you’re getting this kid from.”

Jameson Williams will make his return to the lineup Sunday night when the Detroit Lions visit the Houston Texans at NRG Stadium.

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He was reinstated this week from a two-game suspension for violating the NFL’s policy on performance enhancing substances, the second suspension of his young career, and made headlines during his absence when the Detroit Police Department submitted a warrant request to the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office for Williams’ arrest on gun charges after a traffic stop last month.

Williams was the passenger in a car driven by his brother that was pulled over for speeding. Two guns were found in the vehicle, one registered to Williams and one to his brother. Williams, who was briefly handcuffed and detained during the incident, did not have a concealed pistol license to carry the weapon, but his brother did.

Williams declined to address the gun incident for legal reasons this week.

He said the tumultuous past month has taught him to “be smarter … move smarter, be a bigger person in certain situations,” but he insisted both in a group interview and separately with the Free Press that nothing that has happened recently will change who he is.

“I’ve been suspended before and I don’t really look at that as a good thing or like something to brag about, but I had to miss time before,” he said. “I’ve always been the same person. It don’t change me. It never will change me. Certain people want to see you down, certain people want to see you with your head down, not doing the right thing, not making the right decision. But I’m me. Like I said, I’m me. I always come out of every situation the same person and I’m always going to be the same person every day.”

‘Literally and figuratively’

Williams grew up in the Gravois Park neighborhood on the south side of St. Louis, the second youngest of James and Tianna’s four children.

James ran track at Barton Community College and pushed his kids into sports at an early age in hopes it would one day lead them to a better life. Williams’ sister, Ja’Ianna, ran track at Wayland Baptist, his older brother, James Jr., ran track at Northwest Missouri State, and his younger brother, Jaden, played football at Ellsworth Community College and ran track at Western Texas Community College before following Jameson to Michigan and attending Eastern Michigan and Wayne State.

Jameson excelled at track and football, but gravitated to the latter sport at an early age. He told the Free Press, after the Lions traded up to take him with the 12th pick of the 2022 draft, that he was 6 years old when he first told his parents he planned to play in the NFL, and he used to sleep with a football after watching Oregon highlights nearly every night.

“Growing up I was the hungriest kid ever because I had the biggest dreams,” Williams told the Free Press in 2022. “I came from shit, I came from nothing. St. Louis is, it ain’t the place you want to be. But I’m born there, I had to deal with it, a lot of adversity. Overcame everything. You see where I’m at now. I just been a hungry kid my whole life, had big dreams and I’ve just been scratching them off my whole life.”

In football, Williams got his start playing for the Herbert Hoover Eagles Boys & Girls Club on a team named The Future that was so good and flashy it sometimes drew thousands of fans to games.

On The Future, Williams played alongside future college stars including Jalen St. John (Arkansas, UNLV) and Isaiah Williams (Illinois), who was cut by the Lions this week and is expected to return to the team’s practice squad.

James pushed his son hard towards his football dreams. He took Jameson for regular morning runs before school and in the summer at St. Louis’ Art Hill, and he required any friend who spent the night to join the workouts.

Brandon Gregory, Williams’ high school coach at Cardinal Ritter College Prep, jokingly called James, “Joe Jackson,” after Michael Jackson’s famously overbearing father. But Tianna lost a brother to gun violence before Jameson was born, and the Williamses’ approach to raising all of their children was designed in part to keep them off the street.

“You start seeing young guys start getting murdered at 12, 13 years old like running with the wrong crowds, carrying guns, skipping school, smoking weed. Like, that’s what’s normal. To see guys like Jameson, that’s an anomaly. That breaks the whole mold right there,” Cory Patterson, Williams’ coach with The Future and now an assistant at Purdue, told the Free Press in 2022.

“You got options to be in these streets, and I think Jameson knew what he wanted to do and he chose that early on in life and he pushed himself into that, he willed himself into that. He didn’t get up one day and was like, ‘Oh, OK, we’re going to move you to Chesterfield and you’re going to have a great life.’ No, he struggled through that through his whole (life) from a baby till getting out of there, till college. And those things, there’s a lot of bullets being dodged, like literally and figuratively.”

As sheltered a life as Jameson lived in some regards – his parents wouldn’t let him have a cell phone until high school – there was only so much he could avoid.

At least two people Williams played with on The Future died from gun violence before he was drafted, and James said a police chase once ended in a crash in front of their house and the driver of the motorcycle in the incident was decapitated.

“That’s really one of my reasons of why I’m going so hard,” Jameson told the Free Press this week. “People ain’t get to make it to see this. A lot of people, people who I grew up with, family members, a lot of people. Dead. I got a lot people dead, I got a lot of people in jail. I talk to all of my people. I take care of all my people, bro. People don’t know that I take care of all my people. The people that’s locked up for making their decisions, I’m still there for them. Even though if they lost everybody, I’m still there for them. My family, I’m still there for them in every situation. They can call me anytime they want to.”

‘I know where I come from’

Williams keeps a close circle of family and friends, many with St. Louis ties, because that group helped him reach the NFL.

He supports some family members financially, James said. He would rather “sit in the house with all his high school homeboys and play Madden tournaments” than live the glamorous life of a celebrity, Gregory said. And he makes his home in the city of Detroit, unlike many local professional athletes, because that’s where he feels most comfortable.

That comes with a catch, however, as Williams was caught on body cam footage released to WXYZ-TV after the gun incident last month saying he needed the gun for protection.

“Do you guys know where I live at? Detroit,” Williams said in the video.

James urged caution when discussing the gun incident as no charges have been filed, and those who know Williams well say he does not own the gun for nefarious reasons.

“I know the misconception of places and things that he be at right now, but that’s all that he knows,” Gregory said. “So instead of going to Red Lobster, he’d rather go to the mom’s-and-pop chicken spot on Martin Luther King and get some chicken. So whether that’s good or bad, he just don’t have no bad intent. He’d just rather go see some youngins at the local Chinese restaurant and they could visibly see him.

“But I get it and I done talked to him about it to a certain extent, but it’s not like he’s just a troubled kid that want to be around BS, if that makes sense. He just kind of want to be around the things that he grew up around. And sometimes when you’re a young athlete, I get it, it’s hard to just separate yourself all the way from it. So that’s kind where that’s at to me.”

Williams has made waves on social media by posting everything from late-night videos at diner spots in Detroit to clips of him setting off fireworks. Last week, a picture made the rounds of Williams at a Halloween party wearing an orange jumpsuit with a fake booking card around his neck.

While the timing and location of some of those posts has raised eyebrows, Gregory said he does not believe Williams needs to cut ties with his roots and drew a parallel to Williams’ football career.

Williams barely played in two seasons at Ohio State under Day and Hartline, then transferred to Alabama and blossomed as a 1,500-yard receiver in 2021. At Alabama, Williams built a close relationship with wide receivers coach Holmon Wiggins, Gregory’s former college roommate and a coach whose background more closely mirrors Williams’.

“In my opinion, he’s not running around trying to be in the streets like that,” James Williams said. “He’s just in the streets cause that’s where he’s from.”

Jameson said he wants to be a beacon of hope for people in Detroit and St. Louis, something he and his father dreamed about years ago. One way to do that, he said, is by staying present in their lives.

He drew several hundred kids to a free football camp this summer at the Boys & Girls Club he used to play at, he outfitted two teams in the Herbert Hoover football program with new uniforms this year, he gave away free turkeys at a Thanksgiving food drive in St. Louis last fall and he’s planning another turkey giveaway with Lions safety Kerby Joseph likely in Detroit in the coming weeks.

“Going through this situation, I figure like I don’t really care who people view me as anymore,” Williams told the Free Press. “Everybody got their own opinion. Some people going to think I’m a bad person, some people going to think I’m not. So I really don’t even have too much explaining to do to anyone. I know who I am, I know where I come from and I know what I work hard for and I know what I’m trying to get to, so I think that’s the main thing, me knowing myself rather than somebody else trying to get to know me.”

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‘Yeah, I make mistakes’

Williams is one of the most dangerous deep threats in the NFL. He’s averaging 21.2 yards per catch this season and his blazing speed has helped diversify the Lions’ league-best offense.

But 2½ years into his career, Williams has less than 800 yards receiving and has missed almost as many games (18) as he’s played (24). He sat out the first 11 games of his rookie season while rehabbing from the torn ACL he suffered in college, and last year he was suspended six games (later to reduced to four) for violating the NFL’s gambling policy by placing mobile bets on non-NFL games from the Lions’ Allen Park facility.

Still, Williams is widely liked in the Lions locker room for his easy-going personality and generous ways. At Alabama, Williams once helped a young receiver, JaCory Brooks, get tickets for his parents to watch a game. Brooks couldn’t get tickets through Alabama’s normal player allotment that week for academic reasons, and when Williams noticed Brooks was upset minutes before the game, he cut short his normal pregame routine to find a staffer who could help out without letting on what he did.

In Detroit, Isaiah Williams said he benefitted from a similar act of kindness. Williams, who made the Lions’ initial 53-man roster as an undrafted free agent, found his game jerseys folded in his locker after the Lions’ preseason and regular season openers.

Puzzled, he went to Lions equipment manager Tim O’Neill and asked why he kept getting his game jerseys to keep when no one else did. O’Neill told him Jameson Williams paid for them as a keepsake.

“When I tell you he didn’t say nothing, I had to go up to him and be like, ‘Bro, I appreciate you,’” Isaiah Williams said. “He wasn’t going to say nothing cause he don’t want no recognition. He’s just the type of dude that just look out for people and stuff like that goes unnoticed.”

Lions coach Dan Campbell has defended Jameson Williams, too, insisting he trusts the 23-year-old despite his transgressions.

Campbell said this week he believes Williams has learned from his latest suspension and welcomed him back with open arms. Williams is expected to start tonight against the Texans.

“It hurts, man. It hurts not to play,” Campbell said. “And when you don’t have anybody to blame but yourself, it makes you look at yourself a little bit harder. And so, he’ll be fine, I really believe that, and I do believe he’ll learn from it. I think he’s — I mean, he was just out there today, in our walk-through we had, man, he’s locked in, ready to go, so I think he’s going to come right out of this on top.”

Williams admits to making mistakes — he accepted his most recent suspension without appeal, though he declined to provide details of what substance he took this week, saying, “It’s all on the internet and things like that, so I figure people already have their own type of view” — but downplayed his need to improve his decision-making process.

He said he has already grown tremendously in his time in the NFL, something Campbell, his teammates, parents and people back in St. Louis echo.

Gregory said he and Tianna text often after watching Jameson’s media appearances and sometimes get emotional about how far he’s come.

James Williams said he expects more out of Jameson in some regards — “Some of the little incidents I think he can avoid,” he said — but is proud of the man he is and the things he does.

And Jameson said there are plenty of good decisions he makes that no one sees, and the people important to him, “my teammates, my family, everybody knows who I am.”

“I think people just look at me wrong,” he said. “A lot of people get profiled wrong though. That’s a part of life. But I don’t really, like I said, I don’t really trip off what they got to say, things like that. So I just really do me, because I’m me. I’ll never change for no situation, no type of person. Yeah, I make mistakes. I may make the wrong decision sometimes, but I know what I did wrong and I know I’m going to fix it. So I’m just that type of person. I don’t really try to beat myself up on making the wrong decision and stuff like that.”

Dave Birkett will sign copies of his new book, “Detroit Lions: An Illustrated Timeline” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Our Lady of Victory in Northville. 

Order your copy here.

Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X and Instagram at @davebirkett.

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