Luca Evans (OC Register)  —  LOS ANGELES — Caleb Williams didn’t mean to cry.

He didn’t mean to break down, after that loss to Washington in early November, and become a national topic. Not again. He simply meant to give his mother a hug, a shred of catharsis for dreams that’d been crushed, giving everything he had and coming up short again in a year of frustrating defeat.

But he laid helmeted head on her shoulder, and ah – his mother’s touch. That pot of mixed emotion and self-expectation bubbled over, as it has before and will again, and all notion of holding it in and feeling the man flowed away. And Williams began convulsing in sobs, Dayna Price covering her son’s face with a homemade sign, ESPN on ABC cameras slow-zooming unmercifully as his chest heaved.

Empathy poured in. Criticism did, too. The public labeled him soft. Ex-NFLers blasted him. One NFL scout, speaking to the Southern California News Group on condition of anonymity, said, “Can you sit here and say he has 12 out of 10 mental toughness after seeing that? I don’t think you can.”

These days, Williams thinks back on that clip and laughs at himself. He doesn’t grit his teeth, but smiles, at another moment of vulnerability turned viral. Because it’s just him. 

When he lost his first football game at 4 years old – his Titans youth team, he reflects, against the Raiders – he cried, because he’d never felt that sense of pain. When his Gonzaga College High football team lost a conference championship game his freshman year, he cried, because he couldn’t bring his group a title.

“When you spend so much time on something or someone, when you feel as if you’ve lost or lost someone, I’d hope and expect that you show some emotion,” Williams said. “And that’s what I do.”

“And I don’t see any – I don’t have no shame about it.”

Those tears shed, after the UCLA loss, may be the final time he pulls on a USC jersey – a pressing decision just beginning to creep into his mind a couple days after that walk out of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. And it was a year that’ll go down on paper as a rough blemish on a legendary collegiate career, USC imploding in a disastrous 7-5 finish.

It was a year that tested him like no other, with hopes of immortality dashed and ever-increasing pressure coming off of Heisman status. And a year, ultimately, that could stand as the most important in Williams’ journey.

Because moments of tortuous defeat, of more postgame tears of sadness than any year of his football career, revealed raw Williams’ nature.

A competitor defined in, and unafraid by, his emotion.

With maturity

His eyes first rimmed red in public this year after the worst game of his professional life, a mid-October drubbing at the hands of Notre Dame in which Williams threw three increasingly confounding interceptions.

And his actions, in the following weeks, caused a slight stir. When asked about a fan sprinting up to him and mocking his famously painted nails after the loss, Williams set off a firestorm with a smirk: “Some opinions of a sheep, lions don’t worry about that.” And after a loss to Utah Oct. 21, dropping USC’s record to 6-2, Williams again stoked the fire when the broadcast showed him sitting alone on the bench towards the end of the game. He’d spoken assuredly, preseason, of national-championship hopes; they all but ended with two losses, there, his head thrust back to the sky.

“Hurts to lose,” Williams said the following week. “Hurts to lose twice in a season.”

The vitriol over such emotions – from those, as Williams’ high school coach, Randy Trivers, said, looking to “find his imperfections” and “take him down” – didn’t much bother him, Williams reflected. But after a 6-0 start where he rampaged through opposing defenses, the losing, he said, was a learning curve: learning how to handle it in a “better way.”

“To not be in it,” Williams said, referring to the CFP race, “and then also still have to follow through with each week, doing all the small things that I was doing to play at a level that I wanted to play at … it takes a little bit more maturity that I may not have had a couple years ago.”

“It takes things that I may have not have had,” he continued, “or maybe was just learning, or new to.”

Halfway through USC’s season, after the Utah loss, head coach Lincoln Riley – the man who Williams had followed from Oklahoma – brought his quarterback in for a meeting.

This could be one of the most important seasons of your career, he told Williams, the quarterback recalled in general terms. The only way that can happen is to learn from this. Try to use it as fuel. Whether you leave or stay for another year, you can only be here so long. 

“I kinda took that and sat back on it after that meeting, and I said, ‘You know what, you’re right,’” Williams said.

Using losses as fuel, though, adds lighter fluid to an emotional powder keg when the losses keep coming. And thus came the breakdown after the loss to Washington, Williams having to realize, at a then-21 years old, that cameras would be tracking his every muscle twitch.

“Just trying to understand the time and place to be able to show those emotions also,” Williams said. “But I’m not afraid of me showing them.”

With gusto

Men who leave Gonzaga College High’s program, Trivers said, leave with 12 core program values instilled in them. One, coinciding with the “G” in Gonzaga’s name, is gusto.

His players do not whisper, Trivers says; they shout. When they dance, they dance. When they love, they love.

And Trivers knows, firsthand, of Williams’ gusto.

“Whether you win or lose,” Trivers said, describing a hypothetical championship situation, “a guy like Caleb Williams … win or lose, there’s gonna be tears at the end of that game.”

He is a man, former Gonzaga teammate and friend John Marshall said, who’s always beaten to his own drum – a self-assuredness and leadership that’s resonated with most any teammate who’s played with him. Williams has always been wholly unconcerned, former teammate Olu Fashanu added, of what people think of him. As an individual decompression after losses, said Patsy Mangus, the director of his “Caleb Cares” foundation, Williams will find some sort of restaurant 30 minutes away, drive by himself, and eat quietly while pulling on his Beats.

That expressiveness and self-care is, at times, unusual in a hyper-masculine sport. In college, Williams began famously painting his nails, an homage to the days his mom – a nail tech – would paint his nails growing up. And after the Washington loss, when asked about his mental state, he told media that he simply wanted to go home, watch shows and “cuddle with my dog.”

For plenty of keyboard warriors, it’s created a thin perception of Williams as soft. It may even factor into his draft evaluation; the NFL scout who spoke to the SCNG – who still said he felt Williams was the unquestioned No. 1  pick – said the quarterback’s emotion was “not a positive.”

“I don’t know how many face-of-your-franchise type of first-overall-pick quarterbacks paint their fingernails, or cry in the stands with their mother,” the scout said. “He’s a unique individual … it’s just something that you got to make note of moving forward, know who he is. Are you comfortable with that in the first pick of the draft, or are you not?”

When asked about the scout’s comments, Trivers laughed.

“I would just say to him,” Trivers said, “don’t draft him. And draft someone else, and play against him. Good luck, my man.”

To teammates, Williams’ toughness has never been in question – “anything but soft,” as Trivers put it. As a sophomore at Gonzaga, Williams chucked a game-winning Hail Mary after coming up limping earlier in the game with what Trivers said “may have been a minor fracture,” a sheer display of heart that still resonates fresh in the mind of high school teammates like Sam Sweeney. He has shouldered responsibility without needing to, at USC – after a relatively ho-hum win over San Jose State in USC’s first game this season, Williams pulled senior leaders aside and expressed there was “a lot to get better at.”

And as this season careened off the rails, it was an option, certainly, for Williams to forgo the last stretch of the season with little left to play for and preserve his draft stock from injury. Never an option for him, though.

And he earned another grand measure of respect from his peers by finishing out an ultimately listless year. He accounted for four touchdowns against Cal and Washington. He ran for his life against Oregon’s defensive line. And he left it out, one more time, against UCLA, shedding those quiet tears when all was over.

“He has that attitude that you just have respect for, you just want to play for,” Trojans center Justin Dedich said. “And just, who he is off the field is something that I will remember for the rest of my life.”

With care

On Nov. 20, two days after the loss to UCLA, Williams sat down for an interview with the Southern California News Group, on an outdoor bleacher within the Boys and Girls’ Club in South LA that he’s frequented for two years.

Hours earlier, he’d pulled up in a matte-black Mercedes-Benz for an event years in the making, dating to the time he’d sat down with his father Carl Williams – as all of a freshman in high school – and decided on starting a nonprofit called “Caleb Cares.” It would have three pillars, Williams decided then: mental health, anti-bullying and youth empowerment.

And when Williams’ team and Caleb Cares first reached out to the Boys and Girls’ Clubs in LA before his first season at USC, they’d been cautious, said Kim Washington, the Metro LA clubs’ vice president of resource development. They wanted genuine, mission-aligned partnerships. Not one-offs.

But Williams has been consistent across a two-year relationship with Caleb Cares, Washington said. And here he was, this Monday, doling out two $50,000 checks in partnership with Dr Pepper to two Boys and Girls’ Club students. The night was goofy as it was heartfelt, the students faux-competing to see how many footballs they could rapid-toss into ginormous, inflatable Dr Pepper cans.

“You ever use a paintbrush?” Williams asked the two students, patiently holding his fingers over the laces and demonstrating a throwing motion. “Basically, how I describe it is, paint at your target.”

And for a moment, the pain of an unfulfilled season faded, and the titanic decision awaiting him was suspended. Williams was young again, here, shagging footballs with a massive grin on his face amid a throng of screaming teens. There was no judgment. There was no agenda. There was no one to answer to.

A glint formed again in his eyes, hunching over while he spoke on the bench like an oversized kid, fiddling his foot against a nearby pole. The winter chill had settled in, temperature dropping to the 50s on a Monday night. But Williams wore nothing but a t-shirt.

His team offered a jacket. He declined.

“I feel amazing,” he said, matter-of-fact.

He was here at the Boys’ and Girls’ Club, and has been here, Williams said, to spread a message to be authentic. To love who you love, and feel comfortable showing emotion, the same journey he’s embraced for himself.

And these kids, Washington said, have seen it. They’ve seen when he jumped in the stands to hug his mother.

“There’s a lot of stigmas in the Black and brown community … him being a young Black athlete and showing an emotion, you don’t see that,” Washington said.

“So for them and these kids,” she continued later, “it’s a game-changer, especially for young Black men.”

That’s why every week, Washington said, kids at the Boys and Girls’ Club have written thank-you notes to Williams. Through wins. Through losses.

It’s okay, they write, Washington said. We love you.

Caleb Williams gives the victory sign to the fans in the second half of the USC vs STAN game at the Coliseum on Saturday, September 9, 2023. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/ SCNG)

With consideration

After the tears, after everything’s sunk in, Williams has found himself caught in what he agreed is a “tug-of-war.”

He hoped, preseason, for his name to be etched in history under a national championship. He, and USC, fell far short in little fault of his own, racking up gaudy numbers – 3,633 passing yards and 41 total touchdowns – that’d be good enough to compete for back-to-back Heismans if his team wasn’t 7-5.

He could stay, yes, for a reloaded senior season in the Big Ten, a potential scenario that NFL scout said wouldn’t dissuade NFL teams from pursuing him in the draft.

But Williams’ childhood dream, that this journey has all been working toward, stands on a draft stage.

“College, for everybody, is only a stepping stone, whether you don’t play a sport or if you do play a sport,” Williams said Nov. 20.

“I haven’t necessarily run out of stones yet to step on,” he continued. “And I have to decide if I’m gonna jump into the water or if I’m gonna stay and keep walking on the stones. And that’s a decision that I have to make here at some point, but just don’t necessarily know yet.”

If he jumps, he’ll leave USC with – as former Trojan and NFL quarterback Carson Palmer dubbed it – a “doctorate in media.” He’ll leave, too, with a trial-by-fire understanding of how to handle scrutiny, of the time and place to express emotions that have come naturally since he lost his first game of youth football.

But he’ll leave, too, with an ever-growing confidence that he lives the message of vulnerability he preaches.

“That’s who I am,” he said earlier in November, of his tears after the Washington loss.

“It’s just simply who I am.”

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