“I wouldn’t be here without John Thompson,” Williams, a Notre Dame graduate, said on Monday morning. “He was a hero for us. We had our parents, and we had Len Bias, and Len died. And then we had John Thompson. “He was the first, along with Coach [John] Chaney, who stood up and said, ‘That’s wrong.’ They were offended when people tried to put them into a different class, and it gave me confidence to not put up with stuff that I knew was wrong. He taught Black kids to believe that they were valuable, and the athletes among us then knew that he was talking about us too.”