“He put his arms around me, and he knew how I grew up, that I was a kid from his area, and had gotten into coaching, and he told me stuff that I knew he wasn’t telling everybody,” Williams said. “It was like talking to some figure from the Bible who I wanted to meet. Around there, a lot of people called him Big John, but I could never bring myself to do that. I always called him Coach Thompson. “I just knew that I didn’t have his kind of backbone, and I wish I did. He was like Moses to me.”