Pat Williams brought Magic to Orlando but the man who died last week was so much more

I last talked with Pat Williams earlier this year, when I was driving north on I-95 toward Jacksonville, where I was to have dinner with Julius “Dr. J” Erving and Artis Gilmore for the biography I’m writing about Gilmore’s life. Dr. J and I are collaborating to write the book’s foreword.

“Petey boy,” Pat said when he answered the phone. He always called me Petey boy, affectionately, with an unabashed happiness that we were going to have another conversation together, something we’d done many times since we first met 35 years ago.

When I told him where I was headed and who I was going to have dinner with at a Bonefish Grill restaurant, Pat lit up even more, with questions, observations, insights … his endless curiosity and joie de vivre in overdrive, which, if you knew Pat, was the only gear he drove through life in. He was happy for me that I was writing another book, and over the phone it felt like I had a personal cheerleader encouraging me.

Then he had a request, which might seem odd, but it was totally Pat. “Take a picture of Dr. J and Artis pressing their hands together and send it to me,” he said. I knew exactly why he thought of that. Dr. J has enormous hands, even for an NBA great. And as anyone who has ever shook hands with Artis Gilmore can attest to, it’s one of the strongest grips, if not the strongest grip, you will ever painfully experience.

Even still, how does a guy go about asking two Hall of Famers in their 70s to press their hands together for a photo? Simple. You tell them Pat Williams is asking.

When Pat died last Wednesday at 84, the tagline on obituaries noted that he brought the Magic to Orlando. “There is no Orlando Magic without Pat Williams,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement, providing one of many voices that echoed that same sentiment. While that is true, it doesn’t come close to summing up Pat’s life.

Even now, although I knew Pat very well, I’m still learning things about him that I never knew. Bob Ryan, the longtime Boston Globe sportswriter and TV personality, posted on X after Pat died that when Pat was a minor-league baseball catcher, he was the first batterymate of MLB Hall of Famer Ferguson Jenkins. It was not surprising to learn that. Pat crossed paths with so many people and knew everybody. But he rarely talked about himself. He always wanted to know about you, always inquisitive, always learning, always absorbing knowledge.

It was Pat, when he was Philadelphia's general manager, who brought Dr. J to the franchise, and subsequently other player pieces that led to the 76ers winning their one and only NBA Championship in 1983. When I texted Julius late Wednesday night that Pat had died, he texted back a short time later. The news deeply saddened him. Over that dinner earlier this year, he expressed how important Pat had been in his career, and in his life.

Dr. J's missed shot in playoffs led to Williams coming to Orlando

As an aside, Central Florida can thank Dr. J for Pat Williams coming to Orlando. How so? Back in the ’80s, the late Central Florida businessman Jimmy Hewitt developed a friendship with Pat. Hewitt recognized the energy, the positivity, the leadership skills, the organizational talent and the promotional spirit that embodied Pat, and he wanted him to spearhead the city’s efforts to convince the NBA to award Orlando an expansion franchise. Pat was more than intrigued, but he had a good gig going on in Philadelphia, which was also near where he grew up.

Then Dr. J did something that convinced Pat to leave Philadelphia for little Orlando.

Dr. J missed a shot.

It was 1986, Erving’s penultimate NBA season, and Pat was trying to squeeze every remaining bit of excellence from one of basketball’s all-time greatest players. The 76ers were playing the Milwaukee Bucks in a Game 7 to see who would advance to the Eastern Conference Finals. Pat had made up his mind that if the 76ers won, he was going to stay in Philadelphia. If they lost, then he saw it as an opportunity to move on and find another mountain to climb.

In the waning seconds of that Game 7, with Philadelphia down one point, Dr. J pulled up at the foul line to take one last shot. The ball rimmed out and the 76ers lost.

Pat got on the phone and called Jimmy Hewitt; he was coming to Orlando.

It can’t be overemphasized how huge that was for Orlando. I would argue that the four most influential people in Orlando’s growth, helping to make it the city that it is today, are Walt Disney, Arnold Palmer, Pat Williams and former UCF president John Hitt. Some would add current longtime mayor Buddy Dyer into that mix, and I wouldn’t argue that either.

I recently talked to another NBA Hall of Famer—Dan Issel. He told me how disappointed he still is that when the ABA and NBA merged, the Kentucky Colonels were not one of those teams that became an NBA franchise.

“Look at what having an NBA franchise has done for San Antonio,” he said. “Look at what it has done for Orlando. You can’t overstate the impact. That could have been Louisville.”

After securing Orlando’s NBA franchise, Pat helped assemble a championship caliber team, the lineup of which, almost 30 years later, every Magic fan can still recite—Shaquille O’Neal, Penny Hardaway, Nick Anderson, Dennis “3-D” Scott and Horace Grant. Not only did Pat have an eye for talent, he was also the Magic’s lucky charm when it came to securing top draft picks via the NBA ping-pong ball lottery.

It was Pat who also brought Dr. J into the Magic family in the mid-’90s, as a vice president, primarily to mentor the young team.

Here’s a recently revealed tidbit regarding Dr. J that Magic fans will not like to hear, but it should be told. Shaq and Dr. J became next-door neighbors and fast friends. When the Los Angeles Lakers were wooing Shaq to come west as a free agent, the center said on his podcast last March that he called only one person for advice—Julius Erving.

“I said, ‘Doc, I got an opportunity,’ ” O'Neal related. “You know what Doc said, ‘Follow your heart, young fella.’ So I went to LA.”

Pat Williams by the numbers: 58 marathons, 19 kids, 104 books

Pat, meanwhile, stayed with the Magic as a front-office executive until his retirement in 2019. Along the way, he ran 58 marathons, had 19 kids (14 of them adopted from all over the world), wrote 104 books, became a motivational speaker, and influenced scores of lives.

Pat and I would often talk at Magic games, and one thing I noticed about him was that he always had a book with him. He would stand in the tunnel during games, intensely watching, and then, whenever there was a timeout or a break in the action, he’d take his book and read a few pages. One night in early 2008, when we were talking before a game at the Amway Center, with Pat standing there with another book tucked under his arm, I asked him if he had an opinion on a new device Amazon had introduced called the Kindle, as I was thinking about getting one.

“Oh no,” Pat said. “Books are like trophies. When you get done reading a book, you put it on a bookshelf and admire it every time you walk past it. I have every book I’ve ever read.”

Every book?

“Almost seven thousand of them,” he replied.

That led me to his Winter Park home, where he showed me where he had a carpenter build an exquisite library with beautiful wood shelves reaching up to a high ceiling, with rows and rows of books organized according to his interests, and he had a lot of interests. Every book was non-fiction. “No fiction, none at all?” I inquired. “My wife tries to get me to read fiction,” he said. “But I tease her, I call them storybooks. I don’t have time for storybooks.”

There were, indeed, upwards of 7,000 books in what he called the “Big Library” at his home. He pulled one off a shelf. It was Pop Warner’s Book For Boys, copyright 1934, first edition. I later described the scene in a feature article I wrote for Orlando magazine.

He rubs his hand across the cover, as if caressing it, before randomly opening to a page. Slipping into an authoritative voice, he reads, “Get plenty of sleep, at least nine hours every night. Go to bed early, and don’t lie in bed in the morning. A sleepyhead never makes an alert, smart player.” Williams’ voice rises as his tone deepens. “Eat at regular hours. Eat sensibly. Lay off the stimulants. That means alcoholic drinks and tobacco. Keep healthy mentally. By that I mean be a gentleman. The best athletes are always clean, wholesome fellows. Hit the books. Be a good sportsman. Play a hard, clean game, and take the results gracefully whether you win or lose."

Finally, peering up from the pages, he says, “This was the first book I read. Can you imagine me as a 7-year-old diving into this? I bought into it like it was the gospel.”

It was the first of three magazine stories I did with Pat, the second perhaps the most meaningful, the one that solidified our friendship. Pat had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable but treatable form of cancer. I asked him how the guy who was always writing motivational books and preaching positive thinking was handling such news. It not only led to some deeply personal conversations, but also to me sitting with him during a chemotherapy treatment.

He admitted that it took him a while to practice what he preached.

“Anybody can live life when things are going well,” he told me. “The real test comes when adversity hits, and setbacks really nail you. When that happens, how are you going to deal with it? How are you going to respond? How are you going to turn it into something positive? I had to stay up. I had to stay positive. I had to stay enthusiastic. I had to believe what I was talking about. I had to show that I bought into what I was preaching.”

Sure enough, when I sat with him during his chemo treatment, I saw a man butterflying around the facility, pollinating people, especially fellow cancer patients, with positive thoughts and encouragement. He knew everybody’s name, and I witnessed the pied piper of positivity that was Pat Williams in full force.

Shortly afterward, he wrote another book, "The Mission Is Remission: Hope for Battling Cancer."

He and I also wrote a book together— "Extreme Winning: 12 Keys to Unlocking the Winner Within You."

What an experience.

We decided what the 12 chapters would be and then Pat and I would get together at his office. We titled the first chapter Extreme Dreams, the second chapter Extreme Preparation, the third chapter Extreme Focus … and so on. Whatever the chapter topic was, Pat would open a drawer and produce 3x5 index cards pressed against each other, some of them a foot or more wide, and on those cards were typed quotes, examples and anecdotes on that topic. Throughout his life, if Pat read something inspirational or interesting, he would have it meticulously recorded on index cards, and he had thousands of them. And just like his Big Library in his home, he organized those index cards by topic. From those index cards I’d research and write with him our book chapters.

Williams' final dream was to bring MLB to Orlando

It was fitting that the first chapter of that book was Extreme Dreams, because in his later years Pat pursued one more extreme dream. He wanted to bring Major League Baseball to Orlando, and he wanted to call the team the Orlando Dreamers. His pursuit of that was the third and last magazine article I wrote about him.

We met, as we sometimes did, for lunch at the country club where he belonged, and he drove me in his Jeep Grand Cherokee to a vacant plot of land near Orlando’s International Drive. He had it all mapped out in his head. Everything. And with exuberance, he shared with me his vision of how and where everything would be.

“This is the last mountain for me to climb,” he said.

This was four years ago. He was about to turn 80, and he wasn’t about to slow down, not even with cancer still coursing through his body.

Several months ago, after dropping Julius Erving off at his hotel following our dinner with Artis Gilmore, the Doc and I talked about our friendship with Pat. I asked him if he ever gets to Orlando, and he said that occasionally he does. “Next time you’re in Orlando, let’s get together with Pat,” I suggested.

That was our plan, our pact.

Instead, we texted each other the other night, mourning the death of a good man, a special man, a singularly unique man, our friend Pat Williams.

Peter Kerasotis is a journalist and author who co-wrote a book with his friend, Pat Williams.