Catching up with Wallace Williams

Wallace Williams remembers watching the football head toward the uprights at Stanford Stadium.

"It came right over my head," the former Cougars offensive lineman said. "It was like watching a 747 come over you."

WSU kicker Don Sweet was putting the finishing touch on one of the biggest upsets in college football in 1971 with the 27-yard field goal.

The Cougars had driven nearly the length of the field in the final minutes, with tight end Jim Forrest making a one-handed grab of a Ty Paine pass to keep the drive alive.

Then came the field goal.

"The ball seemed to take an eternity," Williams said. "But we all started jumping around before it got there. It was going right through the uprights, and place-kicks then didn't hook or slice."

(Kicks didn't curve because of the straight-ahead kicking style of the day.)

Sweet's kick beat 10th-ranked Stanford 24-23. It was a big deal because the Cardinal (then called the Indians) had just been to the Rose Bowl and would be back in Pasadena 2-1/2 months later.

To Stanford, the loss to the Cougars was just a surprising bump in the road, but to WSU it was a turnaround game.

The Cougars entered the game with a 2-4 record and finished the year 4-7. Williams, a senior, called the game a "turning point" for the program because it provided a jolt of confidence that led to the 7-4 record that included an Apple Cup win and No. 19 final ranking in 1972.

Former Cougars coach Jim Sweeney has called that win one of the most memorable and pivotal in his eight-year reign in the Palouse. It snapped a streak of 16 Pac-10 losses for WSU. It was such a big win that a Cougfan.com panel of Cougologists in 1993 voted the victory as one of the 10 most important games in the past 30 years of WSU football.

What made the win particularly sweet was that Stanford had humiliated the Cougars 63-16 the previous season.

Williams' son, Jeremey, makes his third and final visit to Stanford tomorrow as a Cougars defensive tackle. He is 2-0 in Palo Alto, and the family is 3-0 because of Wallace's triumph.

Wallace was one of 16 junior-college transfers on the 1971 team. He had attended Bakersfield J.C. rather than a four-year school "because I didn't take the right classes in high school."

He had gone to high school in Bakersfield and said black students back then "weren't placed in college preparatory classes."

For the past 15 years, Williams has been in a position to make sure that doesn't happen to anyone at Rogers High School in Spokane. That's because he is the principal.

Jeremey Williams and his sister, Stephanie, went to high school across town at Ferris High School, where Jeremey played basketball and football and Stephanie, now 25, played basketball. She is now doing graduate work in architecture at Maryland after getting her undergraduate degree from Washington.

The brother and sister wanted to go to Rogers with their father, but Spokane School District policy prevented it. He made it clear to them what he hoped to see when they played Rogers:

"I wanted them to play their best games ever but lose."