A Mentor of Street Ball Dies
From the New York Times:
November 15, 2007
A Mentor of Street Ball Dies, and a Missing Knick Appears
By COREY KILGANNON and VINCENT M. MALLOZZIA gleaming white Cadillac with a license plate reading MISTERLU, its engine off, was parked next to a basketball court in a Coney Island housing project last night.The Cadillac belonged to Robert Williams, a manager at a Brooklyn nursing home. Of course, that job did not pay for the vehicle, a tricked-out car Mr. Williams had trouble figuring out how to operate. Mr. Williams did other work, on the basketball courts that were last night as quiet as his parked car.
For 36 years, Mr. Williams, known on and around those courts as Mr. Lou, coached and mentored hundreds of talented young basketball players from Coney Island. Stephon Marbury of the New York Knicks, who had given him the Cadillac, was one of them. Sebastian Telfair of the Minnesota Timberwolves was another. Mr. Williams died of a heart attack on Tuesday afternoon in his apartment in the housing project. He was 64.
Mr. Marbury, who left the Knicks without public explanation on Tuesday, spent at least several of his hours away from the team at the housing project, called Surfside Gardens.
“My dad passed away at 3 o’clock, and Stephon was here by dinnertime,” said Robert Williams Jr., 40, Mr. Williams’s son.
Dwayne Tiny Morton, the head basketball coach at Lincoln High School in Coney Island, where Mr. Marbury played ball, said, “I mean, there comes a time when you have to stop what you’re doing, even if it is playing professional basketball, and pay your respects.”
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