The new gold tinting in her hair lets everyone know her hopes for this September when she will play on the U.S. basketball team in the Sydney Olympics.
The special-for-the-moment gold-medal hair coloring is about the only thing about Utah Starzz forward Natalie Williams that isn't a natural when it comes to athletics.
Nat does things her way.
Nat-urally.
Take, for instance, the way Williams broke into sports in the first place, at age 8.
People always told little Natalie how great a basketball athlete her father, Nate Williams, was. But it pretty much slid past her. OK, she thought. But she didn't know him, didn't identify with him until recently. "I was always my own person, very strong-minded," she says, though she admits sports are "in my genes."
Maybe because her dad was a basketball player and people made a fuss about him, Natalie didn't hit the hoops until seventh grade, when she was recruited because she was "a head taller than anyone else."
Williams was reared by a single mom, Robyn Baker, now Robyn Gray, in Taylorsville. Robyn named her daughter Natalie for actress Natalie Wood, not for Nate, but she gave Natalie the Williams name "because he wasn't going to be part of my life," says the Starzz WNBA All-Star who will soon add Olympian to her job description.
Natalie first took her talents to softball, which fulfilled her desire to be the go-to person, the one everyone counted on for the big hit or big defensive play at first base. For an only child, playing softball provided an extended family.
She didn't realize she was doing it until much later, but Williams says she had some natural sense for mental game preparation even as a little kid. She visualized doing positive things, making plays. She put herself into mental situations and hit her way out of them. "I always wanted to be consistent, someone people could rely on," she says.
Other kids didn't think about the game till they reached the field. Natalie just naturally did more. She didn't realize until she got to college, where they taught that sort of thing, that she'd been preparing mentally on her own since junior high.
In seventh grade, when basketball finally called Williams, rebounding, physical play and the instinct to be aggressive on the court were simply part of her makeup. Natural.
Away from sports, Williams is quiet and gentle, a bookworm and movie fanatic. In sports, get out of her way—freight train coming through.
Starzz coach Fred Williams was an assistant at Southern Cal and tried to recruit Natalie from Taylorsville High. He lost her to UCLA and the chance to play both volleyball and basketball. He recalls that through all four of Williams's years at UCLA, he begged USC players to take a charge from her. Not one in four years would do it. Nat Williams was too aggressive for them. "They'd say, 'Coach, we want to live a few more years,'" Fred Williams says.
Coaching against her, Williams says, was frustrating. "She's a player that's hard to figure out as far as her size (6-foot-2, 210 pounds) and how she can power those points in." Now that he's coaching her, he realizes, "It's the power, thinking ability and quick release. I wish I'd known that years ago," he says.
On the USA Basketball Web site, national/Olympic-team coach Nell Fortner says, "She's a tremendous athlete. I've never seen anyone who could jump so high from a standing position. She can catch the ball, turn and jump in the air all at once and nail a shot right off the glass."
In Natalie's USA Basketball Internet biography, Fortner continues, "She has a radar for the backboard, and I like that. It's a great shot, and she has perfected it almost to a point where it's unblockable. People might try and alter her shot, but I haven't seen her ever get it blocked.
"She has a move that is becoming a lost art in our game, and that is just the turn-and-shoot. Post players are taught to make moves, to put the ball on the floor, but she catches it and just turns and shoots right over you. And it's deadly," Fortner said.
When she was in eighth grade, Nat started in volleyball, the sport which first placed her on its national team and then made her the last cut before the Atlanta '96 Olympics.
That was devastating, but the horror will not be repeated in 2000 in basketball. Barring injury, Williams is solidly on the U.S. team. She was a starter at power forward for all but a few weeks in the last WNBA off-season, which was prime time for Olympic training. A broken metatarsal in her left foot took her out of the lineup awhile, but she regained the starting spot.
The U.S. team played 31 games (29-2) in Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Slovak Republic and Italy and all over the U.S. against college and pro teams last winter.
That was exhausting, with 14-hour plane rides followed by bus rides followed by sometimes poor accommodations and the fear of not finding enough good food to keep the players going. Williams wrote a six-part journal for USA Basketball. She says the schedule seemed daunting at first. "It just looked so long, but it seemed to go by quick."
The best part of the U.S. training tour for Williams was the first part, when the Americans won the Olympic Cup in San Diego against Poland, Brazil and Australia and then had similar success against the same teams in further competition at Stanford. The lowlight was breaking her foot — a stress fracture she thinks came because of a torn plantar fascia suffered last summer with the Starzz — and the 12-game tour against the college teams. Williams did not play well at her alma mater, UCLA, and the U.S. lost at Tennessee, a huge embarrassment despite the Volunteers' status in NCAA ball.
Williams says she got her game back together on the final trip, to Brazil.
Now, she is poised to repeat what she did last summer for her hometown Starzz, who naturally drafted her in 1999. She was a first-team WNBA All-Star and high scorer/rebounder in the All-Star Game. In her first WNBA season, Williams was fourth in scoring (18.0 average) and second in rebounding (9.2). In December, she was named 1999 USA Basketball Female Athlete of the Year. In the old ABL, where she played for Portland, she was the league's MVP and a unanimous all-star in 1998, when she led ABL scorers (21.9) and rebounders (11.6).
She capped her all-star '99 with the 2000 NBA 2-Ball championship with Jeff Hornacek in February and by averaging 12.0 points and 7.4 rebounds for Team USA.
Now, the Starzz are stocked to have their best-ever season, with Williams as the go-to gal, though, like most other ABL refugees, she's underpaid compared to some of the WNBA's original stars and early ABL defectors. "It doesn't bother me," she says of the money. When she eventually gets big pay, "at least I will have earned it," she says.
The Olympics could help. If gold hair means gold medal, Williams may finally gain some of the national adoration that has so far been one of the few things to elude her. Again, she says it's no matter. "People who know basketball know me," she says. "I hope I make some sort of great contribution," she adds, adamant that the gold medal is all she really cares about.
It will be her final season of USA ball, she says. She needs a rest. She'll play several more WNBA seasons but won't try European ball. When she finally retires, Natural Nat, Sister Golden Hair, will do what comes naturally — put her sociology degree to work with kids or maybe even turn her love of reading and movies into a writing career — kids' books only.
E-mail: lham@desnews.com