‘Banning that flag is a starting point’
Former Tiger-Cat Williams, an African-American in a predominantly white sport, has been the jack man on high-level pit crews for 12 seasons, and won’t miss the symbolism-laden Confederate flag at NASCAR events
It is, says Richie Williams, only the beginning of a beginning, but a significant one.
The former Hamilton quarterback, perhaps the most popular Tiger-Cat ever who started just three games, is now a part-time NASCAR pit-crew member, after a decade of full-time work in stock car’s three highest levels: trucks, Xfinity Series and Cup Series.
As a Black man in an indisputably white sport, Williams salutes NASCAR’s Wednesday announcement that the symbolism-laden Confederate flag is banned from all its properties and events, two days after Cup driver Bubba Wallace called for it.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Williams said from his Concord, N.C., home, in the heartland of stock car racing.
“Banning that flag is a starting point. It’s a huge deal for NASCAR because it’s been a huge part of its heritage since the very beginning,” he said. “Like Bubba mentioned, when you’re there every week, like I’ve been, because you have a job to do, you just get down to it. But, when you look at it on a larger scale, when people of colour come to a race, seeing that flag makes them very uncomfortable.”
Williams was a backup quarterback in Hamilton from 2006 to ’08 behind Jason Maas then Casey Printers, and was released after the Ticats signed Kevin Glenn. He did start three games, throwing for three touchdowns in a rousing victory over the Argos in early August 2008, the Ticats’ only win in an 11-game stretch of the putrid 3-15 season. He was warmly embraced by fans for his playing style, outgoing personality and enthusiastic community work.
Instead of pursuing a stalled CFL career, in 2009 he enrolled in NASCAR’s Drive to Diversity program and became a jack man — the crewman responsible for hoisting both sides of the car during pit stops, and often removing tires. It was a sport he had loved as a child growing up in South Carolina, just 20 minutes from the famous Darlington Raceway. He’d watch NASCAR races, not NFL games, on Sundays during his outstanding college career at Appalachian State.
He’s worked the synchronized bedlam in the pits of more than 400 Cup races, hundreds more truck and Xfinity races, supporting drivers such as Trevor Bayne, Ricky Stenhouse, Jamie McMurray and Elliot Sandler. Among other contracts, he was a full-time mechanic in the Germain Racing garage and had a solid run on pit crews for giant Roush Fenway Racing. When he began in NASCAR’s top series, he was the only minority jack man on pit row working a “house car,” the heavily sponsored lead vehicles of the sport’s biggest teams.
“I wouldn’t say ‘lonely,’ but I’ll put it this way; the feeling you have of being a minority is magnified,” he recalls. “As the years went on and more and more people got to know me, it was different, but, until that point, you got the side looks, the who-is-that-why-is-he-here? looks.
“It’s grown a lot in my time, there are more guys working, but, when I first started in 2009, the pit coach (Phil Horton now Drive for Diversity’s pit crew coach) and I were the only minorities in the shop and, when I was at Roush Fenway, there were probably only five of us, and they had 300 employees.
“I’ve had my run-ins, my issues, within the sport, but you learn how to navigate it and keep a cooler head. I can tell you multiple stories. I’m not going to dig into them but let it be known to people who don’t know: It still happens. To this very date.”
With a fourth child due this week, increased high school coaching responsibilities and an Amazon package-delivery contract expanding the trucking business he owns, Williams has reduced his NASCAR commitments, although he is on call with a truck team and carried the jack in February’s Daytona 500 for Justin Haley, who was only 20 years old but finished 13th.
“It’s been a blessing that I could be a part of it,” he says of his dozen NASCAR seasons so far. “Has it been hard? Hell, yeah. But I wouldn’t go back and change it. I hope I helped open the door for more minorities to follow behind me.”
Williams knows the Confederate flag ban will trigger a pushback from a certain segment of fans, just as there’s been active resistance to the current anti-racism demonstrations.
“Backlash comes with any kind of change that rubs people the wrong way,” he says. “A big part of it is just ignorance. The majority just don’t understand because, if you’re never in situations where you’re treated differently or as a lesser citizen, you could easily say racism doesn’t exist. You have to make people uncomfortable to make change. People don’t think about history as a whole.
“If it wasn’t for the protests and the changes they started way back in the ’60s, I would never have been able to even be in NASCAR.”