Pat Williams - Biography

When you introduce a speaker as well known as Pat Williams, one of America's best known sports executives, you feel like a bellboy at a honeymoon resort. No matter how well you do your job, people can't wait for you to leave. I can't begin to list all of Pat's accomplishments, but for you purists who want the full story, check out his nine column-inches in Who's Who. Yes, this man has done so much that it's hard to exaggerate his achievements, but I'll do my best!

• Pat Williams was raised in Wilmington, Delaware, earned his bachelors degree at Wake Forest University, and his master's degree at Indiana University. He has a doctorate in Humane Letters from Flagler University and is currently working on a doctorate in sports administration from Walden University. He is a member of the Wake Forest Sports Hall of Fame after catching for the Deacons baseball team, including the 1962 Atlantic Coast Conference Championship team.

• He served for seven years in the United States Army.

• He spent seven years in the Philadelphia Phillies organization, two as a player and five in the front office and three years in the Minnesota Twins organization.

• Since 1968 he has been affiliated with National Basketball Association teams in Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, including the 1983 World Champion 76ers, and now the Orlando Magic which he co-founded in 1987 and helped lead to the NBA finals in 1995. Nineteen of his teams have gone to the NBA play-offs and five of them have made the NBA finals. In 1996, Pat was named as one of the 50 most influential people in NBA history by a national publication. He spearheaded the birth of the Orlando Miracle, Orlando's entry in the WNBA.

• In his NBA career he has traded Pete Maravich, traded for Julius Erving, Moses Malone, Penny Hardaway, and won three NBA Draft lotteries, including back-to-back winners in 1992 and 1993. He also drafted Charles Barkley and Shaquille O'Neal, and he signed Billy Cunningham, Chuck Daly, Matt Guokas and Carolyn Peck to their first professional coaching contracts.

• Pat, a disciple of the late Bill Veeck, is considered to be one of pro sports' most zany and flamboyant promoters.

• Pat and his wife Ruth, are the parents of 19 children, including 14 adopted from four nations, ranging in age from 13 to 27. Sixteen of the children are currently teenagers. Two of his sons are in the United States Marine Corps.

• Pat and his family have been featured in Sports Illustrated, Readers Digest, Good Housekeeping, The Wall Street Journal, Focus on the Family, New Man Magazine, plus all of the major television networks, The Maury Povich Show and Dr. Robert Schuller's Hour of Power.

• He teaches an adult Sunday school class at First Baptist Church of Orlando and hosts a weekly radio show.

• In the last three years he has run eleven Marathons, including the Boston Marathon four times and also climbed Mt. Rainier.

• He is a weight lifter, Civil War buff, and serious baseball fan. Every winter he plays in Major League Fantasy Camps and has caught Hall of Famers Bob Feller, Bob Gibson and Fergie Jenkins.

• Pat is one of America's top motivational, inspirational, and humorous speakers, and has addressed employees from most of the Fortune 500 companies. He also has been a featured speaker at two Billy Graham Crusades in Chicago and Syracuse.

• Pat is the author of 42 books, the most recent being Ahead of the Game, his long awaited autobiography. I am told that this book is a million seller---Pat has a million of them in his garage, and he sells them to anyone who wants to help put his kids through college.