Pat Williams (NBA)

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Pat Williams is the senior vice president of the NBA’s Orlando Magic. Also one of America’s top motivational, inspirational, and humorous speakers, he has addressed employees from many of the Fortune 500 companies and the Million Dollar Round Table. He has been a featured speaker at two Billy Graham Crusades and two Peter Lowe Success Seminars. He has also spoken on many university campuses.


SPORTS CAREER
After serving for seven years in the United States Army, Pat spent seven years in the Philadelphia Phillies organization, two as a minor league catcher and five in the front office. He also spent three years in the Minnesota Twins organization. Since 1968, he has been affiliated with NBA teams in Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia--including the 1983 World Champion 76ers--and now the Orlando Magic which he co-founded in 1986 and helped lead to the NBA Finals in 1995. Twenty-three of his teams have gone to the NBA playoffs and five 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.

In his NBA career, he has traded Pete Maravich, traded for Julius Erving, Moses Malone, and Penny Hardaway, and won four NBA draft lotteries, including back-to-back winners in 1992 and 1993 and most recently in 2004. He also drafted Charles Barkley, Shaquille O'Neal, Maurice Cheeks, Andrew Toney and Darryl Dawkins. Williams signed Billy Cunningham, Chuck Daly, and Matt Guokas to their first professional coaching contracts. Nineteen of his former players have become NBA head coaches.


FAMILY
Pat and his wife, Ruth, are the parents of 19 children, including 14 adopted from four nations, ranging in age from 23 to 36. For one year, 16 of his children were all teenagers at the same time. Pat and his family have been featured in Sports Illustrated, Readers Digest, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, 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.


OTHER ACTIVITIES
Williams is the author of 51 books, including his latest title, The Pursuit.

Pat helps teach an adult Sunday school class at First Baptist Church of Orlando, and hosts three weekly radio shows broadcast in Orlando, FL. In the last 12 years, he has completed 42 marathons, including the Boston Marathon 11 times, and also climbed Mt. Rainier. He is a weightlifter, 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, Fergie Jenkins, Rollie Fingers, Gaylord Perry, Phil Niekro, and Tom Seaver.


EDUCATION
Williams--born May 3, 1940 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania--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. He is a member of the Wake Forest Sports Hall of Fame after catching for the Deacon baseball team, including the 1962 Atlantic Coast Conference Championship team. He is also a member of the Delaware Sports Hall of Fame.


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