In the summer of 2014, Andre Reed was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
But that same weekend in Canton, another local product named Andre made his professional debut.
Former Parkland High School and Boston College star running back Andre Williams played for the Giants against Buffalo in the Hall of Fame Game at Canton’s Fawcett Stadium.
Williams had seven carries for 48 yards and scored on a 3-yard run for the Giants in a 17-13 victory over the Bills.
Asked about the anniversary in an interview, Williams didn’t realize it was the 10-year anniversary of his pro debut or his first year in professional football. He doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the past. He’s all about the future, which offers a lot of promise for him.
“I love where I am in my life,” he said. “If I look back, of course, there are mistakes that I made and definitely football that I left on the field. But I don’t think football was the greatest thing I ever did or the greatest thing I ever will do. There’s a lot of life left to live.”
After rushing for a school-record 3,739 yards and 28 touchdowns in 44 career games at Boston College, Williams was a Heisman Trophy finalist and winner of the Doak Walker Award, honoring him as the nation’s top running back. He was drafted in the fourth round by the Giants with the 113th pick.
He played in all 16 games with New York in 2014, and ran for 721 yards and seven touchdowns. He also had 18 receptions for another 130 yards. In 2015, his carries dropped from 217 in 2014 to 88 and ran for just 257 yards and one touchdown.
The Giants released him early in the 2016 season, and he was picked up by the Chargers the next day. He played in just one game for San Diego in 2016 and seven in 2017 before his career came to an end. A comeback attempt with the Houston Roughnecks in the XFL was cut short when the league was shut down by COVID in March 2020.
Four years later, with his 32nd birthday approaching in August, Williams has no regrets. He is proud of his young sons, 8-year-old Barron and 5-year-old Ka’el, and makes them a priority along with some other pursuits.
“I have other ambitions that I think they’re pretty big,” he said. “I am not looking for world domination or to bring world peace or anything like. But I have ambitions that I am chasing every day. There are two things I am passionate about.
“One of them is business and entrepreneurship,” he said. “I started building an apparel company in 2015 or 2016 and met so many people. I have a really great product. I make denim jeans in an athletic fit. I am using the best fabric you can find in the world, it’s Japanese selvage denim. I did a brick and mortar store at the Promenade and then at the Lehigh Valley Mall and I got into E-commerce, which has really helped me to look at things more closely and be very analytical and very precise and careful because when you dealing with numbers everything matters. I have been doing a lot of learning.”
The other ambition is in the field of fitness.
Williams said that in his second season in the NFL, he had injury issues with his shoulder.
“I had a torn labrum and actually it was torn to the point where my shoulder would sublux and the joint would shift and come in and out of its socket and cause extreme pain and knock me out of the game,” Williams said. “It was at that time where I met somebody who told me that if there’s something in your body that’s messed up, he could fix it. He said ‘If you break your brain, I can’t fix that, but anything else is easy.’ I told him about my shoulder and said I already had surgery on it and was considering a second surgery. This guy said he could totally fix it. It was the offseason and I didn’t feel like I had anything to lose. He came and picked me up and we went to the Quest Diagnostics Center and we worked out for three hours. Then he took me to Broad Street in Palisades Park, New Jersey, … [where] you can get all the Asian, Chinese and Vietnamese food. I’ll tell you that after 23 days of training with Master Shin I never had a subluxation event with my shoulder again. Through exercise and nutrition, the shoulder fixed itself.”
Williams said it came as a revelation to him that the body could be fixed through exercise.
“There’s a lot of principles to it, how the body works and taking in oxygen and putting it into the blood,” he said. “Blood oxygen is very powerful and you cultivate it and heal your body. For four years I trained under this guy.”
Williams took what he learned and created his own fitness regimen.
“It extended my playing career and it changed my body,” he said.
While he said he reached his physical peak, he also went through some emotional problems.
“I was going through deep problems at home with marriage and divorce and all of that stuff,” he said.
That’s one of the reasons why Williams is also working on a book detailing all of his ups and downs, a philosophical memoir called “A King, a Queen and a Conscience.”
“I’m writing it for my kids and for my kids’ generation … for the kids who are coming up and trying to do the same thing I did,” he said. “I definitely feel like I have something positive, something helpful to say. I want to give them a guideline and be a beacon. There are spiritual elements of the book as well. A few years ago, in December of 2021, I met an angel of death. I’m being as frank as possible. I met an angel of death and I almost left this life. I wrote about it in my book. It was a very deep experience and it just changed my perspective on everything. I was going to write this book in college and had the idea to do it, but I really didn’t have the life experience at that time to really do it the right way. But now I have and there’s 65 chapters of my life in it. It’s a pretty meaty book.”
The book has gone through several rewrites, and Williams expects it to be published in the fall. He hopes to do a book signing at Boston College.
Meanwhile, he’s working at the Sports Factory of the Lehigh Valley at Ruppsville Road and Tilghman Street in Upper Macungie Township.
“I have a lot of ideas behind my training, especially for the college athlete hopeful, where I want to offer them a training and mentorship experience that is going to help them rise,” Williams said. “This is the training you need to achieve a superior level of fitness. It’s not about faster, stronger, leaner. It’s about your heart, your lungs, your blood. How well can your body take oxygen? How much oxygen can you store in your blood? When you can do that at an efficient level, then other aspects of athleticism can rise, like recovery, durability and stamina. I want to give that knowledge to kids so that they can take it further than I took it.”