GREENVILLE — Jake Williams believes in signs. He said then and he says now, nearly 10 years later, that he had a premonition that he was going to make the legendary throw that saved South Carolina in the 2011 College World Series.
Another one let him know he had to do what he’s currently doing.
“When this really started to get in motion, I was living in downtown Atlanta,” Williams said. “Buildings and traffic all around. I walked out of the house one morning and in the middle of downtown Atlanta, there’s the most gorgeous live Gamecock in my front yard.
“If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is.”
Williams is starting his fourth year of working on his passion project, a documentary on USC’s back-to-back CWS championship teams. Titled “Breaking the Curse,” Williams hopes the film will be completed by early 2021.
Williams was a member of both USC teams, ineligible to play in 2010 after transferring from Wofford but starting 58 games in 2011. It was in Omaha that season that he had his career-defining moment.
Tied at 1 with Florida in the bottom of the 10th inning in Game 1 of the national championship series, the Gators’ Mike Zunino smacked a hard single to left field. Runner Cody Dent took off from second base. Everybody in TD Ameritrade Park knew he was going to score and the Gamecocks were going to lose.
Williams, playing left field, had zero assists all season. He wasn't known for a strong throwing arm, partly because of arm troubles he kept private and partly because everybody’s arm looks weak when Jackie Bradley Jr. is playing beside them in center.
But Williams gloved, stepped and threw, the ball heading to the left of the plate. Catcher Robert Beary snagged it, tapped Dent as he slid inside and the inning was over. USC went on to win 2-1 in the 11th.
It was one of dozens of incredible plays and moments of the Gamecocks’ Omaha run from 2010-12, and Williams will forever be etched in USC lore because of it. He appreciates it and wants to give fans something else as well.
“I still had all of my cell phone footage from bus rides, locker rooms, the post-game speech from (coach Ray) Tanner on the bus after we won in 2011,” Williams said. “My teammates had other stuff they sent me. It’s this incredible perspective on our teams that no one could find in any other way.”
“From Day 1, we’ve all wanted this thing to culminate in greatness and to get it in the hands of the people who care about it the most,” said Jonathan Hillyard, owner of Atlanta’s Connext Media and a USC alum who helped Williams’ project take shape. “This is a 30 for 30-level film.”
Williams has partnered with City Drive Studios to help distribute the film and will rely on the company’s pre-existing relationships to get it into the public eye. Netflix, Hulu and other streaming services are being considered.
“USC has been instrumental with its cooperation and funding. We’ve talked about having a showing at the school theater,” Williams said. “There’s also a guy here in Greenville that owns a theater. That’s our plan, is to have a big release. We’ll have team reunion parties, and get it into film festival lines.”
A Visual Communications major at USC, Williams always had his eye on the creative side of life. Following his graduation and a stint playing pro ball in Sweden, he was leafing through his memories of those seasons and thought somebody needed to tell that story.
Who better than someone that was there for every step of it? Helped by his teammates and numerous other voices during the journey — Red Sox pitcher Matt Barnes, former USC and Red Sox hero Steve Pearce — he and Hillyard have accumulated 27 voices and hours of interviews.
“Our first big trip was when we went to Reno and filmed a game between Michael Roth’s and Christian Walker’s Triple-A teams. We stopped in New Orleans and talked with Peter Mooney,” Hillyard said. “Over the next year, we kept gathering interviews, whether it was in Columbia, Adrian Morales at an AAU tournament in Cartersville, Ga., when we drove to Sevierville, Tenn., where Evan Marzilli was playing in a Double-A game.”
The footage has created some thoughts of splitting the film into two parts, or perhaps a multi-part series, which was inspired by the ESPN 30 for 30 “The Last Dance” over the summer. The vision Williams has is as lucid as his memory of that throw in Omaha.
“I had that moment, whether it was intuition, the baseball gods, God himself, whatever you want to call it, something spoke to me that this ball is coming to me,” Williams said. “It felt like destiny. We felt we couldn't lose, no matter what.”
He hopes his film won’t, either.
To find out more about Jake Williams’ project or to contribute to it, visit Breakingthecursefilm.com/get-involved
