If you accept Canadian football history as starting 110 Grey Cups ago, as most reasonable sports fans do, there have been — conservatively speaking — between 4,000 and 5,000 players who have run back kicks of some variety. They’ve been speedy or shifty, almost all from the U.S., where there are so many more speedy, shifty football players.
Only one was called Gizmo.
Among historical kick returners in the Canadian Football League, Henry Williams is what he says: “Like Muhammad Ali said, the greatest of all time.” He hasn’t run back a kick-off or punt or wide field goal in almost a quarter-century, and depending which CFL records you count, his name is still next to 11 of them.
But Williams, who played 14 seasons with the Edmonton Eskimos, is more than an old record-setter with a cool nickname. He’s an interesting story, and he always was, almost from the day he was born into poverty in Memphis.
Let’s start with his lineage. It’s well-known that his parents both died before he turned seven (his mother from multiple sclerosis, his father in a fire), and that he was raised by his 21-year-old brother Edgar until he, too, died of MS. It’s also well-known that from this family of 11 children, at 62 he is the only survivor, seven more siblings having died from MS, one from cocaine and one in a shooting.
Williams survived his rocky start in life, he has said, because of football. He made a high school team he shouldn’t have, because of his elusiveness while playing a school-yard game (“hot ball”), and he parlayed that into two college scholarships. Along the way he started doing “front flips” when he scored because showboating rules for spiking the ball meant a penalty, and flips didn’t.
He turned pro in the U.S. Football League with the Memphis Showboats — how’s that for a perfect match? — and it was there that Henry Williams became Gizmo. Former NFL all-star Reggie White took some teammates, including him, out to see Gremlins, the movie in which the main furry character was called…Gizmo. The next day, White declared that Williams, at 5-6 the team’s smallest player, was to be known as Gizmo.
For football fans who never saw him play, he was explosively unpredictable, capable of scoring on any kick. He scored 31 regular-seasons touchdowns returning punts, kick-offs and wide field goals. and says “28 more were called back.” No other CFL player scored more than 15. Williams has 450 more returns (1,397) for 7,000 more yards (20,257) than any other player and in 1987 he executed what is arguably the greatest play in Grey Cup history: a 115-yard return after a field goal was wide right. It kick-started the Eskimos to a 38-36 win over Toronto, one of two Cups for Williams.
A slam-dunk Hall of Famer, Williams is now a motivational speaker. From a Canadian Encyclopedia article, his speaking theme is his life: “Don’t ever quit. Don’t ever give up. I’m very lucky. I’m blessed to be here. I grew up without a mother and father.”
The MCP talent agency promotes more than 250 speakers, many who became famous playing sports.
But there’s still only one Gizmo.
