USC’s Caleb Williams and the chase for immortality

LOS ANGELES — The chase for immortality continues here, under a smothering late-afternoon sun as USC’s Wednesday practice winds away, Caleb Williams squaring his hips from the 30-yard-line and firing football after football aimed at the padded base of a practice field pylon.

“Ah, short!” the USC quarterback barks to no one in particular, after one toss tails too far in front of his target.

The chase for immortality has continued for a decade, beginning the day a young Williams sat in a hotel room with his father Carl and devised a plan for greatness. The climb has built from a training facility in Maryland, where one of Williams’ old trainers Chris Baucia barked at a set of quarterback pupils to run off the field between drills because nobody walks but the mailman, and Williams would follow but not before this thing he did.

This thing Williams had to do, as Baucia described it. He’d spot a soccer goal, square his hips, and whip a football at the goalpost. Irritated beyond belief if it didn’t clang off the crossbar. This game he’d play on practice fields at Gonzaga College High, when Williams was still more promise than pomp, challenging fellow quarterback Sam Sweeney: pick a spot on the pylon, aim, fire, try to hit.

“It hasn’t changed,” said Baucia, who worked with Williams from middle school to his final day before leaving for Oklahoma. “There has to be something to trigger that competition in him. All the time.”

Those who knew Williams in high school see him still, these days, as the same kid – the one who smacked himself on the back of the helmet and demanded to run the play again, Sweeney remembered, when he’d make a mistake at a Gonzaga practice.

This same kid, though, has a Heisman Trophy now, after a season that left the world stunned. Head coach Lincoln Riley gave Williams the keys last year at USC, and he delivered, the world falling into his painted fingernails with sponsorships and endorsement deals galore (hello, Dr. Pepper) after a season with 52 total touchdowns. He’s no longer the kid who’s too short, the kid fighting for a spot on varsity, as Williams said during his Heisman acceptance speech.

So there’s little left for Williams to carve at USC except history. Writing his name next to Ohio State’s Archie Griffin as the only two-time Heisman winners. Writing his name as the only back-to-back Heisman winner to win a national championship in the same season.

Nothing left except the chase for immortality.

“It’s a special word to me, because it’s a word that – you touch rooms,” Williams said Wednesday, “and your name reaches rooms that you may never step foot in.”

“That’s important to me,” he continued. “And I explained that to the team.”

Williams first tossed out the term last year, in an interview with local media after last year’s Heisman, bringing it back up again in an interview with “The QB Room” podcast that was released Wednesday.

“The reason why I play,” Williams said on the podcast, “is to be immortal.”

It’s an impossibly grand word for a 21-year-old to bandy about. A word that fights the very nature of death. That elevates a man from human to deity. And yet Williams’ own teammates, a year after he torched defenses and challenged records, already speak of him in that light.

“I mean, it’s Caleb Williams,” senior Brenden Rice said Wednesday, when asked if he’d seen Williams get better in the offseason. “This dude’s a magician. I’ve seen him roll out, cross-body, 40 yards down the field.”

In the DMV area where Williams’ story began, he’s already immortal, thanks to a play his high school coach Randy Trivers can still describe in perfect detail: his 60-yard-bomb of a Hail Mary on a bum ankle to beat rival school DeMatha, the clock hitting zero, clinching a Washington Catholic Athletic Conference championship.

“I will never forget that,” said USC running back MarShawn Lloyd, who played for DeMatha. “That’s something I’ll remember from Caleb forever.”

Yet Williams’ collegiate story is still being written and leaves off on a sour note, tempered by a hamstring injury in a Pac-12 title game loss to Utah. And when asked Tuesday if there’s a new level Williams can reach in his junior year, Riley responded with an indirect challenge.

“He needs to get better at a little bit of everything,” Riley said. “I don’t know if you guys believe me when I tell you that, but it actually is the truth. He’s tremendous, but he doesn’t walk on water yet.”

“He’s got a lot of work to do,” Riley continued, “and he’s the first one to admit that and to see that.”

After observing last season, Riley had aspects of Williams’ routine he brought to Wylie to make sure “got done,” Wylie said, and every part of that routine – Williams’ Catapult GPS tracking metrics, his sleep, meetings with a dietitian and chef – has been “more purposeful” and done with “more aggression,” Wylie said.

Years ago, on those Maryland practice fields, Baucia said, he’d separate quarterbacks training with his organization QB Factory into two groups: middle school and high school. And lo and behold, as a 13-year-old, Williams would always sneak into the upper group, much to Baucia’s chagrin – and then position himself at the front of every drill.

The fire still burns. Immortality comes from championships, Williams said Wednesday. And USC has a “special moment,” he said, “to be able to go reach one.”

“I don’t think he’s trying to live up to a Heisman trophy,” Baucia said. “I just think he’s trying to live up to the thoughts and dreams of a 12-year-old that has been working for this for many, many years.”