Cover Story: Mother & Sun
She’s the city’s police chief. He’s a rising star with the Suns. They make the ultimate mother-and-son power team in Phoenix.
By Mike Saucier
It required a twist of fate to get to this point, a perfect alignment of career timing and success for both.
Ahead of Mother’s Day, Frontdoors Media sat down with Jeri Williams and Alan Williams to talk about their relationship, what it means to give back to the community, their worries for each other and the shaping forces that propelled them.
For Jeri, seeing her son on the biggest of basketball stages can be summed up in a word: blessing.
“The reward is right now,” Jeri said. “I am able to see my oldest reach his pinnacle of success. How many parents get the opportunity to do that, first of all? Second, I’m blessed to be in a place where I can go to home games and see him at his best doing what he was born to do. Wow, right?”
To Alan, the most important thing about his mother being police chief is how hard she worked to get where she is and to dispel the doubts of naysayers.
“It’s very inspirational for me to see that if you’re determined enough, you can do it,” he said. “And to prove all the people wrong no matter what people say you are, or that you can’t do the job because you’re this or that. To prove them all wrong — that’s what the coolest thing is about her being chief.”
Jeri, the first woman and the second African-American to become Phoenix police chief, was sworn in last October after five years leading the police department in Oxnard, Calif.
She came into that position as a 44-year-old outsider and emerged from Oxnard as “one of the most admired public servants in Ventura County,” Rev. Clyde W. Oden Jr., of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in an told the Ventura County Star as Jeri was leaving Oxnard to return to Phoenix. Jeri “meant so much to the community both in terms of how she carried herself and how she carried the department,” Oden told the paper. “She had credibility.”
An ordained minister, Jeri has preached at the church.
She was also lauded by the Oxnard mayor, Tim Flynn, during a farewell at a city council meeting there. “I don’t know how you did it, Flynn told Williams during the meeting, the Star wrote. “How can you be a good mother to your sons and be the kind of police chief that you are? It’s a testament that she is being selected as police chief in one of the largest cities in the United States.”
Returning to Phoenix, Jeri, a Maryvale High School alumnus, was sworn in as chief by her husband, a former Phoenix city councilman, Judge Cody Williams of the South Mountain Justice Court. Before her time in Oxnard, Jeri spent two decades climbing the ladder in the Phoenix Police Department. She rode bicycle patrol when she was pregnant with her second son, Cody Jr.
Jeri was promoted to assistant chief in 2009. Now, leading the department, she oversees nearly 4,000 employees and operates a $475 million budget.
In a 2016 interview, Jeri told the New York Times she wears a bulletproof vest out of a promise she made to Alan when he was a child. He had watched an episode of “Cops” and, in tears, asked her if she was going to get hurt on the job. She still wears it to this day.
The police chief fought back emotions in that interview after she learned that Alan developed a ritual before games in which he seeks out police officers working at the arena and shakes their hands to thank them.
Beyond the dangers that go along with being the city’s top cop, Alan has other concerns.
“My worry for her is what the job brings,” he said. “It’s a great thing, it’s community service but at the end of the day it’s a lot of pressure and it’s a lot of responsibilities, and it’s a lot of outside influences that always want something.”
He went on: “So it’s just making sure she’s not taken advantage of and making sure that she’s happy. Being happy is a huge thing and if she’s not happy she shouldn’t be doing it. But overall, as long as she understands that this is her calling and that’s what God put her on this earth to do, and she’s happy with it, then that’s what I like.”
Jeri has a different set of worries for her son. She wonders what will happen when playing basketball is no longer fun for him.
“What happens on the day that’s it’s over? I worry about what that next step for him is going to be,” she said. “He’s extremely charming, extremely articulate. It has to be something in the public eye, I don’t know what that is, is it being mayor, being a congressman? Heck, is it being head coach of a basketball team? I don’t know what it is but I’m concerned about that day when this part of it is over.”
Alan, 24, just finished up a season with the Phoenix Suns where he drew attention from opponents and teammates for his scoring and rebounding efficiency. Despite an impressive college career at University of California, Santa Barbara, where he became the school’s all-time leader in rebounds and second all-time leading scorer, Alan did not get drafted in the 2015 NBA draft.
In 2016, the center/power forward turned a 10-day contract with the Suns into a full-time job and became a vocal leader, a fan favorite — with an all-time nickname, “Big Sauce” — and one of the league’s most productive bench players in the process.
He even won the 2016-17 Majerle Hustle Award, which is given at the end of each season to the Suns player who most personified the hustle and determination that former Suns star Dan Majerle displayed as a player.
“Words cannot describe from a parental standpoint just how amazing proud I think this human being is,” Jeri said. “I say to him all the time: God picked me to be his mom.”
Alan has achieved the rare dream of hoops-loving boys: getting the chance to play on the home court for the team you cheered as a young fan.
“It’s super humbling and it’s very special to be able to it,” he said. “To walk through the same hallways as so many great Suns players have walked through, to be in the same locker room.
“And to experience it all has been truly special for me because I’ve watched those games, sat in those seats and I’ve seen it and I’ve dreamed of it and now my dream has come true.”
He added that he hopes he inspires kids in arena seats all over the world so “that they one day can be that guy on the court.”
Off the court, he leaves a trail of anecdotes that demonstrate his lifelong habit of thinking of others.
As an eight-year-old, Alan showed flashes of being aware of and helping people in need. His father relayed a story to the sports blog Bleacher Report in which he said Alan, at Toys R Us one day, took the initiative to serve as an on-the-spot translator between a cashier and a Spanish-speaking customer.
Alan, who, along with his younger brother Cody Jr. (a student at UC Santa Barbara) is fluent in Spanish, walked over to where the attempted, dual language exchange was being made, and just started translating. When it was over, his dad told Bleacher Report, he just walked away.
Another time when he was a boy, Alan showed his generous side at a Suns game with his father and brother.
“His dad was a city councilman as long as Alan could remember so they’ve always been in a fishbowl,” Jeri said. “So I can remember there was a time when I had to work and big Cody had both the boys and brought them to a Suns game. They used to sit in the suites and there used to be so much food leftover sometimes in some of them.”
As they are walking out, she said, Alan told his father that they should have taken the leftover food to the needy people near the arena.
“Things like that just show how much heart the kid has and I guess we had something to do with that, I don’t know,” Jeri said. “But he was 7 or so when that happened and so events like that and being exposed to so much as little guys from the City Council side, from mom and dad being involved in the community, constantly giving back — Saturday paint-a-house events and back-to-school backpack drives. The boys have been involved in those things all the time. And I think those are some of the building blocks that made him the man that he is today.”
Alan agreed that exposure to events and community engagement left a clear impression on him.
“More than anything I think it was my brother and I being dragged around when we were with my dad,” he said. “We got to see the impact of what community service can do in the community, how giving back is so important and how much people truly appreciate it.”
Alan said those experiences shaped he and his brother into who they are today.
“We had to dress up, listen and be patient and try to take in as much as you can from everybody around you,” he said. “You don’t even realize it when you’re a little kid because you think it’s this boring thing. When you grow up you find yourself using those things you learned along the way.”
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A Gifted Rebounder, Shooter… and Cook
Frontdoors: What’s the most surprising thing about Alan that the public doesn’t know?
Jeri: Alan likes to cook and he’s actually a very decent cook. He’s tried his hand a couple of times in making dinners, nothing elaborate — grilled chicken and some time of carb or quinoa, rice and spinach or something and he actually has a good palate.
When I was in Oxnard, I didn’t have a grill in my yard and this was when Alan went from being heavy Alan to being lean Alan. Alan’s coach actually had a discussion with me to say, ‘I need you to change your cooking habits.’ So I would grill masses of chicken and make green beans and lower carb rice and quinoa and some other things. Then he would drive down, pick up the food and take a week’s worth of food back with him.
Alan: I love being in the kitchen. She’s been addicted to the Food Channel, and she kind of experiments with different kinds of things. I love to cook. If I have the energy to shop for the food that I want, I like to prepare it and see how it comes out. So I think that’s one of my unique skills that not too many people know.
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The Jokester Son
Jeri: He’s got a great sense of humor and comedic timing. For example, yesterday — he used to do this to me all the time in college — he called in the middle of the day while I was in the middle of a meeting. Whenever I see Alan or Cody pop up I’ll break what I’m doing and answer the phone. So I answer the phone, ‘Hello, Alan.’ He said, ‘I gotta talk to you about something, you got a minute?’ He sounds very serious. So I get out of the meeting, walk back to my office, and he’s like, ‘I need you to sit down, you have a seat?’ So then I say, ‘Yes, I’m sitting down.’ He says, ‘You wanna go to dinner tonight? Hahahaha!’ And he is rolling because to him it’s so funny; to me I’m thinking he’s injured, something bad happened. I mean I hadn’t gotten a call from law enforcement so I knew he wasn’t in jail anyplace. He does things like that to me, which just shows me he’s still my Alan.
So I can see him on the big screen, I can see him playing, Mr. Double Double, but he’s still my Alan, my little Alan.
Alan: I like to loosen her up a little bit — her job is really serious. I think a lot of time she can just be real serious so I just try to loosen her up, to keep her on her toes. We just enjoy each other and we got each other’s back.
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On Mother’s Day
Alan: We’ve done everything from breakfast in bed to, I think, we all went on a vacation one time. This Mother’s Day I can’t give away any secrets but it will be special for sure. She always has to remind me of when Mother’s Day is so I don’t forget. It’s a day to celebrate her and my grandmother who has passed away. The matriarchs in our family have been tremendous and influential.
