Akron native Jamison Williams received a phone call from his paternal grandfather a few years ago, and five of the words he heard created a lasting impact.
“Don’t let my legacy die.”
It’s the message the 82-year-old Frank Williams delivered to his 30-year-old grandson. And it’s an especially poignant sentiment for many families on Father’s Day.
“I took it personally because building something for 20-plus years, it’s not easy,” Jamison Williams told the Beacon Journal. “When you’re building a legacy and you’re building something for your family, you want it to be passed down generation to generation.”
On June 5, Jamison Williams took the lead in orchestrating the Williams Challenge Golf Tournament for the third consecutive year. It’s a role previously held by his grandfather, the golf outing’s founder.
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More than 40 members of the Williams family work to make the event possible, Jamison Williams said.
“I definitely pick up on the family vibe,” said basketball icon Julius Erving, who participated in this year’s Williams Challenge at Good Park in Akron. “What they’ve been able to do here in the last 26 years is nothing short of sensational, and it’s a good model for any community to have a family who is as giving and as loving and as caring as the Williams family.”
Williams Challenge supports local students, honors Frank Williams’ late wife
Since its inception in 2000, the Williams Challenge has distributed more than $100,000, including $10,000 this year, in scholarships to local high school students.
Frank Williams is a former East High School track and field and basketball star who also competed in both sports at the University of Akron. Williams won Class AA state championships for East in the high jump in 1961 and 1962. He was inducted into the Akron Public Schools Athletics Hall of Fame in 2025.
Retired as a skilled tradesman at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Williams has four sons — Todd, Troy, Frank and Tobias — and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
For the past two decades, Williams has been heading the Man 2 Man Fatherhood Initiative he started. He has years of experience with prison ministry and teaching grief recovery classes. He mentors kids to this day at the Summit County Juvenile Detention Center.
But the Williams Challenge has special sentimental value because it awards scholarships in honor of Williams’ late wife, Kay, who died in 1983 of lupus.
“When you lose a wife, you never forget her,” Williams said. “And I tell you what, I struggled for a while, and then I went through grief recovery, and grief recovery sort of put me on the right track that I can deal with it and move on.”
Kay Williams was 35 years old when she died.
“My children, some of them didn’t smile for about 10, 12 years,” Williams said. “It was just devastating because they loved their mother.”
The tragedy prompted Williams’ mom, Callie Mae Williams, to move in with him.
“She didn’t want the kids’ lives to be disrupted,” Williams said. “She moved in, and she said she was going to have to teach me how to run a household. She said, ‘I’ll give you a year.’
“Those first 15 years were some of the most difficult times of my life. I didn’t have a father in my life, so I had no idea what fathering was all about, and then I had to be a mother also and had no clue.”
‘Helping children and helping people’
Callie Mae Williams raised four children in Akron. Frank Williams’ father was incarcerated from the time Williams was 2 to about 14 or 15. It’s why mentoring kids without fathers became a labor of love for Williams.
“He’s the ideal role model, a guy that is always uplifting others, leading the way, caring,” Jamison Williams said. “When you see somebody that’s focused on just helping children and helping people that don’t have fathers with his path in fatherhood initiative and his prison ministry, that impact goes beyond our family. It goes to our community.”
Improving lives in the Akron area is also, in a nutshell, the mission of the Williams Challenge.
“We know if you get a chance, you could do something with that chance,” Jamison Williams said, “and we just want to be a little help in the guidance that people may need.”
It’s a family legacy worth preserving.
Williams Challenge Golf Tournament information
For more information or to donate, visit williamschallenge.org or email williamschallenge1999@gmail.com.
Nate Ulrich is the sports columnist of the Akron Beacon Journal and a sports features writer. Nate can be reached at nulrich@thebeaconjournal.com. On Twitter: @ByNateUlrich.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: ‘Don’t let my legacy die.’ Grandson takes over cause of Akron legend
Reporting by Nate Ulrich, Akron Beacon Journal / Akron Beacon Journal
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By Nate Ulrich, Akron Beacon Journal | USA TODAY Network
