For 26 seasons, Rev. Chette Williams served as the Auburn Tigers' team chaplain before he died in December 2024. His ministering touched the lives of thousands of students, athletes and coaches and made him a beloved member of the Auburn family.
But before becoming a chaplain, Williams helped lead Auburn to multiple bowl game wins as a linebacker. According to teammate and friend Kyle Collins, he was a different person then.
Collins, who coaches the Freedom Cowboys homeschool football team in Huntsville, sat down with 1819 News CEO Bryan Dawson last week on "1819 News: The Podcast," where he told of his time playing football for the Tigers and how he helped lead Williams to Christ.
"Chette ended up being my best friend in the whole world. And the fact that he's gone is still kind of raw," Collins said.
Collins came to Auburn in 1983 as a walk-on and soon gave his life to Christ. It wasn't long before God told him to share the Gospel with what seemed at the time to be a very unlikely convert.
"Chette Williams was a bitter, angry guy. I mean, look, there could not have been two people who were more different. He was black. I was white. He came from a poor economic background. I came from an upper-middle-class background. We had zero in common, zero. But for some reason, Bryan, God put him on my heart and said, man, I want you to pray for this dude. I started praying for him."
Williams initially didn't want to have anything to do with Collins. However, when Coach Pat Dye threatened to kick Williams off the team for his bad influence, Williams had no one else to turn to.
"So he shows up at my door… He's got his Bible in his hand… I began to just share with him that God loved him. God had died for him," Collins said. "He knew all this, but this was a moment that had brought him there. Before we left that room that night, he had gotten on his knees. He and I sat on a twin bed and prayed to receive Jesus… Well, at about 6:30 the next morning, somebody's knocking on my front door. I open it up, and it's Chette. And this is the amazing part. When you talk about a radical transformation of a human being, I open the door, and his face is different… And what happened is remarkable. He did undergo a transformation."
Collins said he became a friend and mentor to Williams and helped disciple him as a new Christian. Their relationship grew even deeper over the next 40 years as Williams became a stabilizing force on the Auburn team, mentoring and leading athletes to Christ.
"I will tell you this, at his funeral service, one of the most impactful things was that one of the people that spoke said, 'Hey, if Chette Williams is sharing Jesus with you or if Chette Williams baptized you, I want you to stand up.' And I bet you 70% of that audience stood up. Yeah, that was humbling."
Collins continued, "Everybody knows, quote, unquote, Brother Chette, and everybody loved, quote, unquote, Brother Chette… But Chette was, to me, he was just my best friend. He wasn't Brother Chette to me. In fact, I always made a point when we were together, I never made him say the blessing over our food, because I said, everybody's asking you to do that all the time, since you're the chaplain, so I'm not gonna let you do it. And we were laughing about that. But, you know, this goes to the impact that he has on the lives, and we were talking about the character makes the football team better. And that's part of the winning medicine."
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