From age eight to seventeen, Willis suffered from a severe stutter. The impediment made ordinary classroom participation humiliating. Schoolmates nicknamed him "Buck-Buck" because of how his jaw clicked when words jammed in his throat. Traditional speech therapy yielded minimal results. Salvation arrived purely by accident during an audition for a high school staging of *A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court*.
The moment he stepped onto the platform and assumed a fictional persona, the stammer vanished. Memorized dialogue bypassed the neurological blockages that choked his spontaneous speech. That discovery propelled him to enroll in the college drama department at Montclair State University in 1975.
Under the direction of faculty mentor Jerry Rockwood, Willis pushed his vocal limits. His signature triumph came during a campus production of Tennessee Williams's *Cat on a Hot Tin Roof*. Playing the tortured, alcoholic protagonist Brick, Willis delivered a raw, grounded performance that shocked faculty members. He discovered how to project pain through controlled silence. Yet the confines of academic theater soon chafed. Willis did not care about earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. He wanted commercial auditions, stage combat, and professional stages. In early 1978, he packed his clothes and boarded a commuter bus for the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
