by Roy Williams
I HELD TYLER out of the first two games of the season. That was a hard decision because we’d also lost Marcus Ginyard, a senior and our best defensive player, after he’d injured his foot in the preseason, and we didn’t have any idea when he was coming back. Then freshman Tyler Zeller broke his wrist in our second game against Kentucky, and we thought he could be out for the whole season.
In our third game, we went to UC Santa Barbara and Tyler felt much better, so I let him play. I could tell he was pressing. He missed some shots that he normally makes. He also sprained his ankle early in that game, which added another question mark as to whether he was healthy enough to play.
Then we went to Hawaii for the Maui Invitational and I didn’t play Tyler in the opener of the tournament against Chaminade. He played all right in the next game against Oregon, but we limited his minutes. He proved that the ankle was not a problem, but I was still concerned. I couldn’t decide whether to play him the next night in the championship game against Notre Dame. I knew he’d be so fired up to play against a Top 10 team and against Luke Harangody, another big guy who was supposed to be pretty good. I talked to Tyler in warm-ups and I said, “Big fella, how do you feel?”
Tyler said, “Coach, I’m fine.”
“No, Tyl—”
“Coach, I’m fine!”
“I just want to make sure I’m—”
“Coach, I’m fine!”
I thought I was going to have to fight him.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll start you, but if I don’t like what I see, I’m taking you out of the game and you won’t play anymore.”
I didn’t really mean that, but I was just trying to remind him that I was the head coach. So I started him and he was sensational. He scored 34 points and we won.
A week later we went to Detroit to play Michigan State at Ford Field, where the Final Four would be played. Michigan State had been through a tough travel schedule leading up to that game and they had a couple of guys hurt, so we tried to establish a quick tempo right from the start. It was a close game for a while, but right before the half I noticed that the Michigan State players were not sprinting back on defense and seemed to be tiring. I turned to my assistants and said, “They’re done. If we keep the hammer down, this one is going to be over with early in the second half.”
We were up by 14 points at halftime, but early in the second half we pushed the tempo even higher. Michigan State started coming up short on open shots. We took away their second shots and kept running our break, and they hit the wall. It felt like a snowball rolling down the hill getting bigger and bigger. We won by 35. After the game I said, “Guys, we were really good today, but that other team helped us. They lost their legs. Say good things about them, because we may play them again down the line.”
Then I added, “If we keep playing our tails off, we might even have a chance to come back here.”
A week before Christmas, Tyler broke the UNC scoring record against Evansville, but he was still saying that his shin ached and throbbed after games, so we did another MRI and bone scan. The doctors found no fracture lines, and the bone was healing, so I told him, “Tyler, your leg is okay. You’re driving yourself crazy and you’re driving us crazy. We need to put this to rest.” After that meeting he was fine. I don’t think he mentioned his shin again the rest of the year.
We won our first 13 games of the season. Tyler recovered to lead our team in scoring in the last six of those games, establishing himself again as the focal point of our offense. Ty was playing brilliantly at the point, rarely turning the ball over and making three-point shots whenever he was given an opening. Then in our Atlantic Coast Conference opener at home against Boston College, we got beat. We were so fat and happy and I think we were surprised by how emotional Boston College was. Rakim Sanders came into that game shooting under 30 percent from three-point range for them and he made four against us. Tyrese Rice scored 25 points and made shots even when we had fingers in his nostrils. Boston College made plays they had not made the whole season. It was one of those games when the people in our locker room understood that we had to give Boston College some credit even when the people outside of our locker room would be saying that we screwed it up. We didn’t play great by any means, but they had played really well and we had to accept that. That doesn’t mean the media accepted it. They blasted Ty. They said he wasn’t quick enough to defend Rice and that it was a mismatch. I had to handle that. I had to make sure that everybody knew that Ty wasn’t the only reason we lost that game, and that it was just one game.
But the loss was a shock to everybody on our team — not just the fact that we lost but that we lost to an unranked team at home. It shook our confidence. A coach can see that right away. In our next practice there was no laughing and trash-talking between drills. It was deadly serious. We’d move the ball three times to a guy with a wide-open shot, and then he’d pass it up to a teammate with the same kind of shot. Our guys just weren’t sure of themselves.
Our next game was a non-conference game against College of Charleston, and in the first half we came out tight. We won that game easily, but it didn’t erase the lack of confidence that we felt, because we all knew we didn’t play great. I knew that our problems could linger.
Four days later, we played our second ACC game at Wake Forest, an undefeated team that was ranked in the Top 5. It turned out to be one of those nights when everything felt like it was going in their favor. Their mojo was right, their cycle of the moon was right, their biorhythms were right — and we were struggling. Jeff Teague went absolutely bonkers from the perimeter and scored 34 points for them. Tyler made only three of his 12 shots and Ty turned the ball over four times, the most turnovers he’d had all season.
That game was the first time that I saw my team have serious doubts. Our shot selection, our patience, our poise, our resolve — we lacked everything that helps you win a tough game. I tell our kids all the time that in every close game somebody’s going to give in and let’s not let it be us. But that night it was us. We panicked. We didn’t defend. We didn’t run back on defense. When our guys came over to the sideline for timeouts, they had a beaten look. They were not walking up on their toes, carrying themselves like they were going to win. They were shuffling around with their heads down and their shoulders slumped. None of them had the confidence that their teammates could get it done, so they didn’t play as a team. Each of them was thinking, “I’ve got to make the shot. I’ve got to get us out of this mess.”
We lost that game by three points. When we left the court, the crowd was chanting, “Over-rated! Over-rated!” I clearly remember walking into the tunnel and hearing one guy yell down at me, “That’s right, Williams, your team sucks!”
Our locker room was split into two rooms. The players sat in one room, and I walked into the other to think about what to tell them. I never prepare what I’m going to say at the end of a game that we lose, because I’m always dumb enough to think we’re going to pull it out at the end. So after losses I always give myself a little more time to collect my thoughts. I know they’re more likely to remember what I say to them after a loss because that’s when I have everybody’s attention.
I paced around that room for about three minutes. I knew we were dealing with a lot of negatives. We’d lost our first two conference games. I knew that the media was going to go after Ty and say that he’d been outplayed badly by Rice and then Teague. After the Boston College game there had been a sense of doom from the press and that had carried over to the public. I’d already seen people jumping ship, and now I knew everybody was going to say that we were sinking. All around us that night there was panic.
In basketball, no matter how good your team is, you’re always one step away from falling off a cliff. If the players’ confidence isn’t restored quickly, a team that has lost two in a row can all of a sudden lose four straight, and then it gets to be five out of six, and then it’s six out of eight, and there is nothing to grab onto, nothing to sl
ow you down. You just keep falling. I knew our team was standing on the edge of that cliff.
When I walked through the door into the players’ locker room, I expected to see some anxiety, but it was a lot worse than that. Some guys were crying. Some guys were really ticked off at themselves. Some guys were really ticked off at other people. Some guys were feeling sorry for themselves. Some of them were just disgusted with the way we’d played. The looks on their faces told me that I couldn’t just say, “Hey, Wake had a great night.” That wasn’t going to work. They needed me to tell them how we were going to be all right.
As I turned to speak to them, I did what I have always done.
I drew from my past.
CHAPTER 2
Angels and Demons
I PROBABLY SHOULDN’T SHARE this because it’s not really something to be proud of, but one part of my family tree goes back to the McCoys who feuded with the Hatfields all those years. On the other side of the tree, my mother’s side, they changed their name from Dalton to Deyton because they didn’t want to be associated with the Dalton Gang, some nasty folks who were killed trying to rob a bank in a small town in Kansas. There are no heroes in my family history, just a bunch of outlaws and fighters.
My dad had 12 brothers and sisters, and my mom had nine, and everybody lived within a few miles of each other in the mountains of Western North Carolina near Asheville, where I was born and raised in the early 1950s. It was a very hardworking family on both sides. My mother quit school in the 10th grade and my father quit school in the sixth grade, both of them to go to work. My mother started working in the cotton mill and my father, as a 13-year-old, started picking cotton before it went to the mill. I was brought up in a very uneducated family.
My grandfather on my mother’s side owned a pool hall in Caroleen, North Carolina. Friday night would be the only night he’d drink, but he would drink a lot. He’d drink so much that when somebody brought him home, he couldn’t undress himself. He’d come home with the money he’d earned for the whole week and he’d tell my grandmother, “I’ll give you $5 if you’ll take my shoes and socks off. I’ll give you $10 if you take my coat and shirt off.” That became Granddaddy’s way of giving Granny the grocery money.
My grandmother on my father’s side we all called Big Mom because she looked after the whole family. Her husband, Pop, ran his own little sawmill — a shed and a saw is all it really was — and when I was four or five years old, all the cousins and I would bundle kindling for him. Pop would cut logs to make furniture. The leftovers were kindling, so on Friday afternoons Pop and I would go into the African-American section of town and sell kindling to people that still heated and cooked with a woodstove.
My mother’s name was Lallage. I thought she was an angel. She was intelligent. She was sweet. She was shy. She appreciated the most simple things in life. She lived by the Golden Rule: treat folks like you’d like to be treated. She enjoyed people and she was polite, but she had a fence around her and she wouldn’t let anybody in until you passed her test. Very few people got inside that fence.
Family was all that mattered to my mother. Family was her first priority and second, third, fourth, and fifth. Nothing ever got in the way of that. She always put the rest of the family ahead of herself. All she cared about was providing, having a roof over our head, clothes for us to wear, and food for us to eat. Everywhere we’d go, she packed up my older sister, Frances, and me; it was like the mother duck and her little ducklings.
My mom was stronger than my dad.
My dad was so funny. His name was Mack Clayton Williams, but everybody called him Babe. His mama gave him that nickname because he was her favorite. She treated him like her baby, even though he was somewhere in the middle of all of her kids. Babe would pick on everybody in a jovial way, and they could pick on him. He had this laugh that made his whole body shake. For all of my cousins, he was their favorite uncle. He liked to play tricks, and if a rubber snake showed up somewhere, you knew who was behind it. Everybody loved Babe.
My dad could tell a story a hundred times and he’d laugh just as hard at the end of the hundredth telling as he did at the first. I remember one time a bunch of the Williams family went to a Baptist revival with my uncle Glenn, who was a deacon in his church. When we got back home, my daddy started teasing Glenn by saying, “Glenn is so cheap that when the collection plate came around, he put a five-dollar bill in there and then he reached in and took back four ones. Isn’t he supposed to be setting a good example for the rest of us?”
He was giggling about it and Glenn swore that he didn’t do it, but Daddy was never one to let the true facts get in the way of a good story. He was always kidding people. In fact, that was his life. He wanted to have fun, and sometimes having fun got in the way of some of his responsibilities as a husband and a father.
My dad was an alcoholic. He smoked. He cursed like a sailor. Every vice you could have, he had. He didn’t play any sports; he just worked and worked and worked. I remember somebody once asked him about running. “The only time I’m running,” he said, “is if I’m real afraid of the guy that’s chasing me.”
My dad was a good man, but alcohol changed him. When I was a kid, I enjoyed being around him if he was not drinking and I hated being around him if he was. Drinking put him on edge. It could make him mean. It made me not even want to talk to him.
My first childhood memories are of having a lot of fun with my cousins playing cowboys and Indians. My favorite picture is of me holding a six-gun poised to shoot, because I remember how happy that made me feel to be a cowboy living in a time when you were either a good guy or a bad guy.
But at around age seven, it wasn’t fun anymore. My dad started going to the beat of a different drum. A lot of nights he came home drunk at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. One night he came home with two black eyes, because he’d been in a bar and gotten into a brawl. But that was just him.
Lots of people in my family were drinkers and fighters. Every gathering, every reunion, and every family picnic on the Williams side ended up with two of the boys going at it. I remember at five or six years old asking one of my cousins, “Who’s going to end up fighting tonight?” There would always be a fistfight over something that somebody said that somebody else didn’t like, just because there was so much drinking going on.
There was one little area in Asheville where my grandparents and three of their grown sons lived, all within 100 yards of each other, in little houses along a dirt road. Maybe that’s where the Hatfields and McCoys figure in, because there were several times when the boys from over the hill came by and they wanted to play with us, but at the end somebody always drew a line in the sand. That’s just what we did. It was the Williams boys against everybody else. I’d bloody a guy’s nose and he’d bloody mine, and then two days later I’d be playing and fighting with those same guys. I wasn’t a great fighter, but I was never afraid of a scuffle.
One of my uncles, who we called “Hillbilly,” once told me the story of a night at a beer joint called the Silver Slipper. A guy came out of the bar and said that my dad and my uncle Gordon were about to get in a fight with some other guys and the other brothers might want to go in there and help them because there were three of theirs and only two of ours. Uncle Hillbilly said, “Naw, they ought to be able to handle that. Let’s just see if they’re tough enough.”
So Hillbilly and the others stood there and watched through the window while my dad and Gordon fought the other three guys. The Williams boys came out and they’d won, but they looked like they lost. That was the only kind of competition I knew. Were you tough enough? And when somebody drew a line in the sand, would you step across?
BETWEEN MY MOTHER and father there was a lot of physical abuse. He would come home drunk and push her around, and Frances and I would try to stop it. I’d try to separate them, but I was too small and my dad would just push me away.
My mother and father split for the first time just after I’d finished first grade. My
mother took us away and the three of us lived all summer in a single room at the Shamrock Court Motel, which my aunt Doris owned. My mother would go off to work and Frances was off doing odd jobs for somebody, so I would go around with another of my aunts, Leona, who was a maid at the motel. She paid me 25 cents a day to take off the dirty pillowcases and put on clean ones. At lunch Aunt Doris would fix me a sandwich, and then I’d go and work some more in the afternoon. That was it. There was no ballplaying. Nothing that kids do. It was just survival.
When the school year started, we moved in with another aunt. We lived in her trailer because she had an empty bedroom. I slept on the couch and my mother and sister shared the back bedroom. We lived there for four or five months, and then Dad started coming by and my parents got back together again. That lasted a little while before they broke up again. We left again and lived with another aunt. All of these aunts that put us up were my dad’s sisters. They were all mad at Babe because they knew that his drinking and carousing was ruining my family. It was difficult for me to understand why my father was doing this to us. My mom and dad got together and broke up, got together and broke up, and the last time we moved out I was 11 years old.
Frances was four years older than me. She was outgoing but not very goal oriented. She was fun but not the life of the party. She was caring but she didn’t dote. Even as a teenager, she was really looking forward to growing up, to moving on with her life. She was anxious to get out of our house and start the kind of family we didn’t have. We didn’t spend that much time together, didn’t play much together, but we had a typical brother-sister rivalry. She would always tell people that when we washed dishes together, she would wash and I would dry but I wouldn’t dry the pots and pans because I said they were too heavy. She always thought I was trying to get away with something, but she was a good sister.