by Roy Williams
I’ll never forget a letter I got from my high school buddy Ronnie Slider who was in Vietnam. His letter told me about his second week over there and how he was scared to death. One night all hell broke loose, and he fired his rifle until it was so hot that he couldn’t hold it anymore. He wrote that he never saw the enemy, that he was just shooting out into the dark. Another friend, David Crandall, was over there and got malaria and is still on disability from his Vietnam service.
At first I was such a believer in our country and in our leaders that I thought the war was the right thing to do. By the end, I hated it. I went from being a hawk to someone who wanted us out of there.
I would talk to Wanda a lot about the war. We did lots of things together our first year in college. She would come to some of my freshman games. We would sit together to get varsity basketball tickets and then go to the games together. We would go to dinner once or twice a week. We went to concerts. We’d go out, but we weren’t dating. My girlfriend would visit and stay with Wanda, and Wanda’s boyfriend would visit and stay with me, and then during the spring semester of freshman year we just decided to get rid of the middle people and that was it. I like to say that I finally slowed down enough for her to catch me.
After that, there was hardly a day that we didn’t see each other. She lived in Cobb Dorm for four years and whenever I came over to pick her up for a date, I would whistle for her. I had an extremely loud whistle and after a while, the girls above her and below her would come to their windows and shout, “Hi Roy, are you taking me to dinner tonight?” I made a lot of friends over there, but Wanda was always the one who came out and got in the car.
I moved into a trailer off campus my junior year, and Wanda started doing my laundry for me because it was easier for her to do that in her dorm than for me to do it in a Laundromat. That’s when I knew it was serious. It was a very pleasant friendship that turned into courtship. On most Saturday nights Wanda and I would buy sirloin steaks and potatoes and head to my trailer to cook supper. We’d eat our steaks with cold Coca-Colas.
IN THE FINAL SUMMER of my graduate school year, I needed two more courses to get my degree. One was required and the other I wanted to be really easy. I heard about a guidance counseling course taught by Dr. Perry. I’d heard it had no tests, no papers, and no projects. That was my kind of class. My roommate, Roy Barnes, and I went to find out about it and were told it was full. So I told Roy that we were going to see Dr. Perry at his house. Roy didn’t want to go, so he hid behind a bush when I knocked on Dr. Perry’s door.
When he opened the door, I said, “Dr. Perry, my name is Roy Williams. I’m in graduate school in health and physical education finishing my master’s. I need one more course to graduate. I would like to take your course, but they said the only way I could get in was with professor approval. Dr. Perry, this is it for me. They told me that your course has no tests, no papers, no projects — and I’m being honest with you, that’s what I want. I can contribute in class with the best of them. Will you let me in?”
Dr. Perry said, “Son, you have to have mighty big balls to come to my house and say that to me.”
“I’m just being honest,” I said.
“Is that guy with you?” He pointed at Roy in the bushes.
“That’s my roommate,” I said. “He’s just afraid to come up here.”
“I should let you in and not him.”
He led us into his home and he showed us all these antiques. A maid brought us some lemonade and we sat down in his living room. Finally, he said, “I’ve got to give you credit for coming over here.”
Then he wrote out a note and handed it to us and said, “Be in that class tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock.”
DURING A TRIP HOME to Asheville over Easter break of my graduate school year, I asked Wanda to marry me.
We were in my Mustang going uptown to a movie and I had brought the ring. I didn’t want to just pull out the ring box, so I needed to hide it someplace. Because I was always ready for a basketball game, I had my shoes, my shorts, and my jockstrap in the backseat. So I put the gym shorts on top of the little ring box. We were driving along and I said, “Hey, reach back there in the backseat. I’ve got something for you under the gym shorts.”
She fished around in the gym shorts and pulled out the ring box. I never said, “Will you marry me?” I never dropped to a knee. I just said, “Well, what do you think?”
She said, “Sure, why not?”
I know there have been a few people in the world who’ve had a more romantic proposal. The bottom line is that my future bride found her ring in my jockstrap, and she’s always said that she should have known right then what she was getting into. There was no way around the fact that she was going to spend the rest of her life around smelly guys in a gym somewhere.
CHAPTER 5
Being Like Buddy Baldwin
THE DAY AFTER I asked Wanda to marry me, I was cutting my mom’s grass right before I left Asheville to come back to school. I ran out of gas so I went around to the back door where I kept a gallon milk jug with gas in it. That’s when I heard the phone ring and I stepped inside to answer it. It was Mr. Estes, a former principal at Biltmore Elementary School. We’d been close ever since the day in third grade when a bee had flown onto my Creamsicle while I was eating it and he’d pulled the stinger out of my tongue with some tweezers. He was a big fan of mine when I played basketball at Roberson.
Mr. Estes said, “When are you going back to school?”
“As soon as I finish mowing my mom’s grass,” I said.
“On your way out of town,” he said, “stop by Owen High School and visit with the principal over there, Charlie Lytle.”
“Mr. Estes, I don’t know if I have time.”
“Son, get your butt over there and visit with Charlie Lytle. He wants to hire you as his head basketball coach.”
I finished mowing my mom’s grass, took a bath, and drove to Owen High School, which was about 10 miles east of Asheville. I went in and talked to Mr. Lytle for 45 minutes. We talked about my basketball career at Roberson and what courses I’d taken at UNC. Then, toward the end of the conversation, Mr. Lytle asked me, “We have won six games or less in basketball for six straight years. What makes you think you could do any better?”
“I just have this feeling I can do it,” I said. “I don’t have a record or anything that can prove it to you, so you’ve got to make that decision. But I can do it.”
He offered me the job. Mr. Estes had told him, “If you don’t hire this boy it’s going to be the dumbest thing you ever did. And when you hire him and he beats Buddy Baldwin, I will stand at center court and sing the Owen High School alma mater for you.”
Mr. Lytle told me, “I don’t know if you’re any good, but Bill Estes thinks you’re really good and I’m going to hold him to that.”
I KNEW THAT being the head basketball coach at Owen High was not a plum job, because if it had been a plum job I would not have gotten it. There weren’t 27 guys lined up outside Charlie Lytle’s office begging to be interviewed. But it was nice to be home. Wanda was happy to be back in the Asheville area and my mom was not only happy to have me around but pleased that I had any job at all.
That summer of 1973 Mr. Lytle called me in to his office along with our football coach, Jim LeVine. “Roy, I hate to do this to you,” Mr. Lytle said. “I know you’re already going to be coaching basketball and golf, but we need another assistant football coach. We need you to coach the backs on the freshman team.”
“I don’t know anything about football,” I said.
“You’ll be fine,” Jim said. “You’ll be with Ralph Singleton coaching the varsity for three weeks. You stick with him and you’ll be comfortable by the time the freshmen report.”
Ralph had been coaching at Owen since the rocks cooled and when I met him I said, “I’ll try my best, but I don’t know anything about coaching football.”
So I showed up at the football field for my very first p
ractice as a coach of any sport and I was totally lost.
I was on the field with my shorts, T-shirt, hat, and whistle and at least I looked like a real football coach. We lined up everybody and they hit themselves in the head like football players do, and I started to feel a little more comfortable. I followed Ralph over to coach some of the backs and he picked six guys and said, “Y’all go with Coach Williams and start on the monkey roll.”
I had no clue what the monkey roll was. That worried me a little because this was the players’ first impression of me as a coach, and I had no idea what to tell them to do. My heart was pumping 150 beats a minute, and my throat was closing up. Finally, I said, “All right, who wants to go first?”
Three guys stepped up and I didn’t know what the dickens they were supposed to do, but at least I knew it was going to take three of them to do it. I backed away from those three kids and I got my feet spread about shoulder width apart and my weight evenly distributed on the balls of my feet. I didn’t know what they were going to do, but I was going to be ready to move. I said “Go!” and the first guy dropped on the ground and rolled over and the next guy dove over him and rolled over and then the third guy did it, and by that time the first guy was back up and doing it again. That was the monkey roll.
My next problem was that I didn’t know when to tell them to stop, so I didn’t stop them. All of a sudden Ralph turned around and saw that none of those three kids were getting up anymore. They were just struggling up to one arm and one knee and falling over the other guy because you’re only supposed to do that drill for 30 seconds. I’d had those poor guys going at it for four minutes.
The best part was that those three guys went to my basketball players. “Coach Williams is the toughest son of a gun you’re ever going to meet,” they said. “You guys better get in shape or he’s going to kill you.”
THE FIRST TIME I walked into Owen High’s basketball gym a couple of guys were in there playing one-on-one. I introduced myself and said, “Be back here tomorrow night at 6 o’clock and bring anybody else you know who plays basketball.”
Thirteen guys showed up. I watched them play pickup games to see what I had, but before the night was over I was playing with them, because some of the guys were so out of shape they had to stop. It was somewhat discouraging, because I was by far the best player in the gym. On the other hand, I immediately earned their respect on the court, which was important because I was only 22 years old and some of them were 18. At one point the ball was bouncing toward the sideline, and I chased it down, grabbed it with my right hand as I was falling out of bounds, and flung it behind my back to a guy I’d seen breaking up the floor, and he caught it and laid it up. Everybody just went crazy. At that point, they didn’t know if I could coach, but they knew I could kick their butts in a pickup game.
Before that first season, the local newspaper wrote an article about me, and I made some ridiculous statements. I talked about how we were going to run a fast break–style offense and we were going to press on defense. Heck, we could barely get the ball up the floor without dribbling it off our own feet.
We didn’t have any youth or middle school basketball programs in our area, which meant that the week before the first game I was showing our freshmen which way to face on the opening tap and which spot to stand along the lane when somebody was shooting a free throw. Most of those kids had never played an organized game.
Despite all of that, I was trying to instill the philosophy of UNC basketball. During our preseason conditioning, I told them if they wanted to play they had to meet the same standard as the players at North Carolina by running a mile in seven minutes. I arrived at my first practice holding a minute-by-minute practice schedule just like Coach Smith. I tried to teach them UNC’s offense and defense, but I figured out pretty quickly that there were some things that were just not going to work. The UNC passing game required savvy. Our guys did not have a lot of savvy. So we had to make some changes.
I look back and think what a terrible coach I was then. I didn’t do a good job of determining who were my best scorers and how we could get them the ball to score. I made up my mind that we were going to play primarily man-to-man defense, even though we weren’t athletic enough to play it. But I kept trying to do it anyway. When we played against a tall center, I tried to have our defense front him, and the other team would just throw it up at the rim and their big guy would get the rebound and lay it in. I knew that if we’d played behind their big man at least he’d have to score over us, but I was stubborn. I didn’t understand yet that just because something worked in practice, it wouldn’t necessarily work in games.
I knew that one of our forwards, Arthur Howard, was a slasher. Arthur could not shoot from the outside and he was not a post player, but I put him in an offense with his back to the basket. I tried to make him something he was not. Bobby Stafford was 6'4" and a solid post player with good touch around the basket, but our offense had so many other people running around in the lane that it was too crowded for Bobby to get the ball. Our point guard, Carl Moore, couldn’t shoot very well, but I never told him not to shoot. I thought basketball was all about playing hard and unselfishly, but there were so many tactical things that I screwed up.
I remember a night when we lost by one point and we had the last nine shots of the game. We were 0-for-9. We were playing volleyball with the ball back and forth across the backboard. When that happens, it’s up to the coach to figure out something different, because obviously what we were doing wasn’t working.
I had two qualities as a young coach. I was very demonstrative and I talked too much. That’s a bad combination. I kicked trash cans at halftime because I was livid that my players couldn’t do what I told them to do. Once I kicked the door of a bathroom stall and it nearly hit me in the nose on the rebound. Another night I brought the entire team over to our two-room garage apartment for a pregame meal, and we had 14 players piled on top of each other. You are supposed to eat no less than four hours before a game, but because we had to wait until school let out, we ate barely three hours before the game. And we had fried chicken. That night Bobby Stafford, our best player, walked over to our bench early in the second half and said, “Coach, I can’t move. I ate too much chicken.” As soon as he said it, everybody else admitted that they felt the same way. We lost that game in the second half because everybody had stomachaches.
That first season we finished 2–19; it nearly killed me. The day after the season ended I had a doctor’s appointment and I was diagnosed as having a hyperacidic pre-ulcer condition; it lasted for years.
In my second year we were 6–16, and we lost nine games by one or two points. During the county tournament a newspaper article came out that said all the conference coaches agreed that Owen was the most improved team during the season and that our future was bright. Back at Owen, however, I started hearing some jokes from other coaches and teachers that Charlie Lytle must have been crazy to have hired North Carolina’s statistician, a kid who was barely older than his players. There were people who thought I should be fired. I’d also heard some grumbling from fans in the stands. The father of one of my players visited Mr. Lytle to ask if he was happy about what was going on with the team. But I was never afraid of getting fired, because by that time Mr. Lytle had more confidence in me than I had in myself.
The next season, I thought we were going to be pretty good, but we started out 1–3. We were awful. Going home after that fourth game, I was miserable, but I tried to hide it. I didn’t talk to Wanda much about it except to say that our team stunk and we had to get better. It just wasn’t as big a deal to anybody else as it was to me, but that was the first time in my life that I ever had trouble sleeping. I lay awake all night. The next morning I talked to Carl Conley, who was a friend and a coach as well, and I said, “I don’t know if I’m made out to do this stuff or not. Since the ninth grade this is all that I’ve ever wanted to do, but am I doing what I should be doing?” Carl told me to stick with it and
that he really believed I was meant to be a coach.
That was the only time I have ever doubted myself. I felt like I was working hard, teaching the right drills, and preaching the right sermons, and I thought that we should be able to win, but the other teams were not cooperating.
I started questioning myself. Why are we not winning? Should we be playing the point zone? Should we be throwing it in to the big guy every time? That was a long weekend of soul searching.
On Monday I told the players to be at practice a half hour early for a meeting. In the meeting I said, “Guys, we’re too good to be this bad. We’ve got too much potential to be doing this, but everybody’s got to be willing to buy in. I want people to say whatever is on your mind right now. Let’s get everything off our chests.”
The little sophomore point guard, Kerner Long, said, “I think I should be able to shoot more. All you ever tell me to do is throw it inside to Bobby.”
I said, “That’s right, because that’s what’s going to be best for our team.”
Another guy told me he thought he should play more. I had to tell him he didn’t play because he wasn’t as good as the guys ahead of him. That made him cry, and I almost started crying there with him.
We aired a lot of things that needed to be said, needed to be out in the open, so that I could explain why we were doing what we did. There were some negative and some positive comments, but it established a better relationship among the players and gave them confidence that I would listen to their concerns and not just say, “I’m the coach, shut up and do what I tell you.” It made them believe that they could trust me. It was a very emotional meeting, the first time I’d really gotten the kids to be honest with me.