Hard Work

by Roy Williams

  By 2 a.m. I finally gave up and went to my hotel room. Not long after that, I got a phone call from Yeager and he told me they’d found Sam. The San Francisco coaches had gone into the locker room and taken Sam out a back door. They had taken him and his girlfriend out to eat, which was illegal. They had taken him to Denny’s. A few months later, we got Sam, and San Francisco got nailed with a recruiting violation.

  We recruited Brad Daugherty from my old stomping grounds outside Asheville. Brad’s oldest brother, Greg, was 7'0" and hated basketball; the middle brother, Steve, was 6'5" and had played for me at Owen. Steve didn’t have any great talent, but he loved to play. Brad would eventually grow to 6'11" and he had great skills and desire, but when I left Owen he was still a fat 5'11" eighth-grader. He’d made me mad that summer at my basketball camp by being disruptive during drills, and so I threw him out and told him not to come back. That night I got a call from Brad’s father, who asked me if I would stop by his house the next morning on the way to camp to talk about Brad. So I went over there. “Coach,” he said, “you didn’t have my first boy and I wish you had. You had my second boy and I was glad you did, and now you’re going to have Bradley. I’m going to ask you to let Bradley come back to your camp and if he makes you mad, you bust Bradley’s ass, and then you call me and then I’ll really bust Bradley’s ass when he gets home.”

  Three weeks after that conversation, Coach Smith asked me to come back to North Carolina, so I never coached Brad at Owen. But I did recruit him to North Carolina. On his recruiting visit, Brad, Steve, and their mother came for a football game. Coach Smith, Steve, and I were sitting in the stands when Steve told a story about a recent talk between Brad and his father at the family dinner table. He told us his father had said, “Bradley, you have an opportunity to go play basketball anyplace in America and I think that’s great. You get to choose where you want to go. I want you to know that I’m going to be really happy wherever you go . . . as long as you choose that school where Coach Williams is.” Brad came to UNC as a 16-year-old, and four years later he was the first pick in the NBA draft.

  The reputation of UNC helped a lot in recruiting. I remember recruiting Rick Fox. He lived in Warsaw, Indiana, which was a hard place to get to. I had to take two flights and then drive an hour. Rick didn’t play his senior season because he had moved to Indiana from the Bahamas through a church-sponsored program and had been ruled ineligible. So I’d go up there a lot just to watch him practice and play pickup games. When Rick finally announced his decision, he said he’d dreamed about going to UNC ever since he was a little kid. Later I said to him, “Rick, why didn’t you tell me that a long time ago? I might have made fewer trips to Warsaw to watch practice.”

  Another player we tried to recruit during my first season as an assistant was Ralph Sampson. I still believe Ralph was the most gifted high school player I have ever seen. He was 7'4" with the agility of a 6-footer. Opponents were not going to get offensive rebounds and they were not going to guard him with one guy. Ralph changed a game with his size. I was the lowest guy on the North Carolina totem pole, so I made nine trips to Harrisonburg, Virginia, to see him play. Ralph had narrowed his options down to 52 colleges in January of his senior year. His recruitment was during the time period when college coaches could “bump” prospects, which basically meant we could say hello. So after every one of his games, 10 to 15 coaches would line up around the court hoping to bump Ralph and his family. I got tired of hanging around for an hour after every game, so one night I said the heck with it and went to Howard Johnson’s for some ice cream. All of a sudden the Sampson family came walking in. I said hello to them, and Mrs. Sampson said, “We come here after every game.” So for the next five trips up there I never stayed at the gym after the game. I’d just drive to Howard Johnson’s.

  Ralph eventually narrowed his decision down to four schools: North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, and Virginia Tech. It was wild because he waited until the last day you could sign a letter of intent to make his choice. That morning he didn’t know what he was going to do, and before he went out to speak at the press conference, he said, “Mom, I don’t want to do this.”

  She said, “You’re going to go out there and make an announcement or I’m going to go out there and tell them you’re going to Virginia because that’s the closest to home.”

  So Ralph walked out and said, “Well, I guess I’m going to Virginia.”

  I’d spent all that time and we’d spent all that money, and the guy said, “I guess I’m going to Virginia.”

  That was a great introduction to recruiting.

  WANDA HAD BEEN on the editorial staff of the Roberson High School yearbook, and a few years after we graduated from there she told me that during our senior year I had won the class vote for Most Athletic, Most Likely to Succeed, and Most Dependable. But apparently the rules stated that you could win only one award, and because I’d won by the largest majority in the Most Dependable category, that was what I got.

  When Wanda first told me that, I was disappointed, because I would have preferred to win Most Athletic. But the more I thought about it, I realized that Most Dependable meant that people could trust me and count on me, and that really meant something to me. It really became more and more important with each stage of my life. I realized that being dependable would take me further than being athletic.

  I earned my keep early on as an assistant coach at North Carolina by being dependable. I was willing to do whatever was asked, and nobody ever had to wonder if it would get done. When I wasn’t on the road recruiting, I would go through 36 newspapers a day to see if there were articles about recruits or other teams we were playing. I ran our study hall. I went around to players’ dorms every morning to make sure they had left for class, and then I checked the classrooms to make sure they’d made it there. I did bed checks on the road trips. And I coached the junior varsity team.

  If I had a glaring weakness as the JV coach, it’s that I wasn’t very good at scheduling. We played teams that were all really good, so we were under .500 my first year. But eventually we got to be more competitive. I felt like we were always going to be undermanned because most of the teams we played consisted of recruited players, so I was really tough on our guys. I motivated through fear. I’d run the crap out of them if we didn’t play well in practice. We ran and ran and ran so we could try to at least get a conditioning advantage on our opponents. I would drill them in the fundamentals and tell them that the game of basketball is a game of mistakes and we’ve got to make far fewer than the other team to have a chance.

  Coach Smith used to watch each of our games for a few minutes and then make suggestions. One time he diagrammed a delay game for me on a paper napkin, and after we’d tested it with the junior varsity, Coach Smith adapted it to his varsity team.

  Coaching that team was coaching at its purest. My junior varsity team was fueled so much by emotion; those guys were not going to go to the NBA, and there was nobody in the stands except girlfriends and parents. They were playing basketball because they loved to play and they loved to wear a North Carolina jersey. The only dream I had to sell was that if a spot opened up for a walk-on with the varsity, it would go to one of our guys. We did have several players move up during the eight years I coached the team. Those were the only reasons for them to put up with me pushing them as hard as I did.

  It was the best coaching experience I could have possibly had because we were always underdogs. I would try different things to cover our flaws, and I didn’t have to read in the paper the next day whether it was successful or not, because no media came to the games. There was no shot clock, so I could hold the ball as much as I wanted to. I could change defenses on every possession if I wanted to. We would try to use lots of gimmicks to bother the other team. We won one game when we shot 13 backdoor layups, which makes you wonder why the other team never wised up.

  We played Duke four times and we beat them all four times, but one game in particular really ticked t
hem off. We played Coach Smith’s “Four Corners” for the whole game; we spread the floor, kept the ball away from them, and ran time off the clock unless we had an open layup. We beat them even though they were much more talented than us that year. I was proud that we never lost to a team that fielded nonrecruited players like we did.

  One night we played Fork Union Military Academy, whose center, Melvin Turpin, would go on to be the sixth pick in the NBA draft a couple of years later. Fork Union’s players dwarfed us across the front line, but we controlled the tempo the whole game by spreading the floor and holding the ball as long as we could until we got a high-percentage shot. We had the ball out of bounds with three seconds to play, down by just a point. I called a set play, and Walker Worth made the shot at the buzzer, but the officials said he let it go too late. They didn’t count the basket and we lost 54–53. Coach Smith was out watching before his game and I remember he walked over and asked the timekeeper if he was sure that he’d started the clock at the correct moment.

  I walked into our locker room and I was just devastated. I talked to my players and then I let them go, and I headed out to catch my breath a little bit. I drank a Coca-Cola in about five seconds and sat down on our bench with a few minutes left in the varsity warm-up. Coach Smith was there and he slid down next to me and said, “Show me that play you just ran at the end of the game.”

  He was really just trying to make me feel better, but we did end up putting that play in with the varsity.

  Whenever I coached the JV team and we struggled, I couldn’t sleep. I remember the day that one of our varsity players, Jeff Lebo, came back to the trainer’s room before their game and found me standing back there with red, puffy eyes. He said something to me, but I was in another world and so I looked up and said, “Let’s be ready, Jeff.”

  He walked away and asked our trainer, “What’s the matter with Coach?”

  “The JV lost and he is really not happy,” the trainer said.

  Lebo said, “It’s just a JV game.”

  “Not to Coach Williams.”

  BEFORE THE 1981 SEASON I went to Coach Smith and said that I thought we needed to have a conditioning program that consisted of more than just running a mile on the first day of practice.

  He said, “Okay, you do it.”

  So I called Indiana and Kentucky and got them to send me their conditioning programs and met with our assistant track coach, Don Lockerbie, and I made up my own program. We did some distance work and we ran some hills, but we focused our workout on running 220-yard sprints. We worked up to a test at the end of four weeks that included 15 220-yard sprints with 90 seconds rest in between. Each guy had a specific time he had to run them in. Every once in a while Don would come out and watch just to reassure me that I wasn’t going to kill anybody.

  The players met me for conditioning three days a week in the fall, and I tried to exhaust them. I tried to bury them. One of our players, Al Wood, once told me, “Coach, I see that stopwatch in your hand and that whistle around your neck and it makes me feel like you are the most powerful man in the world.”

  When Michael Jordan first got to UNC, we were sitting at the track one day after conditioning. It was just the two of us. “Coach,” he said. “I want to be the best player to ever play here.”

  “You’ll have to work much harder than you did in high school,” I said.

  “But, Coach, I worked as hard as everybody else.”

  “Oh, excuse me. I thought you just said you wanted to be the best player to ever play here. Working as hard as everybody else is not even going to come close, son.”

  That was the end of the conversation.

  Two days later, after the next conditioning session, Michael came up to me and we were sitting there alone again. He said, “Coach, I’ve been thinking about what you said. I’m going to show you. There will never be anyone who will outwork me.”

  He did that. From that day on, Michael tried to kick everybody’s rear end in every drill. We had James Worthy, Sam Perkins, Matt Doherty, and Jimmy Black, and he was trying to destroy all of them. That’s when I knew we had something special.

  IN MY MIND at the end of the 1982 regular season we were the best team in the country. Coach Smith had taken a lot of criticism from the press about coaching in six Final Fours and never winning a national championship, but I felt there was no way we were not going to win this one. We had reached the NCAA Tournament final the year before and gotten a taste, and in ’82 I was sure we were going to win the whole thing.

  We were playing Georgetown for the championship and it was a close game throughout. We were down by one point with 32 seconds to play. Coach Smith called timeout and the guys came over to the bench. The negative look on all of their faces scared me to death. It was the first time that night I ever had the thought, “My gosh, we could lose this game.”

  The players sat down in chairs and the coaches knelt down in front of them, and I can remember it like it was last night. Coach Smith said, “Okay, we’re in great shape. We’re exactly where we want to be because we’re going to determine the outcome of this game.”

  I pretended to cough so I could look up at the scoreboard just to make sure I had the score right, because he was making me feel like we were ahead.

  Then he said, “I’m serious. We’re exactly where we want to be. This basketball game is ours. We’ll run ‘Lineup’ in case they’re pressing, but I don’t think they will be. We’ll get it in and let’s see what they’re doing. I believe they’ll stick in a zone. If they are, let’s run “2” and look for the lob, but I don’t think it will be there. If it’s not, don’t worry about it, penetrate and then try to pitch on the backside. If we get the shot and it’s open, take the shot. James, when you go for the lob, go ahead and get inside position on the weak side. Sam, you get inside position in the middle, so even if we miss the shot, we’ll get the rebound and put it back in. If they get the rebound, don’t worry about it. Just foul them. There’s no way they can make a free throw in this situation. We’re going to determine the outcome of this game.”

  When the team left the huddle, I felt so much better. The look on everybody’s face had changed 180 degrees. I saw Coach Smith pat Michael on the back and say, “Michael, if you get it, knock it in.”

  We went out on the court, ran “Lineup” and they didn’t press, so we threw it in; they did stay in a zone, so we looked for the lob, but we didn’t get it. We threw it on the backside to Michael and he took the shot and knocked it in and we won the national championship.

  I was thrilled, but it was also a moment of relief for me because I was tired of everybody saying Coach Smith couldn’t win the big one. I had tears rolling down my face and that was why.

  I also learned a little bit about coaching that night.

  • • •

  DURING THE SPRING after my second season as an assistant coach, I stood outside of our two-bedroom apartment holding Kimberly, and there were mosquitoes all over us because we were living on a flood plain. It was miserable. I walked back into the apartment and I told Wanda that I was going to sell 22,000 calendars that summer and we were going to move into a house.

  I was learning some of the tricks of being a salesman. Instead of dealing with businessmen who had no particular love for UNC, I started making my pitch to rabid Tar Heel fans. Instead of pitching to 10 businesses in a town, I realized it was better to go visit three and try to sell them on the idea that there was some snob appeal to saying that they had calendars when other folks didn’t. That summer I sold 23,000 calendars and made $9,000 and we moved into a house on Lady Bug Lane with three bedrooms, two baths, and a nice yard with azalea bushes that was all ours.

  Three years later, I sold 40,000 calendars and we moved into an even bigger house closer to campus. Three years after that, when I did it for the last time, I drove 3,000 miles over five weeks, sold 55,000 calendars, and made $30,000. I was the best dadgum calendar salesman there ever was.

  We weren’t the only o
nes upgrading our living arrangements. With the money I made from selling calendars, I had a house built in Asheville for my mother. It was the first house she had ever really owned. We’d designed it with three bedrooms so that Frances and I could both visit at the same time and have our own bedrooms. The day I moved my mother’s stuff into the new house, Frances was there and she said she was going to go pick up Mom and bring her back to the house. I said, “Tell Mom I want fried chicken and biscuits and gravy for supper and I’ll be back at 7:30.”

  Frances said, “Aren’t you going to be here when Mom comes in for the first time?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to see her cry. Just tell her to have my supper ready.”

  I went to the golf course, and when I got back to the house, that was one of the great moments of my life. I walked into the kitchen and saw my mother stirring gravy and she turned around and I could see her drying her eyes with a tissue. We were never very outwardly affectionate toward each other, but she turned around and wiped her hands on her apron and I walked over and hugged her. It was one of those hugs that she didn’t want to let go and I knew I was about to cry, so I kind of backed away and said, “Mom, get back to your gravy. I’m starving.”

  AS AN ASSISTANT COACH at North Carolina I always felt like if I did the best job I could, someday the right head coaching job would open up and it would be staring me right in the face. It would be mine and have my name written all over it.