by Roy Williams
She said, “Do you have any other information about him?”
“Nope, it’s just a gut feeling.”
Then Mark Turgeon, who was a graduate assistant under Larry Brown, wanted to talk to me about staying and joining my staff. He said, “I heard you talk about your love for North Carolina at the press conference, and you told that story about Galen Fiss and his love for the University of Kansas. That’s the way I feel about Kansas.”
I hired Mark on the spot because he had some local knowledge and also because I just loved the way he looked me in the eye and said, “The way you feel about North Carolina is exactly the way I feel about this place.”
In September, two top recruits, Thomas Hill and Harold Miner, told me they were coming to Kansas, and we felt good about getting another prospect, Adonis Jordan. Then all hell broke loose.
On Halloween night, I was taking my kids trick-or-treating. We were walking around in the neighborhood where Bob Frederick lived and we saw his wife, Margey, and their kids. She said, “I’m glad I ran into you. Bob is trying to find you.”
I called Bob at his office and he told me that the NCAA had released its findings from a recent investigation it had done on the Kansas program. I went straight to Bob’s office and he told me the NCAA had put the program on probation for three years for recruiting violations involving the previous coaching staff. The outlook was bleak: we couldn’t participate in the NCAA Tournament that year, we would lose three scholarships, and we weren’t allowed to have any prospects on campus for a visit for a full year. I was crushed because the NCAA had led Bob to believe that nothing like that was going to occur. I had so much resentment toward the NCAA because nobody on my staff and none of my players had anything to do with the violations, so I thought they were punishing the wrong people.
Bob was just so apologetic. “Hey, we knew it could happen,” I said. “We just didn’t expect it to happen.”
I called all of my assistants into the basketball office and apologized to them. I said, “This is a shock to me. I’m not sure where we go from here.”
I told them I would understand if any of them wanted to leave for another job. Everybody was stunned. Then Jerry Green broke the silence in his own unique way. “Wow,” he said. “This shit is getting serious.” Everyone just busted out laughing. Everybody agreed that they were staying with me and that we’d keep pushing forward as best we could.
The day after the probation hit, Harold Miner called in tears to tell me he wasn’t coming to Kansas because he thought the probation would hurt his clean-cut image.
Two days later, there was an article about me replacing Larry Brown in the Dallas Morning News that quoted a Kansas booster who a year earlier had been the president of the Jayhawk Club. He said, “Needless to say, we would have rather gotten a Gary Williams or a John Chaney or some of the other names we have heard about. All of us would like to have seen one with more of a proven track record. We didn’t get one, and we will have to wait and see how it all turns out. I think it is causing some anxious moments among some of our people.”
In that same article, a former Kansas athletic director compared my hiring to that of Gerry Faust, a high school coach hired to lead Notre Dame’s football program in 1981, who was unceremoniously run out of town after five mediocre seasons. Joe Rushing, who was Thomas Hill’s coach, called me after reading the article and said he’d told Thomas that he didn’t know if I was going to have enough support to get the job done and that Thomas was considering other schools.
By that time Bob Frederick had told me that the night before I was hired, Margey had said, “Please tell me you are not going to hire that no-name assistant from North Carolina. The boosters will eat you alive.” And later that same night, three of the university’s largest financial contributors had gone to the chancellor’s house to ask him not to let Bob hire me.
So I arranged a meeting with seven prominent boosters. We were going to meet for breakfast. Jerry Green said he wanted to go with me, but I wouldn’t let him because I knew if he’d gone with me there would have been a fight. I went alone. “Guys,” I said, “you’re either with me or against me. I need you to be with me, but if you’re not with me, don’t hurt me. If you need me to prove myself I have no problem with that, but don’t hurt me until you’ve given me a chance to get it done.”
It was that kind of atmosphere. There was some doubt from the people who supported me and there was total frustration from the people who didn’t. There wasn’t anybody I could turn to except for my family and Bob Frederick and my staff, the people immediately around me.
The day after the newspaper article was published, Thomas Hill called to tell me he was going to Duke. We were still chasing Adonis Jordan, but four other prospects contacted us to cancel recruiting visits. It was the only time at Kansas that I really wondered, “My gosh, what did I get myself into?”
I SURVIVED MY first season at Kansas because of the players on my first team. They gave me a chance. They didn’t care that I was a no-name without any head coaching experience. Those kids, Milt Newton, Kevin Pritchard, Mark Randall — all of them gave me a chance.
I had a lot of compassion for them and their disappointment over the probation. After winning the national title the year before, the remainder of that team wanted to go to the NCAA Tournament to prove that they could do some things, too. But they weren’t going to get a chance.
From the first day of practice, my players tried to do what I asked them to do and believed that it was going to work. We had great kids with a ton of work ethic, but we didn’t have many quality big guys or much depth. We opened up the season at the Great Alaska Shootout and we beat Alaska–Anchorage and California, and then we played Seton Hall in the final and we lost. That was the year Seton Hall ended up playing Michigan for the national championship. About two weeks later, we played Temple in Atlantic City on national television. Temple was ranked in the Top 5 and we played great and beat them. We got on a roll and pushed our record to 16–3. Then the bottom fell out.
Most people don’t remember it, even a lot of Kansas fans don’t, but I do, because I lived through it. We lost eight games in a row. We only had 11 eligible players and then a few of those guys got hurt. And so all of a sudden we just had eight guys playing. We lost at Duke, and we lost at Oklahoma when they were No. 1 in the country, and then we lost at home to Kansas State. Then we played Oklahoma at home and we had some foul trouble in the first half. At halftime we got a junior varsity player, Brad Kampschroeder, to put on a uniform, just in case. Sure enough, we had three players foul out. I had our other five healthy guys out on the court and one of them picked up his fourth foul. I looked down the bench, and Brad Kampschroeder saw me looking at him. You have two responses from players, either that eager look of “Yeah, coach, I’m ready” or the one 180 degrees away from that. That poor kid sort of dove back into the bleachers where I couldn’t see him. I just started laughing so hard. We lost to Oklahoma in overtime, and when we left the court, the crowd at Allen Fieldhouse gave us a standing ovation.
One Friday night during the losing streak, I took the team to a room downstairs in Allen Fieldhouse, and I made popcorn and put on the movie Hoosiers. We lost our next game. The next week I made popcorn again and put on Rocky III, and we still lost. A few days later, Jerry Green showed up at my house, walked into the kitchen, pulled open the silverware drawer, and started loading up all the knives into a bag he had with him. Wanda said, “What are you doing?”
He said, “It was not a good practice today. I’m getting all of the sharp objects away from the boy.”
Wanda cracked up. I cracked up.
I was trying everything I could possibly think of. We had one kid, Milt Newton, who had been the second-leading scorer in the national championship game the year before, and he just couldn’t make a shot. He was our best shooter, but he had lost all of his confidence, so I got the sports psychologist at Kansas to work with him. We played Oklahoma State, and Milt made four of h
is first five jump shots, and I thought, “All right, now Milt’s going to be fine.” Then he missed 16 in a row, finished 4-for-21 and we lost again. So we dropped from 16–3 to 16–11 before we finally broke the streak. We beat Colorado. We beat Nebraska. Then we were playing Oklahoma State at their place on Senior Day, and they hadn’t lost at home all year. I did one of those dumb things that I’ve done several times as a coach. I told our kids, “We’re going to win this game. We’re going to go down there, and we’re going to play well, and we’re going to win the game.”
So we had the ball out of bounds with 30 seconds to play, and we were down two. I called timeout and said, “Guys, this is what we’re going to do, and everybody has got to believe that this is exactly what is going to happen. We’re going to go for three, and we’re going to knock in the three, and we’re going to win this game right now. And then we’re going to get the crap out of town as fast as we can.”
Sure enough, Milt Newton knocked down a three with eight seconds to play, and we won — and then we literally sprinted off the court to celebrate.
Then there was some scuttlebutt about whether or not we should be allowed to play in the Big 8 Tournament because of the probation. The other coaches were concerned that if Kansas won the tournament, we could take an NCAA Tournament bid away from one of our conference teams, so they weren’t exactly standing up for us. We played Kansas State in the first round. I thought we got a couple of bad calls from the officials at the end and we lost. At the press conference, I questioned some of those calls and then I said, “At least we won’t have to listen to all the coaches saying we shouldn’t be here.” Those comments were not met with universal approval.
But the dumbest thing I did that first season was that I never signed my contract. I had asked Bob Frederick to make some adjustments to it because of the probation, and that process dragged on throughout the season. Looking back on it, if Kansas had wanted to fire me after we lost eight games in a row, I had no ground to stand on. I just had so much faith in Bob Frederick — and rightly so — but I wouldn’t advise that for any young coach, that’s for sure.
AFTER WE LOST Thomas Hill and Harold Miner, our first recruiting class looked pretty slim. I was still pursuing Adonis Jordan, but I didn’t really know how good our chances were. I called Adonis and I said, “Sometimes you just have to have faith in somebody and that’s what I’m asking you to do. Have faith in me.”
When Adonis called back later that day and said he was coming, I walked to the back of our offices at Allen Fieldhouse. My assistants were there, and I motioned for all of them to come in. I wrote up on a blackboard: Adonis is coming! Hooray! Hooray! It was like a celebration for us, because after the probation we didn’t know if we were going to get anybody.
The only other player we signed was a kid from Finland named Pekka Markkanen. Pekka’s coach had sent me a videotape to watch, but it was shot at an unusual speed and we couldn’t slow it down, so everybody just kept zipping up and down the court in fast-forward. I had to go by the word of a coach I didn’t know, but I wasn’t in a position to be too picky.
Before that second season started, I was walking through the gym while the guys were out on the court playing, and Kevin Pritchard yelled at me, “Coach, did you see what Inside Sports did? They picked us eighth in the league. There are only eight teams. They picked us last.”
“Son, don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’re going to be better than that.”
“That ticks me off so much,” he said. “I told all the guys that we’re working twice as hard now.”
One of the key players on that team was our junior center, Mark Randall. Larry Brown’s coaching staff had almost run Mark off because he’d been hurt a lot, and even when he was healthy, he hadn’t produced. They also had other choices. They just didn’t have much confidence in him and he lost confidence in himself because nothing good had happened for him, but I knew how badly we needed him. We didn’t have other choices. The year before I had told our coaches, “Mark’s the only legitimate big guy we’ve got, so when we see him walking across campus, let’s say, ‘Gosh, Mark, you look good.’ And if he walks out here on the court and doesn’t trip, let’s say, ‘Gosh, you look better than Wilt Chamberlain.’ We’ve got to give the kid some confidence.” Randall averaged 16 points a game our first year, and the second year he was sensational.
We opened that season against Alabama–Birmingham in the Preseason NIT at our place. Kevin Pritchard scored 22 points and we beat them by 26. At 6:30 the next morning I got a call from our assistant athletic director, who said, “At first, it looked like we were going to play the next round at DePaul, but they changed their minds. Now we’re going to play at LSU.”
I said, “What’s going on?”
“Well, UNLV is No. 1 and LSU is No. 2, and they want to make sure they both get to the semifinals in New York City. They’d also like to see DePaul and St. John’s get there, so they’re sacrificing us.”
So we flew down to play LSU and they had Shaquille O’Neal and Stanley Roberts, who was just as big as Shaq, and a great guard, Chris Jackson, who ended up changing his name to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf when he played in the NBA. I added it up later and their starting lineup’s first-year pro contracts combined to be $16 million. We had one pro who made $180,000. But I still thought we had a great chance to win. We got to the gym, and Dick Vitale showed up to watch us practice. Dick said, “Well, they’re really giving you a tough road because they want LSU and UNLV in New York.”
I said, “Dick, we’re going to spoil the party.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re going to beat ’em.” Then I called my team over to where Dick and I were talking. I said, “I just told Mr. Vitale here that we’re going to spoil the party, we’re going to win this frickin’ game. They want LSU in Madison Square Garden, and we’re not going to let that happen.”
I let the team go back to finishing shootaround, and Dick said, “Now I know you’re just a second-year coach. Do you really feel good about saying that?”
“Yeah. Dick, we’re going to beat ’em.”
So then we walked off the court, and Jerry Green said to me, “You’re damn crazy.”
We went back to the hotel and that night at snack I said to the team, “Guys, I want you to go to bed and think about who you’re going to hug first at the end of this game, because we’re going to win this frickin’ game. We’re going to move, we’re going to pass, we’re going to make Shaquille O’Neal and Stanley Roberts spin around so much they’ll wear a hole in the floor.” The players left and Jerry Green said, “You’re damn crazy.”
The next night we were spreading the floor and moving and cutting and slashing around so quickly that their big guys couldn’t keep up with us; we played great and won the game. Everybody was running around hugging afterward. It was one of those really satisfying moments. The next day while we were at the hotel packing up the bus for the airport, this guy came over to me and said, “Coach, that was some kind of job last night.”
“Well, thank you,” I said. “Our guys really played well.”
“The way you moved the ball, and the way your big guys posted up, I wish I could get my son to play like that.”
“Well, thanks again. We were really good. How old is your son?”
“I’m Shaq’s daddy.”
BEATING NO. 2 LSU earned us a trip to New York City to face No. 1 University of Nevada-Las Vegas. I went to Tavern on the Green for a press conference and they introduced me as Ron Williams. I stood up and said, “Folks, that doesn’t bother me, because we are going to play our butts off and by the end of this tournament, you’re going to know my first name.”
UNLV had stars like Larry Johnson and Stacey Augmon and Greg Anthony and Anderson Hunt, all of whom would go on to play in the NBA. But I thought we could neutralize their pressure defense with backdoor cuts. We played almost a Princeton-style offense and they never figured us out. At one point in the second half we were
up by 20 points and we ended up winning by 15. Their coach, Jerry Tarkanian, said afterward that he’d never had one of his teams handled like that.
In the next game we played St. John’s in the tournament final and nobody on our team could guard their star player, “Boo” Harvey. I remembered Coach Smith once telling me about New York Knicks coach Red Holzman’s theory that sometimes creating an obvious mismatch disrupts the flow of the other team. St. John’s had another good player named Malik Sealy, and so there was a timeout and I said, “Terry Brown, you guard Malik.” Terry was a shooter who couldn’t guard his lunch.
Terry looked at me and he said, “Malik?”
“Yeah, you guard Malik.”
Sure enough, St. John’s came down the court and Malik started yelling at everybody that he had a mismatch and he was posting Terry Brown up, and their coach, Louie Carnesecca, started screaming to throw the ball in to Malik. Malik got the ball and shot a turnaround jump shot over Terry and missed. We got the rebound and came down and scored. On their next possession, Malik was posting Terry up again, and they threw it in there and some way, somehow, Terry got around him and deflected the ball, and we stole it and ran down and scored again. They came down a third time, and again they were trying to set up Malik in the post. They threw it in to him, and he turned around and dribbled it off Terry’s foot, and we picked it up and raced down and scored again. Louie called a timeout, and they stopped posting up Malik, but by that time, Boo Harvey was either out of sync or mad and he missed his next two or three shots, and we won the game.
We went from unranked to No. 4 in the country. We won our first 19 games and wound up spending 14 weeks that season ranked at No. 1 or No. 2.
We beat Robert Morris in the first round of the NCAA Tournament and then we played UCLA. We had the last shot to win the game, but we missed it. I’ll never forget that when we pulled into the parking lot at the arena before the UCLA game, Kevin Pritchard’s dad was waiting for the bus. He told Kevin, “Son, you’ve got to play your rear end off today because there are 14 NBA scouts here.” He wasn’t as interested in our team winning as he was in how his son was being looked at by the pros. Kevin had never missed a big-time one-and-one in his career, and he missed one at the end of that game that would’ve given us a three-point lead. He’d never committed more than three turnovers in a game, but he had seven turnovers that game. I think that his dad and the stress just got to him.