Hard Work

by Roy Williams

  I heard about that and I called my staff and said, “That’s it, guys.”

  I called JaRon that night and I said, “Big fella, how you doing?”

  He said, “Great.”

  “Well JaRon, I need to talk to you about your comments.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about that, too.”

  “No, JaRon, it’s okay. We need to just stop this, because it’s gotten personal now, and it’s not going to work. So this is what you can do. I’m going to release you from your commitment, and you can go to UCLA or you can go to the NBA or you can go anywhere you want to go, but it’s not going to be to Kansas, because I’m not going to coach you. But I enjoyed our time and good luck to you.”

  “But, Coach—”

  “No, JaRon, let’s just leave it like this. We can be friends now because anything else that is said is not going to be good.”

  And I hung up. I told Wanda it was the most satifsying two-minute conversation I’d ever had with a prospect.

  While that was going on, we were also recruiting Korleone Young, but it was hard to get a straight answer out of him. Academically, we couldn’t get Korleone to focus on what he needed to do to get into college, and then one day his Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) coach called and told me Korleone was going to the NBA. At the same time, we really thought we were going to get Quentin Richardson. Quentin and his dad both told me they thought Kansas was the best fit for him, but all of a sudden he announced he was going to DePaul. While I was spending all that time recruiting JaRon and Korleone and Quentin, I was also recruiting Tayshaun Prince, but I didn’t have him rated quite as highly as the other guys, so I sort of neglected him. Tayshaun was a wonderful kid, a much more solid kid, and we probably could have gotten him, but I had put the emphasis on the other guys and we lost all three of them, and then we lost Tayshaun, too. I knew I had made some bad decisions on where to focus my energy, but the whole process just had gotten very seamy. In my mind it had become so distasteful that I wasn’t sure I could continue doing it.

  I went to Wanda and said, “I can’t handle recruiting like this anymore. Maybe I have to go to the NBA.”

  TWELVE DIFFERENT NBA teams have contacted me over the years about their head coaching jobs. More than half of those came straight out and offered me the job. The others called and made me feel very strongly that they were recruiting me to come. When Michael Jordan took over the Washington Wizards he called and asked me if I’d be interested in becoming their coach. I said, “If you’re going to play, I would consider it a lot more.”

  Three different people offered me the Boston Celtics job in 1997. I told M.L. Carr no. I told Larry Bird no. Then Red Auerbach called and I told him no. I told Red that my daughter was a senior in high school and I couldn’t move her. Red said, “Well, how about if we just sign a contract and you’ll be the coach next year?”

  I told him I couldn’t do that.

  The Lakers offered me their coaching job three different times. I have always respected the Lakers because of Jerry West. In my opinion, nobody has done a better job running a franchise than he has, and when he offered me the job in 1992, that just blew me away. If I were ever going to do it, it would have to be with somebody as strong as Jerry in the front office and with an owner who would let his basketball people make the decisions. We talked salary with the Lakers the first time and I thought about it, but it didn’t feel right. I told them no and they called back and asked me to reconsider. They lobbied Coach Smith, who said, “Roy’s a college coach. Leave him alone!”

  The Lakers continued to be attractive to me because Jerry West was eventually replaced by Mitch Kupchak, an old friend from UNC. Mitch offered me the job in 1999 and again in 2004, but my answer hadn’t changed. The last time the offer came, Coach Smith wanted to get it out in the media that the Lakers had offered the job to me before they offered it to Duke’s coach Mike Krzyzewski. I said, “Coach, that’s not important.” But it was important to him.

  I’m not one of those people who think NBA coaches don’t really coach. I think they coach a lot more in the pros than we do in college because of the 24-second clock, quicker possessions, 48-minute games. You know your opponents so much better in the NBA, so you’ve got to try different things. And I like the idea of no alumni meetings and no worrying about players’ academics. You just coach. But I’ve always enjoyed the fact that I can mentor my college players off the floor and I don’t think a pro coach could ever have that same impact.

  The only time I ever had any real inclination to go to the NBA was during that tough time period in 1998 when recruiting got very difficult for me. I was vulnerable. If the Lakers job or the Celtics job had come along during that time, I might have taken it. But then my faith was suddenly restored.

  WITHIN A FEW WEEKS of parting ways with JaRon Rush, I started recruiting Nick Collison from Iowa Falls High. Nick’s best friend was a guy named Mike Lindeman, and Mike’s sister, Joie, was Raef LaFrentz’s girlfriend and a Kansas student. Sometimes when Joie came to the ballgames, she’d invite her little brother, Mike, to come down, too. Raef would give him tickets and Mike would bring Nick. One day my assistants told me that Nick was at the game, so I asked him to visit with me afterward. I said, “I’ll be there to see you play before your season’s over with.”

  Nick said, “Thank you, Coach.”

  I thought he was a mild-mannered, polite kid, and I really liked him. One day, later that season, I asked my assistants, Matt Doherty and Neil Dougherty, “How many more high school games does Nick have?”

  Matt said, “Well, he’s playing in the state final tomorrow night.”

  I said, “I have got to go see him play.”

  Neil said, “You know you can go see him play later on.”

  “I told the kid that I’d come and watch him play with his high school team,” I said. “I’m going to watch him play Saturday. We’ll practice early and I’ll go watch the game, and then I’ll come back for our game on Sunday.”

  I flew up to Iowa to see Nick play and he was sensational. He took charges, he blocked shots, he made passes, and he made lots of baskets. He was the most fundamentally sound post player I had ever recruited. He controlled the game like a point guard, calling out plays on both ends of the floor. His team won the state championship, and I headed out to the gym lobby, found a pay phone, and called Matt and Neil right away. “I just saw one of the greatest performances that I’ve ever seen, and you guys didn’t think I needed to come now,” I said.

  I was dumbfounded that they’d said it would be all right to go see him later when I had told the kid I’d see him play a high school game.

  On the last day of the spring recruiting period, I went to see Nick’s dad, Dave, who was his high school coach, and I said, “Coach, what is the biggest negative you have about the University of Kansas?”

  He said, “There’s only one negative about Kansas: all those bigtime players that you bring in. We just wonder if our son will get to play there.”

  “Well,” I said, “do you know what day it is? This is the last day that college coaches can be out recruiting and I’m here at your school. I could be anywhere in America today, but I chose to be here. What that should tell you is that your son is one of those big-time players you’re talking about.”

  Dave Collison looked at me. “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he said.

  That summer, Matt Doherty went to ABCD camp and he called to tell me, “Everybody’s talking about this Drew Gooden kid.”

  I was at Nike camp watching Nick for two days, and then I changed over and went to the ABCD camp and watched Drew Gooden. Drew could run and jump and block shots, and he had an incredible knack for rebounding. The ball just seemed to find his hands. I said to myself, “That’s what we want.”

  We started recruiting Drew. His parents were split up, but they were both very involved and wanted what was best for their son.

  About a week later, Phil Jackson left the Chicago Bulls, and rumors were swir
ling that he was going to be replaced by Tim Floyd, the coach at Iowa State. I was in Las Vegas recruiting, and when I pulled into the parking lot, Tim Floyd pulled up beside me. He said, “I am going to take the Bulls job. Michael Jordan, as you know, is saying he’s quitting. Is there any way you could convince him to let me talk to him. If you could just set it up, I’d really appreciate it.”

  “I’ll do everything I can,” I said, “but I don’t think he’s going to play.”

  I got Tim’s number, and as I started walking away, he said, “Roy, let me tell you something else, too. When I go to the Bulls, Iowa State is going to lose a commitment from a kid from Sioux City who is a Kansas player if I’ve ever seen one.”

  “Is it the Hinrich kid?”

  “Yeah, you would love him. Just watch him while you’re out here.”

  I went into the gym and found Matt and we watched Kirk Hinrich play a game. As we were walking out, I said, “What do you think?”

  Matt said, “Well, I was a little discouraged. He just got back from a tournament in Russia and I think he’s tired.”

  I said, “I like him. He can dribble almost as fast as he can run. Yeah, he fumbled it around a little bit, but he has some unbelievable tools.”

  So we watched Kirk for the next three days and fell in love with him. All of a sudden I was recruiting Nick Collison, Drew Gooden, and Kirk Hinrich. With all three, the only people we had to deal with were their families who just loved their sons and wanted them to go to college and get a great education and have some great experiences. That was the kind of recruiting that I liked.

  We ended up getting Drew first. He came to Lawrence on an official visit, and then a week later I went to his home in Oakland for a home visit. I pulled up in front of Drew’s house, and neighbors started coming out of houses across the street and taking pictures, saying they were coming to the party. I was thinking I was there to make my pitch for Kansas. I got inside, and Drew’s grandfather introduced me to the chef they’d hired to come cook the meal, and he said, “If we’re going to have this kind of party, we wanted to really do it up right.”

  And I said, “Drew, come here. Have you forgotten to tell me something?”

  Drew said, “Coach, I just decided I knew I wanted to come to Kansas, so why put it off? I canceled my other visits, and I just got caught up in everything, and everybody wanted to have a party, and … Coach, can I come to Kansas?”

  I said, “All right, now that I know, let’s go ahead and have a party.”

  As for Kirk, his dad was a high school coach and his mom was a teacher, so automatically I felt like I was ahead with them because those were people I knew I could relate to. Kirk loved our style of play. He had a sister at Kansas. And then we found out that he’d once played in a baseball tournament down in Oklahoma, and as the family was driving back to Iowa, they decided to stop in Lawrence to see Allen Fieldhouse — and so Kirk could have his picture taken in the gym. So we felt pretty confident. After his visit to us, Kirk called a couple of days later and said, “Coach, I’m coming.”

  Then I visited Nick at his home and I told him, “I won’t offer the scholarship to anybody else until after you make your campus visit, but I’m probably going to need to know something pretty quick after that.”

  We thought it was going well, but Nick still visited Duke. When he got back, I said, “Is there anything I have to cover?”

  Nick and his father were both on the phone, and his father said, “Well, Coach, the Duke people said that you’re in line to be the next coach at North Carolina and that if Nick goes to school at Kansas, he won’t finish his career with you.”

  And I said, “Let me tell you something. I’m going to be at Kansas longer than Nick is. I can promise you that I’ll be at Kansas for his entire career.” I remembered saying that and it was important to me, but I didn’t think that it was that big of a deal at the time.

  Nick and his family arrived for their campus visit on Friday and he had a good visit. On Sunday I said, “Nick, on Thursday I’m supposed to go to Juneau, Alaska, for Carlos Boozer’s home visit. I don’t want to go to Juneau, Alaska. Is there any information you can give me, because I’ve got this dilemma?”

  We talked a little bit more, and I left the conference room where we were sitting to get some recruiting material from my office and then I came back, and Nick said, “Coach, I’ve got something to tell you. I’m coming to Kansas.”

  I just lost it and started screaming and cheering. I was overjoyed. It turns out that when I left the room, Nick’s mother had looked at her son and said, “Why are you putting that man through this? You know you want to come to school here and you know we want you to come to school here, so why are you messing around like this? The guy is going to have to offer the scholarship to somebody else.” So Nick listened to his mom.

  Those three guys really changed everything. They reminded me that I could recruit good kids with good families. If it wasn’t for those three guys, I don’t know if I’d have stayed in college coaching.

  They saved me.

  WHEN NICK COLLISON, Kirk Hinrich, and Drew Gooden were freshmen at Kansas in 2000, we lost to Duke 69–64 in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. But what most people remember about that game is that at one point in the first half while I was screaming at one of my players, I wandered out of the coach’s box, and Coach Krzyzewski yelled something about getting back in the box. He just got all over me, which ticked me off, so there was a timeout and I went marching down the sidelines toward their bench and I said, “Mike, I wasn’t talking to the official. I’m talking to my player. I’m coaching my player.”

  He still didn’t like it. He turned to the referee and said, “Do you think you can get Coach Williams to go back to his bench?”

  I said, “I’ll tell you what you can do . . .”

  We got face-to-face there and said some more things you couldn’t print in the newspaper. When I was walking back to my bench, the Kansas fans were going crazy. I found out later that there were a lot of UNC fans in the crowd, too, because the game was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the Tar Heel fans loved the fact that I would go nose to nose with him.

  The next year we finished 26–7 and made a great run, but we were a No. 4 seed and we lost to Illinois, a No. 1 seed, in the third round in San Antonio. Then in 2002, we brought in some good freshmen — Wayne Simien, Aaron Miles, and Keith Langford — and we had a bigtime team. We went undefeated during the Big 12 regular season, the first time anybody had done that since the conference had expanded to 12 teams. We made the Final Four, and in the NCAA semifinal against Maryland, we started the game by taking several bad shots that all went in. During a timeout I told my team, “Guys, let’s not live by that, because we could die by that. That’s fool’s gold. Let’s get the shots we want.” Then we took a few more bad shots and they didn’t go in, and we started panicking and never really recovered. Looking back on it, I don’t know if I did the right thing by questioning those shots, but I thought taking bad shots would eventually cost us the game, and it did.

  Drew Gooden left after that season for the NBA, and we replaced him with a junior college transfer, Jeff Graves, and we knew we were going to be pretty doggone good again in 2003.

  But at the beginning of the ’03 season, Wayne Simien and Kirk Hinrich were both hurt, and we struggled out of the gate. We were ranked No. 2 in the country when we played North Carolina in the Preseason NIT, and we turned the ball over 11 times in the first half, fell behind by 21 points, and they beat us. Two days later, we played Florida and in the first half we missed all six of our three-point attempts and fell behind by 16 points. We woke up in the second half and cut Florida’s lead to two, but we lost again. There was a story in the Baltimore paper later that week that began, “Which ranked team has been the biggest disappointment so far this season?” The answer was Kansas. We were 3–2. I didn’t think it was any time to panic.

  We started sharing the ball a little bit better, and we got on a ru
n. We finished first in the Big 12 with a 14–2 record and we made it to Final Four again. In the NCAA semifinals we were playing Marquette with Dwyane Wade. Marquette had destroyed Kentucky in the round of eight, and Wade looked like Michael Jordan. I did not want our players to see how good he was because I was afraid it could shake their confidence, so we completely cut him out of the scouting tape. We didn’t show them a single second of Dwyane Wade on tape, and when we went out there we were unbelievable. It was the greatest game I’d ever had a team play on a big stage. I try to never look at the score in the first half, so it wasn’t until I walked off the floor at the half and looked up at the scoreboard that I saw we were up by 29. That impressed even me. I knew even Dwyane Wade couldn’t make up that much ground. We shot 53 percent from the floor, made 15 dunks and eight three-point shots, and won by 33 points.

  We played Syracuse in the NCAA final and I thought that we should win because I believed that we were the best team. I thought we should win because Nick and Kirk had come back for their senior years. I thought we should win because it was the right thing to have happen.

  We went out and took some poor shots early in the game and Gerry McNamara made six three-pointers for them in the first half. We fell behind by 18 points before we started chipping away and chipping away. We shot a miserable 11-for-31 from the free-throw line in the game, but we still had the ball in the final minute down by just three. With two seconds left, we got the ball to Michael Lee. As he went up to shoot, Hakim Warrick came out of nowhere to block it, then Kirk missed a three at the buzzer, and the game was over.

  When I shook hands with the Syracuse coach, Jim Boeheim, I knew he understood how I was feeling. I knew that he had been a jump shot away from the national title before and now he had one. I said, “Jimmy, I’m really happy for you.”

  He said, “Roy, I appreciate it. You’re going to get yours one of these days, too.”

  That was a tough, tough night for me, but not only because we’d just lost the national championship game. I knew I was facing a big decision … again.