Hard Work

by Roy Williams

  I kept it going for the rest of my career as an assistant coach. Then I took that slogan to Kansas, and when I was talking to Coach Smith one night during my first year in Lawrence, I said, “I think I’m going to add one more thing. I’m going to start saying, ‘Play hard, play smart, play together.’”

  Coach Smith liked that, and they started saying it back at North Carolina, and before I knew it they were describing the “North Carolina way” as “Play hard, play smart, play together.” It was funny because a few years later a Kansas alum sent a letter to all of the Kansas basketball lettermen, and he wrote something about how Kansas chanted, “Play hard, play smart, play together.” Coach Smith is a Kansas letterman so he mailed me a copy of the letter and wrote on it, Sounds like you guys are copying North Carolina!

  I called him and said, “Coach, you stole that from me!”

  Before the 2004 season at UNC I had T-shirts made up for the players that said, “Play hard. Play smart. Play in March.” I did it because nobody on our team had ever played in the NCAA Tournament.

  The previous two seasons at UNC had been difficult ones. Things had gotten very personal with some of the players’ families against the coach. Matt Doherty is a good coach and a good person, but it was not a good mix at that time. They’d gone 8–20 and 19–16, lost 36 games the last two years, which just doesn’t happen at North Carolina. The players had been criticized by everybody. There was a lot of mistrust. A lot of bitterness. They’d been involved in a coach getting fired. It wasn’t about the team anymore. Human nature says that you’re going to try to protect yourself and a lot of the kids thought that their dreams and goals were slipping away. There were some highly recruited players who had gone through an awful time and they were asking themselves, “Am I ever going to be able to play in the NBA? Should I have left? Should I have transferred somewhere else?”

  Then I came in preaching togetherness and they wanted to believe in it, but they were also worrying about themselves. Every player was wondering about his playing time and how much I was going to allow him to shoot. Lots of questions were whirling around in their minds, and it was hard to get everybody to sacrifice 100 percent for a common goal. There were things being said in the locker room that were disruptive. Players were jealous of other players, and people thought I was favoring one player over another. So it was a battle to get everybody on the same page. I thought they could play hard. I thought they could play smart. But I wasn’t sure they could play together.

  They weren’t bad kids. They were good kids and they wanted to do the right thing, but in my opinion they had been through so much turmoil over the last few years that I’m not sure they wanted to trust me. They weren’t sure they could. I needed them to give me a chance, and one of the key players to do that was Jackie Manuel.

  I had looked at Jackie’s stats when I arrived and saw he had taken more than 70 three-point shots during the 2003 season and hit only 26 percent of them. Also, Matt Doherty had told me about some difficult times he’d had with Jackie and his family. I called Jackie in and said, “This is the way it’s going to be. I’m very difficult to handle if guys don’t take good shots. I need you to take shots that you can make. I can’t have you taking three-point shots and shooting 20 percent. I want you to be here. I’ve never been one to want to run anybody off, but if you don’t think that’s what you want to put up with, if you want to transfer, I’ll help you.”

  Jackie said, “No, Coach, I want to stay.”

  Jackie was one of the keys because he changed his game. He sacrificed. He trusted me. He bought in to what I was saying quicker than anybody else, and he brought Jawad Williams and Sean May and Rashad McCants along after him. I began to tell the other players to do things like Jackie. I bragged on him and used him as an example all the time and the players used to tease him and call him my “son.” But the faith that he had in me was crucial for us.

  We won our first six games that season, and then in our ACC opener we played a close game against Wake Forest at home. With two seconds left in overtime, we were up by two points in a timeout. I told Melvin Scott and the rest of the players twice — it was the first thing I said when they came over to the huddle and the last thing I said when they left — “Do not foul an outside shot!”

  We went back out on the court and three guys weren’t lined up where I told them to be. Chris Paul took a jumper from the deep corner, and Melvin hit him harder than any of our football players hit a guy all year. I was surprised they didn’t call it an intentional foul. Chris Paul made two free throws to send the game into double overtime, and then we lost in triple overtime.

  Our problem was taking what I was saying and actually doing it. We fought that all year long.

  In the middle of January we had a big win at home against No. 1 Connecticut. We were leading the game by 16 points early in the second half, but Connecticut rallied to take an 83–80 lead. Then Rashad McCants tied the game 83–83 on a three-point shot with just over a minute to play, and we got a stop and called a timeout. I diagrammed a play that we hadn’t run the entire game to get Rashad open, and I said, “Guys, if you just believe we can win this game, we’re going to have a lot of fun in that locker room.” Rashad sprung wide open and hit another three-pointer with six seconds to play to get us the win. The crowd at the Smith Center stormed the court and we did have some fun jumping around in the locker room. I told the team it was the first time they made me feel like they all believed in what I was telling them to do.

  Then we had a tough loss at home against Duke. We were up by five points with three minutes to play and we made three turnovers in a row to allow the game to go into overtime. In overtime, Rashad hit another huge three-point shot to tie the game with 13 seconds left, but then we let Chris Duhon drive to the basket for an easy layup in the final seconds to lose the game.

  We lost five of our last seven ACC games on the road that season, because the players still didn’t feel like they could totally depend on each other. Everybody was still looking for a shortcut, trying to win the game individually instead of doing their jobs and trusting their teammates.

  In the ACC Tournament we were playing Georgia Tech in the first round and we had a one-point lead with 10 seconds left. After a timeout we didn’t get lined up properly. We gambled for a steal from behind and that opened up the floor, and Jarrett Jack hit a 12-footer and we lost. It was just because we didn’t do what I told them to do. We weren’t disciplined enough. To reach around and try to steal the ball like you’re on the playground against some guy that couldn’t play dead in a cowboy movie was not going to get it done in the ACC.

  Still, at that point we were 18–10 and we made the NCAA Tournament. In the first round we were matched up with Air Force, a very disciplined ball-control team, and I was thinking that was not the kind of team we wanted to play. Air Force totally controlled the tempo for most of the game, and we fell behind by six points with 13 minutes to play. But Sean May was just too big for them inside, and we put together an 11–0 run and pulled out the win. Then we played Texas in the second round. Sean was our only legitimate big man, and Texas was running in and out five 6'10" guys all game long. Afterward Sean said, “Coach, I just wanted the game to be over with. I was so worn out.”

  That was the mentality of the club. They were just finished. They didn’t have enough discipline or toughness or experience. They just didn’t know how to dig any deeper when the game got tough.

  At the press conference after the game in Denver, there were some questions about whether any of our guys were going to declare early for the NBA draft. After the press conference, I ran into Doug Moe, the former Denver Nuggets coach, and he said, “Why would they ask you that? Somebody in the NBA would have to want your guys. Who would want any of those guys?”

  DURING THE SECOND practice of the 2005 season, we left the court at the Smith Center and brought the players to our practice gym. When they got in there, they noticed that something was different. The players looked aro
und wide-eyed wondering what was going on. I’d taken the rims off all of the backboards.

  For 45 minutes we did nothing but defensive drills: denying the passing lanes, double-teaming the post, fighting through screens. We did that stuff over and over and over again, and it was very difficult. It was exhausting. None of the players ever touched a basketball. But they started to realize that we could get better as a team without shooting the ball. I’d made the decision to put Jackie Manuel in the starting lineup because he gave us a big-time defender in the starting five and I wanted to establish the attitude that we could win with defense.

  In that same practice I reminded the kids that I’d told them in our second year together we could win the whole blessed thing. “We have big-time dreams,” I said. “Every team in college basketball is thinking they have a chance to win the national championship, but that dream is realistic for us. We don’t have to play over our heads. We just need to play as close to our potential as we possibly can and we can live our dreams.”

  I was passionate about that. I believed we were good enough and if they did what I told them to do, we had a chance to win a championship. I think believing it as strongly as I did gave them some confidence.

  We had everybody back — Sean May, Rashad McCants, Raymond Felton, Jackie Manuel, Jawad Williams — and we’d added a talented freshman in Marvin Williams. Still, I was stunned when Sports Illustrated picked us No. 1 in the country. The local media hadn’t even picked us to finish first in our league. We had a team led by a senior class that had gone 8–20 and then lost 27 games over the next two years and a junior class of Raymond and Sean and Rashad, three players who everybody thought were going to be great, but they had only one win in the NCAA Tournament. I knew we had a chance to be really special, but I was surprised that anybody else would think that way because our guys hadn’t proven anything yet.

  I had challenged every one of our players in our individual spring meetings. To Sean, I said, “You have to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life. You’ve got to lose a little weight and you need to move around what you have left. You’ve got to have more stamina, more bounce, to be a top-flight college basketball player.”

  To Rashad: “You’ve got be able to put the ball on the floor and have a better assist-error ratio and be able to do a better job of guarding the basketball.”

  To Raymond: “You’ve got to shoot it a lot better.”

  To Jawad: “You’ve got to be more consistent and be able to handle some adversity if you get injured.”

  We lost Raymond for the first game of that season because he’d played in a summer league game that wasn’t sanctioned. But I thought that was great because I believed everybody else would really step up and make up for Raymond’s absence. That shows what I know. We laid a great big egg. It was as bad a game as I’ve ever had one of my teams play. Quentin Thomas was a freshman playing for Raymond, and he had three turnovers faster than I can eat half a box of popcorn, and Santa Clara beat us.

  We got on the plane the next day to go to the Maui Invitational. I was steaming mad because I felt that instead of competing against Santa Clara, we just gave in. We thought we were going to sashay in there and be the big dog and Santa Clara was going to roll over. There’s nothing I despise more than that.

  So we got to the hotel in Hawaii and I told the guys, “We are not in Maui yet. We’re going to go practice and I’ll tell you when we’re in Maui.”

  I had basically stayed up all night working on the practice plan. I knew one of two things was going to happen. Either we were going to show great effort and be glad to have it behind us, or we were not going to show great effort and I was going to fight somebody. They had made me mad, so I was going to make them mad. I was going to get even. I was going to run them until half the team puked. I was vicious and they responded.

  Five minutes into the practice there was a defining moment. Rashad sprained his ankle and limped off the court and I thought, “My gosh, this is a bunch of crap.” Rashad had a reputation, and deservedly so, that when times got tough in practice he wouldn’t fight his way through it. But a minute later, Rashad had his ankle retaped and he came right back in and played his tail off.

  For almost two hours in a high school gym that must have been over 100 degrees inside, every drill we did I demanded they do at full speed and be extremely competitive. Every little defensive drill that they hated, we did. Some of them we did two or three times. When we were finished, I wanted them to take a shower and eat and go to bed because they couldn’t physically do anything else, and that’s what happened. It was the hardest practice they’d ever had.

  I didn’t tell my players this, but in that practice I saw the competitive fire that I was looking for. I was screaming at them and they were busting their rear ends with no jabbering or complaining. Later, back at the hotel, I told Wanda, “We’ve got a chance to be pretty doggone good.”

  Before the first pregame meal at the tournament I told the players that I’d only lost the first game of the season twice in my career, but both of those times we’d played in the Final Four. We won the tournament opener against Brigham Young, and then in the second game against Tennessee, Raymond injured his wrist. He came back and played with it in a soft cast against Iowa in the final, and we won the Maui Invitational.

  We got on a run and won 14 games in a row. One of those wins came at Indiana at the beginning of December, and I thought it was important to us because it was a very hostile atmosphere for Sean May, who was the top prospect in Indiana as a senior in high school and the son of a legendary Hoosier player. It was a very physical game for us at the end of a stretch when we played six games in 13 days. Indiana wasn’t a great team, but they played a great game that night. Rashad made five three-pointers and scored 19 points, and Raymond had 18 and we were able to make plays at the end and win the game. The intensity and toughness that we showed was something that I loved.

  That winning streak stopped in the middle of January. We lost a game at Wake Forest when we did not match their competitiveness. They pushed the ball up the floor harder than we did. They had us back on our heels. So I got after our guys a little bit. Some of the articles that were written after that game talked about how when things got bad, we got worse. They pointed out how we started complaining, we started going one-on-one, we stopped playing as a team. I challenged the players to make sure we didn’t let that happen again.

  The pivotal moment of the season happened right after our game at Duke in early February. We were down by one point and we had the ball at the end, but we never got off a final shot, and as our point guard, Raymond got the blame. The last play of the game had gotten too much attention, so I picked out 10 or 15 plays for the team to watch on tape. I showed everybody all of the mistakes that cost us the game and then I said, “Don’t you all let them blame this loss on Raymond. It was my fault. It was your fault, Rashad. Sean, it was your fault. You guys who didn’t play in the game, it was your fault because if you had worked harder in practice the day before when we said they were going to spread the floor, we might have handled that better.”

  I think that they all bought into that. They believed it. They became more of a team at that point. And from that moment on, Raymond was a different player. From that moment on, Raymond was willing to make big plays.

  We beat Connecticut on the road in our next game and then won five straight in the ACC before we played Duke again in the last game of the regular season. We were down by nine points with a little more than three minutes left. It was Senior Day for us and you just can’t lose on Senior Day. I got the team huddled around me, and Jawad had his head down. I flicked him on the forehead and I said, “Get your head up. We’re going to win this game. If you all will do everything I tell you to do, I guarantee you we’re going to win this game. It’s got to be a total commitment. You have to do it right now better than you have ever done it before. And if you do that, if you’ll give me total commitment on every possession, I promise y
ou we’re going to win this game.”

  I’m a little wacko, but I really did believe that we were going to win that game. So we went out and made a couple of plays and then Raymond was on the free-throw line and he missed and there was a loose ball and Marvin Williams picked it up and banked one in to give us the lead. That was the loudest I have ever heard any arena in my entire life. We won the game and we were the ACC champions. It was one of those incredibly emotional scenes. For the seniors, Jackie and Jawad and Melvin, who had been through the 8–20 season, it was a great accomplishment. I’ve never been so happy to watch three guys cut down nets.

  IN 2002 I HAD called Coach Smith from Kansas and told him that I thought we had a chance to win a national championship but that I was discouraged about how we were doing such a poor job boxing out on the boards. He said, “Make them sign a pledge that they’re going to box out.”

  I said, “Coach, what do you mean?”

  “Make them sign a pledge that they’re going to box out on every possession.”

  And so everybody on our team signed a pledge and they seemed to respond well to the peer pressure that it created. We took care of business on the backboards all the way down the stretch that season.

  In the first round of the 2005 ACC Tournament, our team played so poorly against Clemson that I threatened to take them back to Chapel Hill to practice that night. The next day we lost to Georgia Tech in the semifinals. Then in the NCAA Tournament we beat Oakland and then Iowa State, and then we outscored Villanova and Wisconsin, but we were awful defensively. I mean really awful. I thought we needed something to motivate our guys, and my assistant coach Joe Holladay said, “How about we make them sign the pledge again?”

  I thought that was a good idea. We did it that Monday before the Final Four. An hour before practice that day I wrote this pledge up on the board: